We imagine a consciousness in the between life state. The body has died and the consciousness has not yet reincarnated in another body. What would it be like? Like dreaming? Like being alone in a dark room?

Like being trapped in some closed, confined space? No. If I’ve left the body, then I am spaceless. Without a body, what is there to be confined? Can a box confine thoughts? Can a box limit emotions? Can a box imprison consciousness? Evidently not. So, let’s imagine the emotion/thought/consciousness complex free floating, in some vast space, or a place where the word “space” has no meaning.

A fish freed from a bottle, swimming in a vast ocean, might look back at the bottle and notice how small and limiting the bottle was. We might reflect on what the body/emotion/mind complex usually contained: merely pleasant or unpleasant body sensations, happy or sad emotions, thoughts of various kinds. Nothing profound, usually. We might see memory, too, and all the past snapshots memory holds. And it all might seems so . . . small. Finite. Interesting in its own way. But does it all merit remembering? Or can much of it be forgotten? Most people are born with no memory of a past life. And for those that do claim memories of a past life, the memories are often of a traumatic incident such as being executed or dying in some accident. If we reincarnate, do we routinely forget most of our past life?

Let’s now imagine consciousness in the between-lives state. The Tibetan Book of the Dead describes what occurs, according to Tibetan belief. Briefly, the consciousness/tendencies complex begins a natural ascent to its source, its ultimate ground: the Real. On first encountering the Incomprehensible Boundless Light, some souls merge, losing their separate identity and ending reincarnations. Other souls retreat from the intensity of supreme naked reality, and descend to lower levels of existence. The text describes the soul as experiencing “peaceful” and “wrathful” deities before finally incarnating in a physical body. The Tibetan Book of the Dead says the “peaceful” and “wrathful” deities are projections of one’s own mind. We might imagine experiencing peaceful deities as heaven and wrathful deities as hell. But why would our own mind create such experiences?

Imagine a loving person who spent their life helping others, trying to make the world a better place. A person who thought, mostly, kind, loving and noble thoughts. That person alone with his/her emotions and thoughts would be in a light, elevated place: a “heaven.”

On the other hand, imagine a person who spent a life filled with greed, hate, and anger alone with those emotions. He will have no one to hate but himself. No one to be the target of his anger but himself. The experience would be a dark, oppressive state: a “hell.”

Thus, there could be a type of judgment built into the universe, without the need of some God who is a person. A judgment based on the fact that it’s more comfortable to experience love rather than hate, more comfortable to experience peace rather than violence. There could be a temporary, non-eternal heaven and hell awaiting us in the between-lives state.