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The Measure
of Time WHEN it is said that the Realisation is
decreed, is it meant also that the time for it has been fixed? If so, all
individual effort and freedom of action seem to go out of the picture, being
irrelevant-neither hastening nor retarding the process. The fact is somewhat
different, not so simple and trenchant. There is very little sense in the common
notion that everything is predetermined as to the time when it will happen,
that the universal scheme has been all unalterably arranged and mapped out from
beforehand, that nothing can change it, all goes according to plan. This is
only a human conception, a construction of the mind, a wrong translation in
the brain of some fact which is otherwise and elsewhere. The mind divides where
there is no division, puts things against each other where there is perfect
compatibility and harmony. Determinism and Indeterminism, Free-Will and
Mechanism are contradictions set up by the mind and have no real objective
existence. From a certain view-point, on a certain level of consciousness
things appear to move in a rigid frame of mechanistic determinism; from another
view-point, on another level, things seem to possess absolute freedom. Looked at from the higher source of things,
the time-factor itself appears as an illusion. What is true is a certain set of
conditions in which forces work themselves out. And in this pattern of
conditions, time (along with space) does not give the absolute and fixed frame
of reference, as is usually taken for granted, but is a varying background,
even if it is not a side-issue or a by-product. The conscious force at work in
the world aims at a change in the conditions; it is a work primarily of
rearrangement and order. The state of Nature, of actuality – of ignorance and
inertia – is one of chaos. What
Page – 176 the Divine Will behind, the Consciousness
standing over, does is to develop a cosmos out of that chaos. Things are placed
wrongly, at random, pell-mell: they have to be assorted, arranged, docketed,
each item in its own place. We know, for example, of the material particle in
which the atoms are huddled together, each pointing to a different direction,
but when they are arranged in such a way that one half
points in one way and the other half the contrary way, we have what is called a
magnetised body. It is when things are arranged in this
manner, the right thing in the right place, that divine perfection, the
Realisation in the material, is attained. And for this consummation to come
about, the process that is followed is a greater and greater infiltration of
higher and higher forces into the field of disorder, of our normal life
and consciousness. The time taken simply indicates that the process is being
worked out; it is an expression of the rhythm of procedure. But to the Divine;
the Supreme Consciousness that works, time itself has
no separate meaning or intrinsic value; for it a thousand or a million years do
not mean more than what is one moment for us. Indeed, the slowness of time
simply marks the steps of events in the lower ranges of creation: as we rise
higher and higher, forces from there come down into the lower field, and the
tempo of events quickens; finally, when the highest peak is attained and its
forces descend and interevene
in the ordering of the lowest levels, then the change, the arrangement that is
being worked out, is accomplished immediately and without delay: the time lag
is abolished altogether. Time may be compared to a kind of elastic bond
connecting the highest and the lowest and running through the intermediate
zones. It contracts as one moves upward and is telescoped, as it were, at the
top. Page – 177
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