Philosophies of heaven are interesting - it says a lot about somebody, what they think will happen to them when they die (and of course what they think will happen to other people, but we'll get to that later). Obviously, if you don't believe in an afterlife, it's a bit moot, so you could just think about your ideal society instead. But there are some key things about Heaven that make it particularly intriguing to try to describe:
a) Everybody's dead, and getting a fresh start of sorts.
b) It's FOR-EV-ER.
c) You're face-to-face with your deity.
Even setting aside Purgatory and reincarnation-until-nirvana for the moment, there are obviously a lot of ways for heaven to look, but I've found the following ideas (pulled from various sources) to be worth dwelling on, both for what they say about my hopes for the afterlife and for their implications in the here-and-now.
To be fully known.
It is no secret that everybody has secrets - shame, and feeling unloved are common. So in thinking about heaven, one appealing bit is the idea that your whole life might be known and understood... and that you might be loved regardless. Most people know the feeling already of having loved someone else enough to overlook whatever they might do badly, or to want to be with them even in the midst of hard circumstances, but it's difficult to see oneself in that same light. So to have that affirmation on a big scale, start-to-finish of how you lived your life, would be pretty amazing. And not just from another person, of course, but from everyone, and above all your deity.
Some would have it go so far as to actually merge consciousnesses - to be so connected to others as to start being pretty indistinguishable. Me, I'd be OK retaining some autonomy, which brings us to the next bit:
To be fully yourself.
This is a hard one to put into words, but I'll give it a shot - the concept of heaven being a place where not only are you free from negatives like shame, above, but also now have the freedom and power to act on all your best desires with nothing holding you back. Personally, I imagine it like being able to actually follow up on all those silly hypothetical "get-to-know-each-other" questions from summer camps - "Assuming you could talk to anybody from history, who would it be?" "Assuming you could go anywhere instantly, where would you visit?" "Would you want to have wings or a tail if you could, and if so what kind?" That sort of freedom would be great just in itself - and so to add on a level in which you could also BE, and not just superficially, always true to yourself, would be a big component of paradise, I think.
To have time.
"Always true to yourself" also highlights the central concept of heaven as eternal. For some, this means everything would kind of blend together, making it effectively a static, timeless, place. Others would want to basically become little gods, themselves - ruling over a planet in sort of a "Civ. V"-style playground. Regardless, this new immortality lets you end up spending time the way you've always wanted, without that meddlesome death business. In my own thinking, I'd veer a little more towards Heaven as process rather than Heaven as static, though I'm humble enough not to think anybody would ever let me rule a planet. But I like the idea that in heaven, if you want to paint a painting, you might be able to just snap your fingers and have it appear... but you might also just be able to learn to paint. Same goes for studying - you could presumably make the trip out to NGC 6302 when not bound by this current earthly body, rather than just looking at the Hubble picture - but the joy of discovering that sort of thing is something I think heaven will include, and not spoil by having everybody just learn all about it instantaneously Matrix-style. And moreso with discovering cool people. OK, last attribute for now, since our own time is still limited:
To see God.
This is kind of a tricky one, since not everybody even believes in God, much less the same one. So YMMV with this point. But I think that, one way or another, we'll all want to settle the question definitively in the afterlife, of what was going on down here on Earth, and the why (if there is one). The search for meaning is huge with humans, and so in heaven, it'll be good to finally get some answers. To provide the requisite pop-culture references for this section: it's always intriguing to me when shows like The Walking Dead or Game of Thrones have the characters deal with the "Problem of Evil." It's very understandable for them to question the amount of meaning or goodness in their world, since their deities are the likes of Grr Martin. The real world can also be pretty evil and question-provoking, which is why we relate to such shows so readily, but the bottom line is that the high expectations we had for a meaningful ending for, say, Lost, are nothing compared with what most people expect God to be able to write for our current existence.
Anyhow, all this to say, these aspects of heaven highlight hopes for the future, but also hopes for the present. I think pretty much everybody wants to be loved for who they are, be a more consistently awesome person, have time to explore and do the things they've always wanted, and of course to see good come from our struggles and meaning from our suffering. I can hope the afterlife does these things, but I also hope it'd just be a continuation of the trends established down here.
*****
This post is dedicated to my friend Lizet, who, as of today, is finding all this out first-hand. Peace, sister.
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