I lump this question under the category of The Brochure to Heaven Doesn’t Sound All That Great.
Along with changeless, some mystics describe ultimate reality as “empty” or the “void,” meaning nothingness. Can’t wait to get there! Sounds like quite a party! We sit around in emptiness and discuss our changeless reality. Whoo hoo! Sign me up! Watching paint dry sounds more exciting.
Why would I go to Heaven to experience emptiness when that’s the one thing I’m trying to avoid on earth? We’ll address the errors of emptiness and voidness later, but for now let’s address the idea of changelessness.
Absolutes: stop contradicting them or stop using them
The word changeless is an absolute ascribed to God, like the words omniscient or omnipotent, or all-loving. It is an all-or-nothing idea; no room for wishy-washy interpretation here.
One of the greatest frustrations I had as a Christian was that clergy would throw around absolutes about God—like God is unconditionally loving—then contradict those absolutes continuously in Bible readings, sermons and other teachings. Either we should stop using absolutes or use them properly. What’s the point to making an absolute statement if you’re only going to introduce exceptions to that absolute?
A couple’s counselor might encourage us to stop using absolutes altogether in our arguments with each other—they’re usually wrong and unfair. “You’re always late!” “You never clean up after yourself.” “You’re always too permissive with the kids!”
It’s true that we use absolutes as weapons against each other when are angry, but absolutes about God can be magical tools opening up whole new levels of understanding about ultimate reality if we use them properly. Here are six things necessary when considering absolutes about God and ultimate reality:
Six Conditions of Absolutes
1.) Define them correctly
2.) Investigate their implications thoroughly
3.) Evolve understanding of each in light of the others
4.) Don’t allow absolutes to contradict each other
5.) Once absolutes are established, don’t allow anything ascribed to God to conflict with them. In short, really do hold them as absolutes.
6.) Use absolutes as a method for eliminating spiritual error, but subjugate them to the experience of God’s love. There is no absolute theology; only an absolute experience of God’s love.
Absolutes are our ticket to visualizing Heaven
Used correctly, absolutes are a gateway to a whole new level of understanding about our ultimate reality with God. In the physical world, Einstein was able to radically transform our understanding of the universe by rigorously investigating the absolute speed of light.
Researchers in his day had uncovered the fact that the velocity of light is absolutely constant as it travels through the vacuum of space. Einstein took this truism and used rationally creative thought experiments to investigate the properties of space and time if this absolute was indeed true. The result was an astonishing leap forward in understanding for modern science.
Absolutes are the key to making a quantum leap in our understanding of God
Absolutes ascribed to God over millennia of time, across a great many faith traditions have the same potential power—to radically alter our understanding of God and absolute reality. And to help us eliminate errors ascribed to God that have endured for centuries upon centuries. Absolutes are a theology scrubber; understood correctly they can undo countless spiritual errors.
Understanding absolutes correctly can literally transform theology by elevating it to a whole new level of understanding.
How many angels does it take to change a changeless light bulb?
So like physics and its absolute speed of light, the discipline of spirituality has some absolutes of its own ascribed to God or ultimate reality (what we Christians call Heaven). Changeless is one of them. But so too are the ideas that God is infinite, indivisible and eternal, which we’ll investigate later in depth.
To understand changelessness we need to tap into condition #2 of absolutes: evolve understanding of each in light of the others. The two main other absolutes we need to understand to grasp changelessness are two of the most common absolutes ascribed to God: God is eternal and indivisible.
Getting our head around changeless
In J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, the pictures in newspaper, framed art and the likes are not dead, static images but are animated, living works of art complete with live characters. Pictures of famous “dead” people are animated by that actual person talking and interacting with the living.
An interesting idea. We can understand one attribute of changelessness by getting our heads around the idea that if God and Heaven are truly eternal, then there is no such thing as a dead or inert person, object or even idea from the past. All is alive fully in the present.
We are pretty comfortable with the idea that our souls live forever in Heaven. Since I was a young boy in Sunday school, I was taught that if we make it to Heaven I would live forever with God.
But we never approached the idea that everything in Heaven lives forever—even our thoughts. So, like those pictures in Harry Potter, there is no such thing as a dead, inert, non-living “soul” in Heaven, but neither is there a dead, inert, non-living thought. All real or true thoughts are literally eternally living information.
There are examples of this idea in spiritual traditions. First, in Native American spirituality we get the idea that sacred wisdom takes on a life of its own. Many Native American people believe sacred songs, rituals and wisdom literally become living things. If a sacred song isn’t sung, for example, it yearns to be told, much like a person yearning to express themselves.
And in several faith traditions the idea has evolved that in pure non-duality the thought and thinker are one and the same. You literally are your thoughts. No separation between subject (thinker) and object (thought). As we’ll see later, modern physics suggests our universe is in fact constructed in such a way that observer (us) and observed (objects in space) are inseparably connected.
It’s really not all that far from Western thought. We say things like, “He is a man of his word,” meaning, his words are him. Or, “She really lives her values.” We also “walk our talk” and other ideas. So, this notion that our ideas could be the real us—especially in the case of deeply held core values—is simply not that far off from our understanding.
If in ultimate reality there is no separation between thought and thinker—they are literally one and the same—then if the thinker is eternal, so too must their thoughts be.
We’ll explore the implications of this later, but for now let’s accept it as true and see what it means for our definition of changeless. If every thought, idea and creation in Heaven is truly eternal, then it lives forever. If it lives forever, then it cannot be absent from Heaven.
No oil changes in Heaven
In order to change, the previous state or condition of something must be absent from the present, right? If you change your hair color, the old color must not be present any more (unless you get a bad dye job and your roots are still showing). If you change your oil, the old oil must be absent from your car. If you change your mind, the old, rejected thought must now be gone, or at least unselected.
But what if your old hair color, oil and thoughts lived forever? That would mean they must still be present somewhere.
Now add the absolute condition ascribed to God by a great many mystics: indivisibility. Perfect unity. Truth is union, A Course in Miracles says. Now you’ve got a real problem with your old hair color. If Heaven is indivisible, how can you separate yourself from it? The answer is, you can’t.
Put these three absolutes together—eternal, indivisible and infinite—and you’ll see neither is there some place “outside” of Heaven to discard your old hair color. If Heaven is infinite, where would you go to discard anything at all “outside”of it? And if it is indivisible, how would you separate yourself from this discarded thing? And if everything is eternal, how could you “get rid of” something in the first place? It would live forever.
Now you see the Harry Potter picture effect. Eternal means it’s always alive in Heaven somewhere. Indivisible means you can’t build a wall In Heaven to separate that eternal, living idea from yourself. (The Buddha called Nirvana “unobstructed.”) And thirdly, if that idea is infinite, like you are, then you both extend to all of Heaven. There is no place “outside the infinite” to lose your old hair color. Or your oil. Or to change your mind and discard the unwanted idea “outside” of you somewhere.
These conditions help us define what is real in Heaven; what is our true, genuine reality. Just as the laws of nature define what is true or genuine in the phsyical world. You are free to imagine an unreal idea that doesn’t meet these criteria, but like a flying unicorn is not testified to as real by the laws of nature, your non-conforming idea simply won’t be testified to as real by the laws of Heaven.
This universe, for example, is a non-conforming idea, relative to the laws of Heaven.
Think about anythign you know that changes, and you’ll see three things conditions apply:
1.) The old, previous state or condition must no longer be present (and thus isn’t eternal, indivisible and infinite)
2.) The current state must be compared to a past state, which remains static and inert during this comparison process—i.e. it is no longer is alive or present in its full condition (and thus isn’t eternal). This violates the “living picture” idea that all ideas remains fully alive and present in the current moment of now.
3.) The one observing the change must be disconnected from that past state in order to know something is now different. If the old state were fully alive and present, the only option would be to experience it fully—given that it is eternal, indivisible and infinite—you couldn’t avoid experiencing it totally.
Thus we see why A Course in Miracles says that all truth must be experienced. It can’t be perceived or known without becoming it—not if you and it are eternal, infinite and indivisible. The Buddha says you must become the path before you can walk it.
Thus changeless doesn’t mean you never expand or extend your existence by creating, it just means that everything comes along for the ride. A tree “changing” colors in Heaven would still have every vibrant, rich color fully alive, present and eternal in that leaf.
Absolute context eliminates the idea of change
We can also understand that you can extend or expand and not change if the essence of the idea was fully understood from the beginning. That is, if you had absolute context, meaning absolute understanding, about the idea. For example, a car accelerates—that’s a change in its velocity. Yet the essence of the car remains unchanged by the acceleration. Did the car become something entirely different because it accelerated? Not for the inventor of that car who envisioned from the beginning that acceleration would simply be part of that car’s essence or totality—it’s spirit, so to speak. To the inventor of the car, having absolute context about the car, the essence of the car remains unchanged by the acceleration.
Similarly, when I go outside and see my trees changing colors in the fall, I don’t say, “Hey, what are these new, tall things in my yard?” I know that the essence or spirit, if you will, of these trees is to “change” colors. That hasn’t changed their essence in my eyes. Similarly my children can play, grow, learn, live and love and that still hasn’t changed their essence in my eyes—the overall context of “human child” has not changed in my eyes.
In order to view something as changed you must disregard your understanding of it totality, and focus in on some reduced attribute of it. We’ve all experienced this when we visit a relative who notices some superficial change in our appearance and says, “My, how you’ve changed!” And we want to respond, “Gee, thanks for defining ‘the real me’ by some superficial aspect of my appearance!’ A tree only “changes” in your eyes if you abandon your knowledge of trees as a whole.
Spacetime is built on change; therefore it isn’t an absolute universe
The Buddha said, “that which changes is not my real Self.” The idea of change in spacetime occurs because we have lost our connection to the whole, and thus view its isolated parts as changing. If we knew the whole, big picture, we could see all of spacetime expanding, extending and the likes, but not changing, because we would know its essence or totality was intended to include those parameters from the beginning. Just as an accelerating car is changing velocity, but its essence is hardly changing in the eyes of its inventor who envisioned acceleration as a wholly understood parameter from the very beginning.
Heaven is changeless. Choose a really comfortable pair of socks to be buried in.
Thus Heaven is changeless because God created it all and envisioned the totality of that experience from the beginning. Absolute context makes change a silly idea. Like a grandfather watching his grandchildren playing in the sandbox, God doesn’t believe Heaven changes because his children extend themselves in creations that are perfectly shared among all. Just as the grandfather doesn’t believe his grandchildren are becoming something other than humans because they are playing in the sandbox.
And if Heaven exists wholly in the moment of now, which Eckhart Tolle has expounded on at length in The Power of Now and The New Earth, then all the “past” conditions are really present only in the here and now.
Einstein himself said, “The distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” No past as a distinct, separate entity from the present means no change. In order to change, something in the present must also be held in mind in the “past” (which Einstein says is an illusion), and that past condition must not exist now (which means it is not eternal, or it is somehow present but not with us, which means it is divisible and not infinite.)
An impossibility in Heaven for all the reasons we have described here.
So is Heaven boring because it’s changeless? If by boring you mean everything and everyone you have ever loved being alive and present and totally connected to you in the most glorious moment of now is boring, then I guess it is.
Sounds like a party to me.
