Living for Eternity

An interesting and entertaining article and video on The Atlantic website last week featured several people expressing being terrified of an eternal existence. The article revealed that there are many such people who experience this and share their fears and support each other on internet forums. The article quotes “Kellie” who wrote: “I remember the first time it hit me. I was around 8 years old. Now I’m in my 30s, and the thought of eternity still freaks me out. It usually hits at night when I’m trying to sleep. I’ve learned to push it out of my mind, but sometimes I can’t, and when that happens I start pacing the room and thinking that I might have to go to the emergency room or else I might kill myself.”
There’s even a name for this fear – “apeirophobia,” from the Greek word “apeiron” which means “infinity.”
The article quotes Martin Wiener, a neuroscience professor at George Mason University explaining: “I suspect that in apeirophobia one comes to the realization that after death you will live forever—if you believe in the afterlife—and in simulating that experience in your mind, one realizes that there is no way to project ahead to forever. That experience is, inherently, anxiety-provoking.”

What’s the problem here? These fears arise because such people simply do not understand what life is nor how it works. Without researching this further (which I might do at a later date) I suspect that these people are freaking out because they project their present experience into an eternity. If your life is not so great that could very well be an unsettling experience. Or perhaps for others that sounds like it could get very boring, and that indeed might be terrifying.

Perhaps you have seen the move “Groundhog Day,” a funny film about actor Bill Murray getting stuck in a time loop, waking up every day hearing the radio-alarm announcing once again “It’s Groundhog Day!” He’s stuck in that loop until he learns how to approach life differently. The external circumstances didn’t change until he learned to change himself and become a better person more thoughtful of other’s feelings. There’s an element of truth in this story. Life in the material world responds to who we are and what we project or want it to be. This is because reality in this material world is relative and is a product of our own creation. Dozens, perhaps even hundreds of books have been written to teach people how to deliberately and thoughtfully control the process of creating the future they want, rather than going through life accidentally and suffering many unwanted experiences in the process. The fact is that we create our future here by what we think and desire. This same process goes on perpetually.

The element that is missing, even amongst those who teach “conscious creation,” is understanding what happens after our so-called death, or rather, the death of the body. The eternal living spiritual being continues to live, but on the mental plane of existence – a plane of reality that each of us creates through the development of our consciousness during this physical life. After staying there for some time and integrating the experiences of the last life we are then prepared to incarnate into the physical once again. The desires we had that were unfulfilled at the end of the last life create the circumstances of the next incarnation, and then physical life begins again. The process goes on one day at a time, just as we experience now.

​The Spiritual Science explains all of this completely. Further, it explains how to break out of the relative time loop of this material plane, to embrace a permanent life of joy on the spiritual plane, where an eternal existence of bliss is nothing to be terrified of, but one that is embraced. An eternal life of happiness. What’s to be terrified of?