This is directly relevant to a previous essay, titled “Smile in the Dark”.  If you haven’t read that, this won’t make as much sense.

In that thought, I discussed the mechanisms of death and enlightenment, specifically describing the “life flashing before your eyes” phenomena.

Have peered deeper into that mechanism, I have seen an even deeper piece that has shown me in very clear detail that forgiveness is not just an option.  It’s compulsory.

As a reminder, this is accepting the notion that your connection to your own personal Godhood is what allows you to fill the role of judge, in determining the course of your afterlife.

Here’s how it works.

The day you are born, you are empty, with the exception of a few base instincts and impulses designed by a few million years worth of evolution.  From that point on you start learning, and as you learn, you attach yourself to certain beliefs that come together to form your psychological self.

That self is inevitably faced with a life’s worth of decisions and some of those decisions will be wrong.  Those wrong decisions are what religion refers to as sin.  That sin is what we are told will result in an unfavorable judgement at the end of ourselves.

Trying to rationalize the religious perspective, all I can see is an ideology obsessed with the need to feel some sense of control.  I don’t believe we have much.  I don’t think our psychological self is made in a series of well informed, intentional directives. I think we’re all just flailing around, haplessly attaching our person to whatever we can find that makes us feel safe and important.  More importantly, knowing that any and all decisions we make are the sum of what we have learned, and that everything we have learned has obviously come from outside of us, our own redemption seems to be inherent in our nature as consumers.

Based on this alone, I already have all I need to tell you that you are perfect, but yesterday I realized how I can prove it to you.

When you die, you will see your life.  Not from start to finish, but rather, from finish to start ant that distinction is extremely important.  You start now, and hit the metaphysical rewind button.  You will see all of your actions in reverse order and that’s exactly how the compulsory forgiveness is manifested.

You see someone you hurt, you feel their pain and their anger that gently increases in intensity until the incident occurs.  You understand the effect you had on them, whatever that may have been.  You see this again and again, and the more you see it, the clearer the pattern becomes.  That pattern is distilled into a belief, and then it happens, you witness the moment that belief formed;  the moment that information was absorbed into your being.  Then in a moment, that belief is cast off, back to the void from which it manifested.

My life has been no stranger to hurt.  That hurt has resulted in a lot of subsequent hurt as I lacked the strength to resolve it before it echoed into someone else’s life.  When I die, I will witness the avalanche of hurt I have caused, but I will also watch that hurt, along with every other belief or idea I’ve ever latched on to disappear in a reverse ballet of my metaphysical disassembly.

At the end of the show, I will be left to witness myself as I was at the beginning.  Empty.  I believe that along with that emptiness, I will also witness my innocence.  With innocence comes freedom.

My only question is whether or not we will be faced with the choice of holding on to these ideas.  If so then that weight will be carried into our afterlife, and so the thought concludes with an endorsement of the eastern idea of practicing renunciation.  Practice letting go so that you are able to avoid carrying your fetters into the afterlife.  There is nothing you’ve learned here that you need take into paradise.