Hinduism is unusual among the world's great traditions in how calmly it contemplates the end of everything. Worlds are not eternal here; they are born, they ripen, they grow weary, and they dissolve. That dissolving is called pralaya — but the word does not carry the dread of "apocalypse." It means a laying-down, a re-absorption, the cosmos returning to its source as a wave settles back into the sea.

The tradition speaks of several kinds of dissolution, nested like the cycles of time themselves. The most intimate is nitya pralaya, "constant dissolution" — the quiet truth that everything is passing away moment by moment, including ourselves in sleep and in death. Larger is the naimittika pralaya, the "occasional" dissolution that closes each kalpa, a single day of the creator Brahma. When his day ends, the three worlds are withdrawn and Brahma sleeps through his long night, the cosmos held in abeyance until he wakes and creates anew.

The Puranas paint this with extraordinary imagery. As the age fails, drought grips the earth for years on end. Then the sun blazes with sevenfold heat, the seas boil away, and at last the fires consume the worlds. Vast clouds gather and pour down rain until every distinction is drowned and there remains a single, shoreless ocean — the ekarnava. Upon those waters Vishnu reclines in cosmic sleep, and creation waits.

Greater still is the prakritika or maha-pralaya, the "great dissolution" that comes only at the end of Brahma's entire hundred-year life. Here even Brahma is dissolved, and the elements themselves unwind: earth into water, water into fire, fire into air, air into space, and space at last into the unmanifest prakriti, the primal nature from which all things were spun. Nothing remains in form. Only the absolute abides, and the seeds of the next creation rest within it.

There is variation in the texts — the number of dissolutions (some count four kinds, adding atyantika pralaya, the "final" liberation of an individual soul that never returns to the cycle), the precise order of the elements, the length of the intervals. But the vision is shared and deeply consoling. Dissolution is not punishment and not failure. It is the exhalation that answers every inhalation, the closing of an eye that will open again. In a tradition that measures time in trillions of years, even the end of the universe is only a turning of the wheel.