The Door to Everlasting Bliss

Will you or won’t you? The answer says a lot.

Say I bring you to a room and point to a door called the Door to Everlasting Bliss. You have the option to walk through the door or decline.

If you walk through the door, your body and consciousness will collapse into a hot pink string of energy and go soaring through the cosmos at the speed of light. Your experience of being the string will be total, unwavering bliss by every measure imaginable. No suffering, pure bliss. You will have no sense of loss going from person to string, either in terms of physical change or change in consciousness. Your experience as the string — compared with your experience now — is not diminished in any way. At worst, as the string, you will feel uninterrupted satisfaction equal to the greatest satisfaction any human has ever felt.

True to its name, your bliss can be everlasting, but in case that makes you uncomfortable, you have another option. As you walk through the door you can select your original Earthbound plan for death, strictly as a matter of timing. In this case, you would exist as the blissful string of energy up to whatever point you were originally destined to die here on Earth, then you would die, blissfully, and go on to experience whatever post-death realm (or lack thereof) currently awaits you. In other words, no change to your duration of conscious experience, no change to whatever awaits you after death, and you don’t have to navigate years or decades of existential dread in between.

Perhaps most important, you will experience no loneliness as the string. Only bliss. As you soar through the cosmos, you will feel as connected, surrounded, supported and loved as any person has felt in human history.

What happens on Earth if you walk through the door? Good news. A copy of you will be made immediately to stay here and continue your journey as a member of all communities of which you are currently a part, big and small. No one on Earth will know any difference whatsoever. The copy made of your body and consciousness will be so exact, it will ostensibly live the exact life you would have lived on Earth, had you not walked through the door.

Meanwhile, as the string, you will be aware of your past and the people who colored it, but you will feel no pain from disconnection with them, only bliss. (I realize that’s a heavy lift, logically speaking, but it’s a thought experiment — bend at the knees, you can do it.)

To summarize: you walk through the Door of Everlasting Bliss, a copy of you continues on Earth as if nothing changed, and the real version of you becomes a string of energy soaring through the cosmos, experiencing total, unwavering bliss, either for as long as you’re currently due to live or forever.

Pretend you’re in the room now. I’ve just pointed to the door. Do you walk through or politely decline?

* * *

I think this experiment reveals a profound truth about the human condition: that we’re much more deeply enchanted by this experience than we tend to think, and for many of us, life on Earth, life exactly as we know it, is inherently blissful. We just keep forgetting. Our daily trudge and constant pricks of ego set us in a daze, and we forget the very ground we walk on is all we’ve ever wanted. We forget that heaven is in fact on Earth.

Some would choose to go through the door. Who could blame them? Whether they decide based on logic or curiosity, or because the world has failed them and they need the relief, it’s a defensible escape. But I sense this group is a minority (and limited sampling on the question confirms that).

It’s the spirit of the decliners that fascinates me.

Those who decline to go through the door seem to acknowledge, whether they realize it or not, that the ambient background of their life — the default setting of their consciousness — is perfect peace. How else could you justify the choice, other than to believe your situation is not radically different than the bliss on offer? From the throne of the same lives we so often complain about and compare to imagined ideals, we decline to trade up for perfection — oh what a secret we must know!

There are other things at play, of course. For one, decliners are a testament to what an intensely social animal we are. To decline the door is to choose to be here with your people, even knowing you will suffer immensely for it.

Decliners also seem to favor the particular over the abstract. I feel this acutely as a man waiting for his first child to be born. Having designed the experiment myself, I believe wholeheartedly in its proposition of unsurpassable bliss, yet I won’t walk through the door if it means missing the chance to meet my own child.

To me, that’s spiritual magic — the kind you could build a life around. Think about that power. Strip away everything else that classifies as spiritual — all the mythology and metaphysics — and train your attention on that one white-hot point of human instinct: that we must be together, come what may.

If you’re looking for a place to start, there it is.