Time goes on forever?

Question

I've never liked or understood this concept since I was a kid. I'm still scared by it. Can someone explain to me how time can go on forever? I don't mean life on earth, I mean life after death. How can you spend millions and millions and millions...of years in one place? How does the universe go on forever? It must end somewhere right? Well then...where would your mind go. How can your thoughts just 'shut off?' Can you just stop thinking immediately?

Okay, I don't think I explained myself all that well, but if anyone could explain and express thier opinions the best they can, I'll appreciate it!!

Wow, all of your answers have helped me! I don't know how I'll pick a best answer...Thanks!

Answer 1

Time is a perception of consciousness, of the endless of moments of awareness. I have read these "moments" are 1/30 of a second. Anything that happens faster than that we cannot be aware of with just our 5 senses.
But consciousness is a faculty of the central nervous system. When it dies, the five senses die with it. They are are our means of knowing those endless moments. Without the faculty of knowing those endless moments, consciousness ceases to exist. A soul that goes on forever with no consciousness would be worthless, and a contradiction. Contradictions cannot exist except as theory, as a concept.
Therefore, even tho the existence of existence goes on forever in both directions, your own existence ends with the cessation of consciousness.

Answer 2

Time is only the measure of expansion of the Universe. The Universe was but a singularity, and there was no time. At the moment of the Big Bang time began as part of the expansion. As long as the Universe exists, time exists.

Note, the universe is still expanding, so the Universe is finite. It may continue to expand, or it may contract back to nothing.

This stuff is hard to grasp. Don't worry about it. There is an old joke about a lecture where the speaker said in 5 billion years the Sun would expand and destroy the earth. From the back of the room a man stands and says, "How long?" The speakers says 5 billion years. The man in back says "Thank goodness, I thought you said millions."

The point is, when you leave this mortal life, you have left the reality of the Universe and what is after may work in a fashion other than what we experince here. Don't fret.

Answer 3

Hiya..

This is a multiple question so I will try and answer each point from my perspective.

I feel maybe the idea of endless time worries you because you feel endless challenge rather than endless joy a possibility..and you would desire rest from labour..

Time is expansive for me ..it always was such..always will be and at any one moment we have before us time and behind us time the same.
This is so in Spirit and indeed in Spirit time is meaningless..
A lifetime on this plane is a few moments in Spirit....the human perception of time becomes lost and inappropriate..for as humans we use the seasons..the sun cycles and the body aging as time measure...which does not happen in Spirit.

We do not spend millions and millions of years in one place.

The Universe is expansive and it is both within and without us..as the Universe expands new worlds are created..voids unfold and within the voids are potential...and the potential is continually met.

The mind is part of us as human but try to consider the mind as different from our conciousness..and know our conciousness is all that really matters.. and what we call Soul is all we are...
The Soul is able to experience life as human and learn and grow for this...
The learning is endless..the books lie before us each book unwritten..each book a life..and there are many books..

Answer 4

As the soul ascends either in nightly out-of-body action or post-passing, time becomes less of a factor, and when the soul remerges with Source, time is no more and Eternity Is.

(What good and coherent qualities the soul loves, is kind to, is truthful about, etc., are what personality continues on.)

Psychiatrist Olga Kharitidi in her "Entering the Circle" and "The Master of Lucid Dreams" encounters time as a dimensional extension in which she, per an experimental out-of-body-inducing apparatus at a physics institute, found to contain portions of self beyond her present life.

Mark Prophet's "The Masters and Their Retreats" takes and describes his soul coherency in the Second Heaven, where time has ceased and Eternity Is.

O. M. Aivanhov's "The Powers of Thought" and Free and Wilcock's "The Reincarnation of Edgar Cayce?" deal with time, especially Free and Wilcock, as it was something Edgar Cayce moved beyond in his predictions of his next embodiment. Http://www.divinecosmos.com Other "experiments with time" are experienced and reported in "Testimony of Light," Helen Greaves, and "Expecting Adam," Martha Beck, Ph.D. Yogananda's "Autobiography of a Yogi" and site http://www.yogananda-srf.org have some insights re eternality. Ann Ree Colton's "Men in White Apparel," also.

kind regards,

j.

Answer 5

Well, with modern physics, time is just another dimension, and it may have an end...But the fact is that objects, such as yourself exist. You exist in the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd dimension, and also in time. Try thinking of time as a physics thing instead of in terms of your experiences. You merely exist and move through the dimension of time, and this provides your mind our reality that everything exists for a certain time, does something for a certain time, etc. But we can only perceive a point in time. Whereas we can look and see through the 3 dimensions of space with our eyes, we can't see back and forward in time. Because we can only see one point in the time-dimension, that is why we think of time as moving along. Modern physics says that whereas the 3 dimension we can see in the universe may be squeezed into a point in the Big Crunch, so will time, and time will thus end with the Big Crunch.

Answer 6

Raina, you've explained it perfectly well. You are the third person in my life to express their anxiety about living forever and ever and ever till the end of time which incidentally goes on forever. Incidentally, the two before you who told me this were also women, and were also very deep thinkers. So I assume you must be one too :-).

In any case, I must admit that I find it strange not to want to live forever. If it ever comes to it, I guess I would just be haunting time and space to my content. And only when there is nothing left to see, will I join in the hymn of Freddie Mercury (may his soul rest in peace) "Who wants to live forever?"

Answer 7

Time and material reality is actually an illusion due to our limited awareness in a 3-D version of Reality. This everyday illusion or dream state is called 'maya'.

There is no separate past or future - just one moment of continuous awareness called 'consciousness'. Eastern or spiritual philosophy is hard to understand when we limit ourselves to just the Ego.

Our true Selves exist outside this illusion of time and space. So to be precise we never actually go 'anywhere' or exist in any 'time' after all. Mind-blowing and scary - isn't it?

Answer 8

One of the oddest things in life I find is that the more I age in body yet in my mind it is as if I never got older. From that perspective it appears that I am ageless. That I am in a state of existence which is outside of time or space. I believe that when I die that the state of mind I feel in my body will be that way after my body dies.

Answer 9

Time does not go on forever - nothing does. Eventually, the universe will die (whether by a bang or by a whimper, there is still debate)

Eternity is a man-made concept - it's just a handy place keeper for very large lenghts of time. So, time does not go on forever, the universe will not go on forever and you and I will just be specks of dust in the cosmic flow.

You are unique - this intersection of atoms and consciousness will never occur again, so make as much of it as you can.

Answer 10

Time is a concept created by man. It's calculations and it's mathematics are a scientific means of control over our daily lives and the world as we know it. Time is in a continual state of movement, we don't know when it started, and we don't know where it is going or how far. We just measure it in increments every day.
The only entity I know of that stands outside of time is God.