Theory #8: Sleeping Through Judgment Day
Introducing the Book’s of Mark’s first “derivative theory”:
Do you know those TV episodes of sitcoms where they use clips from previous shows and mix them in with lame bits of new footage to create a minute-rice version of a new show? Well, this isn’t quite that bad, but it basically involves taking some existing theories, adding them together and extrapolating them into different scenarios to create new theories.
Leonard Cohen once coined the phrase “The place is dead as heaven on a Saturday night.”
I always liked this line because it introduces the bleak concept that, even if there is a heaven, it still might be disappointing. Being a white male aged 18 to 45, I have not only had questions throughout my life as to what will happen after I die, I have actually had expectations.
Growing up I always had the basic hope that I will get to find out all the things that went on that I couldn’t know when I was alive. Things like:
“Which one of us kept underpaying at the restaurant when we were short?”
“Who was right and who was wrong in every argument I have ever had?”
“What is the worst thing I ever caused that I never knew about?”
“Did I tell more lies or was I told more lies?”
“Was anyone faking?”
“On average, did I masturbate more or less than the average person in my demographic?”
“What is the worst thing that was ever done to me?”
And, the million dollar question:
“Overall, was I a good person?”
It just made sense to me that we should find all that stuff out – it went directly against my sense of justice that you don’t eventually learn everything about every decision we ever made. If someone really screwed me over I wanted to sit on an afterlife couch, eat some popcorn (that would hopefully be “to die for”) and find out all about it.
The idea of having a simple judgment day where you either went to heaven, hell or purgatory was entirely unsatisfactory and not nearly precise enough.. I pictured that the next life would have a ready-made formula that assigned weighted scores to each and every decision we ever made, averaged this down to a normalized formula, and give us each a score out of 100 as to how well we lived our life. We could then receive our “Percentile Life Ranking”© that told us what percentage of humans we were better than, and what percentage we were worse than.
Did I mention I am fairly competitive?
Having now grown significantly older and marginally wiser, I am pleased to report that I have gradually become lower maintenance when it comes to afterlives. I have come to accept that my incessant need to have every loose end tied up was part of a deep-seeded belief that life had to be fair. If it wasn’t fair in this life, I expected the next life to make things right.
As you might have guessed, I no longer look to afterlives to rectify the injustices of the present one. I stopped worrying about future lives about the time I realized that this is the only one I can be certain of enjoying. I have accepted that life isn’t always fair. Luckily, it doesn’t seem as important as it used to.
If you have been reading any previous Book of Mark propaganda you have probably noticed a recurring theme of striving for self-actualization as being the key goal to life. I am starting to think that life is a long journey of self improvement, and how well you do in becoming the person you want to be is the real goal, while the stuff that happens and the things other people do to you is less important.
And so Theory # 8 becomes a matter of simple arithmetic: If you start with Theory #2 and strive to be truly honest with yourself, and then add a healthy dose of Theory #6 where you only really focus on the things in life that are truly important, it all adds up to Theory 8:
When it’s all said and done, what life does to you isn’t as important as what you do with life, and you are the only person who has the potential to accurately and fairly judge yourself. If you have truly strived to be who you want to be, and you have gotten yourself to a place where you like who you are, then you don’t need other people, or even your god(s), to tell you who you were and whether you should consider yourself a good person. You have been honest with yourself and kept what is important in perspective. You should already know yourself. All those other questions I asked are just the little details in life that lead you to becoming yourself.
There you have it: 6+2=8. As usual, I offer a simple answer for a complex issue. Sadly, we all know that all kinds of people will beat up innocents, strap themselves to bombs or lie and cheat loved ones, all 100% insistent that they are being exactly the person they want to be. Not everyone is fit to judge themselves. I can only assume they would be if they read the first 7 theories more closely. How do you reconcile the self-congratulations of the immoral into a world of do-it-yourself judgment?
I will soon get to another theory that deals with all that, but it will do nothing to change the fact that we are right back where we started, you have get used to the fact life isn’t fair, and that you just need to focus on yourself.
Addendum – If you are getting as tired of reading about self exploration theories as I am about writing them, you can accept this as a promise that I plan on going a little broader soon. In Theory 10 the aliens will finally arrive and they are going to try and shake things up a bit.
Do you know those TV episodes of sitcoms where they use clips from previous shows and mix them in with lame bits of new footage to create a minute-rice version of a new show? Well, this isn’t quite that bad, but it basically involves taking some existing theories, adding them together and extrapolating them into different scenarios to create new theories.
Leonard Cohen once coined the phrase “The place is dead as heaven on a Saturday night.”
I always liked this line because it introduces the bleak concept that, even if there is a heaven, it still might be disappointing. Being a white male aged 18 to 45, I have not only had questions throughout my life as to what will happen after I die, I have actually had expectations.
Growing up I always had the basic hope that I will get to find out all the things that went on that I couldn’t know when I was alive. Things like:
“Which one of us kept underpaying at the restaurant when we were short?”
“Who was right and who was wrong in every argument I have ever had?”
“What is the worst thing I ever caused that I never knew about?”
“Did I tell more lies or was I told more lies?”
“Was anyone faking?”
“On average, did I masturbate more or less than the average person in my demographic?”
“What is the worst thing that was ever done to me?”
And, the million dollar question:
“Overall, was I a good person?”
It just made sense to me that we should find all that stuff out – it went directly against my sense of justice that you don’t eventually learn everything about every decision we ever made. If someone really screwed me over I wanted to sit on an afterlife couch, eat some popcorn (that would hopefully be “to die for”) and find out all about it.
The idea of having a simple judgment day where you either went to heaven, hell or purgatory was entirely unsatisfactory and not nearly precise enough.. I pictured that the next life would have a ready-made formula that assigned weighted scores to each and every decision we ever made, averaged this down to a normalized formula, and give us each a score out of 100 as to how well we lived our life. We could then receive our “Percentile Life Ranking”© that told us what percentage of humans we were better than, and what percentage we were worse than.
Did I mention I am fairly competitive?
Having now grown significantly older and marginally wiser, I am pleased to report that I have gradually become lower maintenance when it comes to afterlives. I have come to accept that my incessant need to have every loose end tied up was part of a deep-seeded belief that life had to be fair. If it wasn’t fair in this life, I expected the next life to make things right.
As you might have guessed, I no longer look to afterlives to rectify the injustices of the present one. I stopped worrying about future lives about the time I realized that this is the only one I can be certain of enjoying. I have accepted that life isn’t always fair. Luckily, it doesn’t seem as important as it used to.
If you have been reading any previous Book of Mark propaganda you have probably noticed a recurring theme of striving for self-actualization as being the key goal to life. I am starting to think that life is a long journey of self improvement, and how well you do in becoming the person you want to be is the real goal, while the stuff that happens and the things other people do to you is less important.
And so Theory # 8 becomes a matter of simple arithmetic: If you start with Theory #2 and strive to be truly honest with yourself, and then add a healthy dose of Theory #6 where you only really focus on the things in life that are truly important, it all adds up to Theory 8:
When it’s all said and done, what life does to you isn’t as important as what you do with life, and you are the only person who has the potential to accurately and fairly judge yourself. If you have truly strived to be who you want to be, and you have gotten yourself to a place where you like who you are, then you don’t need other people, or even your god(s), to tell you who you were and whether you should consider yourself a good person. You have been honest with yourself and kept what is important in perspective. You should already know yourself. All those other questions I asked are just the little details in life that lead you to becoming yourself.
There you have it: 6+2=8. As usual, I offer a simple answer for a complex issue. Sadly, we all know that all kinds of people will beat up innocents, strap themselves to bombs or lie and cheat loved ones, all 100% insistent that they are being exactly the person they want to be. Not everyone is fit to judge themselves. I can only assume they would be if they read the first 7 theories more closely. How do you reconcile the self-congratulations of the immoral into a world of do-it-yourself judgment?
I will soon get to another theory that deals with all that, but it will do nothing to change the fact that we are right back where we started, you have get used to the fact life isn’t fair, and that you just need to focus on yourself.
Addendum – If you are getting as tired of reading about self exploration theories as I am about writing them, you can accept this as a promise that I plan on going a little broader soon. In Theory 10 the aliens will finally arrive and they are going to try and shake things up a bit.
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3 Comments:
Do you mean judgement or temperature taking. If you judge yourself you can have one of two outcomes.. "I am good" or "I am bad." I guess it's ok when it comes up "I am good" but the latter does not serve one very well. What's done is done and is not either good or bad, it just is. I will maintain that judging yourself is a non-productive activity.
As Mr. Mackey would say "Judgement's bad, mmmkay." LOL, LOL, LOL
I loved how your “Percentile Life Ranking”, the afterlife Heaven / Hell concept being fairly religious was determined using a scientific / mathematical formula.
Also you hoped that the afterlife couch would be to die for, I thought you would worry more about being able to eat the popcorn!
Focusing on yourself is an easy way to ignore injustice and lets one easily fall prey to ignoring the impact our disengagement can have. Unless you aren't truly disengaged with I think is probably the case. However, as soon as you engage with others you are opened to asking, how you can properly judge yourself with out appreciating their impression of your behviour? Just questions, not conclusions about where you are headed with all this. I am trying to catch up.
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