Imagine there’s no heaven

A seed carries the potential of life. Upon encountering fertile ground it may sprout into a plant. As a plant it has inherent characteristics that turn light, air and water into what it needs to develop and grow. It also has some sort of awareness. Several experiments have demonstrated that plants react to music by healthier growth (e.g. “The Sound of Music and Plants” By Dorothy Retallack.) One may claim it’s the vibrations of the sound waves, but still, there is room to believe plants have awareness. Without dwelling further into plants and awareness, I will just mention that plants reacted differently to different type of music, responding better to soothing classical music than to modern compositions. Ultimately plants, like all living entities, perish. They are born out of a seed, convert resources into life-energy, develop through a life-cycle which ends up in death. Sounds familiar?

For humans too, every sperm and every egg innate life potential. When an egg and a sperm unite, most of us would agree, life begins. The embryo has qualities that allow it to turn food into growth-energy. Awareness starts to develop from very early on (e.g. unborn babies respond to music and to their mother’s voice while still in the womb.) As with plants, one may claim it’s just a response to vibrations, but in this case, versus the plants, there is more acceptance that it is human awareness and not just triggering of plant genes by playing certain frequencies. Awareness aside, once born, the human inherently knows how to convert air and food into growth-energy through a life-cycle ending in death.

Why do we expire? Why does anything living ends up in death? It seems that as proficient as we can be in converting sources of energy into what we, as humans need biologically to thrive, we are also born with a limited amount of life-energy. In the traditional Chinese culture there is a certain type of Qi, Yuán Qi, which is innate or pre-natal, acknowledged as pre-set amount of life-energy that cannot be replenished. It is our individual clock ticking from inception, until it is all used up. Imagine it as a block of wood. It has the inherent energy of producing heat when burned. Once it is completely consumed, its energy turned into fire and heat, nothing is left of the actual piece of wood but ashes. “Though the grease burns out of the torch, the fire passes on, and no one knows where it ends,” wrote Chuang Tzu (Basic Writings). There is no “wood soul” that passes on when our block of wood is all used up; it’s all gone, turned into dust. At the end of its life-cycle the plant is dead; and so is the human. We bury the body but know it’s nothing but an empty shell.

We want to believe we have a soul, that our awareness transcends to higher planes. It is way too scary to imagine otherwise. But what if there is no after-life? No heaven, no incarnation. What if our existence came to be because a sperm and an egg met and materialized their innate life-growth potential, and our awareness is just part of that process, nothing more? While we are alive we feel awareness. It is part of our life-form, much like it’s possible each and every single living entity has awareness. Maybe, and most likely, not similar to human awareness, but an awareness all the same, suited to that specific life-form, be it a plant, a bacteria or a dog. We are not that unique in nature, just different and, probably, biologically more advanced.

We do not want to die. We do not want to believe that when we depart this life there is no greater beyond. That this is all there is.
Religion had spread like wildfire over the years based solely on our fear of death and the belief in after-life. After all, if there is absolutely nothing that happens past our death, where would religion be in all this?
But this post is not about religion, nor is it about whether or not plants have awareness. It’s about us, about our energy and impact while we are alive.
Even if after our death there is no place our so-called soul travels to; even if after our life ends, and that flicker we call awareness dies out like a blown out candle, something of us remains. It is the sum of our life’s actions to that moment. Because aside of converting energy sources such as air and food into self-serving life-growth energy, hopefully we have done something else with our lives. Each and every action we took, each and every thought we had, words we spoke and deeds we did, is energy we passed along, energy which made an impact in one way or another. And as such we already exist for eternity. Whether we brought kids into the world, planted a tree, shared our knowledge with others, built some machine at a factory or helped a child cross a busy street, we made an impact.

“Though the grease burns out of the torch, the fire passes on, and no one knows where it ends,” wrote Chuang Tzu. Our fire burnt out completely, but in the process it passed along to others as well as to the environment, and no one knows its full long-term impact.
“Imagine there’s no heaven,” wrote John Lennon.
Your life right now is your eternity.