J.W. Dunne - An Experiment With Time

J.W.DUNNE

1925. Copyrightto the TIMELESS WISDOM COLLECTION: 2014 Business and Leadership Publishing,

Allrights Reserved

Nopart of this book could be condensed or reproduced without the permit of theauthor.

Publishedby Business and Leadership Publishing, Los Angeles, California, United Statesof America.

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The author is considered a forwardthinker and was way ahead of its time. However, please remember that this bookis a product of its time and do not reflect the same views on race, gender,sexuality, ethnicity, and interpersonal relations as it would if it was writtentoday.

Most references to Man must be readunderstanding Man as human being, both male and female, as theauthor intended from the beginning (as a writer of the New Thought Movement, hebelieved in and fought for the equality of women).

Although the wisdom in this book is ageless,parents might wish to discuss with their children how some things have changedsince this book was written.

PREFACETO THE COLLECTION

King Solomon says in Proverbs thatthere is nothing new under the sun.

For thousands of years, life has beenteaching us the same lessons over and over. Through war and peace; through ragsand riches; through stories of hope and of despair; through tragedies andfailure that end in triumph and success

The lessons are simple, as simple arethe values that originate them: Courage, Perseverance, Faith, Love,Truthfulness, Decision, Good Stewardship, Happiness

Also, be extremely careful with whatyou think and how you think it. As a man thinks, so is his life, says theBible. Like attracts like. Fear, Worry and Hateattract more fear, more worry and more hate, in all its manifestations.

Countless sages of the ages havetried to convey these messages and lessons in different ways and formulas.

From Pythagoras to Plato; from Dante,to Da Vinci and Goethe; from Bacon to Shakespeare; from Emerson to PrenticeMulford; from Joan DArc to Helen Keller; from Ben Franklin to Abraham LincolnBut we just keep ignoring them, and making the same mistakes

In this series, we present you themen and women of New Thought, whose lives were committed to enlighten the worldwith the wisdom of the ages.

William Walker Atkinson,Orison Swett Marden, Wallace Wattles, Bruce Maclelland, Christian D Larson,Ernest Holmes, Ralph Waldo Trine, Elizabeth Towne, Henry Wood, Neville Goddard,Charles Fillmore and a few others that we feature in our collection, areconsidered the masters of self-development and positive thinking, and the realpromoters of New Thought, a movement that came very much to life again with theMillennium

In over 200 books, theybrilliantly captured the essence of life, success, and the traditions of theEast, becoming one of the best collections in personal and mind-development inexistence. These books are books for enlightenment... They will provide theseeker the one who is ready and is paying attention-, some of the deepestanswers of life.

Mauricio Chaves-Mesn

Best Sellingauthor of 12 Laws of Great Entrepreneurs

312Principles of Success (you get Sundays off)

CONTENTS

H. G. Wells inThe Sunday Express .... I find it a fantastically interesting book. It hasstirred my imagination vividly, and I think most imaginative people will bestirred by the queer things he has advanced in it. I do not think it has yetbeen given nearly enough attention.

The Outline . The day maycomewill probably comewhen the world will consider this as the most importantbook of our age. There are many people even now. who say that it will revolutionize our attitude towards the world we live in muchas did the " Origin of Species."

OxfordMagazine . Mr. Dunne is a writer of great charm and humour admirable qualities in a metaphysician; and his knowledge of thesubject is surely as great as his knowledge of the stability ofaeroplanes.

The Times. Thestatements are of so serious and remarkable a character that it is certainlyworthwhile for a large number of people to carry out the necessary experiments... whatever we may think of Mr. Dunne's own philosophy of Time it is certainthat something almost equally strange is necessary to account for his results.

The Times(New York). It will probably take more than one reading for the studentto familiarize himself with the new and vast horizons opened to his speculativegaze. But the effort will be well worth while. For in linking, by implication,Einstein with Berkeley, and the experimental physiologist with the believer inthe immortality of the soul, the author of "An Experiment with Time " has evolved a " Weltanschauung "profoundly stirring and fascinating in its implications.

It has been rather surprising to discover how many personsthere are who, while willing to concede that we habitually observe eventsbefore they occur, suppose that such prevision may be treated as a Minorlogical difficulty, to be met by some trifling readjustment in one or anotherof our sciences or by the addition of a dash of transcendentalism to ourmetaphysics. It may well be emphasized that no tinkering or doctoring of thatkind could avail in the smallest degree. If prevision be a fact, it is a factwhich destroys absolutely the entire basis of all our past opinions, of theuniverse. Bear in mind, for example, that the foreseen event may be avoided.What, then, is its structure? I would suggest that we are lucky, on the whole,to be able to replace our vanished foundations by a system so simple as the ''serialism'' described in this book.

Anyone who hopes to discover an explanation even simplerwould be well advised to examine his own statement of the difficulty to be faced viz., that we '''observe events before they occur." Let him ask himselfto what time-order does that word "before" refer. Certainly not tothe primary time-order in which the occurring events are arranged! He may seethen that his statement {and every expression of his problem must bear thatsame general form) is in itself a direct assertion that Time is serial.

If Time be serial, the universe as described in terms of Timemust be serial, and the descriptions, to be accurate, must be similarly serial as suggested in Chapter XXV. If that be the case, the sooner we begin torecast physics and psychology on such lines, the sooner may we hope to reckonwith our present discontinuities and set out upon a new and sounder pathway to knowledge.

J. W. Dunne.

Extract (by permission) from a letter written by Professor A.S. Eddington. ("Minkowski's world," referred to therein, is the"space-time" world adopted by Einstein for the purpose of histheory.)

1 ' I agree with you about ' serialism '; the ' going on oftime' is not in Minkowski's world as it stands. My own feeling is that the 'becoming' is really there in the physical world, * but is not formulated in thedescription of it in classical physics (and is, in fact, useless to a scheme oflaws which is fully deterministic).

'' Yours truly,

"A. S. Eddington . " Observatory, " Cambridge , " 1928, Feb.1."

* Author's Note. This, I think, no Serialist can deny. The inclined line O'O" in Fig-. 9 is ,clearly, as objective to the observer as are any of the vertical lines in thatdiagram. The fact seems to be that what is abstract or mental to the first-termobserver is concrete or physical to him in his second-term outlook.

It might, perhaps, be advisable to say here,since the readermay have been glancing ahead,that this is not a book about"occultism," and not a book about what is called"psycho-analysis."

It is merely the account of an extremely cautiousreconnaissance in a rather novel direction,an account presented in thecustomary form of a narrative of the actual proceedings concerned, coupled witha statement of the theoretical considerations believed to be involved,and thedramatic, seemingly bizarre character of the early part of the story needoccasion the reader no misgivings. He will readily understand that the taskwhich had to be accomplished at that stage was the "isolating" (toborrow a term from the chemists) of a single, basic fact from an accumulationof misleading material. Any account of any such process of separation mustcontain, of course, some description of the stuff from which the separation waseffected. And such stuff very often is, and in this case very largelywasrubbish.