The Hidden Teaching Beyond Yoga by Paul Brunton

Author:Paul Brunton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI013000 Philosophy / Metaphysics
Publisher: North Atlantic Books

MAN’S EXPANDING SPACE-TIME SENSE

It was pointed out in the opening pages of this book that recent inventions were compelling mankind to widen its space sense and expand its time sense. Some further important implications of this development may now be stated. Do we realize that man came to the new notion that the earth was round through expanding his space sense? When medieval navigators made longer journeys and finally circled the globe, when astronomers devised superior instruments and became aware of more distant stars, the belief that the earth was flat became ludicrous and untenable. Copernicus introduced the idea of relativity of direction to European thought. When the medieval flat-earth notion prevailed there was only one absolute and fixed worldview possible. When the rotating-earth notion triumphed, the discovery of Copernicus changed the direction of European thinking and set forces going which gradually revolutionized its culture. The hypothesis of relativity was born out of investigation in a spatial field of a vastness that was beyond precedent in such experiments. This enabled Einstein to find that rays of light which are apparently straight are actually curved and that a straight line, if drawn far enough, would turn out to be a curve! Straight lines seem straight only because we do not follow light for a course of millions of miles and during a sufficiently long period of time. Could we but do so we should find them curved. But such a discovery is subversive of all the axioms of Euclid, of all the geometry that had been based on those axioms, of all the old concepts of fixed material bodies arranged in space according to the old Euclidean laws. Euclid’s geometry worked well provided it was applied only to limited portions of the universe. But when a vaster field was brought into consideration it became unsatisfactory and non-Euclidean systems such as Riemann’s were found more adequate to the measurement of the world. Here again the expanding space sense has revolutionized even the character of mathematics. If it has demanded the giving up of limited notions it has offered more comprehensive and more generalized explanations of physical phenomena in their place.

The expansion of the time sense of mankind is equally important to thought and culture and has shown itself in various ways. Men do not get giddy nowadays at this striking change, as they would surely have done five hundred years ago. The gramophone brings to their ears a voice which spoke a decade ago, the radio enables them to hear immediately speech or song which would formerly have required several days or some weeks of journeying to hear. The world of time has contracted whereas the sense of time has enlarged.

This widening of the space sense which brought the discoveries of Copernicus and of Einstein in science has also brought other new truth in its train. It is affecting the practical policies of statesmen and the theoretical principles of economists. It is influencing the major departments of human life and human culture.

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