Again, ironic in that a few days ago I had responded with a comment in response to the notion of new dawns that Will Doolittle had shared on the Front Page by sharing that our family was surrounding my wife who was in the final stages of hospice. Nancy peacefully passed away two days ago so finding today's entry on heaven was once again quite timely. Nancy and I had talked on several occasions about life after death, and it was her hope that she would once again be united with our son who had passed away twenty years ago at 38, with her parents, grandparents and even her beloved dog, Portia who would be on the rainbow bridge and that I could join them there wherever there was. However, we both also shared the notion and maybe even belief that instead it was an eternal sleep. My mother, despite her life long commitment to her Lutheran faith demonstrated by her forty plus years of teaching the women's church school group, shared with me her feelings that the after life may well be as William Cullen Bryant's poem Thanatopsis describes as one "who wraps the drapery of her couch about her and lies to pleasant dreams." Aaron chose the word memories instead of dreams.
Thank you for sharing this, and my condolences on Nancy’s passing. To have published an essay about heaven just as you and your family were living so close to its questions makes me keenly aware of the limits of anything I might say in response.
I was especially moved by the two possibilities you and Nancy held together: reunion—with your son and all those she loved—and eternal sleep. Perhaps they are less contradictory than they first appear, two different expressions of peace.
Religious believers have their idea of heaven and the afterlife to comfort them. Those of us who don’t can rely on science. Einstein taught us about the conservation of energy. It cannot be destroyed, or otherwise made to vanish, but it can change form. Our bodies and brains run on tiny electrical charges, a form of energy. When a body dies, that activity stops within the body. Where does the energy go? Somewhere. I take comfort in that.
Yet it is not lost. Degrading implies it is somehow lesser, but that’s only in the case of when we humans are wanting energy to do something for us, like making a lightbulb light. The energy that is the difference between a living thing and a dead one no longer has a job to do that we can measure, but it doesn’t cease to exist.
If you put your faith in science, then every form of energy—motion, chemical bonds, electricity, light—slowly breaks down into dispersed thermal energy. Energy isn’t destroyed; it just becomes unusable. So in the end, the energy of every living thing is like a raindrop falling into an ocean. Over time it becomes so diluted that it no longer holds its individual identity.
Unusable is a very subjective term. Unusable for us humans to do our busy, busy things, perhaps. But maintaining an individual identity is not really how Heaven is described. No one expects to go to Heaven and still be worried about the mortgage and cleaning the gutters and mowing the lawn. It’s always about becoming one with God, bathed eternally in the light of His love, and so on. That also sounds an awful lot like Nirvana, the blissful state of having let go of all earthly passions and desires. Heaven, Nirvana, dispersed thermal energy. Potato, potahto.
You write “Heaven, Nirvana, dispersed thermal energy. Potato, potahto.” So for you these things are basically the same, and the distinction doesn’t matter.
Energy is an apt word here -- at once scientifically precise and imaginatively expansive. And conservation reminds us that we are part of transformations larger than any individual life. Tiny electrical charges, as you put it. Tiny electrical charges that enable us to comprehend the self. To seek answers from the universe.
In Sagan, as in Einstein, the comprehensibility of the universe does not diminish its mystery or make it less spiritual. If anything, our effort to understand the elegant nature of what lies before us becomes its own form of reverence.
Perhaps wonder is where the scientific and spiritual imaginations meet. Wonder and the creativity that rises to address it.
Pretty sure Joel Salatin has no more idea of what lies after death than anyone else. Good on him for not being a prosperity gospel Christianity pusher. I suspected that when I saw he was queer for the “streets of gold.” Have a hard time imagining why gold would be valued in an afterlife.
David Byrne’s vision is why I can’t believe in Salatin’s. That’s my question of people who have that idea. Do we sit on a cloud, play a harp and sing hymns forever? Is that Heaven or Hell? I realize Mark Twain already asked this.
If you’d like an interesting vision see “The Nature of Personal Reality” by Jane Roberts speaking for Seth. It sounds nuts, but no more so than what was propounded by a bunch of guys barely beyond cave dwelling thousands of years ago.
Short version: reincarnation, multiple lives in physical reality, a reality created by us.
For heaven’s sake, Aaron! So much to ponder! So much to wonder! So much to say! But let a few random reflections suffice:
Part of our problem with the notion of heaven is that we think of it spaciously rather than relationally, in terms of spaces rather than relations
In our Western history and culture, the Bible has played a very dominant role—for both good and ill. Some would ignore the fact that the biblical writings reflect the times in which they were written. These writings were set forth in a pre-scientific age. The cosmology-the understanding of the universe—was much different from what we now know it is. In biblical times the cosmology was very simple. The universe was a Ike a dome, with earth as the base and the sky above, with heaven beyond and hell below the dome.
Today, in our scientific age, our cosmology is much different. We live in a universe with many planets, and beyond our universe are other universes. In reality, we live in a multiverse.
Where does that leave heaven? For me it leaves heaven, spaciously, shrouded in wonder and mystery.
Which brings me to the point of my thinking of and believing in heaven in relational terms. In terms of my relationships with God, other people, animals, and the earth.
It leaves me thinking of heaven as eternal love and compassion, both in this life and beyond. And this brings me peace and a sense of eternal rest and reconciliation with the Eternal.
Don, this is marvelous—and “relationally” is the word that has stayed with me. I had spent so much of the essay wondering what heaven looks like, imagining it as a setting or place. You have reminded me that the deeper question may not be where heaven is, but what kind of relationship it represents.
Perhaps those moments I describe—when the milkweed opens, when the animals pause, when the world of the dead seems to look back—are not glimpses of a place at all, but glimpses of an enduring relationship. Heaven as eternal love, compassion and reconciliation offers a change in perspective I had not found on my own.
Thank you, Aaron, for your initial inspiration and sharing, and for your kind response to my comments. You seem to have captured the essence of what I was trying to communicate.
I like your images of the milkweed opening and the animals pausing. I don’t believe in a controlling God, some celestial puppeteer pulling strings and making things happen here on earth. But I do believe that there are some things that happen in life that are beyond mere coincidence. I have adopted a phrase my daughter and her friend have come up with to describe those instances in life that are beyond explanation and are more than mere coincidence. They call them “divine co-inky-dinks.”
I see them as moments in life when we sense the Eternal, feeling love, compassion, acceptance, presence, and peace.
Footnote: I believe that death is not the last word. The last word is always God’s, and God’s word is life—life with the quality of the Eternal about it.
My own personal understanding of God: “God—the Mystery beyond all mysteries—is the creative, energizing, unifying, transforming, renewing eternal.Spirit who is love; whose presence permeates the multiverse and penetrates all of life, here and hereafter.”
Thank you! I have thought forever ( as a Christian of indeterminate theology) that heaven as depicted in scripture seems endlessly BORING!!! Imagine hanging out with "nice" people for all eternity! It seems a balance to hell in Satre's No Exit -- like being stuck in a dentist's waiting room with the people who most annoy you. Not your enemies -- that's energizing -- but the people who just . . annoy you. Anyway, I have come to believe that the Lord's prayer has the answer: Thy kin-dom come, thy will be done, ON EARTH. . . !"
Streets of gold and gates of pearl? Doesnt really sound like the teachings of Jesus - at least as far back as I can remember from Sunday School. The whole gold and pearl hardware sound too much like our current WH! Not appealing.
The rainbow bridge story those of us who love and believe in our animals have heard and read about for years. That story is far more comforting and appealing than gold and pearl.
I suppose some people might not agree, but oh well. Who's to know for sure?
Thank you for such thoughtful observations on a topic that for most of us defies a definitive conclusion (paradoxically!). This would of course be a marvelous Aaron Woolf film (did anyone shoot the bombed keynote at the opening?), a project that would give you a chance to weigh this further. Or maybe you don’t need to do that; maybe what’s granted us to know is sufficient, along the lines of the Seder refrain, “Dayenu” (it is enough). In this one topic, I’m comfortable in unknowing. But I’m grateful for your ruminations today.
Good one Aaron. I’ll look forward to read what people have to say about what you wrote. Thanks for taking the time.
Again, ironic in that a few days ago I had responded with a comment in response to the notion of new dawns that Will Doolittle had shared on the Front Page by sharing that our family was surrounding my wife who was in the final stages of hospice. Nancy peacefully passed away two days ago so finding today's entry on heaven was once again quite timely. Nancy and I had talked on several occasions about life after death, and it was her hope that she would once again be united with our son who had passed away twenty years ago at 38, with her parents, grandparents and even her beloved dog, Portia who would be on the rainbow bridge and that I could join them there wherever there was. However, we both also shared the notion and maybe even belief that instead it was an eternal sleep. My mother, despite her life long commitment to her Lutheran faith demonstrated by her forty plus years of teaching the women's church school group, shared with me her feelings that the after life may well be as William Cullen Bryant's poem Thanatopsis describes as one "who wraps the drapery of her couch about her and lies to pleasant dreams." Aaron chose the word memories instead of dreams.
I am very sorry for your loss.
Chuck & Lisa
I won’t comment on what’s beyond. I have seen that you have been loyal and loving caregivers on an arduous journey.
Chuck, we hold you and your family in our hearts - Katie & Mark Long
Charles - Deepest sympathies to you and your family. I felt fortunate to have lived every day to the fullest with my own wife. That's all we can do.
Thank you for sharing this, and my condolences on Nancy’s passing. To have published an essay about heaven just as you and your family were living so close to its questions makes me keenly aware of the limits of anything I might say in response.
I was especially moved by the two possibilities you and Nancy held together: reunion—with your son and all those she loved—and eternal sleep. Perhaps they are less contradictory than they first appear, two different expressions of peace.
Thank you for entrusting this reflection here.
Religious believers have their idea of heaven and the afterlife to comfort them. Those of us who don’t can rely on science. Einstein taught us about the conservation of energy. It cannot be destroyed, or otherwise made to vanish, but it can change form. Our bodies and brains run on tiny electrical charges, a form of energy. When a body dies, that activity stops within the body. Where does the energy go? Somewhere. I take comfort in that.
All energy degrades to heat
Yet it is not lost. Degrading implies it is somehow lesser, but that’s only in the case of when we humans are wanting energy to do something for us, like making a lightbulb light. The energy that is the difference between a living thing and a dead one no longer has a job to do that we can measure, but it doesn’t cease to exist.
If you put your faith in science, then every form of energy—motion, chemical bonds, electricity, light—slowly breaks down into dispersed thermal energy. Energy isn’t destroyed; it just becomes unusable. So in the end, the energy of every living thing is like a raindrop falling into an ocean. Over time it becomes so diluted that it no longer holds its individual identity.
Unusable is a very subjective term. Unusable for us humans to do our busy, busy things, perhaps. But maintaining an individual identity is not really how Heaven is described. No one expects to go to Heaven and still be worried about the mortgage and cleaning the gutters and mowing the lawn. It’s always about becoming one with God, bathed eternally in the light of His love, and so on. That also sounds an awful lot like Nirvana, the blissful state of having let go of all earthly passions and desires. Heaven, Nirvana, dispersed thermal energy. Potato, potahto.
You write “Heaven, Nirvana, dispersed thermal energy. Potato, potahto.” So for you these things are basically the same, and the distinction doesn’t matter.
In Thermodynamics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermodynamics Unusable is not a very subjective term,-it’s a concert concept.
At absolute zero the theory is that all activity stops. No “usable” energy at all, I suppose. So what?
Energy is an apt word here -- at once scientifically precise and imaginatively expansive. And conservation reminds us that we are part of transformations larger than any individual life. Tiny electrical charges, as you put it. Tiny electrical charges that enable us to comprehend the self. To seek answers from the universe.
In Sagan, as in Einstein, the comprehensibility of the universe does not diminish its mystery or make it less spiritual. If anything, our effort to understand the elegant nature of what lies before us becomes its own form of reverence.
Perhaps wonder is where the scientific and spiritual imaginations meet. Wonder and the creativity that rises to address it.
...thank you for the frank and thoughtful rumination / -and for: the stunning picture by the Canadian photographer...
Pretty sure Joel Salatin has no more idea of what lies after death than anyone else. Good on him for not being a prosperity gospel Christianity pusher. I suspected that when I saw he was queer for the “streets of gold.” Have a hard time imagining why gold would be valued in an afterlife.
David Byrne’s vision is why I can’t believe in Salatin’s. That’s my question of people who have that idea. Do we sit on a cloud, play a harp and sing hymns forever? Is that Heaven or Hell? I realize Mark Twain already asked this.
If you’d like an interesting vision see “The Nature of Personal Reality” by Jane Roberts speaking for Seth. It sounds nuts, but no more so than what was propounded by a bunch of guys barely beyond cave dwelling thousands of years ago.
Short version: reincarnation, multiple lives in physical reality, a reality created by us.
For heaven’s sake, Aaron! So much to ponder! So much to wonder! So much to say! But let a few random reflections suffice:
Part of our problem with the notion of heaven is that we think of it spaciously rather than relationally, in terms of spaces rather than relations
In our Western history and culture, the Bible has played a very dominant role—for both good and ill. Some would ignore the fact that the biblical writings reflect the times in which they were written. These writings were set forth in a pre-scientific age. The cosmology-the understanding of the universe—was much different from what we now know it is. In biblical times the cosmology was very simple. The universe was a Ike a dome, with earth as the base and the sky above, with heaven beyond and hell below the dome.
Today, in our scientific age, our cosmology is much different. We live in a universe with many planets, and beyond our universe are other universes. In reality, we live in a multiverse.
Where does that leave heaven? For me it leaves heaven, spaciously, shrouded in wonder and mystery.
Which brings me to the point of my thinking of and believing in heaven in relational terms. In terms of my relationships with God, other people, animals, and the earth.
It leaves me thinking of heaven as eternal love and compassion, both in this life and beyond. And this brings me peace and a sense of eternal rest and reconciliation with the Eternal.
Don, You've still got it.
Don, this is marvelous—and “relationally” is the word that has stayed with me. I had spent so much of the essay wondering what heaven looks like, imagining it as a setting or place. You have reminded me that the deeper question may not be where heaven is, but what kind of relationship it represents.
Perhaps those moments I describe—when the milkweed opens, when the animals pause, when the world of the dead seems to look back—are not glimpses of a place at all, but glimpses of an enduring relationship. Heaven as eternal love, compassion and reconciliation offers a change in perspective I had not found on my own.
What a perfect and generous response. Thank you.
Thank you, Aaron, for your initial inspiration and sharing, and for your kind response to my comments. You seem to have captured the essence of what I was trying to communicate.
I like your images of the milkweed opening and the animals pausing. I don’t believe in a controlling God, some celestial puppeteer pulling strings and making things happen here on earth. But I do believe that there are some things that happen in life that are beyond mere coincidence. I have adopted a phrase my daughter and her friend have come up with to describe those instances in life that are beyond explanation and are more than mere coincidence. They call them “divine co-inky-dinks.”
I see them as moments in life when we sense the Eternal, feeling love, compassion, acceptance, presence, and peace.
Thoughtful reading…
Footnote: I believe that death is not the last word. The last word is always God’s, and God’s word is life—life with the quality of the Eternal about it.
My own personal understanding of God: “God—the Mystery beyond all mysteries—is the creative, energizing, unifying, transforming, renewing eternal.Spirit who is love; whose presence permeates the multiverse and penetrates all of life, here and hereafter.”
Thank you! I have thought forever ( as a Christian of indeterminate theology) that heaven as depicted in scripture seems endlessly BORING!!! Imagine hanging out with "nice" people for all eternity! It seems a balance to hell in Satre's No Exit -- like being stuck in a dentist's waiting room with the people who most annoy you. Not your enemies -- that's energizing -- but the people who just . . annoy you. Anyway, I have come to believe that the Lord's prayer has the answer: Thy kin-dom come, thy will be done, ON EARTH. . . !"
Have you ever watched a TV show called “The Good Place”? If not, I highly recommend it. It is extremely funny, but also thought provoking.
Streets of gold and gates of pearl? Doesnt really sound like the teachings of Jesus - at least as far back as I can remember from Sunday School. The whole gold and pearl hardware sound too much like our current WH! Not appealing.
The rainbow bridge story those of us who love and believe in our animals have heard and read about for years. That story is far more comforting and appealing than gold and pearl.
I suppose some people might not agree, but oh well. Who's to know for sure?
Wonderful piece.
Thank you for such thoughtful observations on a topic that for most of us defies a definitive conclusion (paradoxically!). This would of course be a marvelous Aaron Woolf film (did anyone shoot the bombed keynote at the opening?), a project that would give you a chance to weigh this further. Or maybe you don’t need to do that; maybe what’s granted us to know is sufficient, along the lines of the Seder refrain, “Dayenu” (it is enough). In this one topic, I’m comfortable in unknowing. But I’m grateful for your ruminations today.