Time and eternity “On the aisle of yesterday”

Time is regarded as something which is not just a matter of duration, but as something having reality in itself. By this we mean that, to the ordinary mind, time is regarded as merely duration, i.e., some medium through and in which things or events happen or take place, but which itself is always passing away. We break uptime into past, present and future. The present is always the single point which divides the past from the future, and it is always slipping into the past as we look at it. According to the conception referred to above, time is held to be something far more fundamental than this; it is held to be a dimension in which events are always taking place and having once taken place are always there. Even if time itself seems to have passed on. The past is not something which has vanished into thin air, as it were, as is usually assumed. The past still exists in its own dimension (in the time dimension) and can be recalled and relived under the appropriate stimuli or conditions. It is also accepted that the future is already in existence even though we have not yet contacted it), just as the past exists (even though we think it is finished and done with). This very different conception of time may seem most strange at first sight. It is essentially the esoteric viewpoint, indicating how the whole life of man is linked up from birth to death, into one unity, and that no part of the life can be separated from what has gone before or is going to come after. Thus, the life of man is given a coherence and unity with which the ordinary view of time does not supply us. We feel that the past is dead and gone and the future has not yet arrived; yet the present in which we live is so narrow a reality that we feel, in a sense, that it is the past which is far more real.