Chapter X (part 7)

An age of great inspiration and unconscious productiveness is invariably followed by an age of criticism and consciousness. The one affords material for the analyzing and critical intellect of the other. Thus all those great characters who tower like giants in the history of mankind, like Buddha-Siddârtha, and Jesus, in the realm of spiritual, and Alexander the Macedonian and Napoleon the Great, in the realm of physical conquests, were but reflexed images of human types which had existed ten thousand years before, in the preceding decimillennium, reproduced by the mysterious powers controlling the destinies of our world. There is no prominent character in all the annals of sacred or profane history whose prototype we cannot find in the half-fictitious and half-real traditions of bygone religions and mythologies. As the star, glimmering at an immeasurable distance above our heads, in the boundless immensity of the sky, reflects itself in the smooth waters of a lake, so does the imagery of men of the antediluvian ages reflect itself in the periods we can embrace in an historical retrospect. As above, so below. That which has been will return again. As in heaven, so on earth . Anything that can be said about the understanding of temporal relations is inevitably extremely vague. This is because our language is absolutely inadequate to the spatial expression of temporal relations . We lack the necessary words for it, we have no verbal forms, strictly speaking, for the expression of these relations which are new to us, and some other quite new forms— not verbal —are indispensable. The language for the transmission of the new temporal relations must be a language without verbs. New parts of speech are necessary, an infinite number of new words. At present, in our human language we can speak about "time" by hints only. Its true essence is inexpressible for us. p. 123 We should never forget about this inexpressibility. This is the sign of the truth , the sign of reality. That which can be expressed, cannot be true. All systems dealing with the relation of the human soul to time—all ideas of post-mortem existence, the theory of re-incarnation, that of the transmigration of souls, of karma —are symbols, trying to transmit relations which cannot be expressed directly because of the poverty and the weakness of our language. They should not be understood literally any more than it is possible to understand the symbols and allegories of art literally. It is necessary to search for their hidden meanings , that which cannot be expressed in words. The literal understanding of these symbolical forms in certain lines of contemporary literature, and the union with them of ideas of "evolution" and "morals" taken in the most narrow, dualistic meaning, completely disfigures the inner content of these forms, and deprives them of their value and meaning. Footnotes 118:1 "The Fourth Dimension," p. 77.