THE essays on the concept of Grace, the concept of Time and the concept of Endeavour in Mother’s teaching-all hinge on one point-that everything is preordained and accordingly everything must pass: “Till heaven and earthi pass. one jot or one title shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.” (Matthew 5: 18) But the questions arise “When was it all preordained, and by whom?”
The second question is not difficult to answer. though the answer does not consist in anything more than a parrot-like repi tition of what Great Ones have taught. It was all ordained by the Creator-be it called Jehovah. Brahman, the Reality, or Existence Knowledge-Bliss. Where is this Creator? He is everywhere; he is in all things; nay, all things exist in Him. He is the Mind which is contemplating this Creation in it. We are a part of it; thus we are the stuff that dreams are made of. And dreams are made of the Mind of the Dreamer: and the dreamer is not different from the mind: the mind is his organ. Thus in him, man has the Dreamer and the dreaming mind, Maya. Through the one. man can penetrate into the Being of the Dreamer and merge in Him. That is realization that union with the Beloved; that is entering the Kingdom of Heaven: that is Nirvana. Thus is the second question answered-though only theoretically.
When was it all preordained? This is a subtle question. Various religions have their calenlations. The Hindu eles of Yugas, Manvantaras, and Kaplas, as Sir James Jeans wrote, come nearest to modern calculation regarding the age of this universe. The aeons of the Buddhists are no less staggering. There are others who calculated the age of this word to be a few thousands of years and even fixed the date on which it was created!) The marking of time on the Egyptian Pyramids was spoken of at length by some savants. But all the calculations of the Hindus speak of this cycle of creation when they give in specific figures, the age of the universe and say that innumerable times was Creation manifested and with drawn and that we are only specks in one of such events. Thus the question ‘When was it all preordained?’ loses it’s traces in the bend around the corner of Eternity. Beyond that, anything that one speaks of loses its meaning, unless one has actually experienced it. He who knows does not speak; he who speaks does not know!’
To look at it from a different angle, the question ‘When was it all ordained?’ is just another way of a-king, When has all This been created?’ Logically the question looks allright but it is, in a way, devoid of any meaning. There can be no Time before Creation existed. Time is marked by Change in Creation. When Creation did not exist, it is Eternal Now–if at all there was a moment when Creation did not exist. “There never was a time when I you or these kings did not exist.”- this is the purport of verse 12 of chapter 2 of the Bhagavadgita. Even if there were such a moment when nothing (‘no thing’) existed, it will be the Eternal Moment. It will at once be Eternity and a moment. It is ‘no-t.me’ and never yields itself to the question of ‘when’.
I once asked Mother: “Is all this preordained at some moment in the remote past, or is it preordained at every moment, sponta. Neously?”
“What do you mean by all This?” She asked.
“I mean Everything that happens in Creation,” I said.
“Creation is what goes on every moment. There is only transformation” she replied.
“Do you mean that it is ordained spontaneously?”
“The question of past, present and future does not exist. It is all Now. Hence the question (Is all this…… spontaneously?”) does not arise. She added something more but I failed to note it. For I was dazed by these words. I felt myself at once grasping and slipping from the purport of her words.
As is explained in my essay on the concept of Time (September 67) the question of ‘when’ does not arise for one who is above the barrier of ‘within and without’; that it is all eternal now. As P. D. Ouspensky put it
“As the idea of superman has points of contact with the problem of time and with the idea of the infinite, it is not possible to touch the idea of superman without having cleared up the means of approach to the problem of time and the idea of the infinite. The problem of time and the idea of the infinite contain laws of the action of the machine…
“The problem of time is the greatest riddle humanity has ever had to face. Religious revelation, philosophical thought, scientific investigation and occult. knowledge, all converge at one point, that is, on the problem of time, and all come to the same view of it.
Time does not exist! There exist no perpetual and eternal appearance and disappearance of phenomena, no ceaselessly flowing. fountain of ever appearing and ever vanishing events. Everything exists always! There is only one eternal present, the Eternal Now, which the weak and limited human mind can neither grasp nor conceive.
“But the idea of Eternal Now is not at all the idea of a cold and merciless predetermination of everything, of an exact and infallible pre existence.”
Ouspensky proceeds to put it in the right perspective:
“The world is a world of infinite possibilities. Our mind follows the development of possibilities always in one direction only. But in fact every moment contains a very large number of possibi. lities. And all of them are actualised, only we do not see it and do not know it. We always see only one of the actualisations, and in this lie the poverty and limitation of the human mind… Having imagined this infinite variety… we shall understand that the very idea of arising and disappearing possibilities is created by the human mind….
“Time is not a condition of the existence of the universe, but only a condition of the perception of the world by our psychic apparatus, which imposes on the world conditions of time, since otherwise the psychic apparatus would be unable to conceive it.”. (A New Model of the Universe Pp. 138-141).
These words of Ouspensky serve as a commentary on the words of the Mother,
From all this we find that it is wrong to speak of ‘pre-ordi nation’; it is only ordination and it is not limited by questions of time.