I wonder if some ancient Hindu mathematician (ancient India was renowned for its mathematicians, who were the first to understand the elementary yet essential concept of “zero”) came to the same conclusion as Poincare and Nietzsche in the West would millennia later, namely that if the Universe is finite, then there are ultimately only a finite number of combinations; therefore, if time is infinite but matter is not, then eventually every single one of these combinations will repeat. Ergo, somewhere in the distant eternities, we have existed in our current forms, and have performed these very actions–and will do so again–repeatedly, ad infinitum, into eternity.

This endless repetition is what the popular Czech novelist Milan Kundera termed the Unbearable Heaviness of Being, this burden that everything we’ve done, are doing, and will do–all of our mistakes, successes, joys, downfalls, pains, sufferings, births and deaths–have already happened before, and we are destined (even doomed) to happen again.

I wonder if maybe this ancient mathematician is who influenced the Hindu belief that we are trapped in an endless cycle of reincarnations and rebirths (a belief as distinctly Indian in origin as Ethical Monotheism is Middle-Eastern). For so certain is the Hindu belief in reincarnation you see, that the Buddhists whole raison d’etre is to escape the cycle of rebirths–that is, to escape the Unbearable Heaviness of Being.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead (or, “The Great Liberation upon Hearing in the Intermediate State,” as I’m told the title should most properly be translated), is concerned specifically with ending the cycle of rebirths, and contains poems, rituals, and guidance for the dying subject, in how to successfully navigate the moment of death so as to enter Nirvana, the great emptiness, the final death.

I once read said book, and found it to be strangely…filling. Not for its esoteric theology per se (I am sure that my thorough ignorance of most Buddhist practice left me grasping not half the references therein), but rather in its assumptions that we are able to leave the great weight of existential meaning that bears down on each of us. Modern man, of course, is afflicted by contrast with (as the Milan Kundera novel is entitled) the Unbearable Lightness of Being, the assumption that all that is happening is happening only once, and then never again, and what occurs once might as well never have happened at all. It is made manifest in the physicist’s growing and sober suspicion that the Universe will not endlessly reshuffle a la Poincare or Nietzsche, but will instead just peter out and fade away, eventually drifting apart into the agonizingly slow heat death of creation.

That is, in the East, the great quest is to attain Nirvana; in the West, it’s to avoid it. It takes the Buddhist great energy of soul to reach the state the Westerner fears he will come upon us inexorably.

So which is it? The Unbearable Heaviness or The Unbearable Lightness? Doubtless we’ve written ourselves into yet another false binary here, and there is something else, something further, that we are not considering. For both the Heaviness and the Lightness begin with the presumption of a finite Universe. But have you ever played with the Hubble Deep Field on Google Sky? Even the darkest, blackest patch of night sky is chock-full of swirling galaxies of billions of stars each (Neal A. Maxwell made no hyperbole when he said there are fewer grains of sand on all the oceans of Earth than there are stars in the sky).  We still have not seen the edge of the known universe, all of our best guesses as to the size of the universe are still just that: guesses. Might both these categories–the Unbearable Lightness and the Unbearable Heaviness–prove insufficient if the Universe turns out to be…infinite?

Because LDS theology begins with the assumption that not just time, but matter is also infinite: “There is no end to my works” reads Moses 1:38; “of his kingdom there shall be no end” reads Luke 1:33; “Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end” reads Isaiah 9:7; and Abraham 3:26 famously refers to “they who keep their second estate shall have glory added upon their heads for ever and ever.” Brigham Young himself declared that, “There is an eternity of matter. Astronomers estimate that there is between us and the nearest fixed star matter enough from which to organize millions of earths like this. There is an eternity of matter, and it is all acted upon and filled with a portion of divinity… Eternity is without bounds, and is filled with matter; and there is no such thing as empty space.” (“Discourses of Brigham Young,” Ed. John A. Widstoe, pg. 48).

In all these passages, the base presumptions are that there is no mere reshuffling of older elements, but a constant expansion, increase, and addition of extant matter from an endless supply of new matter. “Matter unorganized,” not “matter reorganized,” is the phrase we use concerning the Creation—for indeed, why would God need to reorganize previous matter if there’s still all this unorganized that needs organizing? (This is an idea that, in a saner world, would help put to rest that nonsensical and stubborn Mormon pseudo-science chestnut that dinosaur fossils come from the remains of older planets or whatever).

The economy of God is very different one from ours; His is a post-scarcity economy, one where there is no competition because there is no shortage of resources to compete over; one where there really are neither rich nor poor, because there is no capacity to horde more or less than others; and one where there no repetition, because there is no finitude to reorganize.

Thus in LDS theology, there is neither the Unbearable Lightness nor Unbearable Heaviness of Being, no reincarnation, no endless cycles of lives or eras or eternal returns. The escape is not into the emptiness, for “there is no such thing as empty space;” rather, salvation for us lies in the fullness of infinity. The next time we talk of “the fullness” of the gospel, perhaps we should take into account how literally and mind-bogglingly infinite is that fullness.