Every epoch has been singular, carved by its own struggles and revelations. The Greeks did not anticipate the collapse of their polis-world, the Romans did not foresee the twilight of empire, nor did Europe imagine the shattering violence of the Great War. If the wisest thinkers of their time could not predict their own century, why should we imagine we can divine ours?
We live amid archives, statistics, and histories more abundant than any previous age. Yet all this memory does not give us foresight. Our present itself eludes us: what we call “breaking news” often decays into tomorrow’s irrelevance. When we cannot even judge the weight of today’s events, how can we presume to chart the destinies of 2030, 2040, or 2050? Here the contrast between civilizational views of time becomes instructive.
The Western imagination tends to think of history as a linear march: past leading to present, present to future. It is an arrow pointing forward. The Hindu imagination, however, is not enslaved to such linearity.
In the philosophy of the yugas, time unfolds in vast cycles—Satya, Treta, Dvapara, Kali—endlessly repeating in cosmic rhythm. But even this vision does not yield prediction. For the cycles described in the Puranas are not chronicles of history but revelations of the eternal. They teach us not what tomorrow will be, but what the nature of time itself is.
History, then, is a Western device—a way of situating man within the river of time. Useful, yes, but limited. The Hindu vision dissolves the very categories of “past,” “present,” and “future” into a single continuum, reminding us that what truly matters is not chronology but meaning. “History tells us what happened,” one might say, “but the Puranas tell us why it matters in the cosmic order.”
From either perspective—linear or cyclical—the result is the same: the future refuses capture. The arrow misses, and the wheel turns beyond our comprehension. What is certain is not the repetition of events but the recurrence of human astonishment.
The only wisdom left is humility. The future is not a shadow of the past, nor the fulfillment of our predictions. It is a realm perpetually unimagined. As Heraclitus once reminded us, we never step into the same river twice. And as the Hindu seers intuited, the river itself is eternal, flowing through yugas without beginning or end.
To live wisely, therefore, is not to claim foresight, but to remain open to surprise. For history does not repeat—it creates. And the future, when it comes, will be unlike anything we can imagine.
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