That once thought, said and done become that forever thought, said and done, with karmic repercussions echoing forever.
— Shilashanti
[T]he eternal refers back to the temporal – to the temporal, the everyday and the point of an ongoing encounter between the finite and the infinite. What we create, experience and suffer, in this time, we create, experience and suffer ‘for all eternity’. As far as we bear responsibility for an event, as far as it is ‘history’, our responsibility, it is overwhelmingly burdened by the fact that something that has happened cannot be ‘taken out of the world’. However, at the same time, an appeal is made to our responsibility — precisely to bring what has not yet happened into the world! And each of us must do this as part of our daily work, as part of our everyday lives. So everyday life becomes the reality per se, and this reality becomes the potential for action…
It is terrible to know that at every moment I bear responsibility for the next; that every decision, from the smallest to the largest, is a decision ‘for all eternity’; that in every moment I can actualise the possibility of a moment, of that particular moment, or forfeit it. Every single moment contains thousands of possibilities — and I can only choose one of them to actualise it. But in making the choice I have condemned all the others and sentenced them to ‘never being’, and even this for all eternity!
But it is wonderful to know that the future, my own future and with it the future of the things, the people around me, is somehow — albeit to a very small extent — dependent on my decisions in every moment. Everything I realise through them, or ‘bring into the world’, as we have said, I save into reality and thus protect from transience.
Viktor E. Frankl
Yes to Life in Spite of Everything