Many spiritual teachers seem to relish telling us that everything is transitory and nothing is permanent. All will pass away, they proclaim. Every one of us will lose everything that's dear to us.

We are shy about saying this so boldly, but in some of these teachers, there's an edge of gleeful cruelty. The idea that they are disabusing us of our delusional lust for life seems to give them a secret, spiteful thrill.

While we agree that there is partial wisdom in the theory of impermanence, we also protest the fixated opinion that it's absolute, complete, and final.

+

Our Alternate Hypothesis: Moments That Last Forever

Here's our alternate hypothesis: Certain moments are so potent, so rich, so meaningful, and so lavishly TRUE, that they lodge themselves in the marrow of forever. They become everlasting fixtures in the architecture of eternity. Disintegrating into oblivion is NOT their ultimate fate.

These are the shimmering interludes when time stops because it has been generously fulfilled. The gap between experiencer and experience collapses into a single point of consummate vivacity.

The Great Mystery bursts through the numbing drone of habit and imprints its supernal glory on the consciousness that receives it and on the archetype of consciousness itself.

+

The Eternal Moment at Hamilton Wetlands

One such breakthrough luminosity came for me, Rockstar, at 8:08 pm, August 9, 2025, as I gazed out over the Hamilton wetlands in Novato, California, toward the East Bay.

In affectionate ripples, the breeze breathed into me as the bay suffused my skin with its honeyed salt tang. Slow motion vortexes of gnats and dust-like seeds and egret feathers swirled around me, as if I had suddenly become their gravity. Or maybe as if the world had recognized me as a fellow participant in its spiraling choreography rather than a mere observer.

The air had texture: thick enough to feel substantial, saturated with moisture that hadn't yet condensed into mist. It carried a quiet electricity and barely audible hum, as though the atmosphere were listening back. I fantasied or perceived that the nitrogen and oxygen and argon molecules had their own distinct personalities—and I could sense their idiosyncratic beauty.

With startling intimacy, the mud emanated its primal incense of creation. Not the stench of rot but the aromatic funk of fecundity: hydrogen sulfide softened by decomposing pickleweed, the mineral tang of bay water mixing with fresh runoff, and the green exhale of cordgrass photosynthesizing its final sugars before nightfall.

I either smelled or imagined I smelled billions of microorganisms conducting their invisible symphony of transformation: musty humus, hint of mushroom cap, whisper of wet stone after rain—all of it braided into one continuous, microbial chord.

The boundary between my olfactory perception and the marsh's exhalation dissolved. I wasn’t smelling the wetlands; I was inhaling and exhaling with them, inside them, as them.

Facing east, I unleashed a wave of blessings toward the Berkeley Hills and Mount Diablo beyond. Not prayers exactly. I wasn't petitioning a deity or begging for favors. My sung words weren’t affirmations in the positive-thinking sense. I wasn't trying to manifest outcomes or bend reality to my preferences.

The blessings I flung out were eruptions of fierce gladness: gratitude weaponized against despair. I was transmitting my solidarity with everything that struggles to stay alive, grow, and become more beautifully itself despite entropy's constant grinding.

I was sending my approval, my unreasonable, unconditional YES, to the red-tailed hawks and the Berkeley homeless encampments, to the BART trains and the bay laurel trees, to the teenagers discovering sex and the elders discovering death, to everyone and everything contained in that eastern view trying to make it through another night and into another morning.

My blessings carried no instructions and made no demands. They were simply my consciousness touching the world and saying: I see you. You matter to me. Keep going. I'm with you.

Meanwhile, the light was conspiring in the rarest collaboration: pink mauve grey blue existing not in sequence but simultaneously, interpenetrating, refusing to resolve into any single dominant hue.

The pink arrived first in awareness: the impossible pastel that shouldn't exist in nature but does when the sun, now behind me in the west, sends its redshifted rays around the curvature of the world to paint the atmospheric canvas. Not the aggressive pink of sunset but the pink of the inside of a shell or a rose petal held to morning light.

The mauve lived in the shadows of clouds I couldn't quite see, in the gradations where pink darkened toward the dignity of purple without ever arriving, suspended in perpetual becoming. It was the color of transition and threshold.

The grey provided the substrate: the color of the bay reflecting the sky and the color of the wet mud banks. It wasn’t the dull grey of negation but the pearly grey of infinite potential, the grey that holds all colors in solution, waiting.

And then there was the blue of the dome above me, still clinging to day: the cobalt blue of the East Bay hills darkening toward their night-shapes, heralding the coming indigo and the stars that would soon pierce through.

My body stood there in a posture of witness: my feet on the earth, rooted through mud and sediment down to bedrock and the planet's molten core.

My spine was vertical, a conduit between earth and sky, between the gravitational pull downward and the expansive reach upward.

My eyes were soft and open, pupils dilating in the dimming light, retinas drinking in photons that had traveled across space to find my particular configuration of consciousness.

My breath synchronized with the breeze without effort or intention, as if my lungs and the wetlands were sharing the same respiratory system.

As I basked, glistening realizations arrived not as thoughts but as visceral truths in my gut, chest, throat, and eyes. The aromas of wet stones, mossy logs, and meadow grasses were telling me that this specific constellation of sensations was a teaching: Embodiment itself is the point, the gift, and the privilege beyond measure. Not a preparation for some better beauty. Not a prod to escape bondage and flee to a more permanent sanctuary. But the destination itself, the mother lode where eternity chooses to become intimate and particular.

These velvety dazzling gleams evoked a weave of memories, both past and future, of other times when I had beheld and been included in the Earth doing its sacred work in boundary and liminal zones. The marsh's edge-nature, neither fully water nor fully land, the water neither fully salt nor fully fresh, called forth other betweennesses I had inhabited:

River and I on walkabout in Germany's Black Forest under dank November skies, sleeping on beds of pine needles, eating apples and brown bread, drinking from creeks. Singing Hildegard von Bingen's ecstatic visions and Captain Beefheart's raw shamanic howls: the sacred and profane refusing separation.

The overnight ferry from Piraeus, Greece to Heraklion, Crete, that floating threshold between mainland and island. River and I staying awake through the dark Aegean hours, debating why Plato would ban poets from his Republic, and exploring Marie-Louise von Franz's technique of active imagination: diving into the unconscious through waking dreams, the permeable membrane between conscious and unconscious mind.

Our retreat at New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur, taking six-hour hikes through mountains overlooking the Pacific, that edge where continent meets abyss. Invoking thousands of words per hour to tell each other our life histories from age five onward, creating the story-bridge between our separate pasts and our merged present.

And then future memories rose, culminating in a specific climax: me standing before a table displaying the 33 books I will have written, feeling the quiet thunder of completion, knowing I have accomplished the work Goddess sent me here to Earth to do. That future glory was already reaching back through time to meet me at 8:08 p.m. on August 9, 2025.

As I ruminated on these personal memories, an unexpected bonus arose. The wetland began to leak its own remembering into my awareness. Or perhaps I finally learned how to tune into the frequencies of memory that had been flowing through everything around me all along.

The cattails, tules, and sedges were remembering through me—with their cellulose and chlorophyll, with their seasonal cycles of growth and decay—10,000 years of bay water rising and falling, of seeds dispersing on wind and current, of roots gripping mud during floods that would come again.

The mosquitoes and fungi held older remembrances still: the fundamental blueprints of transformation, of how to convert death into life, how to move blood through tiny bodies or break down the massive into the microscopic.

The stilts, avocets, and willets carried memories in their hollow bones and in the maps embedded in their cells: memories of migration routes their ancestors flew before humans walked here, of wetlands that existed and vanished and returned across epochs. Their sharp eyes held the memory of watching, of the eternal vigilance required to eat and not be eaten.

And beneath it all, the deepest memories of all: the sandstone and shale remembering when they were sand on ancient seafloors. The radiolarian chert remembering the death of billions of single-celled organisms whose silica skeletons compressed into stone. The serpentized ultramafic rocks remembering their origin in the Earth's mantle before tectonic forces thrust them up into this bay's basement, remembering the water that transformed them at the boundary between crust and ocean.

All these memories—mine and the marsh's, personal and geological, animal and mineral—were flowing simultaneously, interpenetrating like the colors of the twilight sky. The wetlands were not just a place but a confluence of remembrances, a living archive where past and future collapsed into the eternal present tense of this breath, this moment, this unrepeatable NOW.

At 8:08 p.m., the breeze, smell, light, body, and awareness all converged into a singularity. The gap collapsed. Rockstar-witnessing-wetland became simply experiencing, simply being—radiant with the treasure of sentient THIS-ness.

And in that convergence, I understood with my nerves and bones: This unrepeatable configuration of light and salt and mud and breath and consciousness was not impermanent in the way the gleeful teachers of emptiness would have us believe.

The mesh of this imprint had achieved escape velocity from the entropy of forgetting and inscribed itself in the permanent record of what is holy and real.

And maybe best of all: The moment noticed itself through my noticing. The Anima Mundi became conscious of Her own beauty through my consciousness. The gift completed its circuit: from Creation to creature to Creator to Creation again, the loop closed and opened simultaneously.

I was awash in the resplendent gnosis: that living here on planet Earth in a human body is the greatest honor ever conferred. I surged with gratitude that the Divine Intelligence felt moved to lavish me with this gift.

I understood then and I understand now that this moment lives forever. Not just as memory (though memory holds it too) but as a permanent fact, as a fixed star in Indra’s Net, as one of the anchoring points that holds the fabric of reality taut against the entropy that would unweave it.

+

Other Eternal Moments

There have been, are, and will continue to be many such perfect eternal moments.

Another example is the moment that I, Rockstar, first held my newborn daughter Zadi in my arms.

When I close my eyes right now, I feel the weight of her in my arms. Her scent is not quite warm clay after rain and not quite honey mixed with iron. Petrichor! Where did that come from? Deeper still, as I kiss her forehead, I inhale the feral underneath, the wildness she carries from the other side: musk of blood and salt and amniotic fluid. The ocean she has just left still clings to her skin like a consecration from her passage between the worlds.

That moment has never faded into “just” memory. It crystallized into perpetuity. It exists now as vividly as it did then, accessible whenever I step outside linear time and into the eternal present where it still blazes.

Countless other moments have graced me with their eternal pivot. There was, is, and will always be the everlasting instant I fell in love with River Rapunzel Medusa Magdalen Blavatsky, the woman who would later become my Freaky Consort. The song "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts" was playing on a boombox at dawn on the pagan holiday of Beltane. She was dancing atop a mausoleum in Evergreen Cemetery in Santa Cruz. We were gathered with a troupe of other vagabond dancers to ritually celebrate “A Happy Birthday for Death.”

Her movements were feral and ceremonial, arms spiraling upward like smoke from a fire, hips mimicking infinity symbols in the dawn air, and feet percussive against the stone surface. Her whole body was a conversation between wild abandon and precise intention. She moved as if channeling infinity through her limbs: her spine undulating with serpentine intelligence while her hands drew sigils in the space around her.

The angular rhythms of Brian Eno and David Byrne's polyrhythmic collision seemed to have been composed specifically for this interlude and her body, for the way she could be both grounded and airborne, both rooted in the earth beneath that mausoleum and reaching toward the paling stars above.

She danced like a priestess who knew that the boundary between life and death isn't a wall but a membrane, and she was making it permeable with her motion. A fluidic blue fire in me recognized a fluidic blue fire in her. It wasn't infatuation or projection, but a soul-level knowing that has only waxed stronger in all the years since.

That imprint is immutable. It became a star in my inner constellation, forever guiding me home to a miraculously nourishing love.

PS: Anyone who has tasted these imperishable outbreaks of luminescence knows: Consciousness doesn't merely observe reality but also sanctifies it. Through our adoring welcome, resplendent receptivity, and majestic gratitude, we transform temporal experiences into deathless treasures. We become co-creators of the enduring archive.

+

Names and Territories of Eternity

But wait! There's more. News flash: “Eternity" isn't just a vapid abstraction or wishful thinking fabricated by those who can't bear to contemplate their own mortality. It's not some sterile paradise painted on clouds by fear-addled minds desperate to escape the meat and bones.

And despite the grinding, often bullying efforts of materialist reductionists and certain spiritual teachers who ignore, deny, and denounce such possibilities, a vast chorus of brilliant minds across millennia have testified to an invisible ocean of sentience that enfolds, interpenetrates, and remembers us all.

Across centuries and continents, across cultures that never shared a written language or trade route, poets, mystics, shamans, philosophers, and visionaries have independently discovered and mapped this territory. Each tradition offers a different angle of approach to the same shimmering, undeniable reality.

The varied nomenclature points toward an identical revelation: that there exists a living planetary stratum woven from the totality of consciousness itself, incorporating our shared thoughts, feelings, dreams, prayers, actions, traumas, triumphs, loves, losses, and unspoken yearnings. It’s a thickly braided web of layers that are both subtle and substantial, both immaterial and more real than concrete.

This dimension isn't mere metaphor, though metaphor is one of its favorite modes of revelation. It's a breathing fabric spun from the cumulative memory and imagination of all beings who have ever participated in Earth's experiment with awareness. You can't weigh it or photograph it, yet sensitive souls stumble into it constantly, returning with reports that match across unconnected epochs.

Within this field, archetypes and symbols shimmer like constellations in an interior sky, exerting gravitational influence on both individual psyches and collective destinies.

It functions simultaneously as: a library of eternal images, a living memory bank of every human striving and innovation, a force of communion linking us to each other and to the other-than-human intelligences that share this planet, and a sensory organ through which Earth herself becomes conscious of her own existence.

It's where the personal and planetary meet. Here, the boundary between "my dream" and "our dream" dissolves into permeable membrane.

Many traditions have given it sundry names:

• Collective Unconscious: Psychologist Carl Jung's theory positions it as a shared substratum of archetypes and instincts, capable of evolving through individual and collective experiences. Jung said that as people confront and integrate archetypal shadows, creative energies, and new insights, they seed changes that may eventually become universal tremors within this psychic field.

• Indra's Net: A Buddhist vision, building on a Hindu vision, of the universe as an infinite web of interconnections, with each node containing a jewel that reflects every other jewel in the net. This universal talisman represents the indivisibility and mutual interdependence of all things. Any significant creative act or intervention radiates through the entire structure.

• The Dreamtime: In Indigenous Australian culture, this is a timeless realm where ancestral spirit beings created and still create the world, its landscapes, animals, plants, and people. The Dreaming actively shapes, guides, and infuses daily life, relationships, land, and cultural responsibilities.

• The Anima Mundi or World Soul: As originally understood by the ancient Greeks and Gnostics, this is a living substance or spiritual field permeating and animating the entire universe, much as the individual soul animates the body. It contains the collective memories, archetypes, and spiritual intelligence of creation: a cosmic repository of hopes, dreams, and myths.

• Àṣẹ ("Universal Life Force") of the Yoruban people. Àṣẹ flows through all reality as the animating principle, linking all beings, ancestors, deities, and humans into a vast, evolving spirit field. Àṣẹ preserves and transmits wisdom, power, and memory, shaping the world soul.

For more details and further cataloguing of these realms, go here: https://tinyurl.com/DreamtimeGuises

Each of these names points to a single intuition: that our existence isn’t sealed in solitary skins. We participate in a vaster intelligence—a planetary dream-body of mind and spirit, half archive and half oracle, always humming just beyond the edge of speech.

+

How Eternal Moments Rewire the Planetary Mind

The impermanence peddlers miss a crucial truth: The eternal moments I described don't merely persist. They actively transform reality. Each breakthrough episode of gleaming presence sends ripples through the planet’s lustrous sheath of soul records arising from collective human thought and experience.

When I stood transfixed at Hamilton Wetlands, or held newborn Zadi, or watched River dance atop the mausoleum, these weren't passive observations. They were creative acts that altered the architecture of the Noosphere. My Vajrayana Buddhist friend Amandi says they forged new pathways in Indra's Net. My Theosophist colleague Emily testifies that they added potent imprints to the Akashic Records.

+

Moments That Reorganize the Field

This is why the dogmatic theory of absolute impermanence isn’t just incomplete; it's a dangerous half-truth. Its seductive nihilism coaxes us to blindly surrender to the delusion that all our experiences dissolve into nothingness. But the far more ultimate truth is that plot twists suffused with landmark luminosity become permanent nodes in the collective field, forever available as templates, beacons, and portals.

Think of it this way: When I experience a pivotal epiphany—when I exuberantly witness and register an imprinting instant of beauty, love, or revelation—I'm not just recording it. I'm broadcasting it and engraving it. I'm installing new software in the planetary mind. I'm creating what biochemist and author Rupert Sheldrake might call a new morphic resonance, making it easier for others to access similar states of consciousness.

The mystics aren't speaking metaphorically when they describe the interpenetration of all minds. My episode of silky, shiny gratitude at the Hamilton wetlands doesn't remain locked in my private experience. It becomes part of the Collective Unconscious, a frequency that others can tune into, maybe without knowing why they are suddenly moved to tears by a spectacular stretch of sky or feel inexplicably appreciative for their own precious embodiment.

+

The Permanent Record Is Dynamic

Here's what the impermanence fundamentalists can't and won't grasp: The perpetual record isn't static. It's a living, evolving field that grows richer and more complex with each eternal reverberation we consecrate through our grateful awareness. Every time a curious soul fully recognizes and honors a radiant milestone, they strengthen the radiant pathways in the planetary consciousness.

+

We Are Sculptors of the Noosphere

Yes, we are often passive witnesses to fleeting phenomena. The impressions dissolve. Our memories of them fade, and only blankness remains. But that's not all we are. Sometimes we are active sculptors of the planetary mind. Any experience we sanctify through rhapsodic presence becomes permanent architecture in the mental-spiritual field that cradles humanity.

When I held Zadi for the first time and recognized her as a serene and cagey Buddha Elf, I wasn't just having a private paternal epiphany. I was etching and transmitting a potent reinvention of how human consciousness works.

When I fell in immortal love with River dancing on that mausoleum, I engraved inscriptions in the World Soul. They became glistening clues for others.

When I honor these victories of consciousness and refuse to let them be diminished by the spurious doctrine of categorical impermanence, I'm maintaining and enriching the Anima Mundi. I'm ensuring that the moments of supernal clarity don't just persist but propagate.

+

The Half-Truth Revealed

So yes, forms change. Bodies age. Circumstances dissipate. The impermanence teachers can keep that territory. It's real enough, as far as it goes.

But some plot twists matter more than others: those that collapse the gap between self and cosmos, flooding us with recognition of our divine privilege. These moments actively restructure the field of collective consciousness. They are generators of order, meaning, and connection.

The eternal moments are evidence that consciousness creates everlastingness through the sacred act of focused, grateful recognition—rendering the doctrine of absolute impermanence not wisdom, but a failure of vision.

+

Now read a companion piece, "How Eternal Moments Get a Crush on You"