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past
into the
future,
passing from one sphere into another, now
appearing
in
the guise of physical phenomena, now disappearing in the phenomena of
consciousness.
If we examine the idea of Karma from the standpoint of our theory of time and space
of many dimensions, the
interconnection of separate events
will cease to appear to us
miraculous and incomprehensible. Since events, even the most distant from one
another in time,
are in contact with the fourth dimension,
this means that, in reality,
they take place simultaneously, as cause and effect. And the walls dividing them are
nothing more than an illusion which our weak mind is unable to overcome. Things are
linked together not by time but by an inner connection, an inner relationship. And time
cannot separate things which are inwardly close and follow one from another. Certain
other properties of these things make them appear to us divided by the ocean of time.
But we know that this ocean has no
real
existence and we begin to understand how and
why events of one millennium can have a
direct
influence on the events of another
millennium.
The hidden activity of events becomes clear to us. We understand that, in our eyes,
events must become hidden in order to preserve for us the illusion of time.
This we know, that today's events were yesterday's ideas and feelings, and
tomorrow's events lie today in some person's irritation, someone's hunger, someone's
suffering and maybe still more in someone's imagination, someone's fantasy, someone's
dreams. We know all this, and yet our 'positivist' science stubbornly continues only to
see the sequence of visible phenomena, i.e. regards each visible or physical
phenomenon as the effect of
only
another physical phenomenon, just as visible.
This tendency to see everything on one plane, this reluctance to recognize anything
outside that plane, narrows our view so terribly that it prevents us from grasping life in
its entirety. Together with the materialistic attempts to explain the
higher
as a function
of the
lower,
it is the chief obstacle to the development of our knowledge, the main
* Mabel Collins,
Light on the Path and Karma,
Theosophical Publishing House,
London and New York, 1912, reprinted 1936, pp. 96-8.
cause of dissatisfaction with science, of complaints about the bankruptcy of science and
of its actual bankruptcy in many respects.
Dissatisfaction with science is well grounded and complaints of its insolvency are
perfectly justified, because science has actually come to an impasse from which there is
no way out, and it is only a matter of time before it is openly admitted that its main
tendencies have led it completely astray.
We may say - not as a supposition but as a definite affirmation -that the world of
physical phenomena represents as it were a section of another world, which also exists
here,
and the events of which take place
here,
but invisibly to us. Nothing is more
miraculous and supernatural than life. Take a street of a large town, in all its details,
and you will get an enormous diversity of facts. But how much is hidden behind these
facts and cannot be seen at all! How many desires, passions, greedy and covetous
thoughts, how much suffering both petty and great, how much deceit, falsity, lies, how
many invisible threads - sympathies, antipathies, interests - linking this street with the
whole world, with all the past and all the future. If we picture all this to ourselves we
shall see clearly that a street cannot be studied merely by
what is visible.
We must
probe deeper. The complex and vast
phenomenon
of the street will not reveal its infinite
noumenon, connected both with eternity and with time, with the past, with the future
and with the whole world.
Consequently we have every right to regard the visible phenomenal world as a
section of some other world, infinitely more complex, which at a given moment is
manifesting itself for us in the first one.
This world of noumena is infinite and incomprehensible for us, just as the three
dimensional world in all the variety of its functions is incomprehensible for the two
dimensional being. The nearest approximation to 'truth' possible for man is contained in
the formulation:
each thing has an infinite variety of meanings, and to know all these
meanings is impossible.
In other words, 'truth' as we understand it, i.e. the
finite
definition,
is possible only in a finite series of phenomena. In an
infinite
series it is
bound, somewhere, to become its own opposite.
This last thought was expressed by Hegel: 'Every idea, extended to infinity, becomes
its own opposite.'
It is precisely this
change of meaning
which is the reason why the noumenal world is
incomprehensible for man. The essence of a thing, i.e. the thing in itself, is contained in
the infinite number of
functions and meanings of the thing which cannot be grasped by our mind.
And it is also contained in the change of meaning of one and the same thing.
In one meaning the thing is an enormous whole including a great number of
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