Heaven and eternal life
Raptor Eye
Shipmate
in Purgatory
In a conversation about what happens after death, someone said that the very idea of eternal life was a nightmare, at least we know that this life will end.
I've been thinking about this.
Is eternal life only desirable if it is life in heaven, a place where everything is perfect? Would it be better for death to be the end, than to find ourselves living forever anywhere other than heaven?
I've been thinking about this.
Is eternal life only desirable if it is life in heaven, a place where everything is perfect? Would it be better for death to be the end, than to find ourselves living forever anywhere other than heaven?
Comments
I had an experience (no long narrative here though I'll be happy to share if invited) that gave me this assurance. I have felt what this feels like and it's awesome. Hilarious. Wonderful. But mostly hilarious.
Since I was a child I have had memories of past lives, and I have always in this incarnation viewed death as a kind of rest stop. A park bench on a busy throughfare to sit, relax, gather thoughts, watch the world go by for a little while, but ultimately, the call of the narrative and unfinished business and the feeling of needing another, better, happier ending to the story of some relationship or experience pulls one back into the slipstream.
I haven't always been wearing a human suit, but I feel very confident and comfortable in the assurance that the suit and I are not the same entity, and that the Me that informs the spacesuit on spaceship earth is eternal and unchanging.
It's not I who moves through my experiences. It is my experiences that move through Me. Heaven is in Me and if I want to know what that feels like then I just have to move into the scintillating, anticipatory and hilarious nowness that holds my being on that breathless vanishing point between stillness and action.
The only moment I can think of that is even close to it is the moment when the rollercoaster pauses at the top of the drop, and you realize that THIS is the point and there is no turning back and what happens from this point forward is inevitable, and thrilling and hilarious, and tortuous but always safely guided in a single track with a safe landing and a park bench assured at the end. And barfy bags if we need them.
AFF
If people were immortal here on earth, so could not in any way be killed, we would take more risks - or maybe the concept of risk wouldn’t exist, or it would exist in a different way. Perhaps the worst fate would be to be hated by everyone, because after a while, as it’s eternity, you might know everyone there is to know, and there’d be no one new coming - no kids to look up to you and think you’re marvellous. Once someone is a pariah, they stay a pariah. So maybe people would conform more, out of fear, because being non-conforming is the biggest risk you could take.
I rather think I go along with Mark on this. In some ways, the idea of something going for ever - without change - is indeed awful, but it may be that the 'many rooms' will provide just as much in the way of 'full' life as this world does.
Only much better, and more of it.
'Further up, and further in!' as I think C. S. Lewis puts it at the end of the Narnia books....
IJ
I, perhaps naively, imagine heaven to be being with God in a far deeper, more tangible way than here on earth, and I think that will change everything. I also imagine we are transformed after death - a new body and mind and spirit, a new perspective. I don’t think I would want eternal life here on this earth, in this body I have now.
That would chime in with the idea that our unique identity/personality/soul/spirit (delete as applicable) carries on after our physical death.
IJ
Along the same lines, it seems like an idea designed to deprecate our current situation -- "There is terrible injustice now, but it's OK because things will even out later." I understand that scripture tries to use it in the opposite way, "Be good without current reward, because you will receive a reward later." But that is also pathological to my way of thinking. We really do need to put on the mind of Christ, where we do what we believe is right because we believe that it is God's will, not because it will benefit us in some selfish way. As long as we insist on focusing on what's in it for us, we are choosing to remain outside the Kingdom of God. Or so ISTM.
If there's a life-after-death, there's a distinct possibility that it might be better than this present life. If, as I do, we trust in the words of Jesus, there may well be Good Things To Come, as that seems to be the meaning behind 'many rooms in my Father's house'.
If, OTOH, there is no life-after-death, what have I got to worry about?
I think I'll just make the best I can of this life-before-death......
IJ
IJ
As to what heaven will be like, my preferred picture is from Charles Wesleys hymn Love Divine but I would change it slightly to lost in awe, love and grace. That of course does not scan but I am not writing the hymn.
I like 'lost in awe, love and grace'. I hold onto the hope and promise of the continuation of loving relationship with God, ever deeper and closer.
I too trust the words of Jesus. The many rooms illustrate that there's a place for us.
Surely heaven must be the perfect place in the sense that there will be no more pain, no more disease, no more evil.
Reicarnation adds a new dimension if this is not our only life on earth limited by time and physical frailty AFF. Does it fit with Christianity?
Why wouldn't it be compatible?
I guess it just depends if you want to view Christianity through an Aristotelian lens or a Platonic one. Later church thinkers were terribly enamoured of Aristotelian empiricism, and their endeavours to use Aristotelian logic to justify doctrine eventually devolved into arguments about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.
The point of view of reincarnation was well entrenched in the first century Mediterranean mind. However, first century Greek wisdom schools who were early adopters of Christianity were aware of the problem inherent in philo-sophia as a model for mitigating the pain of the world.
In the Platonic school, the best that one could hope for would be an existence where one would, through wisdom and moderation, do no further harm to the world through successive incarnations. But there was nothing anybody could do, through wisdom, about clearing the mess that they had already created through previous and numerous incarnations of folly.
The appearance of Christ in the etheric, and in the flesh, created a huge breakthrough in the transmigrational model of existence. All of a sudden, here is Christ who harrowed the underworld and freed the trapped souls there, and who created, in effect, the exit gate to this funhouse of horrors.
Halla-dad-burn-lujah! Through Christ's intervention in the Monad and His presence in the individual as the Divine Physician (Soter), all of a sudden healing and redemption of past sins and present are utterly possible. Maybe not in a single incarnation but at this point who cares how many incarnations it takes?
If we are all Eternal Beings, one incarnation or a thousand make very little difference, as long as we are all given the same opportunity to accept the aid and healing of Christ in our present challenge.
It's how I see it, anyway.
AFF
Yep. Particularly as transcendence beyond this life is meaningless. Unimaginable. Absurd. It doesn't work. Unless it's a nice longgggggggggggg… walk.
There's a current trend for belief in 'karma' in the sense that justice will be done in this life, people will get their 'come-uppance'. I see no evidence for it in practice, but it seems to be what some people want to believe. I wonder whether this belief has increased because belief in an afterlife in which justice will be done has decreased.
While I agree that in theory we should live as if there is no afterlife and that we want to do the will of God because it is the good and right thing to do, in practice this has put people in the way of danger and oppression, and so perhaps holding on to the hope of life after death with God is to strengthen us rather than to cause us to do things for selfish reasons?
And yet, Jesus encouraged us to give up everything for the 'pearl of great price'. Might we not be accused of selfishness simply by wanting to draw close to God?
A bit of a ramble, thinking aloud.
Can we be content, like Moses looking into the promised land to see the generations unfolding ahead in a future we cannot see, and defocus from the individual way of thinking that it has to be my personal existence that must live on? I think this is the way of some of the mystics as well, where one's individuality doesn't matter when there's a whole.
Thank you for the question.
If I may, can I respond to your ramblings?
Almost half of Plato's Republic is devoted to trying to answer the question "What is Justice?" In the end, he doesn't really have the answer to the question and sort of hints at the notion that justice is a Form and not perfectly manifested here in the cave.
Of course I agree with you - the idea of karma as a force that works its balancing act in a single incarnation is a kind of wishful thinking, and is in no way borne out by the evidence. Isolated cases might give rise to a kind of confirmation bias, but in general, bad shit continues to happen to good people and bad people continue to enjoy unmerited pleasures and privileges.
In my own experience, this IS the afterlife. I'm living out and healing the consequences of causes I put into motion in prior incarnations. But I'm also setting in motion new causes by virtue of the impulse to fulfill the desire for certain experiences.
I just think that the perception that there's a God and an Us is flawed, and possibly one of the shortcomings of the design of the Human Suit. When I was able (entirely by accident and without pharmacological assistance) to expand my attention beyond the perimeter of the Suit, it gave me the personal assurance that we are much more than what we think we are. I say "we" because I don't think I'm in any way special.
There's nothing selfish in my opinion about desiring the experience of feeling the kind of homecoming that awaits us beyond the perceptual limits of the Human Suit.
AFF
Which is why I rather tend to the 'wait-and-see' school of thought, and why I'm not really sure why tclune accuses me of immorality, along with cosmically-pathetic bottom-feeding...
IJ
Yes! Eternal and everlasting are not the same thing at all. Eternal means not bounded by time and space. Eternal life, therefore, is beyond all of our dimensionality. Insofar as we can speak of it - since our language is incapable of capturing the ideas I'm reaching for - eternal life is already NOW. I don't think death matters to God as much as it matters to us. If God lives in the "simultaneity of eternity," then all is the one act of God.
This is part of why meditation is so important to me.
The closest I've come to a helpful analogy/image of these ideas was reading Abbot's Flatland when I was 15 years old. (Please realize that it was intended as satire, so the class structure was intentional; I'm not so sure about the sexism... That said, I think Abbot has done a fascinating job of hinting at the possibility of a realm that is beyond what we can imagine.)
There are many people now who believe that all there will ever be of us once we physically die are memories and possibly genes. To me, the point of the cross is that death is not the end, at least so for those who follow Jesus, but I'd like to think for everyone. I was a little surprised to hear, as in the op, that someone finds the idea a nightmare. The difference is that I'm looking forward to a wonderful place while he is afraid that it will be no better than this world - worse in fact as, to his mind, it won't end.
I see it as important to our wellbeing in this life if we've got something positive to look forward to, both individually and collectively. The view that families and friends are 'up there, waiting for us' is widespread. Is that healthy, I wonder?
One's individuality surely does matter, as well as the whole?
Who follows Jesus? On Twitter? Why would anyone follow Him, whatever that means, if those who don't are condemned to oblivion? Why would one want to follow such a weird, nasty egomaniacal entity?
Does what we want count for anything? What if we don't want to be in a perfect place if it means being close to God? And yet, there are no guarantees in any case, according to Jesus.
What if our destiny is oblivion, but Jesus is throwing us a lifeline, if we choose to grasp it?
Who follows Jesus? Christians surely try to. Perhaps because it's the good and right thing to do, so that everyone will thrive; perhaps because they want to live forever in heaven, perhaps both.
In Hebrew the phrase that gets translated as “forever and ever” is “l’olam va’ed”. It means “to the horizon and again.” In Hebrew, the language for space is exactly the same as the language of time. To say something is long ago (or a long time in he future) is the same as to say it’s far away. The Greek equivalent of olam, aionios, translated as ‘eternal’, means ‘of the ages’.*
Which is all to say, that for the biblical languages, ‘eternity’ was more to do with the idea of spanning, or encompassing (temporal and physical) than it did perpetual or everlasting. Perpetual/everlasting is all about stretching forward in one direction (futurewards). Eternity from the mind of the biblical languages was about encompassing all things and all times, stretching out in all directions. Eternity is omni-dimensional.
*This is my understanding from looking into these things. Disclaimer: I’m not an expert in languages.
We only need to look at the here-and-now to answer that. We are in a place which is very far from perfect. But (most of us) much prefer it to death, eternal life or no eternal life.
The only reason I have a (vague) hope of heaven is that I’d love to be with my parents again. They live in my thoughts every day. I miss them all the time.
It's all well and good to accept that we live our lives here on earth and then when we die that's it, we're gone and never coming back. Many people already believe that.
But if there's nothing waiting for us beyond death, what's the point of religion? It wouldn't matter what dogmas or moral codes you followed or how you lived your life, because the end result would be the same regardless. It would truly be a case of "eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die".
The perspective we have now is one which is time bound, and in which we are mortal with finite lives. From that viewpoint, a short span of life being all we can actually see, it's no wonder most of us prefer to live rather than die.
I miss my parents too. We learn to live with the fact that they are no longer here, the grieving process moves on but never seems to end. I hope they are in heaven, being the perfect wonderful place of love we are promised, even though neither were religious. I would hate to think that they might be in a place of misery.
That looks like looking down the wrong end of the telescope from modernism. Forever and ever, is forever and ever. One way.
What if we don't? What's that got to do with anything? If Jesus then destiny != oblivion.
99.9% of humanity is unaware of the need to grasp anything. The 0.1% are a funny lot. How do they do that in any significant, definitive, exclusive way? How does them doing whatever it is make everyone thrive? Or qualify for eternal life?
It seems to me that the point of the Christian religion is to facilitate the faith of, to gather and send out those who love and want to serve God as demonstrated by Jesus.
It is life lived in that way, close to God, filled with the love we need to share with others, which is what I would like to be carried beyond physical death. But that isn't the point of it, and I would live this way even if oblivion is facing me.
A lot of them do.
I don't understand why anyone would want to love and serve God if there was no eternal reward. If there's nothing beyond death but oblivion then God is pointless and irrelevant.
I don't agree with Paul very often, but he and I are on exactly the same page when he says "If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied".
Aye, a lot of Christians do.
Funnily enough it's not so much the dead, as the living I want to be with. And yeah me Dad, me Nan, Ian M. Banks, Churchill... but me wife, kids, grandson, exes, mates, colleagues, school friends, people I offended. mousethief.