Heaven

The version of Heaven where you sit at the right hand of God and hang out with all your dead loved ones sounds more like Hell to me. 

It’s clearly the worst family reunion ever, a Thanksgiving dinner without mashed potatoes and beer and is there even football on?  If so, what team gets to win?  

(Presumably, if God gets to decide, then it’s going to be the Pittsburgh Steelers every year, but what if I’m a Minnesota Vikings fan?  Do they still lose consistently in the post-season afterlife?  If so, seems like a pretty crummy Paradise for folks from the Land of 10,000 lakes.)

Eternal life of any sort is a nightmare.  Even your very own heaven with 10,000 virgins or George Clooneys or Toms of Finland is going to get old after a few millennia; sure, most of us these days can waste endless hours scrolling on the internet, but even that will get tiresome eventually.

The only possible way for Heaven to be heavenly is if there’s no longer any sense of individual self, which means that it’s impossible for a person to experience Heaven because such an experience requires that very individual.  “I” can’t experience Heaven because the “experience” of Heaven has to be an “experience” that “I” can’t have.

Let’s say, then, that Heaven is the merging of one’s individual consciousness into the Universal Consciousness (kind of re-inventing the Vedanta here); sounds good, but “I” am not the one having that experience because there’s no longer any “I.”  All the heavenly aspects are there: no pain, no sadness, no having to decide what to wear everyday, not even needing to floss!  But that’s precisely because “I” am not around anymore.

No doubt that this sort of non-existence sounds like Hell to some people, but again, here’s the beauty part: non-existence is also not an experience that anyone can have.  So if non-existence is Hell, then not to worry: you can’t experience that either.