To Be Alive in Eternity

According to the teachings of the Mormon Church, the highest accomplishment obtainable to us is to achive ETERNAL LIFE. And the members of the church believe that the Eternal Kingdom is yet to be established, and for all those people who fail to win the victory there will be two lesser kingdoms established. So according to Momorn belief, Humanity will be divided. However the meaning of the word ETERNITY includes the concept of having no begining and so the only thing that can be esablished about the ETERNAL KINGDOM is that THIS IS IT!

And all those hopes for seperation and eternal life may never be realized. Our concept of what it means to be alive is fairly well defined, and every living creature upon the face of this Earth has a definate begining and a definate end. But the Mormons subscribe to a belief that they have enjoyed some prior existence as immaterial spirits. Personally I feel there's no harm in believing in it, but it isn't neccessarily true, and clearly such an existence is not the exact same thing as being alive. So since we know that the Universe has some history and we were not alive in it, eternal life becomes an impossibility.

But we do live now in Eternity and thats almost as good! Even though we each have a definate begining at the time of our birth or conception, all that material substance from which we have been formed has been here as a part of the Earth since the Earth was formed. So in some sense, the begining of the Earth and our solar system was also a begining for ourselves. And to the best of our current understanding even the Universe itself has one absolute begining, and that too is one of our beginings. We may have existed only as a possibility for billions of years, but NOW all of that history has become a part of our personal history. It should be very easy for you to see how an Apple is produced from a long series of beginings. First we have the apple seed which grows into the tree and produces the fruit; and that seed was produced from the fruit of another tree, which in turn was produced from a seed. Every apple has a long series of trees and seeds in its history, but now I eat the apple and it becomes a part of me, and so all those beginings become a part of me as well. Therefor while it is true that we each have one begining, we also have many beginings.

The process of creation is on-going, it is happening now within the heart of our Sun. It is the Stars which perform the labor of creation and in some sense it may be described as a chemical process. And the processes of life are a part of the process of creation, we are participants in the act. This Universe and Heaven are one in the same thing, and Heaven is inhabited by a multitude of personalities, there are persons both great and small within Heaven's embrace. The true number of person's in Heaven may not be defined by life on Earth, we must at least consider the possibility of life on other worlds to be a likelyhood. But even life itself may be insufficient to number the personalities in Heaven, every sun and planet may have a personality of its own. This universe has been blessed with consciousness, and the force of consciousness pervades all the substance and even the emptyness of space.