by Ernest L. Norman
The pages of history have portrayed for us a great pageantry of man. Through its pages are emblazoned in the passing epochs of time, the rise and fall of many civilizations. Egypt, India, China, Greece, Carthage and Rome have risen from the soil of earth; like some passing meteor or sun have streaked across the earthly skies and left behind in rubble, heaps of stone, the testimonies which bear mute witness to the untold millions who have come and gone among these places, who have sung their song of life, who have carved and sung and build, and yet with the passing of time, as the leaves which grow and die in the seasons, as the tides which rise and fall, yes, even the millenniums of time which see the changes of the patterns of stars in our skies.
So, too, that while man in one time builds up into new greatness, new power, new glory, he must know that he is also building into the time and place of his passing, for one generation belongs only to the next; and from the womb of time are born many generations, many civilizations whose parenthood cannot be determined in the color of his skin, the strength of the walls which surround his cities or the number of soldiers in his legions, but comes only as a victim of time and circumstance, betrayed by the weakness of his own emotions – the Judas-like longings of earthly desires which bring him time and again in the trial of flesh and in the courtrooms of many civilizations.
Nor can it be said he is not forewarned of all these things, for his very existence becomes the kaleidoscope of life and death. The regular and rhythmic succession of cycles of birth, death and rebirth should place within his mouth the taste of things to come. Neither can it be said that any emperor, king, or dictator has unto himself the power to forestall this unending procession, nor can he build against it. The sarcophagus of the Egyptian king, desecrated and barren in the desert sun, becomes the shroud of any newborn hopes or aspirations of those who would build in such earthly dominions either temples, castles, pyramids or any bastions made from stone wherein he can tread in fancied security, for surely every stone he so erects will become his epitaph and writes with unfailing hand the weakness of his thinking.
And if a man so seeks an answer from all this, must he not also be forewarned of the impending doom which leads him to search the unanswered question to life in the shambles of some bygone age and that the characters written in stone may lead him to the trap door which will plunge him into the abyss of self-delusion
The quest for life, its origin and ultimately the answer to all things lies not within the circumference of any man’s life or any earthly plane, in any epoch or civilization, for the earth itself is but a vast and complex mirror upon whose complex surface there ever plays this pageantry of life and death, portrayed not as the earth as giver and taker of all things, but one of the many facets of shining imagery which are reflected from the all-creative substance from within.
And internally there shines about each man in his age-old processions through time, the countless and innumerable reflections of this procession. His footsteps leave behind the haloed dust of his creations, which shines in its reflected glory his pathway which leads each man ever onward into the infinite vistas, into the shining cosmos of creation.
How then can it best be said or brought about, that man can build for himself a place of security, for if it is that all of his earthly creations have come to naught and have given him no form or substance for his long hoped-for security and peace of mind and that even as he created all things from each time and place, these were only, in themselves, a mute testimony for that which he inwardly strove; each life he lived a strong emancipation for his spiritual freedom.
Excerpt from Tempus Procedium