"Such understanding is not yours. Still to your eyes the shadow seems the substance,—and darkness, light,—and voidness, beauty. And therefore to see your former births could give you only pain."
*
I asked:—
"Had I found strength to look back to the beginning,—back to the verge of Time,—could I have read the Secret of the universe?"
"Nay," was answer made. "Only by Infinite Vision can the Secret be read. Could you have looked back incomparably further than your power permitted, then the Past would have become for you the Future. And could you have endured even yet more, the Future would have orbed back for you into the Present."
"Yet why?" I murmured, marveling.... "What is the Circle?"
"Circle there is none," was the response;—"Circle there is none but the great phantom-whirl of birth and death to which, by their own thoughts and deeds, the ignorant remain condemned. But this has being only in Time; and Time itself is illusion."