He paid tribute to John Lennon — with a lovely, imagined afterlife conversation, "Here Today" — and to George Harrison, starting Harrison's "Something" by playing it on a ukulele Mr. Harrison gave him.
In effect, the afterlife is here understood as the human intellect's ultimate return to and joining with the cosmic active intellect, a set of ideas pulled directly from his Islamic philosophical context.
You can play the beta version of "Alien Afterlife" for free here.
Yet, even here, afterlives also bring the ghosts of political conflict — his movie is based on two plays by Jean Anouilh ("Eurydice," produced in 1941, during the German Occupation, and "Dear Antoine," from 1969), a playwright whose reputation has been shadowed by his unencumbered wartime activity.
Now it could be noted that most organized religions some time ago latched onto this idea of being rewarded or punished in the afterlife for our behavior here.
Explain to children that many people have different ideas or perspectives about the origin of life, why we're here, the afterlife, and so on.
The tomb of the Napatan king Senkamanisken contained more than a thousand shawabtis, slaves of the afterlife, some of which are here.
"What would it take for you to leave off coming here?" "Probably the afterlife," Mr. Dong says, not looking up from a bin filled with back issues of Hulk and Secret Invasion.
Read the interview in its entirety, including Graham's views on the afterlife (there is none, he says) here.
