This might be a ponderous subject for Blotch, but I’m fascinated with the new issue of Newsweek.
Do we go to heaven? Is there a heaven? Are we in our bodies when we get there?
Can we sleep on clouds as late as we want? Play in a band with Kurt Cobain? Lie on a moonlit beach with Marilyn Monroe?
What if we’re cremated? Will Marilyn still be interested in making love to a pile of ashes? Is Cobain still on heroin? How much do vintage Les Paul guitars cost in heaven?
Author Lisa Miller suggests heaven isn’t a place. There’s no resurrection. Nothing supernatural occurs.
She suggests heaven — and, one would assume, hell – is what occurs in your mind at death and perhaps a short time afterward. If you lived a good life, those ending moments stretch out and fill you with comfort as you painlessly glide into nothingness. If you were an a-hole, I suppose you look back on your life with regret and shame.
Either way, death occurs, and that brief neurological dance with heaven or hell ends. The afterlife, in other words, might only last a moment.
It’s one of several possibilities considered. Anybody out there have the definitive answer?
With apologies go Eugene O’Neil, I expect that the after”life” will be very much like the before”life.” Nothingness. This moment of consciousness is a brief, strange interlude between eternities of …
Of course, since this is an almost intolerable thought, it was when we first had it (somewhere between 50 and 100,000 years ago) that we created a God in our own image to promise us eternal life.
What’s so intolerable about nothingness after death? Sounds fine to me.