The Theosophical Forum – May 1941

TIME — A LINK — Ernest A. Bunting

We are told that Time as an entity has no existence, but that it is a man-made concept by which he measures the passage of Duration and marks or locates events relative to each other in his own consciousness.

True. But is not Time, that same man-made concept by which he also measures the progress of his own evolutionary unfoldment, a link with the past, with those great days of an earlier Race when the Gods brought to the then nascent mind of the slowly evolving mankind the first great principles and teachings of the Ancient Wisdom-Religion?

And is not Time also a link with the future, with that great future when, this present cycle of evolutionary unfoldment being complete, man will have worked out his own destiny and achieved oneness with his own Inner God, will in fact have become a God?

And the present, what of it? The present is the center, the hub if you like, to which the other two are linked by the links of Time; and which, by the same reasoning is linked to those other two by those same links of Time. The present is that point in infinite Duration as measured by man's measuring-stick, Time, in which he has the opportunity and the privilege of taking hold of the results of past mistakes and accomplishments and, by his own conscious efforts along the line of evolutionary unfoldment as taught by the Ancient Wisdom-Religion, Theosophy, of weaving out of these his own great destiny of a glorious future of yet greater service.

Past, Present, Future, these three, but the greatest of these is the Present; for it spells opportunity to grow and the privilege of service. Out of these, growth and service, shall a man weave his own destiny.



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