On Eternity and Groundhog Day

I woke up this morning half-listening to an Atheist defend his beliefs in a Godless world through the notion that an eternity spent in a heavenly afterlife is not much of a reward at all. This is nothing new. I've been pondering the notion ever since I first listened to the song Heaven by the Talking Heads way back in the 80's (damn you David Byrne! Just kidding). No, this morning I woke up thinking, “well what about right now?”

For all we know - right now - we exist inside an eternity. My numbers are probably a bit off, but I recall scientists estimating that the universe is 14 billion years old and still has at least another 100 billion years left to go before either petering out into a broad gray expanse of frozen ash or being pulled together by a supermassive blackhole, something that will basically repack the universe into a tight little firecracker and light the fuse on yet another big bang. Either way, existence goes on. For the former it may not be too exciting. For the latter it may create a universe which is completely different from the one we have now, but this existence however transformed will continue to exist.

Only it will do so without us.

Or maybe not.

See, the thing about heaven and eternity is that it is anchored with the notion of the Self existing eternally in tandem with the rest of existence as it is understood during life. We Catholics get a double whammy since this eternity is described as doing nothing more than praising God, which roughly translates to an eternal never-ending Church service. Yippee Skippee. Most of the people I know can tolerate one hour of church per week but start rolling their eyes if the service runs even a few minutes over.

But what about reincarnation? That notion that at death the body and soul are stripped away, leaving only the spirit to move on and inhabit yet another living creature? Many people see this as a hellish fate, a doom similar to the plot of the movie Groundhog Day where Bill Murray needs to relive the same day over and over until he finally “gets it right.” But once again, this is assuming that the person you wake up as after dying can remember who you were back before you died, ergo that you remain Bill Murray and remember being Bill Murray and can understand that you are trapped in a cycle which will never end until the groundhog believes you have “gotten it right.”

If you have no notion of your Bill Murray-ness, then all that remains is the life you know. Most of us would be horrified to be reincarnated as a cockroach, but that's only because we understand the short squalid brutal life of the roach in relation to the long rich life of a modern human. As a roach you would have none of this knowledge. Your biological drive would make other roaches as sexy as hell. The refuse you eat would taste as good as anything in the world. It's only the knowledge of being a non-roach which stands to crush you like a big shoe dropping out of the sky; just as we might be crushed by knowing that we humans could physically exist as some kind of super-being who never grows old and is infinite in wisdom and lives free from all the troubles that plague mankind (which oddly is the definition of a heavenly existence and opens up a whole new can of worms on the intentions of the vision of Heaven).

So while the Hindu's may believe in reincarnation, a ladder of more evolved spiritual states, and “greater and lesser” life forms. I don't think this is the case. Sometimes it's tempting to say that the complete opposite is true. If ignorance truly is bliss, then those lifeforms that think the least theoretically live the most blissful existences. That would make us big-brained “higher life forms” the most miserable things walking the planet.

Or it could be that the capacity to think expands our reach into both bliss and misery. Lichens, being alive but presumably brainless, cannot experience either delight or despair. Fish and insects, occupying the half-way point between human beings and lichens, only experience half as much bliss and half as much misery as ourselves. Then there is us and we are all over the place.

Which is a good thing.

There definitely seems to be a general synchronization between the power to experience and the brutality of ones existence. If you are destined to live the life of a fish or an insect or a lichen then you definitely don't want to do it with the supercharged, super-observant, brain of a human being. Likewise, being a human with the brain of a fish isn't much fun either. Despite the misery which “survival of the fittest” heaps on those lifeforms deemed unfit – it certainly does leave the fit creatures happy about their fitness. In fact, the avoidance of misery seems to define what creatures fit into the world and which ones do not.

So what does all of this say about the notion of Heaven? Does it mean to say that Heaven does not exist? Or does it mean to say that this existence of ours actually is Heaven and we just don't know it? I think the latter is quite possibly the truth.

Think about this for a minute. It is quite possible that our minds have evolved to keep us somewhat miserable with the way things are (however they may be) so that we keep striving towards a better state of being and therefore evade the fate of the dodo bird and all the other creatures which have fallen out of existence. Certainly we are all doomed to die, a brief moment of intense pain passes, we black out, then (as the theory goes) we wake up as somebody else. Credit card debt is washed away. We lose contact with the ones we love, but also a lifetime of social screw-ups and bad blood is erased from the blackboard of our mind. We get carried around in a warm woman's belly for nine-months. We get to drink milk from a breast as big as our head. We get at least three years of not giving a damn about what anyone thinks with absolutely no repercussions – there is a vacation that no resort in the Caribbean can provide. In the future we get to pass through all the challenges of life yet again, as we have probably done for millions of lifetimes in the past, yet without a memory of what has gone before it all seems fresh and new and exciting. If you need a sense or morality in your existence then the world you stand to inherit is the one you helped support in your past life – lets just hope it's a world that is good for everyone involved since there is no telling who any of us might come back as in the next life.

Strangely, it all always seems to come back to the complexities of the Self. Once one can see past those iron-clad bindings which come with the love of oneself, it really is a Heavenly existence. But isn't that always the case? Instead the Self reigns supreme. It wants to be all-powerful and immortal in a world which never changes from the best state it has ever known. If such a wish were granted to our ancient ancestors 4 million years ago, we'd all still be monkeys in a tree. This may not be the worst thing in the world, but I kinda like what we've become and am genuinely interested in seeing what we will become in the future.