We are the navel of the world, the axis point from which each of us experiences the universe. Yet no two experiences of that universe are ever the same. This is not only true of each and every single human being who has ever lived, but of every living thing one can imagine, from the atom to the amoeba to the Andromeda galaxy and beyond. In this respect, each living thing experiences a universe unto themselves, including the universe itself, and through this conglomeration of reality tunnels, a single universe contains an infinite multiverse of vastly different experiences. And in this way, the fabric of reality is woven together from an endless loom of contending interpretations.
From each of our positions as the focal point of such an experience, each of us falls through time and space, clawing frantically all the while with our mind to grasp some permanence that we can cling too. The experience of life itself became so precious to us, from the air in our lungs to the thoughts in our head, that we decided to devise religions that would assure us that we would never have to let it all go, or give it all up, and return to the nothingness from whence we came.
So important was this hope of humans to maintain their own precious form of" human consciousness," in fact, that we convinced ourselves it was not only the greatest gift any god could bestow (despite the great deal of suffering such consciousness necessarily entails), but that maintaining it for eternity was the highest reward (even though many people think of eternity itself, in any condition, as pure hell).
That reward, most of us would later agree to believe, was given only to those who exercised that great virtue of conforming to certain dogmas, "believing" in certain moral ideals, worshiping the right "god," and ultimately obeying objective "universal natural laws," all of which were defined purely by subjective men and their religions.
With eternity hanging forever in the balance, then, priests dutifully practice this virtue by accepting their ordinations from one institutional church or another, and swearing obedience to their "savior" who was put to death for demonstrating the virtue of refusing to do the same thing. Christianity, ironically enough, is simply a religion that teaches obedience is the greatest virtue of all, to the followers of a man who was murdered as a heretic because he refused to obey.
Addiction to our desire for eternal life, however, blinds us to the eternity in which we now live. For if eternity is an attribute of time, and thus an attribute of a life that can experience time, then "eternity" is nothing less than what we experience between the cradle and the grave. That we are finite, does not change the fact that we are living in eternity even now, even if only briefly. It is only our greed that drives us to want ever more of it. And in that drive, we only desire to "be like God" no less than the devil himself.
Eternity, in other words, is the infinite you are experiencing in every moment, but because of our finitude we are easily distracted from seeking to savor that experience by a plethora of other more pressing concerns, and perhaps none more so than securing salvation for our "eternal" soul. We flit away our precious ability to experience the moments of eternity like dry skin falling to dust, in other words, with much of what robs us of that experience coming directly from our desire to live forever, ironically enough. And in our frenzied attempts to claw our way to an eternal heaven with all the religious "beliefs" we conflate for "truth," we turn our garden of Eden among the stars, into hell on Earth for ourselves, and all who follow.
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