Eternity

"A human life is a schooling for eternity." [Gottfried Keller]

"A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops." [Henry Adams]

"Eternity is really long, especially near the end". [Woody Allen]

"Eternity is long enough for a joke." [With Hermann Hesse]

"Eternity is not something that begins after you're dead. It is going on all the time. We are in it now." [Charlotte Perkins Gilman]

"I have been blessed to see visions of eternity; and events in my future that have been important for me to foresee, have been revealed to me." [Clayton Christensen]

"Eternity's Sun may indeed rise."

"Eteeernity is for quick ones too." [TK]

Thoughts to consider:

Many ideas are embedded in paintings, also concepts of the love life.

• "Truth often hides in an ugly pool (Chinese)" Feel free to look through the things you like at first.
• Solid forewarnings fit for the love-life suits the after-life too.
• "Other countries, other customs (German)".
• The concept 'eternity' talks of man's incapacity to understand all is Here-and-Now.
• To use concepts one hardly understands, is one of the hallmarks of a snob, by the way.
• Savoury teachings could help in non-cramped conditions.

More could be added to the teachings, and you might come back later (This does not have to be a profession of reincarnation).

The Eternal Spirit may be said to exist during all moments in time.

The book of Ecclesiastes 3:11 tells: "He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men."

Despair beyond is a bad thing to avoid by living well here in time while on earth, accruing merit.

Aristotle in Physics, tells that everything that comes into existence does so from a substratum. He argued that a "vacuum" is impossible.

To some, eternity seems like being for a limitless amount of time. Others use it to refer to the timeless being and say God exists in eternity and is eternal, and that man's understanding of past, present, and future time do not apply. It is also said that if God did not exist both outside time and inside time, God would not be able to interact with humans.

Ordinary humans cannot fully understand eternity, neither as an infinite amount of time or beyond time-ness and space too. Some tell that God has to have existed since the beginning of "eternity", as in the common notion of God as Creator.

The "endless knot," used in Tibetan Buddhism, is one symbol of eternity among others. Also, Eternity is often symbolized by the image of a snake swallowing its own tail, known as Ouroboros (or Uroboros). The earliest known representation of the Ouroboros is in the second gilded coffin of Tutankhamun [Aea 77-79]. Carl Jung interprets the Ouroboros as having an archetypal significance to the human mind.

In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the self-begetting sun god Atum is said to have ascended from chaos-waters, appearing like a snake that renews the embodiment of Atum.

Visitor and Waker

Man is a credulous animal and must believe something. In the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones. [Sir Bertrand Russel, in Ras]

Many believe as they are told, without taking their hats off for those who learn to inspect appropriately. Do not believe all just because they seem to agree. Adjust favorably, rather [Kalama Sutta]. Here is an excercise of fiction which is related to Hindu myth, which is in part fiction too somehow.

Disarming Nordic seers of old were not great fools in the Viking Age that slowly ended around 1066 AD.

These best of sages were made aware of the universal forces of creation, preservation, and dissolution inside their own hearts, and later personified them in definite forms as dwarfs among Norwegians:

The sages of old named them such as:

1. Boyish, the Creator or all there is around;
2. Sagacious the Preserver;
3. Handsome, the Destroyer.
4. Waker, simple and frugal in essence.

Such sameness-rooted powers as these four were created as projections of the unmanifested giant (you can read Spirit) to unfold as creation, while the essence beyond creation happens to remain largely hidden behind extraneous, deep minds (such consciousnesses).

The little Stranger

A rather young-looking visitor appeared in front of the dwarfs Boyish, Sagacious, Handsome and Waker. The visitor was holding in his hand a single piece of straw about the size of a toothpick. Placing it in front of the dwarf Boyish, he asked, "Can you create a piece of straw like this?"

After terrible effort, Boyish realised he could not, and that shocked and surprised him.

The lad then turned to Sagacious and asked him to save the straw, for now it began to desintegrate in the sunshine of a steady gaze. Sagacious's efforts to hold it together were wholly fruitless.

Next the little stranger produced the piece of straw again and asked Handsome to destroy it. But try as the dwarf Handsome would to annihilate it, the little straw remained intact.

Now the boy turned to the fourth dwarf, simple, frugal Waker. "You know you know these things," the sunny boy said. "You know you know me. There is no reason to try to fool you."

The little boy turned again to the dwarf Boyish: "Did you ever create me? Every human being is matter-mind, but why is not one of man's arms longer than the other?" he asked.

The dwarf Boyish thought of it so intensely that the boy simply vanished. This led the three first dwarfs to the idea that everyone and everything must have existed idea-wise.

Then the waking one (Waker) among them said it:

"First someone had to create that huge, awesome and perhaps not first idea of having one really long arm. Yet none can tell why just some thoughts turn into wood and brick and others not, and so on. It could be best that way."

Aea: Hornung, Erik. The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999.

Ras: Russell, Bertrand. Religion and Science. Paperback ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961.