may well be enough to distract his attention from his own defects and inadequacies. After all when a job is taken in hand, what is needed is as much confidence as possible, not an acute awareness of shortcomings, whether they are relevant or irrelevant to the job being attempted. Because fluxes in space-time tend to bundle (or because we are emotionally dependent on each other) every person in any particular bundle tends to assimilate and adopt the shortcomings of every other person in the bundle. So the evils of one generation tend always to be perpetuated into the next; although I stress that it will be an evolving evil and not precisely the same evil. Temptation, when viewed in space-time, is seen to have two main facets; firstly when one person persuades another to throw in his lot with him over a period of time by the expedient of each adopting or at least turning a blind eye to the other's vices; secondly in an isolated temptation when the tempter induces the other to think momentarily that their paths do lie side by side by creating a matrix of evil which gives the feeling of this illusion.
However in eternity everything changes; and eternity begins for any particular person, when he escapes from imprisonment in a flux of time.
The clock still ticks of course; but he loses all sense of outward direction or goal, and instead sees the future as an interior evolution. The old goals of conquest, glory (national or personal), scientific knowledge and technical achievement have to be left behind; and new goals take their place. The interior evolution can take one of two forms; either a gradual growth of communication and mutual trust between people, or a nihilism which is destructive of self and others. I need not say anything about nihilism in modern society; it is all too evident. Perfection, on the other hand, does not just happen; it has to be…