Finding Meaning Without Significance Or Permanence

Would you choose to go to heaven if you couldn’t stay there forever?

What if the paradise of our dreams isn’t just possible, it’s a real place?

What if instead…it’s the promise we could live there forever that’s the lie?

What if Heaven exists, but eternity doesn’t?

If that’s not strange enough, consider the mirror version: what if eternity exists, and that’s the nature of Hell?

In Shelly Kagan’s Yale University course on Death (available for free on YouTube), the philosopher gets right at why immortality might not be desirable. If you could truly live forever, your identity and experiences intact, you would eventually run out of things to think. Things to feel. Things to do.

Just like the concept of eternity, we can’t easily imagine ourselves living without end. Even if the universe itself ends or restarts, we’ll still be immortal. We’ll still be here.

Whatever ends will cease to exist with or without us.

Whatever begins will take its first steps while we remain motionless in time with ours.

We continue. Unceasing. Undying.

Variety would at first cultivate a sense of novelty for us, but infinite time doesn’t leave infinite room for novelty. As an immortal, you will eventually explore every permutation that the universe has to offer.

There may, Kagan says, eventually come a time when we long for death (YouTube).

There may, as the infinitely rewatchable show The Good Place suggested in its final story arc, come a time when we contemplate not just the end of our existence, but how to meet that end with meaning.

And in that contemplation, we might experience the infinite potential that’s only possible when we know we are going to die.

All that immortality has to offer

What if I were truly immortal?

In the scenario Kagan describes, I would probably feel like he suggests. I would wish that one day, whether by my choice or not, I could depart for the unknown nothingness.

But what if immortality were just a different version of life — one that continues until it doesn’t? What if the threat of non-existence were removed and death were merely the endpoint we embrace when we know we’ve done enough?

Is that not a kind of Heaven?

The end of an endless life

At the end of an endless life, I would feel as though I’d explored all immortality had to offer (quiet, nihilists).

I would feel a sense that my work is done. I am whole. My only remaining desire would be to cease living, to cease existing, to enter the unknown that is nothingness.

I wouldn’t long to “die” because I hated life. I would long to die because it was the end of a life well-lived.

In another eye-opening talk, Kagan took on Christian philosopher William Lane Craig (The Veritas Forum) to debate whether God is necessary for morality. The debate itself is only interesting if you’ve never heard either person speak before. Kagan easily dismantles Craig’s most flawed and yet most repeated arguments. It’s the Q&A afterward that sticks with me.

William Lane Craig can’t wrap his head around what would make a person’s life or actions significant if they don’t have a cosmic significance imbued toward them by the Christian God.

Kagan, on the other hand, describes the simplest aspects of humanity that distinguish us. We write poetry, we feel joy, we struggle with shame, we debate how to be better and whether to be better, we find meaning and significance wherever we can (even when others seek to deprive us of it)…

Rocks and liquids and ideas, as far as we know, can’t experience any of those things. If none of that strikes a person as special, what would ever pass the bar?

Stairway to Heaven

I’m an atheist now, but I still remember the path to Heaven. I learned mine when I was stuck in mental institutions as a teenager. My family sent me there for anxiety, depression, anorexia — and to turn me into a boy.

Once it became clear to me I wasn’t getting out anytime soon, I used to sit and look out the windows of the dayroom. I built what Sherlock Holmes (yay!) and Hannibal Lecter (uh-oh lol) called a memory palace, a place where imagination turns other worlds into places more real than this one.

For the two years I was in that hospital, that place felt like all I had. Going home terrified me. Staying in the hospital felt just as bad.

I wondered why I was trapped in that hospital. In this body. In this life.

I wondered whether it made sense to continue.

But when a fellow patient from across the hall completed suicide, I stopped cold. I went deep inside myself and my memory palace. I saw what it would be like if that had been me.

I couldn’t know for sure when or if I would ever get out of the institution. If I went home, whether my family would continue to groom and abuse me.

Or if I ever escaped them, whether the pain of what they’d done would ever recede enough for me to wonder if one more day was worth the effort it took to breathe.

It was in my despair that I became quiet enough to hear a voice from within.

It was in the sudden stillness that I remembered what makes me worthy.

It’s the part that belonged to me the moment I came into existence. The part that still belongs to me. The part that belongs to you, too.

It still belongs to us.

It’s the part of you that came into existence before you began to live. The part that will leave with you at the end of your days. The part that is precious and special simply for the fact that it got a chance to exist.

Until science empowers us to do weird stuff like in the show Upload, life does end. Mine will one day come to a close, just as many have before mine. Just as many will after.

I try to find comfort in the thought that once I’m gone, I won’t care whether it happened. But I also think about how to cultivate meaning and significance with the time I still have. Each breath is precious. Each breath is special.

If I have my way, I’ll be here at least as many years as I already have behind me.

If I have my way, I’ll spend those years returning to my path to Heaven.

What is Heaven?

Heaven is a place we may only get to touch.

It’s the feeling of worthiness we cultivate.

It’s the certainty that our existence is meaningful and significant.

It’s the spontaneous expression of self when we know we are enough.

It’s holding all of that close to our heart regardless of whether we live for one more moment or an infinite amount.

Would I go to Heaven even if I couldn’t stay there forever?

I would. I will. And with each day left, I’ll go back as often as I can.