The Afterlife Brochure
My aunt once went to a medium who relayed a message to her that was supposedly from my late grandfather. Apparently a man matching my grandfather’s description (i.e. elderly), was seated at a kitchen table. Alongside him sat other deceased cousins, uncles, and great-grandparents. It was one big happy family reunited. He wanted to let my aunt know that one day they would all be there to welcome her too at that table with a nice cup of tea.
She told me this thinking that the image might bring the same comfort to me as it did for her. Yet my initial reaction (kept internally) was actually one of mild disappointment. So you’re telling me when I get to the afterlife, when I have the possibility of mingling with every great mind humanity has produced, Issac Newton, Thomas Aquinas, Simone Weil, GK Chesterton, Emily Bronte, TuPac, that I’m still going to have to spend my Christmases at Great Aunt Ethel’s listening to how heaven isn’t as white as it used to be?
Don’t get me wrong, most of my family are fine, but I was expecting to be able to branch out a little up there. Instead of comfort, frankly that image made me want to appreciate the brief respite I might have from certain relatives while I’m still alive.
There are some advantages to being mortal. One perk is you only need to invent a finite amount of excuses to avoid going to birthday parties. Once I get to the big reunion in the sky I’ll not only have to try to find an infinite number of excuses, but many of my existing ones will no longer be believable. I won’t be able to say I have a work commitment, there are no jobs. I can’t say I’m ill, there’s no disease.
Even if I do manage to concoct some legitimate ones, the nature of eternity will mean I’m bound to be scuppered by those who plan social gatherings with thousands of years advance notice. ‘So you can’t make my big 4000th bash, that’s fine, how about my 5000th? Check your diary, what are you doing June 6984?’
Paradise will no doubt have perks as well, I suspect the strawberries are pretty good. But I’m wondering if it’s not going to be for me. If that’s the case, what are my other options?
I guess it’s not for me to decide which afterlife is the legit real one. It’s like my parents teasing me as a child with a batch of holiday brochures only to eventually tell me that we’re just going to Butlin's again anyway. Still, there are a few other possibilities for life after death that I can at least tease myself with before I find out the truth (which will inevitably be my least preferred option, i.e. turns out we won’t actually be going anywhere at all, well, that or hell).
You could become a ghost after you die. I might be ok with that. Could be quite liberating to be freed from a body and no longer be restricted by walls. This is surely the preferred outcome for the voyeur, allowing you to keep tabs on former friends and enemies, to find out who is now shagging who, or to be able to to haunt those whom you feel did not sufficiently mourn you.
Still, to me it seems like too short term an option. Once everybody you knew also passes from the land of the living, you’ll only have strangers to spy on. Any paranormal activity you wish to impose upon them just seems vindictive. I don’t think my heart would be in it.
Plus one day the sun will explode and consume the Earth. What do all the ghosts do then? Float slowly for millions of years towards the Andromeda system in the hopes of finding another habitable planet to eavesdrop on?
Another possibility is reincarnation, the idea we come back as a different animal. It’s an idea I’ve always suspected could be true. I once tried to catch a fly in my house, every time I got close it would move away at the very last second and it made me wonder if in a previous life it had been a bus driver I knew.
I’ve always liked the idea that we build up karma over successive lifetimes until we eventually reach nirvana. I’m not saying Christians or Muslims won’t have done well to reach their respective paradises, but they only have to get one life right. To finally obtain enlightenment after being through several cycles of human, not to mention your previous lifetimes as horses, cats, and goodness knows how many woodlice. That is a victory to me that feels hard earned, nobody can deny you deserve it. It really is the ironman of salvation.
I guess potentially the reincarnated have the same time issue as the one facing the ghosts. In searching for enlightenment, it appears you only have a few billion years window to complete your task. That is unless future lives need not be confined to this planet. Is it possible that you can die as a human in this life only to continue your saga as some extraterrestrial being on the other side of the galaxy?
If we are reincarnated I’d be very interested to know my history. Is this my first time as a human? If it is, perhaps I could use that as an excuse when I make cock ups? After all, it’s kind of like my first day at work right? No wonder other people seem so much more socially adapt as homo sapiens, loads of them will be on their fifth time around at least.
And what will I come back as next? I hope I’ve done enough to be human again. Trouble is, I’ve heard that birth rates are going down, which means the number of human bodies able to host souls is going to start shrinking.
The world’s population has exploded over the past century. During this period, a human body has been much like a place at a university. It was once quite rare to be able to get into one, but now there are so many spaces there are definitely quite a few souls occupying them that arguably shouldn’t be there.
However, apparently that trend is now starting to reverse. With lower birth rates it appears that it’s going to be harder to get into a human next time. And if the downward trend continues, it’s going to keep getting more challenging. Every time you become a human again it will be like being a newly promoted premier league team. Every life-cycle you’ll need to work harder and harder just to keep pace with the more established humans and moral paragons among us. It looks like I might need to up my charity direct debits.
Once I drop out of the human league, will I ever get back in? Do I then languish around the lower species for a time? Perhaps it’ll be good for me. A few cycles as various reptiles might knock out some complacency. What if I really mess up though? What if I make one foul error and suddenly find myself as an insect? Or even a bacteria? What moral good could I really do as a bacteria to get my karma back on track? I guess I could be one of those good ones that help aid digestion. I can only hope if I do become a bacteria I happen to be reborn inside a carton of Yakult.
I once asked a vicar what heaven would be like. He told me it would be a paradise that we can’t conceive of as human beings. We are earthly creatures, with limited imagination and intellect. We cannot fully comprehend the majesty of God or the wonders of what his heavenly kingdom will actually be like. It would be like us trying to explain an MDMA trip to an ant (he didn’t say this bit).
What would most people say heaven was like if they had to guess? A world of constant laughter and leisure and orgasmic joy? These are earthly pleasures, we can’t conceive of any other kind. Yet most of these pleasures couldn’t work in the same way in a truly perfect eternal paradise.
Think about how much joyful experience on earth there is that can only really exist in a state of opposition. Can we really have laughter without it being a counterpoint to misery or drudgery or the absurdity of being? Can we really have euphoria without the comedown? The great holiday without the shit job you’re briefly abandoning? The amazing piss without having been stuck desperately needing one in unmoving traffic on the A1 for 2 hours before you finally pull into Peterborough services? In true paradise those negative things wouldn’t be present would they? Yet if the pain doesn’t exist, can we really have any of that pleasure?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure heaven will still be good (better than here presumably). The point is, it probably won’t be good in an earthly way.1 So maybe I shouldn’t really keep trying to think about the various afterlife’s through my earthing-centric lens.
That said, I did wonder, what if the vision that was given to my aunt was correct? What if all of my dead ancestors are in fact waiting for me to join them in the next life with a teapot the go? I appreciate my imagination is limited, but I think there is a way that this particular afterlife could turn out to be a heavenly paradise after all.
What if, when you got to heaven, they provided you with perfect exact body doubles to fill in for you on all of those social visits you’d ideally like to avoid?
So I can in fact turn up to the tea party, and nod along politely to Aunt Ethel when she asks me if I’ve enjoyed her stale Victoria sponge. At least, that is what appears to be happening, everyone else there seems to think so anyway.
Yet, in reality, my doppelgänger is filling in2. Whilst they think I’m sipping weak Earl Grey, what I’m actually doing is branching out as intended. I’m playing the guitar I never bothered to learn on earth (which I can miraculously play up here), having the jamming session with Elvis I always dreamed of, whilst Marilyn Monroe watches on.
Or, what is more likely, not the real Elvis and Marilyn Monroe, but unbeknownst to me, two perfect exact body doubles.
‘Love’ is supposedly the heaven sent pleasure that we can experience on earth, and I guess a Christian argument would be that this is experienced without an opposing force.
I do promise I will sometimes actually genuinely show up, I just can’t guarantee it on every single occasion