updated preface hi and welcome to my dream. herein i describe my most profitable journey into the spiritual realm. it was a journey i made on dxm and salvia completely alone and in dark silence. it led to a beautiful state of mind that hasn't left me since. i figured something out. a "bigger picture" model in my mind. i think i see how things are and everything is making sense now. i feel ...invigorated constantly. and i want to explain it all to everyone, but it seems so hard to just sit back down and reanalyze it as opposed to just walking around feeling it. and plus finding out the meaning of life doesnt solve all questions. it creates more in its wake, even (which the chapter called "what the meaning of life could mean" skims on the surface of). i have talked main parts of this idea over with friends and we all seem to agree on it mostly. all of it makes sense and i will most likely have a section of credits for people that helped me realize this whole huge thing. its long, but its worth the effort to share, i think. i hope you have as much patience to read it as i will need to write it. ill occasionally add to this section to explain the progress of it. defining duality in all the universe, you'll find MANY things but the one thing you'll find the most of is duality. the two sides of every spectrum. and the more we see the universe in duality goggles, the easier we undestand things. things are simplest at that level. duality is the bedrock foundation of all elaborate complex thought because it contains good and evil, positive and negative. artificial intelligence will have ones and zeros while our minds rely on yes and no. stop and go. and where this comes from is the creation of society. society or communal living cannot be birthed unless all memebers at least understand good and bad. a society without good and evil would be chaos and it would dwindle quickly. but from the ground up, we have built this massive super structure of society on top of the two most simple spiritual emotions: create or destruct. and from that we get vastly more important, complex and fascinating other dualities like justice and injustice, wisdom and ignorance, hate and tolerance, open and closed mindedness, but the important part here is they're all different isotopes of the same yin yang of good and evil that begins all concepts. the reason duality is important is because it is the simplest form of thought possible. it is the level of conciousness where only two states exist. and just like building a computer out of googles of on/off switches, we build conciousness on duality. defining eternity in the spirit of defining things, i like to be precise and evidential, but when trying to define time, its easier to fall victim to opinion. so as to avoid that and trying to lay down any hard beliefs (nobody likes a fundamentalist), i would like to present two working definitions of eternity for suggestion. these definitions work for me, see if they make sense to you and give you an idea of what eternity could be like. but i think the responsibility for their sense is in the fact that i had to apply a sense of duality. to define eternity, we must start smaller with time. to date, the big bang is pretty accepted (and fits well in all my theories) and whether or not you believe such an event happened, you have to admit that IF it did, then no matter what.. for us, time began at that point. when the entire mass of the universe was collapsed in the grand-daddy of singularities and started and expanded from there, that is the only time that matters to us and its all the concept of time i think we will ever need. because even if there was a "time" before the big bang, it couldn't possibly have made a difference on the big bang. once all matter and energy in the universe expanded from there, we're out on our own. also we would never be able to learn of anything beyond it because all questions ultimately lead back to it, the beginning, when there was infinitely large amounts of existence in infinitely small amount of space. the next imporant phase in time after something like the big bang (creation, the beginning) is when there will be infinitely small existence in infinitely large amounts of space. this is the natural progression of a big bang type universe. what happens is once the inifinite amount of matter that exists collects into one singularity, the gravity is so great that it literally switches and pulls reality inside out and existence is reversed. up becomes down, black becaomes white, and infinite amount of force pulling all matter and energy onto intself is instantly reversed into infinite amount of force expandings all existence out in a huge explosion that had the same force (initially) as the grand-daddy singularity's gravity pulling in. thus the big bang reoccurs. this sort of switch from yin to yang could only occur at such a time when nothing in the universe existed but two things so they can switch places. that means that all existence has to be compressed into one singular space.. or in other words, we cannot have void, space and matter. matter and space have to be compressed into one so that we only are left with void and existence. once all energy has completely dispersed throughout the cosmos and the universe is one single temperature throughout, the universe is over, dead, any hope of trying to sustain life is gone (even if we find a way to produce energy from gravity so sustain life, sooner or later mass would be distributed into inifinte space enough so gravity would deminish. mass would remain suspended in infinite space until whatever incredibly weak pull gravity would still have on mass would pull it all onto itself, and we would fall into it once more (we could not escape the gravity of the "one" singularity, no matter what amount of space we tried to put between us (the event horizon of an big bang type singularity would reach a negligible distance from infinite space)). so in essence, in a big bang universe, there are two main phases of time each relative to a definition of eternity im proposing. there's forward and reverse. forward time is the time we experience, while matter and energy is expanding and whirling and fading out and life can exist on habitable planets while galaxies still swirl free in the ever-expanding cosmos. reverse time is the infinitely larger time it takes for all matter to retreat from infinite space back to a single singularity. once reverse time is completed and all existence is collected into a single space, physics reverse and time begins again in a new big bang and the laws of probability take over, each time creating a completely unique version of the "history" of the universe (chart NOT to scale). so the phase we experience is the expansion of the universe before it dies out (and we die with it). so far we're only 13.7 (+/- 1%) billion years into this phase and think how long we have until the universe is dead. that long plus our current 13.7 billion years is how long the first phase always is. the second in which all is silent and still until the next big bang is much much longer. think of the force of the big bang and how incredibly far it would disperse all matter. once it stops, the only thing to reverse and suck it back in is the incredibly weak force of gravity. so relative to the first phase of time, the second is infinitely more long. thus the expansion of the universe and the amount of time life has to exist is but a glint, a flash, just a heartbeat in the face of the eternal dark silence. and that is one of my definitions of eternity: even if the universe lives for hundreds of billions of years, it will take an infinite exponent of that time to recollect into a singularity. that eternity could be thought of as the dead time because the other eternity could be thought of as the living one as it occurs in the time the universe is expanding instead of contracting. the reason i consider this amount of time (that could be considered a glimmer against the first eternity) another definition of eternity is because it is not relative to the vast dead eternity, but to the smallest measure of time we can concieve. if one looks at time passing in that fashion, we seem to have just as much of an eternity as the dead time. imagine trying to calculate the number of milliseconds it will take for the universe to die. that is the living eternity.