Heaven, Hell and the Afterlife

Nietzsche once said, through his character Zarathustra:

“When (man) invented hell . . . lo, hell was his heaven on earth; he could put up with suffering now, by contemplating the eternal punishment of his oppressors in the other world.”

If that definition is too Old Testament for you, would you agree with these two definitions? The first one is by the group, Talking Heads:

“Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.”

Nick Carr took that definition to its logical conclusion and wondered:

“If we further assume that hell is the opposite of heaven, then the distinguishing characteristic of hell is unrelenting eventfulness, the constant, unceasing arrival of the new. Hell is a place where something always happens.”

I am guessing the Buddha would have added a very important point to Carr’s definition: “That’s hell only if you choose to react to every such occurrence.”

What would you consider this description of one version of the afterlife by David Eagleman in Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives:

“In the afterlife you relive all your experiences, but this time with the events reshuffled into a new order: all the moments that share a quality are grouped together. You spend two months driving the street in front of your house, seven months having sex. You sleep for thirty years without opening your eyes. For five months straight you flip through magazines while sitting on a toilet.You take all your pain at once, all twenty-seven intense hours of it. …You spend six days clipping your nails…Eighteen months waiting in line. Two years of boredom: staring out a bus window, sitting in an airport terminal.”

If that is how the afterlife is, would you then conclude:

“In this part of the afterlife, you imagine something analogous to your Earthly life, and the thought is blissful: a life where episodes are split into tiny swallowable pieces, where moments do not endure, where one experiences the joy of jumping from one event to the next like a child hopping from spot to spot on the burning sand.”

Did that last part, the conclusion that Earthly life is bliss, hit you the same way Eugene Wei felt:

“I was so struck by this passage, this idea that the only thing that made our lives tolerable was the jumbling of all these events into a shuffled sequence that achieved some optimal variety, serendipity, and novelty.”

Or do you feel that all of the above is proof of what John Milton once said:

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”

Milton phrased it in a catchy way, but the Buddha said the same thing long before. And even devised techniques to handle the problem. Hail Buddha!