The Eternal NOW

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.

—Henry David Thoreau

Poets and mystics through the ages have often grappled with the concept of "eternity," often approaching it not as an abstract or temporal idea but as an experiential reality. Their renderings were rooted in their longing for transcendence and their attempts to articulate encounters with the infinite.

They had come to realize that Eternity exists outside the constraints of time and matter. It wasn’t some infinite future paradise. It was accessible in the present moment—the Eternal Now—this ecstatic experience of pure being where past, present, and future dissolve.

The mystical poet William Blake captured this higher experience beautifully when he wrote these famous lines:

"To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour."

The great Joseph Campbell also came to this understanding through his vast study of mythology, philosophy, and spirituality. Like the sages of old, Campbell saw that eternity represents the unchanging essence underlying all of existence.

For Campbell, myths and symbols laid the path toward this ground of being, which is beyond the rational mind yet intimately experienced through moments of deep insight, awe, or connection.

According to Campbell, a deep understanding of myths helps guide us toward an encounter with eternity. They are “clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life” that help us transcend our limited sense of self and time, opening a doorway to the eternal truths that shape human existence.

Below, I have compiled a few profound passages from poets, writers, and thinkers on that timeless, mysterious state we call ETERNITY. I hope you enjoy them.

Eternity isn't some later time. 
Eternity isn't a long time. 
Eternity has nothing to do 
with time. 

Eternity is that dimension of 
here and now which thinking 
and time cuts out. 

This is it. 

And if you don't get it here, 
you won't get it anywhere. 
And the experience of eternity 
right here and now is the 
function of life. 

Heaven is not the place to have 
the experience; here is the 
place to have the 
experience.

— Joseph Campbell

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We're always thinking of eternity 
as an idea that cannot be understood, 
something immense. 

But why must it be? 

What if, instead of all this, you 
suddenly find just a little room there, 
something like a village bath-house, 
grimy, and spiders in every corner, 
and that's all eternity is. 

Sometimes, you know, 
I can't help feeling that 
that's what it is.”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

Erik Rittenberry

“Everything beautiful 
has a mark of 
eternity.”

― Simone Weil

Erik Rittenberry

“You must live in the present, launch 
yourself on every wave, find your 
eternity in each moment. 

Fools stand on their island of 
opportunities and look toward 
another land. There is no 
other land; there is no 
other life but this.”

--Henry David Thoreau

From my rotting body, 
flowers shall grow 
and I am in them, 
and that is 
eternity.

—Edvard Munch

To the degree you approach the truth, 
your solitude will increase...Keep going. 
Don’t be afraid. 
The worst has already taken place. 
Of course, life will rip you apart again; 
but, as for you, you no longer have 
much to do with it. 

Remember this: fundamentally, 
you are already dead. You are 
now face to face with 
eternity.

-- Michel Houellebecq

The greatest problem is not how to 
continue but how to exalt our existence. 
The call for a life beyond the grave 
is presumptuous, if there is no cry 
for eternal life prior to our 
descending to the grave. 

Eternity is not perpetual future 
but perpetual presence.

—Abraham Joshua Heschel

Erik Rittenberry

“If time and space, as sages say,
Are things which cannot be,
The sun which does not feel decay
No greater is than we.
So why, Love, should we ever pray
To live a century?
The butterfly that lives a day
Has lived eternity.”

― T.S. Eliot

Photo: Erik Rittenberry

“Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole of life, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul.”

— Emerson

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