The End of Time

Old age makes it clear. We cannot remain anywhere. Our lives will not achieve completion. When we look forward, as if we could glimpse the end of our lives or envision our world being destroyed, it seems we are looking at an expanse for which we have no reference point or measurement, a void. We look to our history and our past to find clues to our future.

In this world, we have always been on the move from place to place to place, as environments change, opportunities emerge, obstacles appear. And we have never been alone. Great flocks of birds, swarms of insects, fish in rivers and seas, reptiles, rodents, herds of deer, move across this earth we think we can domesticate and own. And the theories, thoughts, [and] desires that create our momentary certainties, they too migrate, as religious conversion, scientific law, artistic taste, architecture, technology, cuisine [change]. Our idea that we are permanent occupants of anywhere in space and time is an illusion that lasts only so long as a complex and mobile combination of environmental, social, and economic conditions allow us to remain.

Our attempts to reduce the incomprehensible dimensions of existence to the scale of our own understanding never stop. Our efforts to contain the ungraspable within our architecture or history, to map it in our spiritual teaching, science, poetry, art, and narratives, are endless. Our ongoing battle to give ourselves significance amid the completely impersonal unfolding of empty and limitless expanse has no result. Our individuality, our personal endeavors, along with our bodies, will be returned to subatomic dust. We may regard this as a judgment on our egotism and folly, or not. Even the ruins, the records and wreckage we leave behind will disappear without a trace. I sit immobile and look toward the green mountains as a driving rain leaves lines of water trailing on the glass. 

In the totality of world and self, past, present, and future, visible and invisible, known and unknown, tangible and intangible, minute and immeasurable, audible and inaudible, all flow together, swirl, twist, mingle, separate, change one into another, dissolve, flow on. We are engulfed and dismembered and reshaped as someone, something we will never see. There is a sharp cramp in my foot and my leg kicks out. For a moment, I forget what I am doing here. In total, this may be stillness or ceaseless movement. Our decision or belief that the ultimate is stillness, or silence, or unknowable is simply an arbitrary moment when we seek one kind of continuity or another. Words and images make our ignorance approachable.

In Hindu and Buddhist traditions, it is maintained that time moves in continuing cycles of increase and decrease, expansion and contraction, waxing and waning. These vast cycles are divided in four eras called Yugas. The Satya-yuga is the first, the longest and most ideal, a time of inner and outer beauty, purity, and perfection. Desires and their fulfillment are simultaneous. This is said to last 1,728,000 years. Next is the Treta-yuga of 1,296,000 years. In this era, perfection begins to diminish; its luster begins to dim. Longings become goals and paths. In the Dvapara-yuga, lasting 864,000 years, desires, intentions, actions, and social classes become ever more distinct and varied.

Finally, there is our era, the shortest, the Kali-yuga, the time of destruction which lasts 432,000 years. Now, desire and the objects of desire are distant. We struggle to unite them, but the results are temporary. Cravings themselves are momentary, marked by anguish, longing, rage. Time accelerates. What one generation believes, the next rejects. The concept of truth itself dies out. Spiritual, moral, and ethical life degenerates. Material advantage becomes the only accepted value. Pollution, corruption, disease, degeneration, and violence fill our minds and poison the world around us. The only virtue that still can be practiced is compassion. We are moving into the end of time. All will end before another cycle begins.

And indeed, we do feel some kind of end approaching. The globe is becoming uninhabitable. The tempo of mass destruction has increased. The last century saw unparalleled slaughter, destruction, dislocation: two world wars, internal slaughters in China, Russia, Cambodia, Uganda, the atom bomb, the Holocaust, and innumerable smaller episodes of mass violence. Dread and unreality pervade the age. This is the old age of the cosmos.

***

Vyāsa’s name means “compiler” in Sanskrit. He was also known as Kṛṣṇadvaipāyana or Vedavyāsa, and he lived around 1500 BCE. He was a legendary being, both as author of and actor in two of the greatest works in Indian and world literature. He is the exemplar of all who, in old age, opened a bridge to a completely new way of seeing.

Vyāsa’s earliest achievement was to have edited the ancient Vedas and divided them into sections so they would be accessible for ordinary people. Then he wrote or assembled the greatest of all epics, the Mahabharata. Finally, in his very old age, he composed a very different kind of book, the Bhagavata Purana. This is a long text providing a pathway for human beings at the end of time to move from history and enter the realm of the gods.

The Mahabharata was a record of events in the eon that immediately preceded this final era in which we now live. It recounted the fatal struggles between two clan branches, both said to be descended from Vyāsa’s own grandchildren. Vyāsa intervened at many points in the action of the Mahabharata and thus was a progenitor of the principal actors, an actor himself, and the author of this great collective history of humanity. This vast compilation, filled with innumerable accounts of love, rivalry, fidelity, jealousy, war, and complex family evolution, marked the end of the Dvapara-yuga.

After Vyāsa completed the Mahabharata, he was exhausted and in despair. The Kali-yuga, the age of darkness and destruction had begun, but Vyāsa did not die. With his four disciples and his son, Shuka, he retreated deep into the forest of Damdaka. He realized that his ordering of the Vedas would only benefit the priesthood, and the Mahabharata would only provide people with worldly understanding; neither would it free humanity from the darkness, greed, and confusion of the Kali-yuga. This required a very different kind of teaching. So, Vyāsa meditated, reflecting on all that had come before and all that would come afterward. Old age had stripped him of any belief that humanity controlled its fate. His mind moved between sleep and dream and hovered beyond life and death. He saw the Kali-yuga come to an end.

There were immeasurable kinds of existences moving through life and death, unseen, unheard, unbeknownst to each other.

The world and all the forms of consciousness it supported dissolved into a roiling sea of atoms split apart, particles of momentary awareness, light waves without origin or end, flickering thought forms without reference. He saw wave upon wave of transitory shapes, figures, congruences, dissonances, attractions, repulsions, light and dark, vibrant, inert, multi-colored, colorless, warm, cold.

Vyāsa felt himself dissolving, as human, as place, as reference point, in the surface of the Pralaya, the Sea of Dreams. He was dissolving back into the primordial moment before awareness began and after existence ended. He saw the Pralaya rising through the minds of beings in the dark age as cosmic amnesia washed away their learning, accomplishments, skills, wisdom, [and] memories altogether. Vyāsa floated in this luminous, lightless void, this infinite expanse, neither space nor time. Here he saw the last dark age dissolve, and a new cosmos emerge. In this infinite expanse, he entered universe after universe, world after world, being after being, as each dissolved to reemerge in different forms.

Over and over, he saw, deep within the Sea of Dreams, a faint form coalesce. A dark blue light, glowing softly in the depth of the sea, slowly became the form of a baby glowing like a sapphire, asleep and dreaming, cradled, and rocking in the coils of an immense green serpent. Vyāsa saw emerging from this sleeping baby’s navel, rising like a dream, a long emerald stem that gradually rose to the surface of the Pralaya. Over centuries, from its green calyx a vast thousand-petalled pink lotus of shining light unfolded. From its pistil and stamen, a delirious scent of love filled the air. On the golden anthers swaying at the center of this lotus in full bloom, the cosmos, fresh, new, and pure, began again, just as it had done thousands of times before and would do thousands of times again. Patterns and chaos alternated on both minute and cosmic scales. The radiant lotus petals fluttered softly, and music, inseparable from silence, filled the whole of space. Thus, Vyāsa experienced primordial mind, immense, luminous, all-pervasive.

Then, burning like a rainbow of suns in unmeasurable time, Vyāsa saw goddesses and gods blaze across space. Brahma and his retinue, Vishnu, his avatars, and devotees, Shiva and his lovers, emerged in their golden chariots, riding through the shining air. He saw their loves and battles and heard their wisdom and their songs, saw their beauty, their caprices, their paradises. He sat with sages and danced with devotees. He heard all the worlds speaking, singing, going to war, doing business, farming, weaving, gambling, drinking, feasting, making love, giving birth, starving, stealing, dying. He saw how this world, too, would end. As Vyāsa aged, all feeling, yearning, understanding, memory, appetites, visions became concentrated in his shrinking body. He was filled with the incommunicable intensity of boundless love. Thus, the words of the Puranas covered the surface of his mind like the iridescent swirling on a soap bubble.

Vyāsa saw that just as a mayfly’s life is a human day, a human life is an instant in the life of a deity. He saw that all living beings were composed of trillions of other kinds of beings, each with its own lifespan. He saw millions of invisible ghosts and spirits each caught in its own fate. He saw that the living and the dead walked side by side without knowing it, that innumerable civilizations of insects, rodents, birds, animals, reptiles, fish, fungi, and trees coexisted ignorant of each other within the human realm. There were immeasurable kinds of existences moving through life and death, unseen, unheard, unbeknownst to each other.

Vyāsa spun together hundreds of thousands of moments in tens of thousands of strands. He wove the Bhagavata Purana so that those in the age of destruction could find their way to a life of passionate devotion, undistorted, and uncorrupt. Here, for the first time, were written in one place the lives and deeds of the gods in their celestial domains, the accounts of the sages who bowed down to learn from them, and the history of all humanity’s deeds. Thus, these things were not lost. And in these texts, devotion offered paths of liberation. This was Vyāsa’s final gift to a cosmos that would soon destroy itself.

Vyāsa recited this text to his son, Shuka, whose name means “parrot,” and who had the ability to remember and repeat everything he ever heard. At that time, a messenger came to Vyāsa, telling him that King Parīkṣit, last of the Pandava kings, the victors in the Mahabharata, was sitting by the river Ganges, waiting for his life to end. Vyāsa sent Shuka to recite the Purana to the dying lord. Thus did the one who originated the epic seek to liberate the last of the family whose story it was. Shuka went to King Parīkṣit as he sat dying. The king had no more power, no control over anything or anyone anymore. His wishes and desires meant nothing. Now he could only sit and wait for death, as the Ganges flowed timelessly before him. He listened as Shuka began his recitation with these words:

This Purana-Sun
has risen for those who have been blinded by
the age of Kali.

For seven days and nights without interruption, Shuka then recited the Bhagavata Purana, and King Parīkṣit listened without distraction. Others nearby wrote down the words. When the reading neared its end, Shuka sang:

Time, without end, is the destroyer.
Time, without beginning, is the creator.
Immutable, creating beings through other beings.
He destroys through death
even the Lord of death.

And he concluded:

O king, now do not fear death.
Just as when a vase shatters,
Space that was within it does not change.
But merges with space

When a log burns,
Heat dissipates in air.
When a river joins the sea,
Water is inseparable from its vast expanse.

Birth, Life, Death are moments, words.
In old age and death, they lose their meaning
Completely.

When all the Bhagavata Purana had been read to him, King Parīkṣit, the last of his celebrated lineage, died. There was nothing to perpetuate or to end. He let himself go. His devotion, his love, his gratitude could go no further. The universe was exhausted.

Vyāsa remained in his forest dwelling and waited for his son’s return. But Shuka had become a solitary wanderer, and they never met again. Vyāsa, grieved at being parted from this child he loved so dearly; he cried out, “Oh my son.” The trees, into whose deep shadows Shuka had vanished, whispered. Vyāsa listened but could not understand. Nothing after that moment of incomprehension is known about the person we call Vyāsa.

It is in the smallest moment, the shortest silence, the tiniest flicker, the most minute gap that the end truly ends. And it is in that same miniscule caesura that beginning begins. And only in that single instant do they meet and part.

***

Now, in the warm shallow valley before the yellowing foothills, now, around the barking dog, now before the smell of burning toast, now beneath the cold soles of feet, a sleeping wife’s slight snore in the dark bedroom, space expands in these articulations. Space here inseparable from all forms of awareness but never touched by them. A space that is itself at a slight distance from that which appears within it.

The tangible and intangible, the unknown and the known, the living and those who live only now in memory, appear in an expanse that stirs slightly, withdraws, moves forward, expands above, below, in all directions side to side. Alive, continuing.

Moving outward, it absorbs the “I,” the “it,” the “you,” the “they,” the “we,” the “is” and “was” and “will be.” It is expanse, shimmering, boundless, not reliant on sense or experience or awareness of any kind. Not a thing. I appear and disappear and appear and disappear and there is no continuum or resting place outside or within.

There is indeed a secret expanse which we, the old, find ourselves inhabiting. The body in its final time is both intensely claustrophobic and completely empty. Nothing is fixed. The losses are painful, but now there is less here, less there, less now, less then. The absence of so many true friends and lovers is a constant sorrow, but frequently it seems they are close by. It is love and understanding still linking us. We are still in the rolling terrain where we look for ways to reach this and avoid that.

The grasses, dry, almost golden, their tassels bright in the evening sun, now bring me back to the moment when I first came here and stepped out onto a path which branched out and became many, became my life. I met a teacher from Tibet and this meeting led to other teachers, other friends, marriages, fatherhood, other kinds of studies, different kinds of jobs, teaching, writing, learning lofty things and humble ones. I became learned and foolish, was arrogant and humiliated, fell in love more than once, had a bad marriage, a wonderful marriage, learned betrayal from both sides, knew good fortune and bad, and, bit by bit, knew the end of all those things, and other things beginning.

And now I look at the gilded tawny fields I first saw fifty years ago, and they are the same. A hot summer evening. It is slightly humid but very clear, and I feel that first moment, that tingle of desire, that warmth of beginning, of being drawn onward as the sun which has been so very hot today drifts behind the dark mountain ridge, and pale clouds rise, and the soil cools leaving the smell of heat and growing and drying. I feel the long-ago beginning on this, the same ground as now I feel the end. Tenderness and gratitude. It really is love. And even if it was an illusion or is going to end in two seconds and will be forgotten everywhere forever as if it never was, this love is real, and it is complete.

♦

Excerpted and adapted from Winter Light: On Late Life’s Radiance by Douglas J. Penick, Punctum Books, Earth, Milky Way, 2025. © 2025, Douglas J. Penick.