excalibur wrote:Dr Roles had a lovely diagram on this with the now on a vertical line and the past and future on the horizontal line and where they crossed was the now and that was in line with Param Atman.
I think the diagram you are referring to is probably the one from his paper of 19th October 1981. I've inserted it below and also included Dr Roles' commentary on the diagram from that paper.
Dr Roles wrote:At this point some of some feel we need to have a simple picture to present to the mind in any situation—a picture which contains enough knowledge ‘in a nutshell’ to remind us forcibly and instantaneously of our aim to liberate ourselves from the Maya or illusion in which we live.
Though so much has been discovered about the structure and function of the human nervous system in the fifty years since “A New Model” was first published in 1931, we can take as our starting point the diagram (Figure 8) at the top of p.427 of the current third edition (with certain modifications) using its author’s main line of argument—6-dimensional spacetime.
“Let us take the line of time as we usually conceive it. The line ‘Before’, ‘Now’, ‘After’, is a line of the 4th dimension. Let us imagine several lines perpendicular to this line. These lines, each of which designates now for a given moment, will express the perpetual existence of past and possibly of future moments.”
Dr Roles wrote:Comment. For our present purpose I shall take the short time-space of a day of 24 hours (say from 6 a.m. today to 6 a.m. tomorrow), which is made up of moments of ‘psychological time’. Though our worldly lives have to be synchronized by clocks and calendars we simply must not believe in the validity of this artificial line on which we live ‘round the clock’, day after day all our lives and maybe life after life. Its absurdity becomes apparent when we stop to consider for a few moments:So continuing Mr. Ouspensky’s argument:
- How this line has no beginning and no end,
- How the future is not born yet and what was once the ‘future’ is always fading through the ‘present’ into the ‘past’ which is considered to be irretrievable and,
- That the only freedom we get from this prison is when we are fast asleep and know nothing about it!
“The line of the 4th dimension is the only ‘time’ we know or recognise. But, though we are (mostly) not aware of it, sensations of other ‘times’ both parallel and perpendicular continually enter our consciousness; and the perpendicular lines which consists only of now are, as it were, cross-threads, the weft in a fabric over the surface of time, in relation to the parallel lines of time which represent the warp.
But each moment of ‘now’ on the lines of passing time contains not one, but a certain number of possibilities, at times a great, at others a small number.”
Though we can talk endlessly about it, we ignore those lines of ‘Now’ which have the most possibility and try to meditate with the outward-looking half of the mind which lives entirely on the line of passing time.
Around 800 of Dr Roles' papers are currently being prepared and checked for uploading to the archive later this year.