(Note: This was actually written in a paper notebook (you know, those $1.19 laptops) about a year and a half ago, and I just recently refound it. I’m posting it here to test a theory.)
One of the strangest things about being dead is how long it takes you to become aware of it. You lie there waiting for a feeling of peace, a spectral figure with a scythe, a choir of angels, the promised fruits of your martyrdom. None materialize.
Of course, it is perhaps a malapropism to say ‘materialize’, since the first thing which /does/ strike you is that you are no longer material.
It is roughly at this point that you begin to understand just what has happened, and there swiftly follows the shock of realizing that neither your doctor nor your lawyer nor your therapist will see you. You can literally walk into their offices, jump up and down and scream at the top of your insubstantial lungs, and they will not see you.
So where is St. Peter, where are your 71 virgins? Where lies your eternal reward, be it bliss or damnation?
As with all those who have gone before, you will soon experience a wrenching of sorts as your Awareness is separated from your immortal soul, to be added to the Global Whole, a totality of understanding and insight which keeps the entropy of the Universe at bay.
Your soul will be fed back into the great system when this is done, but it will take time. During this period, you may experience the joy of making a constructive contribution to the Global Whole based on the contents of your Awareness, or the despair of the destruction which you have wrought being cast aside like unwanted chaff. It is not truly eternal, but by the time it ends, you have insufficient Awareness to perceive that.
Such, then, would be Heaven or Hell.
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