Eternity

Face the Real, the endless, eternal, timeless Real. Step back and face it.

From the distance, it is clear. Everything is in place and the pieces match. Nothing can possibly be out of place. Every little detail, no matter how subtle or complex, extends out to every other in an infinite network of correspondences and reflections.

Then you fall back into the maelstrom and things become confused, chaotic and unintelligible.

In the clarity, you can see the waves. The rushes of vast energy, reaching up and outwards, trying to find a place of rest, seeking the end and finding eternity. Forever. A timeless dance that will rise and fall to the vast infinitely fractal breath of nothingness.
The end is an illusion. There can be no end because there was no beginning. What didn’t begin cannot end. The flow of time itself is our illusion. What happens now and what happens then. The space between them and the space around them. All an illusion.
And it is only within the illusion, that you will create an end for yourself, a final clear resting place where struggle stops and the waves become a calm, gentle pool that will never move again. You may rest in such a place for what will appear to be a long time (a long time which is not eternity but which you may fool yourself into believing that it is) but sooner or later the resting place, the end that you were seeking, will come to an end.
Because it wasn’t before, it won’t be again.
Because you arrived at it, you will surely leave it.
You can only eternally be in the place that you never left.
The end of things will have an end in itself.

Any process that begins will end.
Any process that ends will begin… again.

Open your eyes for the first time and the world is brand new, rushing at you from all directions, incomprehensibly beautiful sounds and sights penetrating you through all possible gaps in your frail armor… and you are in it… you are part of it, without questions or answers, without the need for either. A complex symphonic orchestra that others will call a "doctor", a "nurse", a "hospital", a "mother"… and an even stronger storm of experience inside of you that others will teach you to call "fear", "pain", "hunger", "love".
For a time you may be allowed to swim in it, to drench in the myriad colors beyond the linguistic horizon, to laugh at jokes that have no punch line and dance to rhythms that have no measure.
But around 4 or 5, you fall… and the fall will bring answers with it. Answers that spell an end to freedom. A luscious apple of human knowledge that brings a new beginning, a limited sentence of incarceration in a world of predetermined limits.
Hold on to those answers too tightly and there may never be any questions again. What is this? Who made it? How was it made? There is a very high probability that some adult will be close to you when you ask out loud, and the adult will be ready to spout a mechanical answer they themselves are only repeating from the adult that first branded them with it.
And this simple mechanical answer becomes a "fact" and the questions are sealed away. There may be moments when the questions come back but these moments become fewer and less frequent as time goes by, until you look back onto your past and laugh at the foolish little kid you once were. "But that was back when I didn’t know the harsh realities of life. Once you are an adult there is no more room for foolish questions."
With the questions sealed away, deep in your subconscious, so deep that even in dreams they will be cloaked in myth and memories of schoolyard games… what will happen when the Real breaks through once again, uninvited, and forces you to come face to face with it.
What if the Real doesn’t match the mechanical answer you were given so long ago. What if it happens that your parents didn’t know everything? What if your preacher was wrong? What if the old men who made every effort to put all their knowledge in one book came short? What if your teacher didn’t know what she didn’t know? What will you do then?
Everything that you know as your reality had a beginning.
And because it had a beginning, it will have an end.
Sooner or later, you will find yourself back in Eternity.

What will you do "then"?
What did you do "then"?
What do you do "now"?