A personal metaphysics

or Life, the Universe and Everything

Maybe the place to start is with my concept of Eternity. It seems to me that there is a close correspondence between eternity, God, truth, ultimate meaning, etc. Because we are creatures who live in a four-dimensional space, we need to be able to think within these dimensions, and eternity is convenient because we can focus on the dimension of time, which is intuitively important as far as I am concerned because issues like life and death tend to be framed in my mind by questions of time. There was a time before I was born, and there will be a time after I am dead.

Because I think of time as being linear, I will endeavour to show what I mean by eternity with the help of a simple line. That line could also be a point, or a circle, or a spiral perhaps, but a line is what I find easiest to cope with.

Eternity in this view is a line stretching from zero to infinity. If we are referring to time, then everything that has ever happened or will happen is situated on this line. I think of that as being a ‘God’s eye view.’ What we see as intervals of time, say a year, or our own lifespan, is signaled by a segment of line. What we think of as ‘being’ we tend to think of as taking place in an interval along this line. I was born at a certain point along this line, and I will die at a certain point. I like to think of being born as an unfolding of eternity which results in my coming into being.

The image below shows my understanding of birth, life and death from the perspective of eternity. Death is a folding back into eternity. Nothing is lost from God’s eye view: I came into being, and my being will never be taken away (from the perspective of eternity). I believe that it is possible to experience eternity in the now, as in practice stillness of body and mind found in meditation, contemplation or mindfulness. Paradoxically, this experience is only fleeting (I say paradoxically, because in the context of eternity it is odd to speak of something being fleeting or temporary). I think that as I live in the time between birth and death I can easily be unmindful of the present moment, by being preoccupied with things that have happened or things that have yet to happen. In silence and stillness it is possible to become one with eternity, knowing that in another moment my mind may have wandered back into the dimensions of time in which I live my ordinary life. However, it is in the evanescent experience of eternity that I prepare for death, the point at which all of my time-bound life gets folded up and taken into eternity.

Oct 2015

Note made Feb 2017: Well, I have been trying to engage with Whitehead’s philosophy and the idea of process as the key underlying theme. It’s out with ‘being’ and in with ‘becoming’! I’m afraid that it means that I now think a lot of what I have written above to be pure tosh! It’s all quite exciting, but I’ll have to re-think where I stand on a lot of that stuff.

Nov 2022

Yes, I have moved on. I agree with Whitehead that the future simply does not exist. It cannot even be seen by God. Rather, the future is constantly being made, created in the present.