Metaphors for the Afterlife

It's almost midnight but the world around me is already asleep.  I honestly should be able to but I'm so outright giddy that it's impossible for me to calm down.  I'm like a kid on Christmas night, refusing to go to be just to make it last a little longer.  

I'm blessed with the friends I have.  Honestly.  Sometimes everyone feels so far away, but not tonight.  

Conversations from today rush and flow together and leave me with an image that I can't shake.  It's bright and interesting enough that I wanted to share it.  

I was talking to a friend today about my commute between London and my home in one of the smaller neighboring towns.  Often times I get stuck in the commuter rush and anyone who doesn't board fifteen minutes ahead of time is lucky to get a seat, meanwhile first class remains wide open with all the quiet and comfort of a plush hotel overlooking the sea.  To my friend I described first class as a kind of heaven, with invisible angels in business suits occupying the empty seats and he carried it further, adding that one would need a certain amount of karmic merit to ride in the first class cars.  

So lets look at that for a second, shall we?  The train is on a journey, carrying its passengers through the afterlife.  Maybe the train itself is the eternity of the dead: souls perpetually moving towards a destination but never arriving, always suspended between two points.  Or maybe the train is simply carrying them to the next stage of the afterlife...who knows?  But in first class there are the angels, the ones who earned enough karmic merit in life to deserve a bit of a rest in death.  It is populated by the deserving few: Mother Theresa, the latest incarnation of the goddess Kuan Yin, your mother, my mother, or that little boy down the street who had a crap life but could light up the world with his smile.  They ride in silence, talking low, and the deep plush seats absorb the tension from their weary limbs.  In coach you have the rest of us: the poor sods who were neither good nor bad in their life.  Instead we're the ones who muddled through the best we could but never did solve the riddle of our own peace, our own purity, our own endless light.  So we're stuffed into the coach cars, muddled and anxious as we were in life, trying to make sense of our journey until a door opens and we either move up to first class or get off the train entirely.  

The only other area in the train is the engine or the luggage car - he places where people don't belong because they're dangerous or uninhabitable.  So, the beautiful part of this metaphor is that there is always redemption, always hope.  

Because there is no hell.