What is eternity?

Hi, coluber and welcome to A2K.

Strangely, I read a definition of eternity once:

Pick the tallest mountain in the world; pick the smallest bird in the world and surmise that the bird comes once a year to the apex of the mountain to sharpen its little beak. When that bird, engaged in that activity, wears down the mountain, then one day of eternity has passed.

My story is similar.
Only, instead of a bird, there is an angel who flaps his wings on the mountain once every 600 years, and when the mountain is leveled, eternity has only begun.

My personal opinion: eternity does not exist. Time will end... some time.

truth
Letty and fbaezer, it seems that for you'all eternity is equivalent to "everlasting" (an infinitely long or unending amount of time). Most mystically-oriented thinkers describe an eternal moment is as a timeless moment. That's something we don't normallly experience; we are clock-bound, unable to experience life without a sense of time and space. That was, I think, Kant's notion: the innateness of space and time in human consciousness. In forms of eastern meditation there is an absence of a sense of time, or at least it moves very fast. After an hour of meditation, one often feels that little or no time has elapsed. I think this approximates the experience of eternity for some people. I'm not sure. For me, it's just experience as it is. There is clock-time in it, but one doesn't notice.

sometimes where you are near death experience or in an occuring accident - my experience or feeling is that of the effect of time slowing until reality can catch up. A mini sub-eternity.

Being married to my wife all these years is all the eternity I can take

gordy - I hope you been married over a year or three

Eternity is part abstraction and part idiom.

Rufio: Would you explain to this fuzzy-head what that means?

JLNobody: If you were an American Indian you'd be a shaman. I know a mystic when I see one. Would you tell me what kind of meditation you practice?

truth
Coluber, a shaman? Not really the type. An old meditating aspirant? yes.

Eternity is an abstraction because we can't know it empirically - I don't have to explain that, I hope.

Eternity is an idiom too:
"I will x for eternity"
"x will be for eternity"
It means that whatever you're talking about will continue into the conceiveable future, or that the speaker has no plans of discontinuing it. It doesn't mean that the thing in question will, or will be expected to continue into what we think of philosophically as eternity.

In the first case, we can't know eternity as anything other than an abstraction - and in the second, it's a linguistic element used to convey culturally defined meaning that has no hard and fast definition in reality.

eternity is just another word for "this moment" or "the present". Time undivided by human minds

truth
Cyracuz. You're right. Please go have a talk with Rufio. She's partly right about the concept being an abstraction (ALL concepts are abstractions). But she hasn't clue about what this abstraction SHOULD stand for. You do.

what is eternity
I agree with Cyracuz and JLNobody, Eternity is here and now simply because the immediate present is the only stretch of time not defined by beginning or ending in the human mind. as soon as one attaches a beginning and ending to any length of time it loses its abstract quality and becomes no more than a quantity.

Welcome to eternity seansimpson.

yeah, welcome Sean. Eternity is really waiting in the doctor's office even when you're early for an appointment.

adieu

What it SHOULD stand for is all of the forseeable future, or the continued present, however you want to look at it, I don't think it matters really. Anything that you can see as being probably in the future is part of eternity - I wouldn't say I'm going to be in college for eternity, because I think it's highly likely that I will graduate in two and a half or three years. But I might say that the earth will be around for eternity, if I can't think of a reason why it would be destroyed. But if I knew more about astronomy than I do, I might say otherwise. I think I remember something about the sun turning into a red giant and eating the first three planets in the solar system, but I don't remember much from 3rd grade truth be told.

truth
Rufio, was that free associaton?

Free association?

This suggests that time exists only within the perception of the human mind. Would it take Halley's comet 76 years to complete its ellipse if mark Twain weren't alive to see it in the sky?

It also suggests that time can remain meaningful if it is "undivided," and, of course it cannot any more than speed or depth or size can.