Darkside

The simplest of logic is also the most cruel. It requires no external belief or understanding. Simply being conscious and able to read these words is enough to prove it: Either you will persist in being conscious forever, or at some point your consciousness will cease. 0 and 1. There are shades in between, but the whole remains true regardless. 

This is a hard truth. I just watched the final episode of Community, which gets meta and dark for one paying attention. They present a commercial which is a game of the show, where the kid plays a "card" that is actually the script for their commercial. The dad says something like "don't you see, nobody wins. This means we are pawns in a game, we were never born, and we have never truly lived." They all stare down at the ground in a group existential crisis as the narrator goes into a monologue crudely walking the line between satirical and profound in a deeply disturbing way. The fact is, if our consciousness is capable of ceasing, our fate will be worse than this. We will become forgotten, by ourselves and everyone, and may as well have never existed at all. Consider if the commercial character's consciousnesses were able to persist indefinitely in that state instead; their lives would be consumed by the realization that their lives are meaningless.

We do not know what is on the other side of death. We have faith, even unspoken, in this or that. I do not understand those that can believe in annihilation and are not horrified to the core by the prospect. It means every second here is less than meaningless, it is as nothing. In X years you will no longer register it had happened at all.

Now what if there was a form of rebooting? What if we could return to life in some form, with some or all memory erased? In this way consciousness would both be annihilated and perpetuate forever, to some degree. At least in that scenario you could be content in knowing that when you do truly experience an existential crisis, that crisis at some point will fade. But still, the you who you see yourself as today will be annihilated, and the you that persists from one experience to the next will be forever trapped in a loop. 

Let's say you can become godlike in your own realm. There would be no reset or annihilation in this state, you would instead persist forever. With the sum of all possible knowledge though, and no challenge remaining in your environment, over the span of infinite time, how could it be expected that the things that intrigue you would become anything but sparser and more dull? Challenge would become intrigue, intrigue would become curiosity, curiosity would become a small blip of interest, and then everything would eventually become the same flat meaningless space. Since you persist eternally, this would be forever.

Now let's consider the classical view of heaven, an idea much more tangible. I have heard it described as a number of things, many of which sounds incredibly boring to me. At the same time, others would be in hell, including those you loved and were called to love by God. So, it seems as though portions of consciousness must be removed to fit the individual to the environment in this case, parts of you must be annihilated. In this case, could it be said that the one reading this will be the one in heaven, or would it instead be someone fundamentally different? We would not just be different in the sense that our personalities change over time, but in the sense that the things which give us joy here do not match with the things that would give us joy there. Additionally, either all memory of the loved ones in hell must be removed, or our fundamental concept of what love is must be changed. Why then would we be called to love each other, if so many would not be in attendance and instead tortured? Would we, here and now, even recognize ourselves in a heaven such as this?

If it seems like I am hell bent on peeling apart the layers of reality, it is due to these reasons. If it seems that I am obsessed with what I call eep (eternal euphoric perfection- actual heaven from my understanding) it is because I am. My real question is, knowing you have but a short time before you are faced with what is next, how are you not equally obsessed? How can you know the options, at a core level being nothing or something, forever, and not agonize about how you might craft it if you could? I don't think it is because people have better things to do, in fact I know that's not the case given the stakes and timeline. I think it is a combination of existential horror stopping most from considering it, the belief that there is nothing to be done, and a grace given by God to most people that any arguments this fundamentally shaking are largely ignored or disregarded. The reason this grace is given is that God would not set in motion consciousness, any self aware consciousness, without a solution already in mind. God has more familiarity with these possible endings than we could ever hope to fathom, and already has a plan in place. Because of these, most people remain in possession of a blissful blindspot for such things for their entire lives. I believe some lose this blindspot through their experience, and once lost it cannot be honestly regained. Only in such a state can someone truly assist in the crafting of the final solution. 

There is only one suitable permanent outcome that I can see: love. Love is the only thing that in its true form does not fade in time as other challenges do, as there is no "winning" in love. When you feel love fading (once again I'm talking about true love) you fight to respark it- you become a savant, studying and tearing yourself apart to regain what you once felt. Yes, this proposal means that you will experience love in its many forms for all eternity, constantly shifting, ebbing and flowing, unable to escape its sometimes maddening tides, but for true love, for your soulmate, it will be worth every moment. You will be on effectively equal footing for eternity, but gracefully just a half step out of sync on everything, and in all the right ways. It means never being the undisputed master of your realm; it means never experiencing your realm fading to meaninglessness. It means never being forgotten, even if some edges crumble over time as new ones are built. It is a longshot, but I guarantee it is the only way to resolve this (reality), in the end.

eep is unfathomably huge, and it is as varied as can be conceived of (likely far beyond conception from our human perspective). eep has many pockets, and in it you never need to walk alone, your perfect partner always somewhere calling you home. eep is just around the corner.