Gardening while listening with my best Bluetooth noise-canceling headphones, I happened on an album of Leonard Bernstein’s “Essential Works.” How many of us have a body of work in this life that could be mined for a collection of what’s “essential?” Want to know more about your great-grandpa? Why not take out his “essential works collection,” better than surveying genetics on 23 and Me. I got into a lot of good stuff in the case of Leonard Bernstein, heard pieces which were great, his own West Side Story, His conducting Appalachian Spring. Then came the first movement of Mahler’s Second Resurrection Symphony. By that time, I was tired of listening to music, at which point I usually switch to books. Though I am a longterm fan of Mahler, I had never heard anything Bernstein’s rendering with the New York Philharmonic. It simply blew me away. On YouTube, a few days later, I managed to find Bernstein conducting the Mahler 2nd with the London Symphony Orchestra in a cathedral. To see and hear Lennie in the borderlands between heaven and earth makes you think.

What happens to your memory after you leave this world? Memory of a life fades very fast. People like to think their life will be preserved in a “world to come” as in religious tradition.

Here’s a whirlwind survey religious tradition. Christianity judges by our worst acts. In Christianity, no one merits heaven. The only reason anyone avoids damnation is the Grace of God and that Grace depends solely on the belief in Christ. If you don’t believe, you are destined for hell. Abraham, Moses, David, Elijah, and all the prophets and heroes of the Old Testament were sent into the anteroom of Hades, Limbo, by their not knowing, thereby not believing in Christ. They didn’t deny, yet lack of knowledge foreclosed belief. The Catholic church tried to correct their oversight of condemning holy men to hell, in what was called the harrowing, or the Invasion of Hades by Christ and kidnap and liberation of righteous individuals. This was imagined to have occurred after the crucifixion and before Easter, probably Holy Saturday. Dante was able to interview great gentiles like Homer and Ovid inhabiting limbo the outer border of hell in his Inferno, yet it was too late to question the greatest of the Jews. Moses and David might have been great men, but they committed acts worthy of condemnation, which is true of everyone.

On the other hand, the basis of salvation for Christians is belief. Such evil-doers as Dr. Faust, even Don Juan, go to heaven by God’s Grace, the more inspiration Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Here’s something worth considering. The greatest prophets certainly Moses, know the future and would be able to divine Christ who would live a mere 1500 years after Moses.

I love the Egyptians. Anubis weighs the Good and the Bad of in a life. Your unencumbered soul must weigh less than a feather to be admitted to the Next World. It doesn’t appear that belief or contrition makes that much difference, where the slightest infraction will tip the balance away from eternal life.

In the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, every act counts, and we all are doomed to treadle on a wheel of birth and rebirth. Which incarnation you ultimately assigned is determined by a combination of intent and action. You may come back as a cricket, a paramecium. What I love about the tradition of reincarnation is all living things are soulful incarnations with awareness. I have come to believe that all living things experience their lives in their own quirky way. A bat has batness and sees its world partly through ultrasound that humans do not experience, and a bird has birdness, which means migrating experiences its own world partly through a magnetic sense that humans don’t seem to possess. I have to say I just love this idea, which in my own mind at least is beautiful enough to rescue the notion of reincarnation from oblivion that is to give the concept of reincarnation a new life. Reincarnation is a religious axiom whose corollary or theorem is that all living things experience in their own way. Yet it places all creatures on an eternal unpleasant wheel.

Judaism seems agnostic as to the World To Come, Olam HaBa, in its parlance. A post-death world isn’t mentioned in the Hebrew Bible at all. Christians believe resurrection had to await Christ and Christianity. Yet resurrection is an ancient Jewish concept that long preceded The New Testament, and Hebrews didn’t invent resurrection either. Life after death is a deep yearning in us all since we can’t conceive of the idea of eternal blackness and death. For Jews, people are judged not by inner thoughts as much as for what they do. A person who has made mistakes or even committed heinous acts achieves purification through repentance. The person who wishes to atone must recognize and repent his act. Even then, there is a good chance he won’t enjoy human or divine forgiveness. Commission of good or evil is mostly determined by principles and dictates of the Torah, the holiest book in Judaism. The final stage of Atonement is forgiveness, which requires the promise of not repeating sinful behaviors. We all know that transgressions are likely to be repeated, such as drug abuse, greed, and addiction.

I realize that all of the above interpretation is an extreme oversimplification of all of the religious faiths mentioned. I am making a point for purposes of argument. The weighing of a woman or man depends not on inner thoughts, beliefs, or even actions. I am lobbying for the judgment not based on their worst act but on their best work. Your place in memory or in the next world ought to be determined not by your worst behavior, but your best oeuvre. That is what came into my mind as I was listening to Lennie perform the first movement of Mahler’s Second Symphony. Nobody is perfect. But what good are they?

Although Leonard Bernstein is long gone, his interpretation of Mahler’s symphonies was so transcendent that it communicated something directly to me. His opening of the first movement of the Second Symphony was of such clarity that it ended up breaking a code that stretches through a pantheon of the great musical works stretching from Beethoven through Brahms to Mahler. See my essay “Death March” on decoding symphonies recently submitted.

There may or may not be a next world separated from this one. I highly doubt there is if by that is meant a Dantean next world post-death. Instead, I see all humans who ever lived as part of a unified scheme or web to which we all contribute. My own views of the Next World take a furtive step beyond medieval ideas of Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso. Should you still harbor thoughts of such places, where might they be in Space-Time of Einstein as opposed to the Ptolemaic Universe of Dante? My view of the Next World is that it is contiguous with This World and evolving in time, not space. Persons of the past were like we are today, and we are in for a revolution of thought and form made possible by future discovery and knowledge.