Meditation on Heaven

While there are many paradoxical claims regarding life after death, Heaven—the unrivaled, elite country club of the cosmos—offers the most glaring contradiction of them all: eternal happiness.

The faithful can’t arrive at a consensus on what constitutes a heavenly reward. However, when pressed, conjuring a guess as to what the criteria of bliss would involve isn’t a difficult task. Is your eternal existence filled with epicurean delights, mounds of the most delicious cuisine that arrives on silver platters? Maybe knowledge is the foundation of your happiness. Imagine the pleasure of walking through the Pearly Gates only to discover that Heaven is a celestial library that could encourage any erudite heart to skip a beat. What if your requirement for merriment is much simpler than the first two?   What if you need only family and friends to find happiness?   Well, despite the straightforwardness of this request, the tenets of Christianity make this the hardest desire to satiate.

The road to Heaven can be neither bought nor bartered. Instead, the afterlife is contingent on the non-evidentiary belief in an invisible and benevolent being—a being so benevolent that he will not bat one all-seeing eye as he sentences you to an eternity of anguish if you so much as use the curiosity he saw fit to gift humankind. With a large portion of the world’s population going to Hell, the challenge writes itself—can we obtain true eternal happiness with the knowledge that our loved ones are miserable? No, I would say not.

Meditation on Death

We are all going to die.

One needs to meditate on these few words for only a moment to realize the terminable existence we live. Death has been the foundation of my anxiety for years, undergirding a sense of existential dread that has burrowed itself deep into my psyche, plucking away in a relentless fashion until my thoughts swelter in a symphony of dissonance.   My mind, in an act of desperate autonomy, makes a plea to the metaphysical and attempts a rationalization of our seemingly dualistic nature—is my consciousness separate of my corporeal being?

When the idea of consciousness is allowed time for rumination, my sensibilities—in a rather odd set of impressions—transcend the physicality of the known world, leaving only the essential components of what makes me a unique creature: thought and emotion. I focus on my breathing. In, out. In, out. Each limb is sinking lower and lower until I disappear completely in an act of ghostly transparency. I can feel only my residual weight.  Electricity surges through, and my nerves wriggle and tingle and dance under my skin, washing my body with the strange negotiations between the speculative and the known. I open my eyes.

We are all going to die, and the pleas of a celestial hoax simply cannot bring comfort. Every moment awake is a new miracle, bathing our consciousness in the sublimity of the ordinary; and in our final breath, we can say we lived.