We imagine ourselves as having had a beginning, although at precisely what point in time it happened is uncertain, and that like taxes our end will come. We think of most things this way because that’s the way they appear and it’s what we’re taught. Within our short lives of self-awareness, we witness coming and going, and in a relative sense, it’s a valid experience. We’re born and eventually we’ll die. In an ultimate sense, however, nothing happens. As we Buddhists say, “Looks like coming, looks like going.”
Where do things come from and where do they go? To try to answer the first question, we look to the heavens for answers about beginning and scientifically have settled on the Big Bang, but that does not answer the deeper question; where did the Big Bang come from? We also try to peer into the tiniest of places using super-colliders to split atomic particles into smaller and smaller bits, but that has not settled the question either, just deepened the mystery.
The answer to the second question is just as elusive. Where do things go? Science, once again, tries to give us an answer: entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics govern the destiny of matter. Our universe, we are told, will eventually become uniformly cold, empty and dark. Does that mean the answer to where things go is to nowhere? Did we come from nothing only to return to it?
These answers are not only unsatisfying, but may be entirely wrong, which is to say there was no beginning and will be no end. We are embedded in an ongoing process of continuity in which nothing is gained and nothing is lost, no increase and no decrease, no birth and no cessation. And where would something go? There is no other place, at least that we can detect. In light of these frustrating questions, we’ve invented all sorts of stories, such as going to Heaven, going to Hell or being stuck in Purgatory, what Buddhists call the Bardo.
Placing emphasis on individuality simply makes matters worse by personalizing all we see, hear and think. While our individual human lives provide a brief yet precious opportunity to ponder the meaning of life and behave in ways that create a good society, we are simultaneously members of the human species, and like all animal species we are on a species-wide trajectory that began long ago. Dynamic Kinetic Stability, duration through change, ie: the species as a whole continuing through the time-bound evolutionary process in which individuals participate but are subordinate to nature, governs us. How long humanity will last is anyone’s guess, but even if we become extinct, the continuity of life on earth will continue in some form, give or take a few billion years. The universe has nothing but time.
Science tells us that matter and energy cannot be destroyed, only converted from one form to the other. As matter chauvinists, however, we’re biased. Although we are manifestations of energy, we can’t easily think of ourselves that way and enjoy the common bond it forms with everything everywhere. Energy is all, and probably all there has ever been. When we go, our individual energy flows into the universal quantum energy fields in which we are continuously bathed, and from which we are inseparable. There’s comfort in that, I think. If you like, you may call it Heaven.
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