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Look Ahead
By Frater
O. J. RankinTHE ego's development through experience is an essential part of a great evolutionary process, the successive culminating phases of which must always lie in the future. The present is preparatory and can never be more than the sum of the past, which is "carried forward" from the preceding columns. There can be no realization of future in the present. We will be tomorrow what we have made ourselves today. We can realize today, but only anticipate tomorrow. No matter how perfect are our thoughts and actions of today, the reactions are not due until tomorrow. Action and reaction cannot take place simultaneously. From time to time great minds have thrown some light upon this truth. Christ said, in effect, "Seek to be and to do only what is consistent with the life that you will live in the world to come." Paraphrased, this might read: "Plan, where you are, and while you can, for where you will be next." Seneca wrote: "He is born to serve but few, who thinks only of the people of his own age. Many thousands of years, many generations of men are yet to come; look to these, though from some cause silence has been imposed on all of your own day; then will come those who may judge without offence and without favour." Milton, referring to "Paradise Lost," remarked: "An inward prompting which now grew daily upon me, that by labour and intense study, joined with the strong propensity of Nature, I might perhaps leave something so written to after times as they should not willingly let it die." We have only to look into Nature to see the beneficial results of this universal tendency to "leave something . . . . to after times." What would happen if Nature left nothing? Yet today many a so-called leader of humanity "thinks only of the people of his own age." Such a narrow now-or-never policy is out of harmony with natural laws and can only bring trouble and strife. It is the universal now-and-ever policy that leads to lasting peace and happiness. "Ever" is a compound of "nows." If, during past decades humanity had used up all its "nows," surely we should have found our world in a very deplorable condition. | ||
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