Clean, Part 3: Awareness of Eternity

This is the final chapter in my 3-parter about “Clean”, which I define as Spiritual Fitness.  I wrote about Awareness of Self, Awareness of Context, and now I’m writing about Awareness of Eternity. 

Awareness of Eternity

“Clean” in my terminology is Spiritual Fitness. Sounds vague? Let me be a bit more precise. I define fitness as “being your best self, for yourself, for others, and for the future.” I define spiritual as being the things of the spirit: the air that moves inside you and the air we share between us, which is home to words and meaning. So, Clean is about being honest and aware, about speaking truth and goodness, and about listening to wisdom. In order to practice Spiritual Fitness, I advocate practicing Awareness of Self, Awareness of Context, and Awareness of Eternity.

What do I mean by eternity? I mean everything that came before you and everything that will come after you. Think about that. Draw your own conclusions. We all have widely differing philosophies about existence and eternity. Some doubt whatever they cannot see right in front of their face, while others place great faith in what they have learned from books or teachers or preachers. There are specific words for each and every one of these philosophies and all their permutations. Everything you can think about the universe and how it works has an “ism” attached to it somewhere. I consider that plethora of isms to be like a shattered mirror, and each ism is just a fragment or a shard of the whole reality. To look at the whole, you have to imagine all of them put together, or just ignore them all entirely and try to see the thing without shattering it at all.

But you might not be like me. You might be a theist or an atheist or some other kind of “ist”. (I found a list of over 770 words that end with “ism”). That’s ok. My ideas about Spiritual Fitness do not propose an ideal and are not prescriptive. In other words, I am not telling you what to think or how to think, I am simply telling you TO THINK. Think about what you are, about what everything is–what reality is, what existence is–and think about what will come after you.

In practicing spiritual fitness, I think it is important to think about what will happen when you die. What will happen to you? What will live on and what won’t? What will remain of you in the world? What impact will you have that continues on? Regardless of what you believe about life and death and after life, I know for certain that human beings leave a legacy in our words and our actions. Other humans remember what we were and what we said and what we did. They integrate the best parts of ourselves into theirselves. They carry on our good works. They repeat our good words and record them for posterity. So, awareness of eternity is about legacy. Draw your own conclusions and act accordingly.