How do you, as a believer, conceptualize eternal life?

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As the counterpart to the temporal. You non-believers are lucky enough to be able to take life at face value. Morality is as simple as the golden rule, religion is convenient bottle-feeding to an underclass with no other hope, life stops as soon as the electrons in your brain do. Science and truth are interchangeable concepts. Very simple, very certain.

I get no such luck. Everything has to be balanced, and recontextualized against a world in which everything is happening, all the time. God has to pick his morality battles cautiously because Adam and Eve isn’t just a story, it’s an ongoing commentary into the human condition. Religion is just as flawed as everything else, if you don’t take the good and leave the bad, lots of people really will have nothing. Life continues, our beings and essence are simply too valuable to allow to completely die. And science is just one of many perfectly viable ways to see the world, wonderful when it works, but too hard and costly and we often make more of it than it can really do.

Eternity is a reality, one I have to constantly contend with. Many people contend with their morals, I’ve never had trouble with that. Others contend with self-esteem, not me.

No, it’s existence I need to get a handle on. Imagine taking a count of just how many interactions with the world you have in a day. What would you count? Would you count getting out of bed as one interaction? Taking a shower?

For me getting out of bed is in the hundreds. These are little decisions that run through my mind. I’m still processing my nighttime adventures, checking my phone, every minute is immensely dense. Even though I have a routine, and have to in order to stay sane, the amount of novel interaction I perceive myself having with the world is just on another level.

Life has slowed way way down. Imagine a long wandering walk through a foreign land. Everything you see is new, things are alive in a way you just don’t get back at home.

That’s me, all the time. Eternity, right here at home, in the present. And it needs to be managed. Because while it sounds like heaven, it can quickly turn around and become hell. Part of the management is routine building. Getting off the routine and having to go without messes me up for what feels like an eternity.

In my life, temporal things linger. They stick around for ages and ages. The me that begins life with some unfortunate random thing dies, then another me is born and the unfortunate random thing still hasn’t gone away, then that me dies and another one is born and third generation me has learned how to deal with it. Then fourth generation me is born and it goes away.

Key to managing these long-lasting temoporal things is the concept of choice. If I choose a thing, it matters not whether it’s better or worse than what would have happened had I not chose. Choosing means I exerted agency, free will. I can continue to make the choice, and that reduces the amount of temporal stuff that can invade.

When I had an apartment, it was way nicer than the condo I ended up buying for myself. But the apartment got sold out from under me and the staff all changed, morphed into someone I didn’t have a relationship with and was annoying to deal with. I chose the apartment, but the condo is more of a choice because it’s a purchase and not a rental. There’s far less temporality in the condo, even though the apartment was nicer. I don’t have to renew every year. When my mortgage company sold my servicing rights, I refinanced with a bank that doesn’t usually sell servicing rights. When the company I worked for got bought by a bigger one, I made the choice to move to a company that’s not in any danger of that anytime soon.

Choice makes eternity bearable. If you’re constantly subject to the whims of an uncaring world, eternity is a constant hell. Your ability to make decisions, whether it’s an internal one to surrender to the necessity of the moment, which is what I used to do years ago when I didn’t have the financial wherewithal to choose where and how I lived, or external ones where your choice affects your relationship with the world, is how one is able to not just survive, but thrive.

I’ll end with a note that both Jesus and the Buddha defined death similarly, in terms of lack of adherence to a higher organizing principle, be it turning away from God in the case of Jesus, or the Buddha as suffering brought about by attachment to base things. Eternity was clearly on their minds.