The Eternal Moment

Once you realize that you and everyone else are immortal beings, you see time itself as an illusion.

As a child I thought of eternity as endless,
days and months and years and centuries,
then millennia and billions and trillions
of boring, boring years: what would I do
with all the time in the universe...?

Now as an old man I know time is a big liar,
itself unreal, an illusion born of sweat, fear,
the loneliness of spirit in a material world.

I see now eternity is always here,next to us,
within us, the moment none can grasp nor
measure nor repeat, the endless moment,
that indistinguishable point between past
and future, between what was, what will be--
the soul's singularity, its alpha and omega.

And all our fears of extinction
are like wasted breath,
for we are real and time is not--
we are the eternal moments....

Reviews

[Junie Souffrant]

I some how gain hope, from reading this piece but strangely feel sunken. Just the thought of "time" gets me that way, like I am always in competition with "time" lol. "the loneliness of spirit in a material world" this line describes me right now.....love you

[Nolo Segundo]

Well, there are reasons one's soul is lonely in this world....

[emmajoy]

As with your comparison re.vanilla icecream with your other reviewer.. I agree but disagree with you.

Thinkers think, weigh up - some quickly, others spending their life wondering what the.. til it's too late to decide one way or another. And in that is the declination.. the end of wondering what, where, how. Perhaps eternity wraps the soul.. the ending immaterial because Man isn't privy to such knowledge. Thus, the 'soul' is an unknown, both as subject religious or scientific. We can't analyse or disect it. Tis an impossibility. Plus, however created - the Eternal Soul has extreme and inexplicable powers. The 'spirit' is more easily understood; is what's seen during an earthly life then, after a being's death, lingers til forgotten - even when etched words fade.

Whilst space in all its dark shadows and flitting lights exists so will eternity BUT how many of us will be aware of it. If that is an unknown, then, best to take each second of a lifespan as it comes and treasure it. Mayhaps.

A great piece of writing makes a reader want more.. i do. Forgive my blathering.

[Brent]

Powerful piece on the existence of humanity. You're right that we just made time up to quantify how long things have existed. Time is not an inherent property of the universe. I like to think that even in death, we are still part of this universe. So, we do exist eternally in that sense.

Keep up the excellent work!

[Nolo Segundo]

Thank you, Brent for the kind words. In truth though, I mean it quite literally: the soul is real and each of us exists endlessly, without beginning or end. I learned this the hard way when I almost drowned at 24 and had an NDE.

Of course my near death experience was 'subjective', but isn't ALL human experience subjective? I mean, how do I know vanilla ice cream tastes the same to you as it does to me? Objectivity is really a shared illusion that happens to work, much as the sun seems to our senses to cross the sky each day. In fact, we are all standing on a globe spinning over a 1,000 miles an hour as it hurtles through space even faster, but we never 'feel' it. So it seems with the soul: our nervous systems are so finely tuned and our brains so cognizant of THIS world that we can't sense (except perhaps in our dreams) that there may be other worlds, other planes of existence, perhaps even other lives that we have lived or may live.