Through A Window In the Blank Wall

Many of us allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by the small worries and vexations of everyday life, clothing them with a reality quite disproportionate to their importance; we are too apt to look at them, as it were, through a powerful microscope, piling power upon power of magnification, until we have made mountains out of mole-hills, whereas if we treated them at their true value we should look at them through a telescope, in the reverse direction, when they would appear not only trivial, but would be seen to be too remote to have any material effect on our lives. -- Large Print 15 point font.

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Excerpt:

The sub-title of this volume, and indeed its inception, arose from my lately coming in contact with one of those establishments which are doing for humanity what a mother's arms do for the child who is "sick unto death"-a beautiful home with cheerful rooms and cheerful nurses, where patients are tenderly cared for after severe operations, carried through by our most famous surgeons, some cases, alas, almost hopeless from the first. At the head of this establishment was one of those kindly self-abnegating personalities, whose loving sympathy and encouragement have comforted the dying and smoothed the path for many a weary pilgrim passing from this life to the next.

With immense responsibilities on her shoulders, and after a day full of strenuous work, the head of this establishment would often sit through the night for hours by the couch of those whose lives could not possibly be prolonged for more than a few days. It was a few simple answers elicited by the questions brought to me from those poor sufferers, and the way such answers seemed to calm anxieties connected with the fear of death and to render the impenetrable Veil more transparent, which suggested the title, "Through a Window in the Blank Wall."

I do not wish to lay claim to having made any startling discovery; similar thoughts, especially those concerning the non-reality of Time and Space, have no doubt occurred to others, but the whole problem "What is the Reality?" has been insistently pressing on me ever since I can remember, and I have tried to give here in simple colloquial language, without any attempt at rhetoric, the conclusions I have personally come to as to what is the Truth.

The study of ancient and modern philosophic theories is useful as showing how impossible it is, for even the greatest thinkers of any age, to grasp the Absolute with our understanding or to measure the Infinite with our finite units. The propounders of all these theories seem to me to be, without exception, looking in the wrong direction for the "Reality of Being"; they are all arguing from the standpoint of "Intellectualism" in a similar manner to that of the "Theologians" referred to in View Three. Our latest expositor of this, M. Henri Bergson, bases his theory upon "Life" being the Reality; this he postulates is a "flowing" in Time, and Movement therefore becomes for him the Reality; and yet we know that Motion is but the product of Time and Space, and these are only the two modes or limitations under which our senses act and upon which our very consciousness of living depends. Surely the Absolute cannot be localised, must be Omnipresent, and therefore independent of Space-cannot have a beginning or end, must be Omniscient, and therefore independent of Time; these two unrealities can therefore have no existence in "Reality of Being."

If, then, there is any truth in "Intuition," we have, in this theory, the Reality, "Life," not only limited by the unreal but actually dependent for its very existence upon those limitations! In these Views I have attempted, on the contrary, to show that Time and Space have no existence apart from our Physical Senses; they are the modes only under which we appreciate motion, or what we call physical phenomena, and as our conceptional knowledge is based upon our perceptional knowledge, our very consciousness of living is limited by Time and Space, and we must surely therefore look behind consciousness itself, beyond the conditioning in Time and Space for the Reality of Being, otherwise physical motion, the product of these two limitations, would become the Reality of Being.