Why Can the Future Not Be Known?
We imagine the future on the basis of our current knowledge. Reality appears according to all the laws of Heaven; therefore, the future we see reflects our will. The future that will actually unfold would be visible only if we knew all the laws of Heaven and every relationship that can arise between those laws in reality.
On the Sixth Day, God completed creation. The world is complete; it already exists. The world can be known only if we come to know it in its details, limited by time and space, because the world as a whole is incomprehensible to consciousness.
Without the limitations of time and space, the perception of the world would be pure light, in which nothing would be distinguished from anything else. Imagine a projector that did not display the frames of a film one after another at sixty frames per second — the rate that is optimal for human perception — but instead projected every frame continuously onto the screen. The images would overlap and produce a completely bright screen on which nothing could be distinguished and nothing would be separated from anything else.
Because our perception is limited, we gradually come to know the world. Our experiences appear separately from one another, and in this way they reveal, one by one, the laws of Heaven as they are manifested in reality.
Perception therefore becomes a sequence of experiences, which appears to us as the passage of time. Throughout our experiences, our knowledge continually grows, and we come to know the laws in an ever-increasing number of combinations. As a result, we recognize more and more patterns of relationships that can arise between the laws.
Our knowledge is therefore always limited, and we are able to imagine the future only on the basis of the knowledge currently available to us. The future we imagine becomes increasingly accurate, and we are able to see relatively farther ahead in time. Even so, the imagined future always remains limited, although it comes ever closer to reality as our knowledge grows.
The evaluations attached to our knowledge make the formation of our image of the future even more complex, because we also possess knowledge that does not exist among the laws of Heaven. Our mistaken interpretations also shape the future we imagine, while the future that actually unfolds reveals those errors through experience. The difference between the imagined future and the future that comes to pass reveals where our knowledge was mistaken.
We could perceive the future accurately only if we knew all the laws of Heaven completely and also knew every possible form in which each law can be manifested. Those forms of manifestation also depend on evaluations. Therefore, we would also have to know every possible evaluation of every existing law, as well as every pattern of relationships through which these evaluated laws may appear together with other laws, whether those appear with or without evaluation.
Our life continues until complete knowing. Therefore, throughout human life, the imagined future plays an essential role, because the future that unfolds continually confirms how accurate our knowledge is and reveals where we are on the path of knowing.