Addicted to the Afterlife

It is the nature of addiction (or at least the mind-forged manacles variety I am familiar with) for the addictee to desire a reward: you suffer, and the only way you move beyond the suffering (present moment) is to imagine a reward that will make the suffering go away. In other words, while you suffer you imagine some thing or experience that will give you pleasure in the future. The problem is that you imagine pain to be eternal and unending and wish that pleasure could be the same, but you fail to realize that both pain and suffering are temporal. Because of this, the twin desire to both escape pain and to seek pleasure is futile and can only end in disappointment because the goal will never ultimately be attained.

The way a pleasure reward becomes an addiction is when, through some sort of mental self trickery, you convince yourself (your mind convinces itself) that the only way to endure pain is through the belief - indeed, faith - that you will get a reward when the suffering is over.

For example, when I run these days, I have a nice little addiction to sports drinks - Gatorade usually, but it could be any number of sugared-out sports drinks packed with sugars and potassium and electrolytes (salts). True, for the amount of running I do (50+ miles a week) I need physically these drinks to rehydrate. But, mentally - and long distance running is as much about mental discipline as it is physical conditioning - I have told myself that I deserve a sports drink when I am done. I deserve it - it is my due, I have suffered and now I get my reward for being a good doggy. As I run, I continually imagine how good the drink will taste and because is it in fact an intense pleasure to drink a bottle of Gatorade after a long run, I spend a good time of my run wishing it was over so I could get to that pleasure experience at the end.

So too, I believe, does a person who sees this life as suffering and painful and hard create a similar attachment to the afterlife - Heaven, in other words. The relgionist who believes that all this world is a fallen, damaged sham ruined by our inherent sinful nature, uses the promise of the afterlife to endure and suffer through this world. Heaven is the reward at the end of suffering, due recompense for time served, the end reward for making it through the test of living through this mortal coil we know as life on earth. So, all experiences and feelings and goals and disappointments here and now are not fully, consciously experienced because we are in a hurry to get them over with so we can get on to the bliss of Heaven,

Thus a person can become addicted to the afterlife, thinking and speaking and dreaming about notions and visions of heaven (which is hard to imagine physically), a blissed out state where there is no suffering, no pain, no hardship - only the Glory of God making everything alright, like it was perhaps in the womb, or even that moment of time (eternity in an hour?) just before the sperm hit the egg and found its purchase, before little zygotes did their job, before cell division and all that scientific mumbo jumbo - it is possible this person I call me had an existence and state of being then? In the end, as Eliot said, is our beginning. Thoughts of the afterlife become a drug when it is used to blot out the naked lunch of existence that is right there before us everyday: the snapshot of reality as it simulteneously grows and decays before our very eyes, including this body we inhabit.