Do You Want To Know What Heaven Looks Like?

(this hasn't been edited yet, so be warned.)

Amidst pictures of hieroglyphs, my mind keeps circling back to the main actress at the end of The Mummy Returns who asks Brendan Fraiser (after being resurrected and fighting off one of the bad guys with crazy Sai skills she must've learned while dead) a casual, frustrating question. She asks it in this sultry British accent that may or may not be real. I can't remember the exact wording, but this is what I think I remember:

"Do you want to know what Heaven looks like?" And they fly away into the sunset on a hot air balloon.

I should probably go back to the beginning.

***

I love having important books around, even if I don't use them. I think this bad habit of mine reached its heyday after studying Ancient Greek for a measly year - now, I have a Greek New Testament, my Greek textbooks, a binder full of Greek exercises and notes, Plato's Crito in Greek, and, for whatever reason, a Homeric Dictionary and the first 18 books of the Odyssey in Greek that I bought at my college bookstore for an Ancient Greek class I never intended to take. But the ruler of this pantheon of useless information is my faux-leather-bound copy of Smyth's "Greek Grammar," which sits, with its cordovan-color and its gold letters, nearest to the pinnacle of my bookshelf. Comparatively, my full copy of Shakespeare's First Folio is hidden to the side, but that's in part because it's too big to actually fit on the shelf.

And next to that Folio is my newest acquisition, which is also too big for shelf life or my established pantheons of useless information: The Egyptian Book of the Dead.

I've gone about buying up copies of guides to the afterlife, in the pursuit of understanding how humans understand Death. The Bardo Thodol (also known as The Tibetan Book of the Dead) was my first one, and I'm also looking to find a good copy of the Medieval European guide to Death: Ars Moriendi. While I'm still wading through my texts, I find myself additionally marred by my preconceptions about them. The Egyptian Book of the Dead in particular, as you can see by my mind being on a continuous loop of The Mummy Returns. Let me see if I can make a little list of some of those preconceptions/obstacles:

-The lady from The Mummy Returns.
-The popular perception of The Egyptian Book of the Dead as a guide to necromancy. Since it refers to the things in it as "spells" (which originates as the Anglo-Saxon word for "story" I believe: e.g. "godspell" meaning "God's Story"), part of me is concerned that by reading the book I am somehow enacting it. Two interesting sidenotes: 1) that's the heart of why theater gets banned - when something happens onstage and the audience thinks it really happened; 2) The Bardo may not be magic, but the name implies that the act of a dead body hearing it read aloud will cause the person's soul/consciousness to ascend. So again there's that performative aspect to the power of the words themselves that is not entirely rational.
-The lingering comparisons I've heard used to dismiss Christianity as some kind of mixtape of Egyptian religion and Neoplatonic philosophy.

As I said, I'm still mid-mystery here across the board: I've finished neither Book of the Dead, and my knowledge of the rest of world religions, let alone how they treat death, comes down to my own experience practicing Christianity and some survey-style books I've read. My Greek has deteriorated so much that I can't really read the New Testament that I bought so I could discern the original intent of the authors. It's just more information in there with snippets of The Epic of Gilgamesh and a vague understanding of symbolism in literature that makes me think I know what's up. Oh, and The Mummy Returns, apparently. For all the books that I love having on my bookshelf, there's very little knowledge I have to go up against some of the challenges in these texts, and in myself.

Which is when that lady from The Mummy Returns stuck on loop finally made something click.

***

My good friend, who's now an expert in the Old Testament, pointed out that one chief characteristic of the Old Testament world was Scarcity. There was never enough food to go around, never enough goodness in the hearts of everybody, never enough power to keep everyone safe, etc. I'm probably butchering that, but you get the general idea. And this idea of Scarcity has been alive and well, even through today. This shone some light one element of The Egyptian Book of the Dead that has always struck me, even if I didn't know how to process it. The Book was originally written as a guide through Duat, the Underworld (where the sun went during the night) through to "Aaru," which theoretically located at the point of dawn in the east. While souls might live in the Underworld, following the advice in the Book and reaching Aaru means you've attained godhood, and can mingle with Osiris and boogey down on the boat of the sun.

Here's what struck me, and what the lady from The Mummy Returns was actually articulating: I never think much about what Heaven looks like anymore. I think a lot about what the Underworld and sometimes what Hell might look like due to my macabre tastes in literature and all this research, but there's some moratorium in me when it comes to the details of Heaven. I run into enough trouble trusting my own intuitions and beliefs to begin with, and the act of thinking of a pleasant afterlife as an actual place seems to have been ingrained in me as somehow gauche, backwards, unenlightened, and generally stupid.

Now, Aaru isn't too specific, any more than the Elysian Fields are, but there is something oddly comforting about it. And it's not being a peer with the gods and free from their control. Call me crazy, but that doesn't actually appeal to me as much as the Abundance that Aaru would represent in the minds of the Egyptians. Aaru's chief defining quality is that it is the spiritual heart (specifically the Ka, the soul) of the Nile, and the word itself means "field of reeds."

I'd never thought of Heaven like a field of reeds before, but I have thought of Heaven as a place of Abundance, even if I couldn't always put my finger on it as specifically as the Egyptians did by putting their Paradise in the sacred center of the thing that gave them life. If the actress from The Mummy Returns did her homework, that would've been apparently what was pretending to have seen after fighting all the bad guys off with her crazy Sai skills.

So much of my looking into Death has involved ghost stories, mutilated bodies, menacing underworld rulers, and the like, but I might be losing the forest for its trees. During this research, I often figuratively wrestle with my own doubts, my own fears, and in doing so I often discover that although I seem to have an abundance of information, none of it is useful. I have a scarcity of wisdom. One thing that afterlives which value a process (The Egyptian Book of the Dead, The Bardo Thodol, Dante's Purgatorio...) all cope with is how Death discerns what is essential. And once the dead have passed through the process, they too are only what is essential, and they have that essential thing in Abundance.

This is where looking at how people treat Death gives me perspective.

***

I wonder where my unessentials are in life right now. And I'm starting to wonder what Heaven looks like again. That second wonder makes me think of two things:

-A favorite professor of mine clarifying a line in the Book of John. Jesus at one point is often translated as saying "the Kingdom of God is within you." Apparently the line is something more like "the Kingdom of God is among you." For me this fits better with when Jesus tells his followers that if two or more of them meet in his name, he'll be there too. Calling to mind those two passages is how I begin most of the Quaker Meetings I attend.
-The following quote from the Bardo:

Oh nobly born, when the body and mind were separating, thou must have experienced a glimpse of the Pure Truth, subtle, sparkling, bright, dazzling, glorious, and radiantly awesome, in appearance like a mirage moving across a landscape in springtime in one continuous stream of vibrations. Be not daunted thereby, nor terrified, nor awed. That is the radiance of thine own true nature. Recognize it.

From the midst of that radiance, the natural sound of Reality, reverberating like a thousand thunders simultaneously sounding, will come. That is the natural sound of thine own real self. Be not daunted thereby, nor terrified, nor awed.


Here, 'Reality' is so abundant that its sound is too great to imagine. Of course a Buddhist would probably slap me on the wrists and say that Reality is neither abundant nor scarce, nor non-abundant nor non-scarce, that it has no sounds, but no silence, nor any non-sounds, nor any non-silence ... but the poetry certainly speaks to a kind of abundance you find in other traditions.