There is the dream that we have a wonderful life waiting for us after we die. Since I look at this life with a jaundiced eye, I would like to think so, but then again my thinking, or yours for that matter, may be merely wishful.
I remember looking out over the bay while sitting at a picnic table at Point Pinole in the North Bay. I was reading “The After Death Diary of an American Philosopher”. It was ironic that the philosopher in question, who had quite a tale to tell in the book, had been an empiricist, or perhaps pragmatist publicly certain of the concrete nature of material life. But then the book wasn't really written by him, but someone who was "channeling" him. Thus the appellation "after death".
He made the after death state seem like a veritable heaven; sans body, of course. The mind not entirely alone in the void can be such a wonderful thing; perhaps that is why we develop one. We have other talents than while alive. He was thankful for his seat on the balcony, able to overlook the stage upon which life is cast (his words more or less). Although I imagine that if he sits there long enough he will not be able to relate to what goes on below.
I like a good book, of course; and at least the possibility of enjoying it with a bit of coffee or if I were younger, a smoke. But I am afraid that these things, the things I enjoy entail a certain amount of physical life. And that may be the one thing that's missing when we "pass over" as the phrase is. I may have as much of a jaundiced view of that life as I have of this.
I would think, just speculating here that fantasies or a dreamy sort of after death reverie might be possible. For the simple reason that there is no body that has to get up and go to the bathroom in the commercial break.
Being alive, I suffer from not knowing, only being able to read about such things.
I have it from a variety of authors that the purpose of life lies somewhere in the living, although that can be challenging at times. I almost think that the living self doesn’t know what the dead self is doing.
Perhaps the living and the dead lead very different lives and there is no way to understand that from this no matter how many books you read.
One idea that gives this life more merit than it generally receives is that it is an artistic creation of something larger than the individual living it. That it is an idea that has been born into materiality and is able to consider and reflect and talk back to it's creator.
I do plenty of that. And oddly, I know my creator hears me because sometimes she complains.
So if I am her object of art, perhaps she looks at me with a bit of a jaundiced eye?
