On my daily walk with our dog the other morning a question popped into my mind. It was a new question for me; one that I have never heard asked in quite the way I was asking it.

Later that day, in the local cafe, I tried to put this question into words so that I could think about it more clearly and share it with others. After three pages of failed attempts I tossed it on my mental compost pile. Five days later, instead of trying to formulate the perfect expression of this question, I began writing some other questions related to it.

Taken as a whole, these questions begin to get to the heart of what I’ve been thinking about. So here is a list of some of them. You probably won’t want to try to answer each question as it comes. Read through them to get a sense of the scope of The Question at the end.

Imagine your life after death. (You don’t need to believe that there is an afterlife, just imagine.) What will you be like in that other life?

I’m not asking, “What will heaven be like?” The focus is on you and not your surroundings. I am not asking, “Who will be there in that new life with you?” The focus is on how you will experience a new life. So:

In that new life, what memories will you have? Will you keep all the memories you have at the time you die? Will all of your memories be restored (maybe even to the point of remembering what life was like for you in your mother’s womb)? Do you hope that only those memories that give you joy will remain and that the rest will fade away? Will you bring even any of your memories of this life into the next?

What about your emotions? Will you still have the full range of emotions that you have experienced on earth? Will you still be able to feel pain and joy, loss and lust, frustration and fear? Will your feelings somehow be heightened or deepened or dulled? Will only the good emotions remain, maybe only a sense of peace and joy and belonging and love? Will your feelings of love still come with pangs of grief?

And your thoughts? Will you still think in English? Will your train of thought ever go off the tracks? Will you keep both your right brain and your left brain and continue to think both analytically and creatively? To use Daniel Kahneman’s terms, will you still think both fast and slow? Will you know everything completely and understand all things clearly? Will you think at all?

The question also includes desires and character. Will you continue to have desires for your own good along with desires for the common good? Will you experience conflicts between competing desires? Will you care what others think of you or that your character has integrity? Will you even have desires and hopes and dreams?

What will consciousness be like? Will some or all of your subconscious rise to the surface? Might your new life be more like the consciousness you have when sleeping? Will you be able to distinguish your self as separate from others? Will you consciousness be somehow merged with a universal consciousness? Will there still be a narrative to your life? And will you be the one who tells it?

This is just a brief list of the questions that continue to flow from my original question, “Who is the me that I want to be saved?” It might be a helpful question to ask yourself.