On That Bright Red Car

Hell is written in many ways, none of which occur in the bible prior to 450AD. The torment of the eternal conscious (TEC, Google it ) is questioned by reputable Christian scholars.

I believe that Hell comes after death, looking like a bright red car. In more metaphysical terms, Hell is the ultimate branding of our character. How might we understand this?

Pullman says it best when he likened personality to being followed by personal familiars, small animals that change to reflect our character. Should a child feel brave, their animal becomes aggressive and large. Cowardly? A mouse now seems more apt. An adult’s familar in comparison cannot change its shape despite their movements in mood. An adult’s character, like their familiar, becomes fixed in one form.

The finality of character for an adult stems from the proportion of time they have lived.

Time is experiential. One second for a one second baby is its entire experience of life. One minute for a baby of ten minutes is 10% of its life.

But those reference points of time do not increase in perfect proportion. Instead they are expontential. Because one year for a ten year old is 10% of their life, two years for twenty-year-old should be 10% as well. Yet the twenty-year-old experiences their ‘10%’ of life as moving quicker.

Knowing this, what might be the half-way point for an average Western life? Let’s say 80 years old, with no ‘anti-socialist’ health care issues in this example.

Not forty.

Try seven years old.

The experience that comes to define your character for life is mostly lived prior to being seven years old. By that age you will be defined by the bravery or courage you exhibited, the virtue or vice you have embrace. Psychological models in 2020, both Jungian and behaviourist, will confirm this statement, that how you have lived by seven years old will be determine your character for the rest of your days.

Knowing this, it should be clear that Hell is simply the inability to change your character after death. Whatever human consciousness that might live on after death, regardless of whether it has human interests, will suffer the knowledge that it is impossible to change its character, even with those few good deeds committed in later life.

This is where our Western concept of a midlife crisis comes to help us. Most people see a midlife crisis as the mere upgrading to a younger car, and perhaps partner. Yet a profound change, a paradigm shift is our potential miracle. The Catholic confession, the hallucinogenic vision, the all-in Wall Street Bet if that’s your belief - they all grant us that seismic shift that might in one moment define us more than all the discipline of a life well-led before. Only a midlife crisis can change our characters after seven years old and grant us reprieve from the Hellish knowledge of an eternity to be as we have always been.

It is then a shame I cashed my change on that bright red car.