You know, I expect the most pleasant memories in most lives, that we experience when we die, are ones that passed almost unnoticed when they happened. We were too busy being present in them.
But remembering them is a Kum Nye exercise. Remembering them, expanding the feelings, and focusing on and expanding the feelings. It’s an obvious idea, really, but one rarely seen. I have not seen it suggested anywhere else, although it must have been.
People like me, we are in the habit of worry, of looking for danger, of being habituated to tension and conflict, and really only comfortable in it. I worry when I stop worrying. Maybe that is one decent definition of an anxiety or trauma disorder.
But imagine if, when you die, your after-life existence consists in the main of revisiting any and all moments of your life that you like. I don’t think that is what happens, but imagine it as an exercise. Would you not want at least a few islands where you forgot your cares, forgot the weight of the world, forgot your “duty”–which no one assigned you–to right all the wrongs, and to worry and care about the suffering?
Just a few bubbles here and there would make a huge difference, when life is light for a time, and not so hard, and not so thick. They can have beginnings and ends. No need to extend the frivolity endlessly. But something there, in your memory, in your history, in your record.
I write this mostly for me, but it may be useful for someone else too.