One of DS' posts has prompted me to express my thoughts on afterlife. Since I was a little kid, afterlife in heaven has always been a fascinating thing for me. I remember when I was still a small little kid (prob primary 1), I had a very interesting conversation with my mum about afterlife in heaven (Ds, I know my memory is scary). Our conversation was as follows:
Me : 妈，天堂是怎样子的？
Mum : 天堂就是一个没有烦恼，没有痛苦的地方咯！
Me : 这样在天堂我们还要不要做工？
Mum : 当然不用啦，在天堂你就每天享受生活，不用愁吃愁穿。
Me : 这样钱从哪里来？
Mum : 在天堂，你要什么上帝都会给你的。
Me : 这样子在天堂每天都不用做工，就一直玩耍？
Mum : 对啊，每天都不用做工，每天玩耍，所以生活就没有烦恼咯！
Me : 可是在天堂的日子很长哦，每天玩耍玩到一千年不会xian的meh？你每天快乐，过不久也是会麻木的哦！
Mum : (有点不耐烦）不知道哦，这个你就要问牧师了。
Haha，I don't know why, till now, I can still remember this conversation so vividly. Looking back now, I'm quite amazed by my ability to comprehend and ask such a philosophical question at such a young age during that time. I'm not bragging about myself, even till today, I'm still asking myself and thinking about the last question that I asked.
In my opinion, there are two problems with the concept of a "heaven" that enables people to live happily forever after-- Happiness and Sadness must always co-exist. You will never know what it feels like to be happy without knowing the meaning of sadness. For eg: how do you know going back home to see your family is a happy thing? It's because you have experienced the loneliness and sadness of staying away from your family. How do you know getting good result will make you happy? It's because you have experienced the disappointment and unpleasant experience of scoring badly in your exam and being scolded by your parents and teachers, or you can also know that from other people's experience. Happiness and sadness are always two sides to a coin. You won't know what it means to be happy without experiencing or knowing sadness in the first place.
The second problem is the concept of "living forever". To me, life is precious and meaningful because it will come to an end one day. That limitation of life and the scarcity of time makes me even more acutely aware of every second and every moment that passes by. I know I have only that limited amount of time to do things that I like to do and to make this world a better place. In fact, I dont understand why I need to have a "forever life" so that I can live a meaningful life. Forever life means that I have plenty amount of time, everything can wait and wait and wait since time will never end. I will just keep on procrastinating and keep on wasting my time without the fear that time will end one day and I have yet to do anything meaningful. Do you think this kind of life is more meaningful? There is a saying that "天下无不散的筵席”，it is precisely because of the limited amount of time that makes every gathering with friends and family so meaningful and precious, because once I miss the opportunity to see my friend this time, I might not be able to meet up with him/her again in the future.
When I was a small little kid, I used to think that "living forever" is the best, probably it's due to the fear of death. But now, I understand that there's a start and end to everything, it's just like watching a movie. Can you imagine watching a movie forever with no ending? I don't think anyone would wanna watch that kind of movie, it's precisely because there's an end to the movie that makes the movie unique and memorable. And death is just an ending to one's life movie.
After going through this thought process, I find that "forever life" is more scary than "death". Because I may just become a robot (since I will be numbed to the feeling of happiness) after some time and yet I will be living forever as a robot, with no ending.
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1 comments:
from a christian perspective, (which is what we believe whether or not u think it's absurb lol), in heaven, time and space dont exist, which in human context, we use the word eternal = unlimited time, but actually there is no 'time'. So u actually wont feel "damn, i've been here for ages"
and u may think that we might be fed up being happy everyday, but bear in mind, we are not flesh and body, but a (i think should be) spirit entity.
As a human, we get to be desensitized over a period of time, biologically because we have limited amount of triggering factors(in neurological pathway), that's y we physcially will get tired of feeling certain sense after a certain duration.
And u r right that happyness and sadness/suffer do co-exist. that's y there is heaven and hell, where u can actually see the contrast.
i cited all these from the book that u think is of highly contradictory haha.. oh ya.. haven been owes trying to tell u that those contradicting verse stated in wikipedia is lame. (read the whole chapter and u know y)
you actually trigger my interest in reading the book =.=
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