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Updated: June 18, 2025
If in this lecture I have in any way succeeded in getting behind the theory to the immediate facts, the answer is not nearly so certain. The question can be transformed into this alternative form, Is there only one family of durations? In this question the meaning of a 'family of durations' has been defined earlier in this lecture. The answer is now not at all obvious.
It can be stated in this way: There are durations which contain as parts any two durations of the same family. For example a week contains as parts any two of its days. It is evident that a containing duration satisfies the conditions for belonging to the same family as the two contained durations. We are now prepared to proceed to the definition of a moment of time.
You will remember that in my last lecture I defined the concept of an abstractive set of durations. This definition can be extended so as to apply to any events, limited events as well as durations.
Sixty-three kings of France have sat upon the throne; these have, one with another, reigned about twenty years each. This is the usual course of Nature. The ancients, therefore, were mistaken when they supposed the durations in general of reigns to equal that of generations. They, therefore, allowed too great a number of years, and consequently some years must be subtracted from their computation.
Because man thus lives, not in an ever-equal chain of mutually exclusive moments, in Clock Time, but in Duration, with its variously close interpenetrations of the successive parts; and because these interpenetrations are close in proportion to the richness and fruitfulness of the durations he lives through; he can, indeed he must, conceive absolutely perfect life as absolutely simultaneous.
As international hostilities gradually came to an end, the National Spiritual Assemblies of Persia, of the British Isles, of Australia and New Zealand, of Germany and Austria, of Egypt and the Sudan, and of Iraq—freed from the limitations imposed on them by the war—embarked on projects of various durations to expand the base of the Administrative Order, settle pioneers in goals both at home and abroad, and multiply the available Bahá’í literature.
Here we are touching on that character of the passage nature which issues in the spatial relations of simultaneous bodies. This possible identity of the durations in the case of the sense-awareness of distinct minds is what binds into one nature the private experiences of sentient beings. We are here considering the spatial side of the passage of nature.
The farthest we can go towards a conception of external objects, when supposed SPECIFICALLY different from our perceptions, is to form a relative idea of them, without pretending to comprehend the related objects. Generally speaking we do not suppose them specifically different; but only attribute to them different relations, connections and durations.
I neither am going nor coming; nor is my dwelling in any one place; nor art thou, thou; nor are others, others; nor am I, I. As if he had said, 'All is for the soul, and the soul is Vishnu; and animals and stars are transient paintings; and light is whitewash; and durations are deceptive; and form is imprisonment; and heaven itself a decoy." All of which we see reproduced in Emerson's poem "Brahma."
Also every duration which is part of a given duration intersects the stations of the given duration in loci which are its own stations. By means of these properties we can utilise the overlappings of the durations of one family that is, of one time-system to prolong stations indefinitely backwards and forwards. Such a prolonged station will be called a point-track.
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