My Nirvana...

Consider that when you die, you do not cease to exist. Instead your mental abilities and your sensory perceptions mutate. They transform in such a way that every memory, every moment of your life, becomes clearer to you than when you were alive, or even when you were actually living those moments.

Is it hard to imagine your memories becoming more lucid than the actual experiences you have had while being alive? Generally memories tend to be less complete or detailed than the actual experiences, but there have been cases in which epileptic patients have claimed that in seizures they have relived past experiences with profound clarity, accurate to the minutest detail. So if the hyper activation of a few cells in the brain can cause such an effect, it shouldn’t be too hard to imagine one reliving his entire life through the memories possessed upon his death.

In this supposed spiritual existence the lucidity of memory would be followed by a heightening of sentiments. We would experience joy, sadness, fear, nostalgia, and the entirety of human emotions triggered by our memories at a level never experienced during our normal lives. Among these emotions most significant would be remorse.

Imagine an awakening of the conscience. Not an arbitrary sense of right and wrong but something much more objective. A nun who might have been self-recriminating in her life would not be inundated by remorse, and neither would a hardened criminal be exempt from regret. It would be a coming to consciousness of a part of our mind that has been making judgments on us all our lives. The one critic of our personality that we cannot ignore or claim to be biased is our own self.

In this afterlife the punishment would be remorse itself; the full realization of the actions we chose to take and the effects they had. This would cause a mental struggle to accept our selves in spite of all the mistakes we made, the pain we caused, and the responsibilities we eschewed.

Forgiveness in this case would have to come from within ourselves and not from the subjects of our wrong doings. Often such forgiveness is the hardest to find, and in a state of heightened conscience it would necessarily be so. The larger the burden of our past crimes the harder would be the path to complete spiritual awakening.

Overcoming this flood of memories, facing our true nature and accepting it, understanding our faults and repenting would mean Nirvana. For after mastering the emotional dimensions to our minds, we would have attained serenity conducive to the full realization of the potential of the human mind. The true extent of the power of reasoning, creativity, imagination, and abilities which lie mostly inactive in our subconscious during our lives would all be at our disposal.

I look at dreams as a demonstration of the power of the human mind. I can dream of complex personalities, alien worlds, and mythical creatures, and not realize that I am asleep till when I wake up. In the model of afterlife that I have just built up, we would be able to reach a state where we become completely aware and in control of our mental abilities. This would mean that at our whim we could create more lucid and more complex ‘dreams’ than the ones that come in our sleep.

If we consider that our perceptions are dependent on our sensations brought about by a physical body, heaven must necessarily be a state in which these sensations are manipulated. In other words it must be an illusion built up in our minds through forced input to our sensory apparatus. An illusion is not a delusion if it is manufactured intentionally while knowing its true nature. Hence a heaven without any deception would be a heaven created by one’s own self.

To make this model of afterlife complete we should allow communication between minds. So let us imagine that at the level of mental prowess reached it could be possible for minds to interact without requiring any physical medium. I could enter your ‘dreams’ if you allowed me to, and you could enter mine, or we could build new ones together. And the people who have progressed to such a level could try to show the way to others who are lost in the emotional turmoil of their private ‘nightmares’.

My acrimony towards religion began with a questioning of the concept of hell, rather than the questioning of the proof of god (which I believed I already understood at that time). Are heaven and hell really a model that provide a most just solution and allow an idea of a most merciful god? I don’t think so. But since I don’t actually deny the possibility of an afterlife, and as fantasy never ceases to interest me, I like to let my imagination dream up ideas of what it could be like to continue to live after death, and what a model of the afterlife better than heaven and hell would be like.