I'm going to tell a story. It's not a "true" story, maybe, but it is a real story.
1. Life, the universe and everything.
Basically, the universe is a shear thickening fluid.
It is also a non-uniform fluid, it's "lumpy" in other words. Some parts of this fluid seem "solid" to us because their coefficient of adversity, that is the amount of resistance they put up to force applied against them, is very high. All force creates a resistance. This creates a counter-resistance, ad infinitum.
As a different metaphor, imagine a bowl of very soft jello that's been banged on from many different directions at once, creating ripple patterns that interfere with each other.
Even though at any local position, the composition of the universe is constantly changing... overall, in the aggregate, nothing changes. That's right, nothing changes, when the universe is looked at as a single fluid. There will always be the same amount of matter-energy in the universe.
We are also part of this fluid, and everything we encounter around us is as well. Everything that has a beginning, has an ending. Just as our bodies will die one day, so will the universe, in that it will no longer be a dynamic system. Everything will be uniformly spread everywhere and there will be no more rippling and shifting of the fluid. It will just sit there. The fluid is settling out.
The good news has to do with time. Time is eternal. There is nothing before time, because the concept of "before" implies time. There is nothing after time either, for the same reason. Time is the rate of change of the composition of the fluid. When the fluid stops changing, there is no time. Part of all of us, humans and maybe other things in the universe too, maybe, is made of time in addition to the fluid. That part of you can never die. You can never experience anything outside of time. You can't "be dead". It's not possible. To exist as a person, implies being alive. Your body can die. But you can't actually die. I'm not quite sure how it works near the endpoint either.
2. How human life works.
Every action has a reaction. Everything you do creates resistance from the world. There is a lag between your initial undertaking and the resistance. Even lightning takes time, as Nietzsche said. Remember the fluid? The harder and faster you "push out" into the world, the harder and faster the resistance will come. By moving slowly and smoothly, you can push through this resistance. The Slow Blade Penetrates The Shield.
Or as wikipedia said "The dilatant fluid would disperse the force of a sudden blow over a wider area of the user's body, reducing the blunt force trauma; against slow attacks, such as a slow but forceful stab, the dilatant would not provide any additional protection."
People don't perceive imaginary time very well, maybe because we're partially made of time. That is, we have trouble imagining time correctly when we look back at the past or into the future. In 5 years, if you move one inch, only one inch, per day, you will have travelled half the length of a football field.
5 years seems very long when we imagine it into the future, but looking back through the past, it doesn't seem very long to us. Just one inch per day.
If you move 2 inches per day, you can go endzone to endzone in 5 years.
This is an analogy, I think you can see where I'm going with this.
Most people (myself included, I'm not being an elitist here) like to move very fast when they first undertake a project... they are very excited about what's going on, etc... then the resistance hits and they are slowed or stopped by it. This is usually when they give up, maybe they'll try sprinting into the hardened cornstarch a couple of times. One inch per day...
The downside to the slow, easy way to do things is that it's boring and frustrating. See, repetition breeds confidence. This is a phrase my friend Jesus told me once after a night of drugs and music. Not that Jesus, the hispanic raver Jesus. No matter how you interpret that last sentence, we're venturing into lulz territory. Anyway, the important thing to remember is that repetition breeds confidence.
If someone asked me to build a computer for them, I could undertake such a project with no hesitation, because I've done it so many times now. I know that even if something initially went awry, I have a strong model/map for how to get around that and fix it. I wouldn't think of it as anything scary or challenging at all. But it would be, if anything, boring. And when something did go wrong it would be frustrating. "Not this shit again"...
So the slow, easy way to do everything can be boring and frustrating. It might be more fun to run fast, create walls of resistance and overcome them, so in the end when you get where you're going, you can say "I did it, against all odds!" But really, it was always just you. You made your own odds.
In a way, I'm not doing you a favor by telling you this. I am taking some of the excitement and fun out of it. On the other hand, your brain will probably make you forget most of this, for that very reason, when you're in the middle of living your life.
But on the other hand, a lot of people are upset by life... mostly because it hasn't matched their expectations. They don't understand the implications of their own life strategy. As an example, I have a friend who basically lives life by a series of explosions. He bursts, then gets hit by an immense backpressure of resistance, and then gets really angry at everything. Then he bursts forward again, rinse and repeat. I mean, if he saw how he was creating this, and was just doing it for fun, cause he likes living that way, on the other hand... he'd at least have the option to accept and expect that pattern or try a different approach. There are all kinds of ways to play with the fluid.
Rollercoasters are fun because we expect them to do crazy shit. But if someone put you in one for the first time, and you had no idea of what a rollercoaster was, and they said before you left, "oh this is a nice train ride"... you'd flip out.
But that would definitely be the most exciting rollercoaster you'd ever ride. So sometimes knowing that it's just a rollercoaster can take a bit of the drama and intensity out of it.
3. Made in G-d's image.
What does that phrase really mean? That God has a body that looks like our bodies? A lot of people used to think that, but that's kind of ridiculous. The people who promoted that sort of interpretation either were scamming someone or really didn't think about what they were reading.
It is the part of us that is made of time that is an image of God. Or, to put it a different way, we are acting in a movie being made by God. God is the director and the audience. So are we. It's all part of the greatest piece of performance art ever.
In order to be able to be the director, audience and actor and still have a good time, there needs to be a separation of consciousness so the left hand doesn't realize what the right hand is doing, so to speak. If it were simply imagination, well, you'd know what all the characters are going to do... when you played with dolls or "action figures" as a kid, you knew what you were going to make all of them say.
When do you not know that? In a dream. We are all being dreamed by God at once. We are the dreamer, and the dream self, and we don't even know sometimes what we're going to do next. This makes it interesting. Again, I have done you no favor here. By reading this, if you hadn't already, you have now begun a path toward becoming a lucid dreamer.
Eventually your particular dream-self will find its endpoint in the story.
What happens to you when you get to the end of a dream?