Extemporaneous musings, occasionally poetic, about life in its richly varied dimensions, especially as relates to history, theology, law, literature, science, by one who is an attorney, ordained minister, historian, writer, and African American.
Saturday, June 1, 2019
ETERNITY
ETERNAL REST
One can never "rest upon one's laurels." Day and night do not rest. Winds do not rest. Earth sun moon stars planets seasonal growth does not rest. Eating breathing drinking working sleeping loving eliminating reproducing are all a part of living .
The iconic "Tortoise and the Hare" aphorism of wise ancient Ethiopian, Aesop, slave in Greece, crystallizes this law of active engagement in maxim, in other mosaics of prosaic.
So too does the revealing history and examples of ancient Egypt and Ethiopia, which were so far in front of humanity in science, literature, music, mathematics, philosophy, civilization, that they coasted from the 4-5th dynasties pyramid-building eras onward through the rest of their history and beyond until today's archaeology, Egyptology, and study. But in a few thousand years , their heirs had lost the knowledge of self and had been defeated, enslaved, mocked!
Perhaps falling is as inevitable as rising: sunrise as sunset, perhaps . If so, I confess error here and now!
Perhaps we all recirculate anew as seed, as genome, photonics, ideas.
If so. America will fall as Rome fell; as Egypt and Ethiopia fell, as all fall. Yet the fabled fall of our perception and conception of 'fall', falling, may be but glosses, glades, a phase of forever, which we term as 'eternity.'
Active engagement demands rest! I have fallen asleep at the wheel on an interstate highway and survived with just a scratch after a collision. Rest is requisite in this realm if not in the nether realm, or the eternal realm, where there is no time, nor space, no movement, only eternity.
"There exists no source or ground from which anything could make its way into that standing present; any imagined entrant will prove to be not alien but already integral. And as it can never come to be anything outside it, so, necessarily, it cannot include any past; what can there be that once was in it and now is gone? Futurity , similarly, is banned ; nothing could be yet to come to it. Thus no ground is left for its existence but that it be what it is.
"That which neither has been nor will be, but simply possesses being; that which enjoys stable existence as neither in process of change nor having ever changed--that is Eternity. Thus we come to the definition: the Life--instantaneously entire, complete, at no point broken into period or part--which belongs to the Authentic Existent by its very existence, this is the thing we are probing for--this is Eternity."
P. 216, "Time and Eternity," THE ENNEADS, Plotinus (1991).