by Tucker Lieberman

Created on: November 18, 2011

If Heaven were a real place apart from this world, would people there argue about the same twaddle that consumes us on Earth?  It is hard to imagine that such a heaven could be worthy of the name.

In his novel Schopenhauer's Telescope, Gerard Donovan imagined dead souls arguing about "how to eat honey, what temperature, what infinity means now that they're in it and, well, bored. Meetings, arguments, leaders…they don't trust humanity, don't trust anyone. If I could, I'd write a scene in heaven where thousands of millions of them sit around and listen to sermons from each other."

This scenario is funny because it sounds more like Hell than Heaven.  But exactly what is hellish about it?  The Buddhist teacher Stephen Levine says our hell is simply wanting to be somewhere else, and this makes some intuitive sense, given that any heaven primarily populated with discontents seems to be blowing a hole through its own purpose.

The nature of our hellish discontent is hard to pin down.  We each feel and express our own cynical wanderlust in different ways at different times.  Sometimes it appears as a protest against unfairness.  Sometimes it's an urge to escape pain, drudgery, or embarrassment.  Sometimes, even when the surface of the waters appears untroubled, it's a nagging sense that This Cannot Really Be It.

There are also various reasons why we each develop assumptions about what our lives should be like and why we become frustrated when something goes awry.  Some religious doctrines teach people to feel entitled to a prosperous present and an awestruck afterlife.  Even if a person is not religious, simply growing up in the material world generates a lifetime's worth of hopes and expectations.  Children, unburdened by these learned assumptions, sometimes surprise adults in how matter-of-fact they can be when facing their own mortality.  For similar reasons one could hypothesize that non-religious adults, insofar as they are unimpressed by the implausible promises of orthodoxy, find it that much easier to accept that death is final.

These individual differences aside, everyone knows the meaning of fear and dissatisfaction.  Whether we are religious or non-religious, old or young, accepting our current position can be awfully tricky.  Yet what else is there to accept?  Environmental activist Derrick Jensen wrote in Endgame that "for the time we are here on Earth – whether or not we

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