How To Reach Heaven
Could the ‘Spirit Mercurius’ be the compass that leads there?
What is heaven to you?
Is it a white room with cloud-like white furniture in the sky? Are there Angels waiting at the gates with a rolled-up certificate ready to shake your hand?
To me, it can’t be.
A gate insinuates that there’s a line in the sand. But I think the entrance to heaven is as clear as the line where the sand meets the ocean.
My best guess — and what I believe — is that it’s a state within.
A state where you can die peacefully. A state of no suffering, no desire, and no sense of self. The result of achieving contentment, joy and fulfilment.
Something like what the Buddhists call Nirvana.
So then, how do we achieve this ideal state?
For a moment, envision your future self.
You can see it now when you picture it, can’t you? It’s a little hazy, but you have a general idea of who you want to become, or what you want to create. You generally think of this version of yourself in a positive light. Someone who’s wise, wealthy and happy — someone you’re excited to become.
I see:
A well-dressed man with a cane
My friends and family close by
A beautiful cottage with lots of books
Animals and children frolicking around an acreage
Myself passing stories through generations in front of the fireplace and teaching life lessons
That is inner peace to me — that’s Heaven.
What’s yours?
Admittedly, there’s a lot that stands between you and me right now, and that moment you can so vaguely see. Decisions, tragedy, betrayal, hardship, good times and bad times, temptations, trials and tribulations.
How do we navigate them? How do we guarantee that we’ll realise that vision of ourselves?
I don’t have the answer yet, but I’m exploring it with you, right now. And I won’t stop writing this until I do. I’m sure the answer we arrive at will be as murky as the question we asked, but I’d like you to join me in my pursuit.
The pursuit to find out which way is the ocean, and how the Hell we get there.
The twisted stairway that leads to Heaven
As we speak, I’m climbing the stairway to heaven — and so are you.
It’s a little tricky though, I’ve gotta admit. It’s not a normal flight of stairs — it’s more like one of these:
You get me, don’t you? :)
Are we expected to know who we are, where to go, what to do and who to listen to? Are we expected to figure all this out on our own?
Navigating this existence — this experience — is as simple as a glass of water, yet as complicated as the sub-atomic structure of water and matter itself.
“Do what you love” they say — but what do I love? What do you love? How do we discover the path? Who do we follow? Do we idolise, or is that bad? Who inspires us?
It’s like trying to walk through a maze that’s engulfed in fog.
Jordan Petersen recalls a story of a conversation with an atheist man during one of his Bible lectures that catapults us towards our answer.
The man wrote to him saying he was entranced by Petersen’s Biblical lectures, and that if someone had told him a year ago that he’d be obsessed with Bible readings, he would’ve called them crazy.
Then the man said:
“You don’t choose your interests, they choose you.”
Think about when you need to get your taxes done, study for an exam, or buckle down for mundane robot work.
It’s a drag. No matter how hard you try, you can’t quite stay focused. Even if it’s critical that you focus, it’s just so difficult — impossible even.
An interesting thing I learned while researching ADHD is that it isn’t a lack of focus that keeps you distracted, it’s “hyper-focusing” on something else — something that isn’t the task at hand. So it’s not that you can’t focus, it’s that you can’t focus on what you want to focus on.
On the contrary, when something piques your interest, you’re locked in — you’re in the zone — even if it isn’t good for you. It results in effortless focus for hours, enhanced cognitive function and everything you learn is branded into your brain.
This begs the question, and Petersen asks it:
“If you can’t control your interests, what does?”
The Spirit Mercurius — a personal guide to Heaven?
“When the alchemist speaks of Mercurius, on the face of it he means quicksilver (mercury), but inwardly he means the world-creating spirit concealed or imprisoned in matter.”
— C.G. Jung
On my journey to find the path to Heaven, I found the above quote from Jung.
Don’t worry, it confused me too. But this is how I interpret it — using a couple of different sources*.
Mercury (or Hermes in Greek Mythology) was the Roman messenger of the gods — he had winged sandals so he could zip around the Heavens. He’s a cheeky-looking guy, isn’t he?
Why is this weirdly muscular, cheeky messenger of the gods depicted as a world-creating spirit?
From the information I’ve gathered, it seems Jung is using him as a metaphor — trying to say that there’s a messenger that works behind the scenes of your psychological processes, zipping around and directing your interests to the things it deems worth being interested in.
Our interest is like this when you think about it. When you walk through an antique store, a mysterious force seemingly puts a laser pointer on certain objects, and other ones look like junk.
Well, maybe Mercury — or, The Spirit Mercurius — is manipulating your attention to the things that are crucial in your logical character development through time.
It chooses:
the people you respect — moulding your character
the books you’re interested in — shaping your mind
the people you’re attracted to — creating your future family
“But what kind of an idea is that?” — you might be thinking — “A random little pixie that decides what I do?”
But it’s not just a random pixie.
It’s you — kind of.
Jung’s idea is that The Spirit Mercurius is the manifestation of your future self, operating in the present.
Your potential self is guiding you through life by manipulating your attention onto what you need to know for you to realise your potential.
It’s directing you to Heaven — by our definition from earlier.
The crux of it — in my understanding — is that the voice that beckons to you to go against your animal nature is your Spirit Mercurius.
That little voice deep down telling you not to eat junk food, to get off the couch and go workout, to read instead of watching a movie is your Spirit Mercurius begging you to pursue the path of psychological development.
When your Spirit Mercurius calls, will you answer?
I love thinking about attention this way.
A little voice in my head, the potential me, has travelled through space-time as we know it to direct me to Heaven.
That’s awesome — for lack of a better term.
I’ve come to the conclusion that your Spirit Mercurius is delivering one overarching message to you with your attention:
Don’t bargain with the future.
Don’t trade your future for pleasure in the current moment.
Don’t say you’ll rest today and act tomorrow.
Don’t borrow fun from tomorrow by getting drunk tonight.
Following the Biblical theme, don’t make a deal with the Devil.
We all know these messages, we’ve heard them inside our heads a million times, but maybe it’s time to take them more seriously.
Each time you ignore your Spirit Mercurius, your potential falls a tiny bit lower. Ignore it long enough, and your potential will crumble until it’s where you are right now.
And damn it, maybe that’s Hell!
Being stuck with nowhere to go — no potential future.
In the short story ‘No Exit’ by Jean-Paul Sartre, he depicts Hell as being stuck in a room with two other people and no escape.
I’ll take the burning lava pools and horrible torture thanks!
You might think I’ve been talking absolute nonsense this whole time — but at the very least you know the voice in your head I’m talking about is real.
Call it your internal monologue, your gut feeling, your intuition. Call it Bruno if you want. It’s beside the point. The Biblical telling just seems to give it some soul, which is why I choose to think about it that way.
All I know is that there’s something inexplicable inside us, something remarkable within our minds that seems to know the right thing to do, what to be interested in, and what to avoid.
Anytime we make a bad decision, it’s because we didn’t listen to it.
But what if you listened to it, every single time? What if you built a mind so strong that it could withstand the little voice forever?
What if you pursued all of your interests that the Spirit Mercurius pulled you to?
My advice is to do exactly that.
Listen when your potential self beckons to you through your Spirit Mercurius if you want to become the best version of yourself — if you want to reach Heaven.
Swim with the current, not against it.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart for reading this if you got here.
I put a lot of time and effort into these newsletters - I hope they help you as much as they help me.
Ideas like this genuinely do gamify life, and make it more interesting and simple to me, and my aim is just to share that with you.
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Sincerely,
Eren
*Sources used for this article: