I've been reading a rather tongue-in-cheek set of imaginary scenarios by neuroscientist David Eagleman for what comes next when we die. Forty little riffs, well told, fun to read, on God or gods, the large or small scale universe, illusion and reality, mortality and perpetuity, strife and concord.
Consider the title fantasy Sum, for instance, an afterlife where our lives are relived activity by activity: all the sleep hours, all the eating hours, the driving hours, etc. Or Metamorphosis, in which the dead hang about until their names are no longer spoken. Or the Circle of Friends, a post-mortem in which we only ever with those whom we were acquainted with.
The two that most caught my attention were Prism, an afterlife in which we are divided into separate beings by age to accommodate the different drives we have at various ages, and Subjunctive, an afterlife which we inhabit along with our better, more fulfilled selves as well as our worse possibilities. These seemed more about our living condition than anything after our decease.
The idea of our multiplicities separately instantiated rather than sensed dimly within us is a potent one. I am Legion said the spirit inside the pigs, many and one at the same time. Well, perhaps it's true of each of us in every possible way as we actually live, only not as clearly delineated as in Eagleman's afterlife.
Issues of bondage, deception, meaninglessness are raised as if we had to wait to death to encounter them.
Strife, indifference, perplexity and regret can the result of flawed divine intentions or conflict between divinities or sheer blindness: all of which in less fantastic garb are descriptive of our world.
Afterlife fictions are like science fiction, except that the raw material is the human desire for meaningfulness, and the factual basis is that we all must one day die. Why shouldn't we explore them all?
The world-to-come of the God-in-love framework is perhaps of the genre, less explicit than some, more positive than others, and not impossible. It is unwritten by a deity posited to be less hapless than some, less designing than others, and purposive in a positive way (as lovers are.)
One story, Search, is a parable of the dividing and reuniting consciousness which seemed to me wonderful in its way. I only wished you had been in the story, God-in-love, but perhaps you are.
Consider the title fantasy Sum, for instance, an afterlife where our lives are relived activity by activity: all the sleep hours, all the eating hours, the driving hours, etc. Or Metamorphosis, in which the dead hang about until their names are no longer spoken. Or the Circle of Friends, a post-mortem in which we only ever with those whom we were acquainted with.
The two that most caught my attention were Prism, an afterlife in which we are divided into separate beings by age to accommodate the different drives we have at various ages, and Subjunctive, an afterlife which we inhabit along with our better, more fulfilled selves as well as our worse possibilities. These seemed more about our living condition than anything after our decease.
The idea of our multiplicities separately instantiated rather than sensed dimly within us is a potent one. I am Legion said the spirit inside the pigs, many and one at the same time. Well, perhaps it's true of each of us in every possible way as we actually live, only not as clearly delineated as in Eagleman's afterlife.
Issues of bondage, deception, meaninglessness are raised as if we had to wait to death to encounter them.
Strife, indifference, perplexity and regret can the result of flawed divine intentions or conflict between divinities or sheer blindness: all of which in less fantastic garb are descriptive of our world.
Afterlife fictions are like science fiction, except that the raw material is the human desire for meaningfulness, and the factual basis is that we all must one day die. Why shouldn't we explore them all?
The world-to-come of the God-in-love framework is perhaps of the genre, less explicit than some, more positive than others, and not impossible. It is unwritten by a deity posited to be less hapless than some, less designing than others, and purposive in a positive way (as lovers are.)
One story, Search, is a parable of the dividing and reuniting consciousness which seemed to me wonderful in its way. I only wished you had been in the story, God-in-love, but perhaps you are.
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