Archive- The Paradox of Perfect Bliss: How Desire Shapes Our Conceptions of Heaven, Nirvana, and Human Meaning
From the archive! The basic content remains the same.
Follow up Article! : The Impossible Object: Why "Good Desire" Cannot Survive Divine Transformation
A quality overview and discussion of article by AI hosts
Throughout human history, we've told ourselves stories about what comes after death - visions of paradise where suffering ends, where all questions find answers, where we finally achieve the contentment that eludes us in life. These visions of perfection, whether the Christian heaven, Buddhist nirvana, or secular utopias, share a common promise: the end of wanting itself. However, this promise conceals a puzzle about human experience.
Consider how we actually experience satisfaction in life. The joy of achievement often fades shortly after success. The thrill of possession diminishes once we own what we desired. Even our deepest pleasures seem to require some element of anticipation, striving, or incompleteness to maintain their meaning. This pattern suggests something unsettling: What if our capacity for meaning is inseparable from our experience of lack?
Imagine achieving everything you've ever wanted: perfect happiness, complete knowledge, eternal bliss. Now imagine experiencing that state forever, without any sense of yearning or desire. Would it still feel meaningful? This paradox lies at the heart of how we conceive of heaven and the afterlife, revealing a fundamental tension not just in our yearning for perfection, but in the very nature of human desire itself.
Most narratives about what happens after death demand our commitment to specific beliefs, but perhaps what matters most is how we approach living now. The central question isn't whether an afterlife exists, but rather how our conception of it shapes our engagement with present reality. While I first examined this issue through Western Christian traditions, I extended my analysis to other traditions, such as Buddhism, which offer unique perspectives. It's important to note that these reflections extend beyond any single religious framework to challenge our basic assumptions about what makes life meaningful.
The Nature of Desire and Meaning
First let's consider what we actually want when we imagine heaven. Our very sense of self is shaped by desire and longing - not just as things to overcome, but as the fundamental fabric of who we are. Religious traditions have proposed various responses to this condition - from cessation of these desires to their complete transcendence through radical transformation of human nature itself.
Yet even as we imagine transcending our current nature, we must question whether any form of consciousness, transformed or not, requires some form of striving or limitation to be meaningful. The satisfaction of reaching a mountain summit reveals this. The mountain remains, in a sense, fundamentally unattainable even when reached, and this very unattainability is what makes the experience meaningful.
The desire principle extends even to our most beloved forms of entertainment and competition. In American football, the game's excitement arises from the uncertainty of victory or defeat. When one team dominates too thoroughly - imagine a 49-0 blowout where the outcome is certain by halftime - both players and spectators disengage. The winning team's achievements feel hollow not simply because there's no challenge, but because there's no space left for desire to circulate. Even in victory, players often express disappointment in such one-sided games, unconsciously recognizing that what they truly seek isn't just victory, but the sustained engagement with desire itself.
The Christian Paradox of Paradise
This insight into the nature of meaningful experience naturally leads us to question Christian conceptions of an afterlife free from all longing. The religious experience itself demonstrates this paradox: much of its power lies not in achieving perfect union with God, but in the persistent space between believer and divine.
Christian Religious life often operates through this productive distance - reading scripture, struggling against sin, seeking connection through worship. When people imagine heaven as an eternal worship service, they're unconsciously preserving this vital space that gives their earthly faith its meaning. Even in our attempts to imagine eternal bliss, we find ourselves unable to conceive of a state beyond longing, separation, desire - not because we're unimaginative, but because we can't imagine ourselves without it.
The traditional narrative presents a curious circle: humanity falls from Eden's paradise, only to potentially return to heaven's paradise. But this raises an obvious question: if one fall was possible, why not another? The common view of heaven as an unchanging state fails to address what would prevent another disruption. If God's rule wasn't enough to prevent the first fall, what makes us certain it would prevent a second?
Traditional and modern forms of Christianity have proposed various solutions to the paradoxes of paradise, from dynamic conceptions of heaven to radical transformation of human nature itself. In dynamic conceptions of heaven, they'll propose spiritual progression, continuous creative work, perpetual discovery of divine knowledge. Mormon theology, for instance, envisions the celestial kingdom as a place of progression where souls continue advancing toward godhood itself. Yet these sophisticated attempts raise even deeper questions: If meaningful free will and growth can exist in heaven without the possibility of evil or suffering, why this earthly journey at all? Why didn't God simply create that state to begin with?
The Transformation Problem
Some Christian traditions, drawing on biblical passages like 1 Corinthians 15:35-49, propose a solution to the desire paradox through the concept of radical transformation. Paul writes of a "heavenly body" that will replace our "earthly body," suggesting that in the resurrection, believers will be fundamentally transformed: "And just as we have borne the image of the earthly one, we will also bear the image of the heavenly one." This transformation is often interpreted as freeing us from earthly limitations, including the very structures of desire and lack that seem to make eternal perfection problematic.
At first glance, this appears to resolve our paradox. If we are transformed so completely that our very mode of consciousness no longer requires desire or lack, then perhaps eternal perfection becomes possible. Traditional theology has often emphasized this discontinuity between earthly and heavenly existence, pointing to passages like Revelation 21:4 -"and {he} will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying [, nor pain] anymore, [for] the former things have passed away.”
^[AI Critical New Testament]: See the section of their preface on Braces and Brackets and/or their translation and notes for detail.
However, this solution potentially creates an even deeper philosophical problem: If we are transformed so fundamentally that we no longer experience desire or lack, in what meaningful sense are we still ourselves?
While this transformation is often framed as the removal of sin and limitation, it would effectively alter the very structures that make human consciousness and experience meaningful. Our memories, relationships, values, and sense of meaning are all shaped by experiences of limitation and desire. Even our love for others and for God seems inextricably bound up with yearning and distance.
Modern science fiction has imagined different forms of consciousness - from Star Trek's logical Vulcans to artificial intelligences achieving sentience - yet even these alternative forms of subjectivity typically maintain some form of drive or limitation that makes their experience meaningful. A consciousness free from such structures would diverge significantly from human experience, more so than differences among human cultures or even species. This would suggest being completely alien to what is your current self.
The theological position might counter that divine transformation preserves some essential "soul" or core self while removing sinful or limiting aspects. But this raises the question: what exactly is this core self, independent of our ways of experiencing and relating to the world? The biblical concept of being "born again" or "born from above" (John 3:3) already suggests a kind of radical transformation in this life, yet it builds upon rather than erases our existing personality and experiences.
This does not argue against the possibility of post-death transformation; rather, it suggests that any such transformation would be more radical and alienating than traditional accounts typically acknowledge. Perhaps this is precisely the point - that the heavenly self would be as unimaginable to us as adult consciousness is to an infant, or as Paul suggests, as different as a plant is from the seed from which it grows (1 Corinthians 15:37-38). But this then raises questions about the comfort or appeal of such promises of eternal life, if that life would be lived by what is effectively a different being.
The Lacanian Perspective
From the Lacanian perspective, those apparent theological puzzles reveal something about the nature of human subjectivity itself. Perhaps what we're really encountering here is not a flaw in theological reasoning, but the fundamental impossibility of imagining a state of pure fulfillment.
Introductions I have had to the thought of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, through various short and long form media, have helped shape my perspective throughout this piece.
informed by that background:
Our very existence as subjects is constituted through desire and lack - not as temporary conditions to be overcome, but as the essential structure of human consciousness. The 'fall' from Eden might be understood not as a historical event to be reversed, but as a mythological expression of this fundamental truth: that human subjectivity itself emerges through separation and lack. The central question isn't why God didn't create heaven directly, but whether consciousness as we know it could exist without this constitutive gap.
Buddhist Alternatives and Their Paradoxes
Buddhism might seem to offer an alternative vision through the concept of nirvana, though Buddhist schools differ significantly in their approach to desire itself. Traditional Theravada Buddhism, with practices like nirodha-samāpatti, literally aims for the extinction of all feeling and perception - adepts attaining this cessation lose consciousness entirely, sometimes for days. This represents a genuine attempt to transcend desire through its complete elimination.
However, other Buddhist traditions, particularly later developments like Dzogchen and Vajrayana, take radically different approaches, with some "left-hand path" practices actually involving direct engagement with desire and intense emotions rather than their elimination.
Yet even in traditions that genuinely seek desire's cessation, we find a telling paradox: the very pursuit of non-desire becomes an object of desire. The traditional Buddhist practitioner's relationship to enlightenment mirrors our broader relationship to desire - they must want to not want, desire to move beyond desire.
What's particularly revealing is that in orthodox interpretations, the state they long for - nirvana - ultimately represents a kind of void or negation of subjectivity itself. Christian heaven promises fulfillment or transformation of human consciousness. Traditional nirvana, on the other hand, promises its dissolution.
A radically different religious tradition frames its ultimate goal as an escape from human consciousness's structure, suggesting an insight into the relationship between desire and being. Whether through eternal fulfillment or complete dissolution, both traditions grapple with desire by imagining its end - yet both must use desire to move toward that end.
Buddhist thinkers have developed sophisticated responses to this paradox - from reframing the initial desire for liberation as a skillful means that naturally falls away, to arguing that the critique rests on false assumptions about the self, to claiming that enlightenment reveals we already possess what we seek. Yet each of these responses inadvertently demonstrates the inescapability of the very structure they claim to transcend.
The 'skillful means' response still requires wanting to use the skillful means effectively. The 'no-self' argument must be desired as a more accurate understanding than belief in self. The 'already enlightened' teaching creates its own form of spiritual wanting - the desire to recognize what we supposedly already are. Even the most sophisticated Buddhist philosophy cannot escape the fundamental pattern: any movement away from our current condition - whether toward elimination, recognition, or acceptance - necessarily employs the very structure of desire it claims to overcome.
This isn't to dismiss all of Buddhism's insights, but rather to suggest that the fantasy of completely transcending desire reveals something essential about human existence itself. The fact that even traditions explicitly designed to eliminate desire find themselves caught in these recursive paradoxes points to desire not as a problem to be solved, but as the fundamental structure that makes conscious experience possible in the first place.
The diversity within Buddhism - from complete cessation to direct engagement with desire - reveals how even within a single religious framework, practitioners grapple with fundamentally different relationships to human subjectivity. Yet whether through elimination or transformation, the fundamental paradox remains across various forms of spiritual seeking.
Perhaps nirvana, like heaven, is best understood not as a state we might achieve, but as a concept that organizes our spiritual seeking while necessarily remaining beyond our grasp. Its value lies not in its attainability but in how it shapes our engagement with the present moment.
When we try to imagine a truly static state of perfection, whether heavenly or nirvanic, we find ourselves unable to conceive of it without smuggling in elements of longing – even descriptions of heaven often include souls continuing to learn, grow, and discover new aspects of divine glory, tacitly acknowledging that meaningful existence requires not just change, but the persistent space of desire itself. This isn't a failure of imagination, but a reflection of how fundamental desire is to human experience – not as something to be transcended, but as the very structure that makes experience meaningful.
Near Death Experiences: A Case Study
But what of people who say they have experienced death and come back? Who say they have experienced one of these states of the afterlife in what are often called Near Death Experiences? What do they tell us (or what don't they)?
While our philosophical considerations might seem abstract, they find concrete expression in how humans actually encounter and interpret seeming glimpses of the transcendent. Near death experiences (NDEs) offer a fascinating case study not only in how our relationship with desire manifests in moments of apparent contact with the divine, but also in how transformed states of consciousness might be experienced.
The most striking paradox of NDEs lies in how people report vivid, "realer than real" experiences while their brains show minimal activity. Many describe states of awareness that seem to transcend ordinary consciousness - expanded perception, dissolution of ego boundaries, and profound shifts in how they experience time and space. These accounts might seem to support the possibility of consciousness radically different from our ordinary experience. Yet even in these apparently transformed states, we find familiar structures of meaning-making and desire operating. The experiences remain comprehensible and meaningful precisely because they maintain some connection to ordinary human ways of understanding and relating in the world.
While NDE's might seem to suggest something beyond purely physical processes, we might better understand these experiences as manifestations of our ideological fantasies. This becomes particularly evident in how NDE content often aligns with the experiencer's existing beliefs and cultural framework - Hindus might experience reincarnation processes, while Christians encounter Jesus or angels.
This cultural specificity, rather than undermining these experiences, reveals something crucial about how our interpretive frameworks and unconscious expectations structure even our most transcendent moments. Consider how the deity encountered in NDEs often reflects current religious understanding rather than historical reality. The modern Christian conception of YHWH or "God" differs markedly from the deity's original context within a Canaanite pantheon, yet Christian NDEs today reflect contemporary monotheism rather than this historical complexity. This suggests these experiences arise from our current interpretive frameworks rather than revealing eternal truths - yet this doesn't diminish their significance. Instead, it illuminates how deeply our relationship to the divine is entwined with our fundamental structures of desire and sense-making.
Divine Diversity and Its Implications
Even within contemporary monotheistic traditions, we find striking variations in how the same divine figure is perceived. Conservative and progressive believers might pray to the same God while holding radically different views of divine nature - one might experience a stern father demanding strict adherence to traditional values, while another encounters a loving presence championing social justice.
These varying experiences of the divine might be understood not as contradictions to be resolved, but as different manifestations of our tendency to long for completion and ultimate coherence. The divine often functions as what we might call an impossible ideal - not because it doesn't exist, but because our relationship to it necessarily involves a productive distance that generates meaning.
This variance in divine representation reveals a deeper tension in how we relate to limits themselves. The stern, patriarchal God setting clear boundaries and the more expansive, progressive divine presence might seem opposed, but both speak to our fundamental need for a productive relationship with limitation.
The conservative vision acknowledges how boundaries create meaning - just as a game requires rules to be playable, human experience requires some structure to be meaningful. Meanwhile, the progressive vision recognizes how pushing against inherited limitations can open new possibilities for meaning and connection. Rather than seeing these as contradictory, we might understand them as different expressions of how humans navigate the necessary tension between structure and freedom, limitation and possibility. This mirrors how desire itself requires both lack and potential - neither pure restriction nor complete freedom can generate meaning alone.
This theological complexity poses questions about traditional visions of heaven. If believers are effectively relating to different gods under the same name, how could they all share the same eternal paradise? This becomes especially relevant when we consider that the majority of NDEs, regardless of the experiencer's religious background, are positive rather than hellish. If we accepted NDEs as evidence, this would challenge sectarian claims about salvation being limited to specific beliefs, suggesting that just as heaven might accommodate varying Christian interpretations of God, it might extend beyond the boundaries of any single religious framework.
Justice, Suffering, and Present Engagement
The very concept of hell, like karma in Eastern traditions, seems to arise from both our human desire for justice and our ideological need for a coherent moral universe, rather than from genuine insight into the afterlife. While these frameworks may have served important social functions throughout history, we might question whether deferring justice to future lives or afterlives has ultimately helped or hindered our ability to create justice in the present.
These varying conceptions of cosmic justice don't just reflect theological differences, but reveal tensions in how we approach social change. When we imagine an afterlife that perfectly resolves all earthly injustices, we might inadvertently blunt our drive to address systemic inequalities in the present, satisfying our need for moral coherence while deferring actual justice.
Conversely, when we envision posthumous judgment primarily through the lens of individual moral choices, we risk overlooking how social structures shape human behavior and possibility. The conservative focus on personal responsibility and the progressive emphasis on systemic change mirror this tension in how different religious frameworks conceptualize divine justice. Yet perhaps the most productive approach lies not in choosing between individual and collective responsibility, but in understanding how they interweave - just as meaningful desire requires both personal agency and a broader context that makes choice possible.
This tension emerges particularly clearly in how different traditions approach suffering and inequality. A purely individualistic karma-based explanation might rationalize existing social hierarchies as the product of past choices, while certain interpretations of divine providence might justify current power structures as part of God's plan.
Yet these same religious frameworks also contain revolutionary potential - liberation theology's call for structural change, Buddhism's emphasis on universal compassion, or Judaism's tradition of tikkun olam (repairing the world). The key question isn't whether justice will be achieved in some future state, but how our conception of ultimate justice shapes our willingness to engage with present inequalities.
The varying interpretations of NDEs, from religious proof to psychological phenomenon, might seem to leave us at an impasse. Yet perhaps their real significance lies not in what they tell us about post-death existence, but in how they illuminate our present relationship with desire, meaning, and justice. Like religious frameworks themselves, NDEs reveal how humans constantly negotiate between immediate experience and ultimate meaning, between individual transformation and collective responsibility. This brings us back to our central question: how might we engage with these fundamental tensions in ways that enrich rather than escape our present existence?
Finding Meaning in the Present
Rather than clinging to rigid afterlife narratives or dismissing the mystery entirely, we might hold these questions more lightly. The value of exploring these paradoxes lies not in reaching definitive answers about post-death transformation, but in understanding how our relationship to desire and lack shapes our engagement with the present moment. When we acknowledge how fundamental desire is to human experience - not as something to necessarily overcome but as the very fabric of meaning - we might paradoxically find ourselves better equipped to engage with life's actual challenges and opportunities.
Consider how different spiritual frameworks already demonstrate this truth: The Jewish Sabbath doesn't merely point toward eternal rest but transforms ordinary time through intentional constraint, making a family meal into ritual and conversation into contemplation. Buddhist meditation practices - particularly in non-Theravada traditions - can work to transform consciousness within this life, sometimes by changing our relationship to desire rather than eliminating it entirely. They show how we can hold difficult experiences differently without needing to eliminate them. Even contemporary death awareness movements, while often secular, show how contemplating mortality can deepen our engagement with present relationships rather than just offering comfort about what lies beyond.
These practices suggest that our richest form of spiritual wisdom lies not in certainty about post-death transformation or what lies beyond, but in learning to find meaning within the necessary space between seeking and finding, between desire and fulfillment - the very space that makes us human.
Perhaps what matters isn't securing our place in an afterlife or achieving some state beyond desire, but understanding how our relationship to lack and longing can transform ordinary experience into opportunities for meaning and depth. While this doesn't preclude the possibility of more radical transformation after death, it suggests that our present form of consciousness, with all its limitations and yearnings, has its own value and dignity.
In this light, religious frameworks offer not just promises about the future but tools for engaging more fully with the present moment, where the sacred and profound already reside within the rhythms of ordinary life.
*Article contains AI generated content. All articles undergo thorough personal curation and review*
references or further reading:
[Vajrayana Now blog (on Buddhist traditions and meditation practices)]
Learning about Lacan through Peter Rollins, and Michael Downs aka The Dangerous Maybe:
[Peter Rollins On Christianity and the Absurd (including discussion of Adam and Eve myth from a psychoanalytic viewpoint)]
[The Dangerous Maybe blog for learning about Lacan and philosophy]
[Scripture quotes are from the more detailed AI Critical New Testament. (The AI Critical New Testament includes critical notes and variants.)]