prudence life becomes eating, drinking, and making merry. Keeping the ship heading correctly is a necessary chore, but apart from the gilded chains of this slavery, man is free to enjoy himself. There is no great cause to which he can devote himself heart and soul. No free man devotes himself to a slavery. But if there is a goal, the situation is transformed. All man's crusading spirit finds an outlet in pursuit of true and false gods; and it becomes worthwhile man dying for his beliefs. Yet if there is a goal, one day man will reach it. What will it be like when he does?
Well, the first thing that will happen is that evolution will stop! It will not stop for everyone else; but it will stop for the man who has reached evolution's goal. He will continue to change, he will continue to mature; nothing ever stands still. But he will no longer live in a flux of time; time for him will have ended, and eternity will have begun. He will still have to get up in the morning, day will still follow night, the seasons in their order, and the sidereal year. The clock will not have stopped ticking, but eternity will have dawned, like the dawning of thought so many centuries ago.
What keeps a man imprisoned in a flux of time? Basically it is having a fixed settled outlook, which progressively and irreversibly hardens with time. No one has a completely fixed outlook, except in the face of death. Actions mould consciousness; but the more fixed the consciousness to start with, the more stereotyped the actions, and therefore the less radical the change they effect on the consciousness. However, if I had to suggest one thing that made this progressive hardening inevitable, I would say lack of insight into this process of becoming. Once a man has this insight, it is not obvious to me why the process should be irreversible anymore. Naturally a man's consciousness will still tend to harden, because this is what life does to him; but I fail to see any psychological mechanism which would prevent the man relaxing again. If…