Heaven is for those who think of it.
Joseph Joubert
Finley Peter Dunne
Christian Morgenstern
Mark Twain
Confucius
Winston Churchill
Rainer Maria Rilke
Samuel Butler
Ramakrishna
Andre' Gide
Montaigne
Socrates (Plato, Apology)
Goethe
Bertrand Russell
Cervantes
Marcus Aurelius
Marcel Proust
This starry world, and I in it...
How can I get out of it?
I go to sleep but when I wake I am still here...
All night the flame of life burned in my breast and brain as
the stars burn in the breast and brain of the world...
And what is Death?
It is a swing-door. I push through, coming out on the other
side.
But the other side is the world, just as this side is the
world...
There is no escape...
So I had best do my work now, lest I shall have to do it later.
I had best be myself now, lest later I shall have to battle with
the crusts upon myself,
Lest later I shall have to begin again at the beginning, unlearning
all my faults...
This was as true a hundred million years ago,
This will be true a hundred million years from now,
As it is now, at this moment.
James Oppenheim
What shall we be like when
We cast this earthly body and attain
To immortality?
What shall we be like then?
Ah, who is to say
What vast expansions shall be ours that day?
What transformations of this house of clay,
To fit the heavenly mansions and the light of day?
Ah, who shall say?
But this we know, -
We drop a seed into the ground,
A tiny, shapeless thing, shrivelled and dry,
And, in the fullness of time, is seen
A form of peerless beauty, robed and crowned
Beyond the pride of an earthly queen,
Instinct with loveliness, and sweet and rare
The perfect emblem of the Maker's care.
This from a shriveled seed? -
- Then man may hope indeed!
........
We know not what we shall be - only this -
That we shall be made like Him - as He is.
John Oxenham
9. All things are implicated with one another, and the bond is holy; and there is hardly anything unconnected with any other thing. For things have been co-ordinated, and they combine to form the same universe [order]. For there is one universe made up of all things, and one god who pervades all things, and one substance, and one law, [one] common reason in all intelligent animals, and one truth; if indeed there is also one perfection for all animals which are of the same stock and participate in the same reason.
10. Everything material soon disappears in the substance of the whole; and everything formal [causal] is very soon taken back into the universal reason; and the memory of everything is very soon overwhelmed in time.
23. The universal nature out of the universal substance, as if it were wax, now moulds a horse, and when it has broken this up, it uses the material for a tree, then for a man, then for something else; and each of these things subsists for a very short time. But it is no hardship for the vessel to be broken up, just as there was none in its being fastened together.
25. Nature which governs the whole will soon change all things which thou seest, and out of their substance will make other things, and again other things from the substance of them, in order that the world may be ever new.
29. Wipe out the imagination. Stop the pulling of the strings. Confine thyself to the present. Understand well what happens either to thee or to another. Divide and distribute every object into the causal [formal] and the material. Think of thy last hour. Let the wrong which is done by a man stay there where the wrong was done.
32. About death: whether it is a dispersion, or a resolution into atoms, or annihilation, it is either extinction or change.
35. From Plato: the man who has an elevated mind and takes a view of all time and of all substance, dost thou suppose it possible for him to think that human life is anything great? It is not possible, he said. Such a man then will think that death also is no evil. Certainly not.
40. Life must be reaped like the ripe ears of corn: One man is born; another dies.
41. If gods care not for me and for my children, There is a reason for it.
50. That which has grown from the earth to the earth, But that which has sprung from heavenly seed, Back to the heavenly realms returns. This is either a dissolution of the mutual involution of the atoms, or a similar dispersion of the insentient elements.
56. Consider thyself to be dead, and to have completed thy life up to the present time; and live according to nature the remainder which is allowed thee.
75. The nature of the All moved to make the universe. But now either everything that takes place comes by way of consequence or [continuity]; or even the chief things towards which the ruling power of the universe directs its own movement are governed by no rational principle. If this is remembered it will make thee more tranquil in many things.
Marcus Aurelius Antonius
167 A.D.
Translation: George Long
...the idea of heaven as a place where God, angels, and those human beings who have led good lives are united forever in harmony has begun to fade. While most U.S. Catholics do believe in heaven, they are less and less sure what heaven will be like.
Two general beliefs replace the popular images of heaven that many Catholics learned as children. The first - the official teaching of the church, and a stance held by most clergy...is that heaven is intrinsically unknowable and that a firm adherence to any picture of it is understandable but theologically unsupportable. The second, which appears to be particularly popular in the United States, is that heaven is a distraction, that belief in it and specualtion about its nature detract from the work of God in this life...
"Heaven is a waste of time," says Lawrence Mullaney, a Catholic social activist in Boston. "We don't know anything about it, we never will until after we die, and I think talking and arguing about it just distract people from doing what can be done right here and right now to help people..."
"The Bible makes no references to heaven as a place," notes (Dr. John) Pilch. "...the word 'heaven' is a euphemism for God..."
...The idea of bodily resurrection, of joining God in heaven after death, came from the prophet Zoroaster, who lived around 1400 B.C...
...Dante's "Divine Comedy" mapped heaven and hell with meticulous care, as did the works of John Milton and many others
But with Martin Luther - who believed that heaven, hell, and purgatory were spiritual states corresponding to faith, despair, and doubt - and the advent of eighteenth-century rationalism, certitude about the specifics of heaven began to fade. Even theologians began to admit that they weren't at all sure what heaven would be like, or even if there would be a heaven...
Philosophers, too, found it harder and harder to pin down the specifics of a place they'd never seen. Alfred North Whitehead, for example: "Can you imagine anything more idiotic than the Christian idea of heaven? What kind of diety is it that would be capable of creating angels and men to sing his praises day and night to all eternity?"
...Thus arrived heaven's modern state. in which most people believe in some sort of heaven, but very few are sure about what sort of place it might be. Of course, some disciplines are sure. The Latter-day Saints, for example, think of heaven as a paradise containing lakes, forests, flowers, and beautiful buildings. Babies and children who have died become adults upon entering the spirit world, although they can change back to babyhood to be recognized by their families.
"We do not speak of such things as harps and clouds and angels with wings," say the authors of a popular Mormon book on the afterlife called 'The Life Beyond.' "We speak of servants of God, each faithfully laboring according to assignment, each standing in his own office, laboring in his own calling."
...Christian Fundamentalists are also pretty sure about heaven. They "have no doubts about hell or heaven - and who is going where," says NEWSWEEK's Kenneth Woodward. Many adhere to an idea called "theocentric minimalism," which holds that heaven is a life after this one in which God is the prime mover, and that's that. No other details necessary or available.
...Boston attorney Henry Kopel, who is Jewish, associated the Catholic idea of heaven with two giant hands reaching down from heaven to gently carry the faithful to their reward. (Father Dan) Riordan clearly remembers hearing a fundamentalist radio preacher informing his listeners that a special airplane made a regular flight to heaven above.
...While it appears a fact that the traditional heaven of the past two millennia...has lost its comprehensive grip, it also appears certain that it's not been replaced by any other comprehensive idea. Heaven has become a personal matter; and depth of belief in heaven...is unique to each individual soul.
Individual ideas of heaven, no matter how carefully some try to pigeonhole and quantify them, prove to be as indosyncratic and as different as people themselves are. But collectively, as surveys and polls and informal interviews prove, people still yearn, even suspiciously and reluctanly and skeptically, for some form of life after death, of resurrection - of heaven.
Brain Doyle
U.S. CATHOLIC
June 1990
"Moon Kitten"
Michaelann R. Smith
Lunar Excursions BBS
Toledo, Ohio
As to man's future state many very different views have been held and are held by different peoples. To some it appears but a continuation of the present life, for others it involves a retribution for what has been done in this world... The retribution may consist of a simple reversal of this life's lot, so that those who have fared ill here will be well off in the next world, and vice versa; or the better lot in the next world may be reserved either for those who were in this world persons of quality, or for those who distinguished themselves by their valour, or by their virtue or by their piety. Or the next life may be for all men alike a continuation of this, under more pleasant conditions, or under more gloomy conditions, but in either case the rank and occupation of the deceased will be what they were in this life, even the scars and mutilations of the body surviving with the other marks of personal identity. Or, again, life may be continued, but in such a way that personal identity is concealed, as for instance by the transmigration of the soul into an animal body, or is forgotten, as by the souls that drink the waters of Lethe before being reborn, or merged into the divine essence. Or the soul may not survive death at all - only the fruit of its moral or immoral acts may be transmitted.
An equally great variety of opinion prevails as to the situation and topography of the next world. It may be on the earth's surface, or under it or above it. If on it, then it is a far-off land, a garden behind the distant hills, a land beyond a distant river, an island across the sea, a far-off western world. Or it may be above the earth, in the sun, the moon, the stars, or above the solid firmament of the sky. If below the earth, it may be one vast and gloomy realm, or it may be mapped ot into many various divisions. If the retribution theory is held, then heaven may be above the earth, or it may be underground. If it is underground, then the places of bliss and punsihment are topograpically distinguished; if the heaven is above the world, then it may or may not be locally distinguished from the abode of the gods. The underground hell may or may not have places of torture; if it has, they too may be more or less numerous. The number of heavens may extend to the third, the seventh, or even go as high as thirty.
...funeral rites...show primitive man to have believed that the ghost lingered for some time in the neighborhood of the survivors...the deceased engaged in his familiar guise and occupations.
...The Yoruba proverb runs "A corner in this world is better than a corner in the world of spirits."
...In the Greek Hades, Achilles is still a king, and the phantom Orion hunts phantom beasts; "...the shade of the Algonquin hunter hunts souls of beaver and elk, walking on the souls of his snow-shoes over the soul of the snow; the fur-wrapped Kamchadal drives his dog-sledge; the Zulu milks his cows and drives his cattle to kraal; South American tribes live on, whole or mutilated, healthy or sick, as they left this world, leading their own lives." In Sheol the kings of the nations have their thrones, and the mighty their weapons of war.
The idea that, in the underground ghost-land, the soul continues to follow the same pursuits as in life, gave rise to the custom of burying him with the necessary weapons, implements, pottery, clothes, etc.
...in the Scandanavian Walhalla, the wariors ride forth to the fight as they did on earth, only at the end of the day and the fray those who have been killed go back to the banquet and enjoy it, just as their victors do. In Egypt, where the heaven was also one of material, more peaceful delights, access to it depended quite as much upon the due performance of the elaborate funeral rites by the survivors, as upon the virtue and piety of the deceased himself.
...in these early speculations as to ghost-land...there is nothing religious...
...in Christian countries, the superstitious believe that graveyards are haunted, though they would not deny that the souls of the dead are really in heaven or in hell.
...the belief of the totemist, that the dead man rejoins his totem and is transformed into the shape of the animal totem, may live for a long time by the side of the belief in a ghost-land.
...things have changed: in the good old times men did not go to the dreary, gloomy nether land; they went to the garden beyond the hills, lighted and cheered by the rays of the sun...but that is over now; to this generation the gates of that bright land are closed; and if they were open to the men of yore, that is because men were heroes in the brave days of old.
...In the Tongan Islands it is only aristocratic souls that go to Bolotu, the western and fortunate isle, "full of the finest fruits and lovliest flowers, that fill the air with fragrance, and come anew the moment they are plucked; birds of beauteous plumage are there, and hogs in plenty, all immortal saved when killed" to be eaten, and even then "new living ones appear immediately to fill their places."
...Irish literature is full of tales telling...of a happy island from which the man who discovers it cannot return - an island in which...there was no death and no sin...and...there are all manner of delights.
History of Religion
Frank Byron Jevons, 1896
Methuen & Co. Ltd.
London