CHAPTER
XLII.
ETERNITY WITHOUT TIME.
" Man's conception of eternity is that of infinite duration, continuance
without beginning or end, and yet everything he knows is bounded by two or more
opposites. From a beginning, as he sees a form of matter, that substance passes
to an end." Thus spoke my guide.
Then he asked, and showed by his question that he appreciated the nature of my
recent experiences: " Do you recall the instant that you left me standing
by this bowl to start, as you imagined, with me as a companion, on the journey
to the cavern of the grotesque?"
" No; because I did not leave you. I sipped
of the liquid, and then you moved on with me from this spot; we were together,
until at last we were separated on the edge of the cave of drunkards."
" Listen," said he; " I neither left you nor went with you. You
neither went from this spot nor came back again. You neither saw nor experienced
my presence nor my absence; there was no beginning to your journey."
" Go on."
" You ate of the narcotic fungus; you have been intoxicated."
" I have not," I retorted.
" I have been through your accursed caverns, and into hell beyond. I
have been consumed by eternal damnation in the journey, have experienced a
heaven of delight, and also an eternity of misery."
" Upon the contrary, the time that has passed since you drank the liquid
contents of that fungus fruit has only been that which permitted you to fall
upon your knees. You swallowed the liquor when I handed you the shell cup; you
dropped upon your knees, and then instantly awoke. See," he said; " in
corroboration of my assertion the shell of the fungus fruit at your feet is
still dripping with the liquid you did not drink. Time has been annihilated.
Under the influence of this potent earth-bred narcoto-intoxicant, your dream
began inside of eternity; you did not pass into it."
" You say," I interrupted, " that I dropped upon my knees, that I
have experienced the hallucination of intoxication, that the experiences of my
vision occurred during the second of time that was required for me to drop upon
my knees."
" Yes."
" Then by your own argument you demonstrate that eternity requires time,
for even a millionth part of a second is time, as much so as a million of
years."
" You mistake," he replied, " you misinterpret my words. I said
that all you experienced in your eternity of suffering and pleasure, occurred
between the point when you touched the fungus fruit to your lips, and that when
your knees struck the stone."
" That consumed time," I answered.
" Did I assert,"
he questioned, " that your experiences were scattered over that entire
period?"
" No."
" May not all that occurred to your mind have been crushed into the second
that accompanied the mental impression produced by the liquor, or the second of
time that followed, or any other part of that period, or a fraction of any
integral second of that period?
" I can not say,"
I answered, " what part of the period the hallucination, as you call it,
occupied."
" You admit that so far as your conception
of time is concerned, the occurrences to which you refer may have existed in
either an inestimable fraction of the first, the second, or the third part of
the period."
" Yes," I replied,
" yes; if you are correct in that, they were illusions."
" Let me ask you furthermore," he said; " are you sure that the
flash that bred your hallucination was not instantaneous, and a part of neither
the first, second, nor third second ?"
" Continue your argument."
" I will repeat a preceding question with a slight modification. May not
all that occurred to your mind have been crushed into the space between the
second of time that preceded the mental impression produced by the liquor, and
the second that followed it? Need it have been a part of either second, or of
time at all? Indeed, could it have been a part of time if it were
instantaneous?"
" Go on."
" Suppose the entity that men call the soul of man were in process of
separation from the body. The process you will admit would occupy time, until
the point of liberation was reached. Would not dissolution, so far as the
separation of matter and spirit is concerned at its critical point be
instantaneous?"
I made no reply.
" If the critical point
is instantaneous, there would be no beginning, there could be no end. Therein
rests an eternity greater than man can otherwise conceive of, for as there is
neither beginning nor end, time and space are annihilated. The line that
separates the soul that is in the body from the soul that is out of the body is
outside of all things. It is a between, neither a part of the nether side nor of
the upper side; it is outside the here and the here-after. Let us carry this
thought a little further," said he. " Suppose a good man were to
undergo this change, could not all that an eternity of happiness might offer be
crushed into this boundless conception, the critical point? All that a mother
craves in children dead, could reappear again in their once loved forms; all
that a good life earns, would rest in the soul's experience in that eternity,
but not as an illusion, although no mental pleasure, no physical pain is equal
to that of hallucinations. Suppose that a vicious life were ended, could it
escape the inevitable critical point? Would not that life in its previous
journey create its own sad eternity? You have seen the working of an eternity
with an end but not a beginning to it, for you can not sense the commencement of
your vision. You have been in the cavern of the grotesque,the realms of the
beautiful, and have walked over the boundless sands that bring misery to the
soul, and have, as a statue, seen the frozen universe dissolve. You are thankful
that it was all an illusion as you deem it now; what would you think had only
the heavenly part been spread before you?"
" I would have cursed the man who dispelled the illusion," I answered.
" Then," he said, " you are willing to admit that men who so live
as to gain such an eternity, be it mental illusion, hallucination or real, make
no mistake in life."
" I do," I replied; " but you confound me when you argue in so
cool a manner that eternity may be everlasting to the soul, and yet without the
conception of time."
" Did I not teach you in the beginning of this journey," he
interjected, " that time is not as men conceive it. Men can not grasp an
idea of eternity and retain their sun bred, morning and evening, conception of
time. Therein lies their error. As the tip of the whip-lash passes with the
lash, so through life the soul of man proceeds with the body. As there is a
point just when the tip of the whip-lash is on the edge of its return, where all
motion of the line that bounds the tip ends, so there is a motionless point when
the soul starts onward from the body of man. As the tip of the whip-lash sends
its cry through space, not while it is in motion either way, but from the point
where motion ceases, the spaceless, timeless point that lies between the
backward and the forward, so the soul of man leaves a cry ( eternity) at the
critical point. It is the death echo, and thus each snap of the life-thread
throws an eternity, its own eternity, into eternity's seas, and each eternity is
made up of the entities thus cast from the critical point. With the end of each
soul's earth journey, a new eternity springs into existence, occupying no space,
consuming no time, and not conflicting with any other, each being exactly what
the soul-earth record makes it, an eternity of joy ( heaven ), or an eternity of
anguish ( hell ).
There can be no neutral ground."
Then he continued:
" The drunkard is destined to suffer in the drunkard's eternity, as you
have suffered; the enticement of drink is evanescent, the agony to follow is
eternal.
You have seen that the
subregions of earth supply an intoxicant. Taste not again of any intoxicant; let
your recent lesson be your last. Any stimulant is an enemy to man, any narcotic
is a fiend. It destroys its victim, and corrupts the mind, entices it into
pastures grotesque, and even pleasant at first, but destined to eternal misery
in the end. Beware of the eternity that follows the snapping of the life-thread
of a drunkard.
Come,"
he abruptly said, " we will pursue our journey."
( NOTE.- Morphine, belladonna, hyoscyamus and cannabis indica are narcotics, and
yet each differs in its action from the others. Alcohol and methyl alcohol are
intoxicants; ether, chloroform„ and chloral are anesthetics, and yet no two
are possessed of the same qualities. Is there any good reason to doubt that
combinations of the elements as yet hidden from man can not cause hallucinations
that combine and intensify the most virulent of narcotics, intoxicants, and
anesthetics, and pall the effects of hashish or of opium?
If, in the course of experimentation, a chemist should strike upon a compound
that in traces only would subject his mind and drive his pen to record such
seemingly extravagant ideas as are found in the hallucinations herein pictured,
would it not be his duty to bury the discovery from others, to cover from
mankind the existence of such a noxious fruit of the chemist's or pharmaceutist
s art?
Introduce such an
intoxicant, and start it to ferment in humanity's blood, and before the world
were advised of its possible results, might not the ever increasing potency gain
such headway as to destroy, or debase, our civilization, and even to exterminate
mankind?-
J. U. L.)