heaven and hell

For the past few hours I have been on a bus heading north. I got on at the Highway 407 Bus Terminal in Vaughn, Ontario. The sky, seemingly infinite and perfectly blue, boasted only a few clouds, and every plant and tree was a sickly bright green. The town centre is small in Vaughn. There are something like seven or eight tall buildings there, all very modern, and from my vantage point there was nothing at all beyond these buildings; nothing else on the horizon. As the bus left the city, I started to imagine a Frutiger Aero-esque city and for only a moment convinced myself that that is what Heaven must look like. 

If heaven looks like this, it would get old so quickly, I thought. If heaven was a dreamy, almost empty futuristic city with only white and blue skyscrapers and bright blue skies and effervescently green trees and plants and nothing else except rolling grassy hills as far as the eye can see, it would get very boring. And so, I wondered, what else could Heaven be? 

I had always imagined Heaven as this blindingly bright glowing empty space in the sky somewhere with no pain or sadness or evil. A place with no night, no darkness, an always sunshining white open place where you can reunite with loved ones. But if you think about it, it’s rather empty, and reuniting with dead loved ones would only last an hour or so, and in the Heaven I imagined, there’s not much else to do. 

It’s widely understood that Heaven and Hell exist mutually on Earth. One cannot exist without the other. Same with Good and Evil. Wellbeing and Suffering. One gives the other weight and meaning. If Heaven is a place without suffering, then how good really is the good there? Is perfection the same without imperfection? Can’t we only truly appreciate perfection and eternal goodness if it is untouchable or unachievable? Humans always desire more, it’s what makes us human.

We, too, need suffering in some way because it gives our lives meaning. Without the bad times, there would be no good times, or we would be sorely unable to appreciate the good times. In a twisted way, if we only experienced perfection and happiness, it would probably also feel like Hell. It wouldn’t feel meaningful. Without the duality of life and death, eternity and ephemerality, morality and immorality, truth and lies, light and darkness, benevolence and malevolence, generosity and selfishness, our lives would have little meaning and carry little weight. 

Human civilization as a whole has tried to forget about and eradicate its messiness. We have tried to make everything as good as possible, but evil and suffering is inescapable. Religions acknowledge this. There is no universal good, and there will never be a universal community. There will always be some kind of messiness, complexity, and conflict. My point is, suffering and discomfort are necessary to derive meaning from life, and Heaven would feel just as hellish and torturous and meaningless as Hell would.

But then maybe what it takes to satisfy the soul and what it takes to satisfy the mind are different things. A human mind needs duality to derive meaning. It needs to experience both the bad and good sides of life to appreciate and make sense of either, to find balance between them. Heaven and Hell are not like life at all, they are seemingly beyond life. So, assuming the mind dies with the body, maybe all the soul needs is a moral direction, and is able to settle for a lot less complexity than the mind can. In which case, our soul is a much more simplified version of ourselves, and is able to transcend personal necessity and desire and the need for duality. Even the need to feel meaning. That kind of thing is maybe only necessary in life. But isn’t death meaningful too? 

I have never personality loved the duality of Heaven and Hell. It just feels like another way to categorize the actions of people into two complementary sections to answer the eternal question as simply as possible. It’s not an unnatural pattern of thought, but perhaps there is another answer for what happens to our souls after we die. Truthfully, how can we be certain there is a Heaven or Hell when none of us who are alive have ever been dead? We can’t be certain, we can only perpetually debate and ruminate because none of us will know the answer until our lives are over. 

Our lives are so transitory in the grand scheme of things that there can’t only be two results for us. Perhaps nothing happens. Or perhaps we are judged on a case-by-case basis based on an uncountable amount of minute data collected on our life's deeds. Like a plant identification key, we'd get filtered through and assigned one of several thousand different types of end locations that would suit us best, or maybe falls somewhere on a gradient of ultimate good to ultimate evil. Perhaps we are all pooled into one large space, not Heaven or Hell or anything based on morality, with both the incredibly benevolent and most evil souls all existing together. Without our beliefs, our physical bodies, our minds, our personalities, our desires, our motivations, our values, or our complex conceptions of the world, each soul could be indistinguishable from the other, and we could all coexist without ever knowing how any one soul had acted as a human. Maybe the afterlife transcends morality and punishment. 

Or perhaps there is a justice system in reincarnation. If you are judged by hyper-specific criteria on the minute details of your life and deeds, it could determine how you are reincarnated in the next life. Perhaps there is an honour system. If one soul gets used by several different humans over thousands of lives, the more people that are generally good who are using that soul, the better and better the reincarnation gets. The person who lived before me was a good person, and so our shared soul was reincarnated again into a human, me, who lives in a wealthy country, was born healthy, and to loving, financially stable parents. But one mistake could ruin it all and send the soul back to a reincarnation that experiences a lot of suffering and pain. Whether they can transcend the suffering and pain and still be good in their life determines how the next reincarnation goes, and whether someone well-reincarnated continues to do good or becomes corrupt affects the same thing. 

By this logic, I wonder, does our soul belong to us? Is my soul unique to me? Or does my soul belong to a larger chain of unconnected, unrelated individuals who have existed throughout history? Am I just borrowing it for my short, transitory existence? I guess this concept isn’t really an afterlife, but more so ever-renewing life. 

Anyway, just some things I’ve been thinking about. Honestly, I think people have a habit sometimes of focusing too much on what lies beyond and don’t enjoy their life while it lasts. I intend to enjoy every second only because I am so unsure about what waits for me. Whatever it is, I, and everyone else, will all eventually be able to understand it. We all will die someday, so it will come no matter what I do. I find it important to remember that every day I am dying, and to treat is as this precious thing, because that way I’ll appreciate it as much as I can. 

Just like, if you met someone and knew they were going to die tonight, you’d treat them with so much more compassion than you normally would. We never know when any one of us will die, including ourselves. Life seems to spring eternal until it doesn’t. And if we remembered death and felt more at peace with it’s actuality, we might have more capacity to love ourselves, our fellow humans, the animals we share this world with, the earth itself, and have compassion and presence in our lives a little more. We are all dying all the time, life is not eternal, and if it was it would be meaningless. Death is okay, and certainly nothing to be afraid of. Whatever is waiting at the end will meet you when it’s your time. Whether you believe in Heaven or Hell, it’s better to believe that you will be rewarded for being a good human, whether that reward comes after you die, or during your time on this Earth.