Afterthis

My bust­ed head­light thank­ful­ly does­n’t require a new plas­tic shield. I do need to fig­ure out how to remove it so I can glue a chunk back on, but last night I replaced the bro­ken bulb, thanks to Lo-Lo. I’ve been assum­ing that Halo­gen meant a Hg-vapor light. For years I have thought this. I hate the mer­cury vapor head­lamps on cars, they blind me. So when I bought a new bulb last night I was appalled that there were only Halo­gen bulbs. Thank­ful­ly they were still tung­sten fil­a­ments.

Now that is out of the way.

I’ve talked to a few peo­ple about what might hap­pen after death late­ly. So I fig­ured I’d set down my own thoughts on the sub­ject. I hes­i­tate to call it an after­life, most­ly because I think the word ‘life’ might not mean then what it means now. So I’ll call it afterthis to please myself. I don’t think of heav­en and hell as the sep­a­rate places or even as places at all. I almost want to say I see afterthis as a pro­gres­sion to a high­er state of com­pre­hen­sion. I don’t think afterthis is cor­po­re­al at all. For me it might exist sole­ly soul­ly. I do think that the way we live our lives will deter­mine the qual­i­ty of the afterthis. An over­sim­pli­fied anal­o­gy is that if a mouse is evil in its life it goes to mouse hell when it dies and is chased by cats all day, but a saint­ly cat dies and goes to cat heav­en where it chas­es mice. They could be the same place.

Now for a soul it would be a bit dif­fer­ent. The qual­i­ty of life that a per­son lives deter­mines the amount of their com­pre­hen­sion and wis­dom afterthis. So a bad per­son would­n’t be much dif­fer­ent in afterthis than that per­son was in life. A good per­son would know more, per­haps be more at one with the stuff of itself and the stuff of cre­ation, be more one with God. This fits eas­i­ly into the ‘choos­ing evil is choos­ing not-God choos­ing good is choos­ing God’ sce­nario. For me all of the thoughts of hell as a place of lit­er­al burn­ing tor­ment and heav­en as feast­ing is more sym­bol­ic than any­thing. For me, the burn­ing tor­ment of a hell would be a con­tin­u­ing sense of lack of love lack of under­stand­ing. Heav­en would be a feast of knowl­edge and a feel­ing of full­ness and joy that com­plete under­stand­ing and one­ness would bring.

Where the idea of the res­ur­rec­tion of the body fits in, I am not sure. I hes­i­tate to think that it is lit­er­al. Per­haps it is some­thing that can only be thought about with any cer­ti­tude in the afterthis. More expan­sion on lit­er­alal­i­ty in the com­ing days.