Enlightenment in the Afterlife?

Between my own thoughts on Heaven and movies like What Dreams May Come, I've long-since wondered if a Heavenly after-life guaranteed intellectual, as well as spiritual, enlightenment.

I mean, if God is the personification of perfection and Heaven is perfection given dimensional breath and substance, one would think that everyone inhabiting that plane of reality would have to be really smart, really wise, and well-intentioned. Otherwise, there goes the (perfect) neighborhood.

If that's true, though, doesn't that mean that we cease to be ourselves? I mean, a baby who dies and goes to Heaven gains the ability to talk and wisdom that he or she might never have had - in effect becoming a person he or she might never have been. A flawed, but basically pious person becomes an angelic sage, as a result of this necessary Enlightenment.

It seems that the only way one would not change, after walking through Heaven's Gate, is if one was already perfect. And, from what I hear, no such mortals exist.

An alternative is that, like that Star Trek movie, we'd all have our own personal corners of Heaven, which leave us flawed, but in absolute control of the wonderful things that surround us.

Great.

But that also means that all of the people who surround us there aren't really the relatives we knew on Earth. They're versions of them that we'd like to see... and they're seeing versions of us that they'd like to see.


Ultimately, this is little more than a mental (and maybe spiritual) exercise, as I'm not a theist or an atheist, but an agnostic. But, I will admit, this makes me very skeptical about the potential existence of a plane of perfection.

What do you think?