What Heaven does not Want I do not Need

It’s been a pleasantly rainy week-end and I’ve stayed at home while everyone else is away at a music festival. I suppose ‘pleasantly rainy’ implies a stone building, not a nylon tent.

I very quickly fell into the habit of mindfulness meditation whenever away from the computer. There is nothing about my ordinary life that keeps me from practicing mindfulness, but somehow it seemed that when I was alone, there was nothing else to do, or could hope to do.

While I was rummaging through memories, I felt pangs of regret over mistakes I’d made, and even despair when I thought that most of them were patterned.

It occurred to me that there can be no healthy way for me to make myself cranky about myself. Usually, when I am making myself cranky, I am thinking about something that is not me. That is perhaps pathetic, but at least not pathologic.

Then I started imagining the outcomes of the alternatives to my bad decisions. Married Person X, lived in City Y. I regretted them all, some even more. However, my ‘mistakes’ spared me from a job and a house that I didn’t and don’t want. I would have been the prisoner of a gilded cage. I started thinking that at least my mistakes have led me to a place where I have the luxury of reflecting upon them peacefully. I’m not too stressed or harried for it. I don’t know if that makes my decision-tree the least bad path, but there is some closed-loop logic that identifies it as a sufficiently thoughtful path.

The more time I spent observing my mental state, the better it became. Just thinking about how I was repairing my thoughts was making me happy. I entered a virtuous circle.

On the second day, I began to experience a growing sense of bliss. It lasted so long and became so powerful, I was distracted from doing anything other than attending to it. It was an awesome body high. It was so intense, I thought I was going to start dreaming of Heaven and that I would not be able to stop. (Heaven for me is a particular kind of dreamscape, and not a religious place.)

I considered what I would have to leave behind. I ended up deciding that I’d managed to get a pretty comfortable life that was unlikely to improve. I can only hope for different, not better, so I shouldn’t say no to different if it does mean better.

I thought about the bouts of crankiness to which I am still subject, and what an unlikely candidate for Heaven that makes me. It occurred to me subsequently that this kind of self-doubt and self-recrimination is by itself a disqualification. If Heaven isn’t about feeling good, it is the most curious kind of heaven. Therefore, there is no perspective in which this type of thinking should be in my interests. Besides, isn’t it Heaven’s problem? I mean, they can’t be too fussy these days, so they must have some kind of internship or boot camp. I’ll be fine. And if not, what’s the worst that can happen? I’ll wake up in my bed on Earth. Maybe it happens every night to everyone. Each night, we try to get in, only to get rejected and to awaken in our beds in the morning. Maybe we’re all in a cranky refugee camp on the outskirts of Heaven, and only our arrogance makes it appear to be reality.

Just say yes. It’s all anyone in Heaven wants to hear, and besides, what part of Heaven don’t you want? Yes will be fine.

I did laundry, to make sure no one would get stuck washing my dirty clothes. I made sure the cat had enough food and water to get through the next day. I turned off my computer instead of putting it to sleep.

As I lay in bed, I turned the fan to blow in my face, because it feels a little like flying. I shuddered from the last wave of bliss. Then I closed my eyes.

When I opened them, I had just broken the surface of an indoor university swimming pool. I was standing chest-deep in water. Other people had similarly come to the surface. We were all a little confused. Some life-guards ushered us out of the pool and back to starting blocks on the pool’s edge. These were literally blocks, and each was a different height. We mounted the blocks, and on a signal, dove into the pool and began swimming, as in a race. Magically, the life-guards were in the water and assisting each student to throw strokes. When it was over, we stood around haplessly. The department head waded over to me. He was a man with thin gray hair and gray beard, wearing an office suit and spectacles.

He gestured to the starting blocks. “We’re doing research on the heights of starting blocks. We want to see if starting height makes a difference in the outcome of the race.”

I was baffled, and slightly overwhelmed, as I usually am in this kind of allegorical dream. “What do you think?” he asked.

I said that I didn’t know.

He removed his glasses. “Let me explain it to you,” he said.

I awoke into a modern city at night. My mouth was drooping open. My thoughts ran like molasses. What was happening to me? I was standing on the sidewalk on a boulevard across from a square. I vaguely recognized the city from earlier dreams, but not from waking life. A tall woman approached me. “I want to show you something,” she said in English.

I have no clear memories after that. We went to a store and met some people. I think that the situations were supposed to be annoying, but I was too stupid to react the way I normally would. My thinking seemed to be about five seconds behind everyone else’s. I didn’t mind it. I thought that even if I couldn’t understand enough to get cranky, I wasn’t in danger. My guide seemed to know what was going on. Besides, the city was pretty at night.

When I awoke in my bed, hours had passed. I realised that my questions about Heaven had just been answered. The height of your starting point might make a difference, but if the goal is simply to be allowed in the pool, the race is rather moot. The height of your starting point might make a difference, but probably not as much difference as your swimming ability,.

I think I got the second message as well: crankiness is a toxic by-product of intelligence. You need to understand a situation in all its relevant details pretty well in order to feel confident that your disgruntlement is someone else’s fault.

I saw that if I’m not in danger, there isn’t much to be cranky about. I don’t need it and Heaven doesn’t want it. It’s all rather simple, in the end.