Podcast:

21 February 2018

Strive to live the ideal life…but don’t ever live it.

Try to be like Jesus, but don’t ever be him.

Build heaven here on earth, but don’t ever try to complete it.

I believe in these statements. And I believe in them because I believe in the more fundamental principle that there is no limit to human progression. I believe this last principle because it’s what I observe around me, and I believe it because when I live as if it’s true, things seem to go better.

As a Christian, at some point in my youth I was presented with the traditional idea that if you live well, you can obtain heaven after this life. I was encouraged to believe in this principle, and to me, to believe something is to act it out, to live as if it’s true. And so I did act it out. I began, however imperfectly, to strive to live by the conditions I was told would be necessary to obtain that future heaven. This included what you might think: trying to live a good moral life, respecting and helping others, not lying or cheating, and so on.

This conception of a future heaven is a useful tool and leads to a better life. It pushes our minds and efforts to the long term. If you haven’t noticed, pretty much everything bad for us in life brings us short-term benefits while producing long-term pain, and pretty much everything good for us in life comes from submitting to short-term pain, in return for long-term peace. So if you believe in a future heavenly state, which can only be achieved by strenuous, disciplined living, then you are more likely to be in that long-term mindset which is characteristic of a decent life.

But then one day a wise man put a different thought in my head. He said: “You can have heaven right now if you build it.”

That’s a bit different thought. Instead of placing the heavenly state in some other life, it says it’s obtainable in this life. Well, I don’t know about you, but having heaven right now seems better than having it in some other life.

I knew that the wise man wasn’t saying to pursue the pleasures of the day. And he also wasn’t inferring the attempt of building some sort of political utopia. These two notions have proved themselves destructive throughout history.

So Ruling out these notions, I began to see what he meant.

Humans used to devote the bulk of their energies to simply doing their best to not be wiped out by mother nature—To eat enough calories to make it through the winter, or reproduce; to flee the latest predator, or shelter themselves from the latest storm. Most people throughout history have been in slavery or various forms of subjugation to a minute number of powerful rulers.

But over time things got a bit better. Little by little physical and moral and conceptual tools led humanity to make things better. And here we are, relatively comfortable. With society running relatively well in many parts of the world (you’re not enslaved, you likely have more than enough food, you have endless access to knowledge in your pocket). Yes, we’ve got our problems, among them the problem that we’ve progressed so far that we now have the technology to absolutely destroy ourselves. But still, things are pretty good when you compare it with the destitution of almost the entirety of history.

We humans have this incredible ability. And that’s that we can envision how to make things a little bit better, how to suffer a little less, and then actually do it. I don’t see anything else in the universe that can do that like we can.

So take that notion of human progress and apply it to an individual, or a family. All of us can think of some small thing we could do today that would make life a little bit better. Or maybe it’s more helpful to put in in the negative—we could all do something today that would make life a little less horrible, a little less hellish. Jordan Peterson says we should start by cleaning our room. I do that now, every morning. It works. We could all do that.

My family has been trying out this principle. Once a week, we identify a few things that could make our family life a little less hellish, and a little more heavenly. Dishes after meals (we have 9 people in the family after all) used to be a little slice of hell that only my wife was willing to confront. Now, nobody walks away from any meal until the kitchen and dining room has been restored to a heavenly state. Everyone now gives a kiss on the cheek to each other, a beso, whenever we leave to school or work, and whenever we come home. How good could things get if we all took life like this, a little at a time? We don’t know.

The final interesting thing about this: Along the way, I stopped thinking of heaven as some future static state to obtain. If you combine the belief in unlimited human potential with this concept of incremental progress, you can reach the conclusion that if you ever obtained a complete state of heaven, you’d be wrong. In fact, I’ve noticed that you feel the most heavenly when you’re heading toward the next thing. Maybe heaven isn’t a static state you obtain in the next life. Maybe it’s a dynamic state of being you adopt in a universe of limitless progress. “You can have heaven right now if you build it.”

So I end where I began:

Strive to live the ideal life…but don’t ever live it.

Try to be like Jesus, but don’t ever be him.

Build heaven here on earth, but don’t ever try to complete it.

Because if you did, you’d be wrong.