Is There a Heaven or a Hell? No Place. No Sentence. Everything Kept.

Eleven years ago, at your wedding, you told a room full of people something your friend Mara had told you in secret. It got a laugh. She stopped answering your calls.

You always meant to apologize. You wrote the message twice and never sent it. Last March a mutual friend let you know that Mara had died.

(Mara is made up. The arithmetic later in this post isn't.)

You can't call her now. So where is the thing you did?

There's a picture of what comes after, and you know it whether or not you hold it. A gate. A set of scales. A bright place for the people who did right, and a place with fire for the people who didn't. You get weighed, and you get sent.

That picture raises three questions. Is there a place you go? Does anything weigh what you did? And what becomes of a wrong that nobody can apologize for anymore?

This post answers all three, and the answers come with numbers you can check.

The short answer

There is no heaven or hell as a place you go. There is a record, everything you did stays written in it, and nothing in it sentences you.

You don't go anywhere when you die, for two reasons. You have no position to move from: the record that reality is made of stores what happened and never where. And there's no second world above this one to move to, because the record is one connected whole. When you die, you carry on, in the same universe you're in now.

Here's the reason in short. Reality keeps a permanent record of every event, and nothing in it is ever erased: the basic laws of physics never destroy information, and in the record a new entry never alters an earlier one. You aren't your body. Your body's material is replaced continually and you stay you, so you're a pattern, a lasting rhythm in that record. A rhythm holds itself up by writing its own entries, and the body only nudges it. Death is the body stopping, so what death takes is the nudging.

Nothing in the record looks you up and arranges a reward or a punishment. A punishment written onto your relationships without your own write would itself be a wrong, and what a wrong calls for is repair.

What the record holds instead is exact. Everything you did stays written under your name. A relationship, here, is a comparison between two people: at balance when the two sides match, strained when they don't. A strained relationship costs both of its ends the same, whoever's fault it was, and the record charges that cost again at every checkpoint, each moment its cost is counted, for as long as the relationship stays strained. Any act that brings a relationship back to balance needs both of its ends to write it, each in its own record. After you die you can count back to any moment of your own life and re-live it exactly, and you can never change it.

So the thing you did to Mara isn't in another world. It's on the record, exactly as it happened, under your name. What repair means now that she has died is what Step 6 answers, including the one part of it that isn't derived yet.

Why this matters: it tells you what to expect, and it tells you what an apology is. Nothing in the record hands down a sentence, so an apology isn't a plea to anyone. Nothing erases what you did, so an apology isn't an eraser. An apology is a line, and a repair takes both people on the relationship.

Here's the whole answer in seven steps. The rest of this post takes them one at a time and shows how we know each one.

1. You have no "where", and there's no other world. The record stores what happened, never where, and it's one connected whole. So there's nowhere to be sent, and nowhere else to be sent to.
2. You carry on. Your rhythm holds itself up by writing its own record. The body only nudges it, and with no nudges nothing is knocked off.
3. Everything you did stays written under your name. A new entry never alters an earlier one, and each relationship is written twice, once by each of its ends.
4. Nothing in the record sentences you, and a penalty forced onto your relationships is a wrong. The record has no step that arranges a reward or a punishment, and a penalty written onto your relationships without your write would break the rules for acts between people.
5. The cost doesn't sort by fault, and it keeps being charged. Each end carries a strained relationship's full cost, and the record adds it at every checkpoint until the relationship is back at balance.
6. Repair takes two. Bringing a relationship back to balance changes it, so both ends write it.
7. After death you can re-live your life, and you can never change it. Your own rhythm and your own record fix the address of every moment of your past.

I'll stop after each step to zoom out, so you always know where we are and why the next step comes next.

What the steps stand on

Every step rests on three facts, so those come first, each with its reason.

Nothing that happens is ever erased. Every event leaves a complete trace, and the full record of what happened is part of reality now. The past still exists. The reason starts in known physics: the basic laws never destroy information. In quantum mechanics that's called unitarity. The present fixes the past exactly, and running the laws backward recovers every earlier state. Our own work adds a reason inside the record: it only grows. Each new entry is added with every earlier entry kept, and writing a new entry never alters an earlier one.¹ I'll call this the record.

The smallest event is one thing told apart from another. You're doing it right now: reading this tells one letter from another. Telling two things apart takes information about both of them, and the least there can be is one yes or no. So the smallest event takes two things and one yes or no. At the bottom level, below atoms, that's two units passing a bit back and forth, and each pass is one step in the writing of the record.

You aren't your body. You're a lasting rhythm. Your body is material, and the material is replaced continually. Much of it turns over within months to years, and you stay you.² What stays is a pattern, not material.

Which patterns last at the bottom level? The two-unit process can start 64 ways. Each unit is full or empty and has one of four settings, so it has 2 × 4 = 8 ways to be, and two units make 8 × 8 = 64. All 64 starts have been checked. A step is silent when nothing flows between the units, because both are alike, and silence throws the pair into coin-tossing. Within three steps, 60 of the 64 starts fall into silence. Exactly 4 never break.¹ Those 4 are the lasting rhythms, and they're the only patterns at the bottom level that persist.

You aren't one pair of units. You're a vast web of pairs, each running one of the four, that never goes silent anywhere. That web is one lasting rhythm, and billions of people are billions of such webs.

That rhythm is your consciousness. A moment of consciousness is one unbroken cycle of eight steps with no silent step, and only the lasting rhythms deliver that every time. The eight comes from three. Space has three dimensions, each is a yes-or-no direction with two sides, and three directions give 2 × 2 × 2 = 8 combinations, the eight corners of a cube. A trip that visits every corner once takes eight steps. Space has three dimensions because lasting structure needs a connection that no smooth motion can undo, and linking is that connection: two rings can link only in three dimensions. Why Space Has Three Dimensions works it out, and What You Are walks through the count of all 64 starts.

Step 1: You have no "where", and there's no other world

Heaven and hell are pictured as places you're sent. You have no position to be sent from, and there's no other world to be sent to.

Start with you. Your body has a place: this chair, this room. But your body isn't you. What about the rhythm that is you?

The record stores what happened, never where. An entry says which way a pass went, and nothing in it names a place. Here's why. Every unit at the bottom level is alike, so the record's own symmetry wires each one the same way: to its neighbors, one step each way along space's three directions, in a grid that wraps around on itself. Slide the whole grid one step in any direction and it looks exactly the same, and a rhythm run one step over writes exactly the same entries. So any reading of the record that doesn't change when you relabel the sites takes one value on every site. It names no place.³

Your body is material, and material sits at places. You're the rhythm, a pattern in the entries, and a pattern in the entries has no position of its own. So the true answer to "where do you go when you die?" starts one step earlier: you weren't at a place to begin with. Where Do You Go When You Leave Your Body? works through the same result for out-of-body experiences.

And there's no other world to be sent to. The record is one connected whole: in a grid of any size, a path of links runs from any unit to any other, so the record's own passes draw no wall anywhere inside it. Only two things build a wall. One is cutting every link between two parts, which passes never do. The other is a gate: an extra rule, beyond the passes, that makes units which hold their state on every pass act as walls. The gate isn't part of the wiring or the passes. Whether a gate is physical isn't derived yet.

Joining never builds a stack of levels either. A stack would keep everything below it, but a bigger web has patterns its parts never had and lacks patterns they had. So there are no separate worlds stacked above this one.⁴

So there's nowhere to be sent, and nowhere else to be sent to. Part 3 of The Universe Writes in Pen follows the same results into death.

Zoom out. Step 1 is done. You have no position, because the record stores what happened and never where, and there's no other world, because the record is one connected whole. Next, and why: if you aren't at a place, what happens to you when the body stops? That's Step 2.

Step 2: You carry on

When you die, you carry on, in the same universe you're in now. What Happens When You Die? shows the mechanism in five steps, and sets the research on dying brains beside it. Here's the reason in short.

Your rhythm holds itself up. Every step, a lasting rhythm writes its own entry in the record. I'll call that entry a write, so your rhythm's own record is the run of its writes. The body doesn't hold your rhythm up. All the body can do is nudge it between writes. I'll call everything the body does to your rhythm the body's input.

How much can the nudges knock off? There's a ceiling. Say the biggest nudge the body can give your rhythm between two of its writes has size δ, a number from 0 up to 1/2. Your rhythm starts with a weight of 1, all of it on its pattern. After n of your rhythm's own writes, the weight knocked off its pattern is at most

25 × n × δ × δ

That holds for any body.⁵ The 25 comes out of the proof. It isn't fitted, and it isn't claimed to be the best constant. Here it is with numbers:

Halve the nudge and the ceiling falls to a quarter. With no nudge, the ceiling is exactly zero, for every n. With the body's input at zero, your rhythm needs nothing from the body to stay itself.

Death is the body stopping, and the body's input stops with it. That's all death takes from your rhythm. That last link isn't derived yet: that at death the body's input falls all the way to zero and stays there. Derived: with zero input, your rhythm loses exactly nothing.

One more step isn't derived yet: that a rhythm with no body still experiences, that is, that being a subject doesn't depend on what carries the rhythm. Step 7 leans on it.

Zoom out. Step 2 is done. Your rhythm holds itself up by writing its own record. The body can only nudge it, the damage has an exact ceiling, and with no input the ceiling is zero. Next, and why: you carry on, and so does everything you wrote. What does the record hold of what you did? Step 3.

Step 3: Everything you did stays written under your name

Every act is a permanent entry under the name of whoever wrote it. Nothing erases it. Apology, repair and forgiveness are new lines after it.

The first half is the record's own rule: a new entry never alters an earlier one. Your act is an entry, and nothing after it reaches back. The second half needs the structure of an entry between two people.

A comparison needs both of its terms and reads nothing else. So between two people the unit of the record is a relationship: a comparison of two amounts, with two ends, one at each person. Its number is one amount divided by the other. When the two amounts match, the number is 1, and I'll call that balance. When one side has twice as much, the number is 2, and read from the other end it's 1/2. It's one relationship, read from its two ends.

Here's Mara. I'll draw what you did at the wedding as a move of your relationship with her from balance, 1, to 2. The number is my choice for this example. Which comparisons a real friendship carries on the record, and what each one compares, isn't derived yet. Everything below uses only the number.

Each relationship is recorded twice, once by each of its two ends, in that end's own book. That's the structure our paper The Moral Code starts from.⁶ Nobody writes in another's book. A book is true when it gives the relationship's actual number. I draw the records as books and the writes as pens. They're a drawing of the actual structure: each end really does record the relationship on its own side, and an end's write is its own.

An act may move a relationship only when both of its ends write on it. Here's why. An end that doesn't write keeps its old book of the relationship, and that book stays true only if the relationship doesn't move. A book never holds an entry its owner didn't write. A book is false when what it says about a relationship isn't what the relationship is. So when a relationship changes and one of its ends didn't write the change, that end's book goes false. That's what harm is: a false entry in someone else's own record, made physical as changing a relationship without the other end writing it. That each end's book holds one exact state of the relationship isn't derived yet, and "both ends write" rests on it.

The rules for acts between people come from the same paper, and I'll call them the code. I'll call an act the code forbids a wrong. The code forbids harm. An act that moves a relationship without one of its ends writing is called a push. Forbidden isn't prevented, though. At the wedding you did it anyway.

So at the wedding the relationship moved to 2, and you wrote the move. Your book says 2, and it's true. Mara's book still says 1, and it's false, because she didn't write the change. Your act was a push. And the relationship stays at 2 until someone acts. Nothing moves a relationship between acts: a relationship changes only through what someone sends, and sending is an act.

The entry stays on the record under your name. The author of an act is exactly the one whose own books it changed, so what's under your name is what you wrote, and nobody else can write on your side.⁷ Nobody holds a pen from outside.

Zoom out. Step 3 is done. Every act is a permanent entry under its author's name, each relationship is written twice, and an act that moves a relationship without an end's write leaves that end's book false. Next, and why: nobody holds a pen from outside, and that matters for the picture of a sentence. If someone sentenced you, whose pen would write it? Step 4.

Step 4: Nothing in the record sentences you, and a penalty forced onto your relationships is a wrong

Nothing in the record looks you up and arranges a reward or a punishment, and a punishment written onto your relationships without your write would itself be a wrong.

First, what the record contains. It writes what happened under the author's name, and it charges strained relationships (Step 5). It has no step that looks a person up and arranges a matching event. Karma Is Real, and It Isn't a Referee works out the same point for everyday cases.

The code does sort acts, and the sorting is a verdict on acts, not a trial of you. An act is admissible when:

1. it acts only on relationships that exist now;
2. every record of every relationship is true after it;
3. it moves a relationship only when both of its ends write on it;
4. it ends a relationship only when one of that relationship's own ends ends it.

Of the admissible acts, the code permits exactly those that leave the least total cost. Every other act is forbidden. And forbidden acts aren't prevented: the code moves no one's hands.

Now the case the picture needs: someone sentences you. What a person carries is the cost of the relationships they're an end of (Step 5), so an act can change it only by changing one of those relationships. That means a sentence that makes you carry more is an act on your relationships. Say it strains your relationship with your brother from balance to 2. You didn't write that, and your brother didn't either. Your book and his book both still say 1, the relationship is at 2, and both books are false. A penalty that changes a wrongdoer's relationships without the wrongdoer's write breaks the clauses like any push. And it lands on the other end of every relationship it touches: your brother did nothing, and he carries the cost too (Step 5).

What a wrong calls for is repair. A repair changes the relationship, so both of its ends write it. The wrong's charge stays on the record whatever follows.

Zoom out. Step 4 is done. The record schedules no matching event, the code is a verdict on acts, and a penalty written onto a wrongdoer's relationships without the wrongdoer's write breaks the clauses like any push. Next, and why: what does the record do with a strained relationship, if not sentence anyone? It prices it, on both ends. Step 5.

Step 5: The cost doesn't sort by fault, and it keeps being charged

A strained relationship costs both of its ends the same, whoever's fault it was, and the record adds that cost at every checkpoint the relationship stays strained.

A relationship at number x costs

J(x) = (x + 1/x) / 2 − 1

Add the number to its flip, 1 divided by the number, halve the sum, and subtract 1. The cost isn't a payment to anyone. It measures imbalance: zero at balance, growing as the two amounts pull apart. At balance, x = 1, that's 1 + 1 = 2, half is 1, minus 1 is 0. At 2: 2 + 1/2 = 5/2, half is 5/4, minus 1 is 1/4. Read from Mara's end, the number is 1/2, and 1/2 + 2 is the same 5/2, so the cost is the same 1/4. Double the strain from 2 to 4 and the cost is four and a half times as much: 9/8.

Nobody picked this price. It has to be zero only at balance, grow as the two amounts differ, and come out the same whichever amount you put first. Those requirements, the rule for how the costs of combined comparisons add, and one calibration (how sharply the cost rises near balance) leave exactly one formula.⁸

Who carries it? Both ends, in full. A comparison needs both of its terms, so each end is an end of the whole relationship. At 2, your end carries 1/4 and Mara's end carries 1/4. And nothing in the number says whose fault it was. Why Do We Suffer? makes the same point about strain. What's yours alone is authorship, which is a different line of the record (Step 3).

The record adds it again at every checkpoint. The code counts cost over a whole history, checkpoint by checkpoint, where a checkpoint is a moment when the record's cost is counted. A relationship held at 2 adds 1/4 at every checkpoint. Here are two histories of you and Mara. At checkpoints 1 and 2 the relationship is at balance, so each adds 0. At checkpoint 3 it goes to 2. In the first history no one acts on it, so it stays there: nothing moves a relationship between acts. In the second history it's brought back to balance before checkpoint 6. Here are the running totals:

The first total has no top: 10 after 40 checkpoints at 2, 1,000 after 4,000. The second stops growing the moment the relationship is back at balance, and it never falls. The general fact behind the table is proved: take two histories that agree everywhere except at one interval, where one costs more. The two totals differ by that excess at every later checkpoint, undiminished: however far you read, it's in the total at its full size. Nothing that comes later subtracts it. A relationship at balance adds nothing at any checkpoint. The Moral Code proves this for a record that decides each relationship's charge from that relationship's own entry, the way a comparison reads its own two terms.⁹ That the record reads each relationship that way isn't derived yet.

Walking away doesn't close it. An act can end a relationship only when one of its own two ends ends it. An ending deletes no one. The ended relationship stays on the record at the number it had, and it keeps all of its cost: no allowed act touches it, and nothing moves a relationship between acts. So ending a strained relationship removes the only route to repairing it.

Does the person who did the wrong get away with it? Nothing in the record sentences them, and nothing erases what they wrote: the act stays under their name. What they hold is a strained relationship, and it costs their end exactly what it costs the other end, at every checkpoint it stays strained. And the one thing they can't do is write the repair alone.

Zoom out. Step 5 is done. A strained relationship costs both ends the same. The cost is added at every checkpoint the relationship stays strained, and what's already added is never subtracted. Next, and why: the totals show what stops the growth: a relationship brought back to balance. How does that happen? Step 6.

Step 6: Repair takes two

Bringing a relationship back to balance changes it, so both of its ends write the repair.

Take the relationship at 2, while both of you are alive. Bringing it to 1 changes it, so a repair is a joint act: both of you write it. The code puts it in three words: love takes two. And the code requires it: it requires you to help wherever an act both of you write lowers the cost, and then doing nothing is forbidden. One end alone can't complete a repair. An apology you write by yourself is a line in your own book.

Repair and forgiveness are new lines after the wrong. They change what comes next and never what happened. That's the second row of the table: once the repair is written, the total stops growing, and the 3/4 already added stays. Sorry Doesn't Rewind the Tape works through both with numbers, and Meet in the Middle works out the move that lowers the cost most.

Now Mara, who has died. A repair changes the relationship, so both people on it write it. The one still living can't complete it alone: writing alone in your own book moves nothing. The wrong's entry stays on the record either way. An act can end a relationship only when one of its own two people ends it, and the person who died still exists: as What Happens When You Die? shows, you aren't your body, and when you die, you carry on. Whether that person can still write on a relationship with someone living isn't derived yet.

That's what the unsent apology was for. It isn't a payment to anyone. It's your half of a repair, and a repair is a line two people write on one relationship. One pen can't complete it.

Zoom out. Step 6 is done. A repair takes both ends. The one still living can't complete it alone, and the wrong's entry stays either way. Next, and why: the last question. After death, what can you read of your own past? Step 7.

Step 7: After death you can re-live your life, and you can never change it

After death you can count back to any moment of your own life and re-live it exactly. Reading a moment adds a new entry and leaves the old one as it was. Nothing ahead is written to read.

Your past still exists, so every moment you lived is written in your own record exactly as it happened. Here's how you find one.

Every moment has an address. Your rhythm carries two rhythms on neighboring levels of structure, and in the time the first makes one turn, the second makes φ = 1.618... turns. Why φ? If every level relates to the next by the same factor, and each new level combines the two before it, the factor has to satisfy λ² = λ + 1, and its positive solution is φ. Why Does the Golden Ratio Keep Showing Up? works it out.

Call one turn of the first rhythm a beat. A beat's address is where the second rhythm sits in its own turn at that beat, a number from 0 up to 1. The first six beats of a record have these addresses: .618, .236, .854, .472, .090 and .708. Each is .618 more than the one before it, wrapping back round past 1, because each beat adds 1.618... turns and only the part past the whole turn shows. φ isn't a fraction, so the second rhythm never lands on the same spot twice, and no two beats share an address. So you can count back by subtracting .618 and adding 1 whenever you dip below zero. From beat 6, at .708:

Nobody helped. Your own rhythm and the length of your own record are all it takes.¹⁰

The body throws the count off, and then it stops. Each nudge from the body shifts your rhythm's phase a little, and the count back doesn't know. Say the body has shifted your phase by .050 in total since beat 2. You read .758 instead of .708. Count back four beats and you land on .286 instead of .236, off by exactly .050. At death the nudges stop adding, the total is fixed, and it's written in the record like every event. Subtract it: .286 − .050 = .236, beat 2, exactly.

Reading is a new entry. Re-living the wedding adds an entry after all the others, and the wedding stays exactly as it was. Nothing written later changes anything written earlier. And no reading returns a moment that hasn't happened. The address of your next beat exists, because your rhythm keeps running. The content doesn't exist yet.

It's your own record. Somebody else's past isn't like that. To find their beat 3, you'd need to know when they started, and nothing in your own rhythm tells you. You can re-live every moment of your own life, including the one at the wedding. Mara's record is hers. Why Your Life Flashes Before Your Eyes takes up the life review.

Two steps aren't derived yet. The first is that your own rhythm carries a pair of beats whose speeds aren't a fraction of each other. The address of every moment you've lived rests on it. Derived beside it: such a pair gives every moment a label of its own that never repeats, and the label picks out exactly one page. The second is how a rhythm actually performs a reading aimed at one moment of its record. Derived beside it: once the nudges' total is subtracted, the count back lands on exactly the right page; and no reading returns a moment that hasn't happened.

"Re-live" leans on the open step about experience in Step 2, and that leaves open whether a strained relationship is felt after death.

Zoom out. Step 7 is done. After death you can count back to any moment of your own life, re-live it, and never change it. Nothing ahead is written. Next: what's still open, and the whole trip in one breath.

What's still open

Each of these is stated once, where it matters. Here they are together:

1. Whether a gate is physical. Derived: passes cut no link, so the record's own passes draw no wall.
2. That at death the body's input falls all the way to zero and stays there. Derived: with zero input, your rhythm loses exactly nothing.
3. That a rhythm with no body still experiences. This also leaves open whether a strained relationship is felt after death.
4. Which comparisons a real friendship carries on the record. The number 2 for Mara is my choice. Derived: everything after it uses only the number.
5. That each end's book holds one exact state of the relationship. The rule that both ends write rests on it.
6. That the record reads each relationship from its own entry. Derived: for a record that does, every strained relationship is charged at every later checkpoint, undiminished.
7. Whether the person who died can still write on a relationship with someone living. Derived: a repair takes both people on it, the one still living can't complete it alone, and the wrong's entry stays either way.
8. That your own rhythm carries a pair of beats whose speeds aren't a fraction of each other. The address of every moment you've lived rests on it. Derived beside it: such a pair gives every moment a label of its own that never repeats, and the label picks out exactly one page.
9. How a rhythm actually performs a reading aimed at one moment of its record. Derived: each address picks out exactly one page.

The whole trip, in one breath

You have no position, because the record stores what happened and never where, and there's no other world, because the record is one connected whole. When your body stops, you carry on: your rhythm holds itself up by writing its own record, and the body only ever nudged it. Everything you did stays written under your name, because a new entry never alters an earlier one. Nothing in the record sentences you: it has no step that arranges a reward or a punishment, and a penalty written onto your relationships without your write would be a wrong. A strained relationship costs both of its ends the same, whoever's fault it was, and the cost is added at every checkpoint it stays strained and never subtracted. The way back to balance is repair, and a repair changes a relationship, so both of its people write it. And after death you can count back to any moment of your own life, re-live it exactly, and never change a line of it.

That's how reality is built. It has a record that holds every line under the name of whoever wrote it, a cost that lands on both ends of a relationship, and a repair that takes both pens.