CHAPTER EIGHT

My Heaven would be much like my life on Earth has been. To be surrounded by my loving friends and family would be my heaven.

Angelo Joshua V. Roma, 16
Higher Life BBS
Ogden, Utah

Heaven is what you make it, just like life. What will I do with my afterlife? Probably live it, just like my life now.

Chad Simmons, 17
Civic Forum BBS
Huntsville, Alabama

Heaven can be here right now, if people will just take the time to make it happen. If people could just sit down on their butts together and work things out rationally, and lovingly, you would have world peace. If people would be willing to share everything with each other, then there would be no hunger, no starvation. There would be co-operation, happiness, and love. If people would be willing to work together in everything they did, then there would be no wars and the world would advance in technology far quicker than anyone would have ever dreamed of. Most of all, heaven must include God. For whithout Him, none of this would ever be possible...he would be the "glue" for all of this to happen. But the way things are going now, it looks doubtful.

Herbert Cruz
Vancouver, Canada
Prototype Generation BBS

Address by Emerson

But when the mind opens, and reveals the laws which traverse the universe, and make things what they are, then shrinks the great world at once into a mere illustration and fable of this mind. What am I? and What is? asks the human spirit with a curiosity newkindled, but never to be quenched. Behold these outrunning laws, which our imperfect apprehension can see tend this way and that, but not come full circle. Behold these infinite relations, so like, so unlike; many, yet one. I would study, I would know, I would admire forever.

These works of thought have been the entertainments of the human spirit in all ages.
........As we are, so we associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus of their own volition souls proceed into heaven, into hell.
..... All things proceed out of the same spirit, and all things conspire with it. Whilst a man seeks good ends, he is strong by the whole strength of Nature. In so far as he roves from these ends, he bereaves himself of power, of auxiliaries; his being shrinks out of all remote channels, he becomes less and less, a mote, a point, until absolute badness is absolute death.

Address To The Divinity College Of Cambridge (excerpts)
Ralph Waldo Emerson
July 15, 1838

I believe in reincarnation so I do not have a working concept of an actual place called heaven. I think it is just a state of mind. Death is only a guide through a door leading to new and wonderful adventures.
Heaven is something we all need to try to achieve while we are alive. Not by being the perfect Christian, Mormon, Jew, Catholic, or any other religion. We are all human; humans are not perfect. Heaven is a way of being, as well as a state of mind.
When you walk down a woodland lane on a crisp fall morning when the air is ripe with the smell of the coming snow and dying leaves - and you feel as if there is nothing more peaceful, nothing more blissful than what you are doing at that moment - that is heaven.
When you suffer hours of labor, and with one final push you feel your world explode around you with pain and joy, and the only sound other than your own heartbeat that can even touch you is the cry from the child you have created and brought into the world - that is heaven.
When you give yourself completely and unconditionally to another, even if the feelings are not returened, or if you get hurt - just the action of giving, and being in love much more than words or physical actions could ever convey - you are in heaven.
It is impossible to stay in heaven or in a heaven-like state forever. How could we know real joy without first knowing sorrow? How can we know real love when we have not tasted the bitter fruits of loneliness? How can we know heaven if we don't first know hell?
Find yourself. Know who you are and make peace with yourself. Find the core of your being - find what makes it happy, and you have found heaven.
Peace.

Kirsten Hughes, 23
"Starchild"
Writer, poet, dreamer
Trinity Cross BBS
Colorado Springs, CO

Everyone will have their own personal heaven/hell. The factors in determining what they "get" are based on how a person lives his/her life. If a person wrongs everyone they come in contact with, then that is all that person will know about and that is how his heaven will be for him - a place where he is getting wronged. If a person is good all their life, then the afterlife will be good.
When you die, you start to dream and you don't wake up. Now even if those dreams are only a split second, you are dead, so it might as well be an eternity. Dreams that take only a few seconds in "real time" may last days in a dream time. So it comes down to what you dream about.
If you had a horrible life, you get horrible dreams. If you had a good life, you get good dreams.

"Bad Karma," 28
Steel cutter
Theater of Vampires BBS
Wilmington, North Carolina

The Mortal Messiah

God lives in the family unit. He is our Father in heaven--the literal and personal Father of the spirits of all men. He begat us; we are the offspring of Heavenly Parents: we have an Eternal Father and an Eternal Mother. We were born as spirits, and we dwelt in the presence of our Eternal Parents; we lived before our mortal birth. As spirits we were in all respects as we are now save only that we were not housed in mortal bodies as is the present circumstance. Christ was the Firstborn of all the heavenly host; Lucifer was a son of the morning: each of us came into being as conscious identities in our appointed order; and Christ is our Elder Brother. (MM1, p.21)

Being subject to law, and having their agency, all the spirits of men while yet in the Eternal Presence, developed aptitudes, talents, capacities, and abilities of every sort, kind, and degree. During the long expanse of life which then was, an infinite variety of talents and abilities came into being. As the ages rolled, no two spirits remained alike. Mozart became a musician; Einstein centered his interest in mathematics: Michelangelo turned his attention to painting. Cain was a liar, a schemer, a rebel who maintained a close affinity to Lucifer. Abraham and Moses and all of the prophets sought and obtained the talent for spirituality. Mary and Eve were two of the greatest of all the spirit daughters of the Father. The whole house of Israel, known and segregated out from their fellows, was inclined toward spiritual things. And so it went through all the hosts of heaven, each individual developing such talents and abilities as his soul desired. (MM1, p.23)

Eternal life--life in the highest heaven; the kind of life enjoyed by Deity himself; life reserved for those who receive, inherit, and possess all things--this glorious type and kind of everlasting existence comes to those who believe in the Son of Man! (MM1, p.477)

Bruce R. McConkie
The Mortal Messiah, vol 1, p. 21,23,477
(c) 1979 Deseret Book Company
Salt Lake City, Utah

I don't see nature judging our destruction of it. It just disappears if we destroy it. But it comes back again, doesn't it? Maybe in another form? So the real lesson in all of this is that life is eternal regardless of how mindless we behave. And I believe that souls, invisible entities, are a part of the cyclical harmony of nature. None of it ever dies; it just changes form.

Shirley MacLaine
Out on a Limb
(c)1983 by Shirley MacLaine
Bantam Books, Inc.
New York, N.Y.

What happens after death is so unspeakably glorious that our imagination and our feelings do not suffice to form even an approximate conception of it....The dissolution of our time-bound form in eternity brings no loss of meaning.

Carl Jung
Letters, Vol. 1
ed. Gerhard Adler and Aniela Jaffe
trans. R.F.C. Hull
(c)1971, 1973 by Princeton University Press

If we could see ourselves and other objects as they really are, we should see ourselves in a world of spiritual natures, our community with which neither began at birth now will end with the death of the body.

Immanuel Kant
Critique of Pure Reason

I think immortality is the passing of a soul through many lives or experiences, and such as are truly lived, used, and learned, help on to the next, each growing richer, happier and higher, carrying with it only the real memories of what has gone before...

Louisa May Alcott
Letters

Why should it be thought incredible that the same soul should inhabit in succession an indefinite number of mortal bodies...? Even during this one life our bodies are perpetually changing, though by a process of decay and resoration which is so gradual that it escapes our notice. Every human being thus dwells successively in many bodies, even during one short life.

Francis Bowen
"Christian Metempsychosis"

In view of the endless duration of the immortal soul throughout the infinity of time...shall the soul remain forever attached to this point of world-space, our earth? Will it never participate in a closer contemplation of the remaining wonders of creation? Who knows but that the intention is for it to become acquainted at close range, some day, with those far distant globes of the cosmic system...which from this distance already provoke our curiosity?

Immanuel Kant
General History of Nature

And whether I come to my own today or in ten
thousand or ten million years,
I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheefulness
I can wait...
And as to you, Life, I reckon you are the leavings
of many deaths,
(No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.)

Walt Whitman
Song of Myself

I am certain that I have been here as I am now a thousand times before, and I hope to return a thousand times....Man is the dialogue between nature and God. On other planets this dialogue will doubtless be of a higher and profounder character. What is lacking is Self-Knowledge. After that the rest will follow.

J. W. von Goethe
Memoirs of Johannes Falk

Take our own bodies. I believe they are composed of myriads and myriads of infinitestimally small individuals, each in itself a unit of life, and that these units work in squads - or swarms, as I prefer to call them - and that these infinitesimally small units live forever. When we "die" these swarms of units, like a swarm of bees, so to speak, betake themselves elsewhere, and go on functioning in some other form or environment.

Thomas Edison
The Diary and Sundry Observations

...what marvellous deepening of emotional power may be gained with the recognition of the idea of pre-existence...we learn that we have been living in a hemisphere only, that we have been thinking half-thoughts, that we need a new faith to join past with future over the great parrallel of the present, and so to round out our emotional world to a perfect sphere.

Lafcadio Hearn
Kokoro

The City of Enoch

And the Lord called his people ZION, because they were of one heart and one mind, and dwelt in righteousness; and there was no poor among them.
........
And Enoch continued his preaching in righteousness unto the people of God. And it came to pass in his days, that he built a city that was called the City of Holiness, even ZION.
And it came to pass that Enoch talked with the Lord; and he said unto the Lord: Surely Zion shall dwell in safety forever. But the Lord said unto Enoch: Zion have I blessed, but the residue of the people have I cursed.
And it came to pass that the Lord showed unto Enoch all the inhabitants of the earth; and he beheld, and lo, Zion, in process of time, was taken up into heaven. And the Lord said unto Enoch: Behold mine abode forever.
And Enoch also beheld the residue of the people which were the sons of Adam;
.....And after that Zion was taken up into heaven, Enoch beheld, and lo, all the nations of the earth were before him;
And there came generation upon generation; and Enoch was high and lifted up, even in the bosom of the Father, and of the Son of Man; and behold, the power of Satan was upon all the face of the earth.
.....And Enoch beheld angels descending out of heaven, bearing testimony of the Father and Son; and the Holy Ghost fell on many, and they were caught up by the powers of heaven into Zion.
And it came to pass that the God of heaven looked upon the residue of the people, and he wept; and Enoch bore record of it, saying: How is it that the heavens weep, and shed forth their tears as the rain upon the mountains?
And Enoch said unto the Lord: How is it that thou canst weep, seeing thou art holy, and from all eternity to all eternity?
And were it possible that man could number the particles of the earth, yea, millions of earths like this, it would not be a beginning to the number of thy creations; and thy curtains are stretched out still; and yet thou art there, and thy bosom is there; and also thou art just; thou art merciful and kind forever;
And thou hast taken Zion to thine own bosom, from all thy creations, from all eternity to all eternity; and naught but peace, justice, and truth is the habitation of thy throne; and mercy shall go before thy face and have no end; how is it thou canst weep?
The Lord said unto Enoch: Behold these thy brethren; they are the workmanship of mine own hands, and I gave unto them their knowledge, in the day I created them; and in the Garden of Eden, gave I unto man his agency;
And unto thy brethren have I said, and also given commandment, that they should love one another, and that they should choose me, their Father; but behold, they are without affection, and they hate their own blood;
........
.....And the Lord said unto Enoch: Then shalt thou and all thy city meet them there, and we will receive them into our bosom, and they shall see us; and we will fall upon their necks, and they shall fall upon our necks, and we will kiss each other;
And there shall be mine abode, and it shall be Zion, which shall come forth out of all the creations which I have made; and for the space of a thousand years the earth shall rest.
And it came to pass that Enoch saw the day of the coming of the Son of Man, in the last days, to dwell on the earth in righteousness for the space of a thousand years;
But before that day he saw great tribulations among the wicked; and he also saw the sea, that it was troubled, and men's hearts failing them, looking forth with fear for the judgments of the Almighty God, which should come upon the wicked.
And the Lord showed Enoch all things, even unto the end of the world; and he saw the day of the righteous, the hour of their redemption; and received a fulness of joy;

Moses (excerpts)
Pearl of Great Price
(c)1981 Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Salt Lake City, Utah

Somewhere the sun is shining;
somewhere the songbirds dwell.
Hush then thy sad repining,
God lives and all is well.

Somewhere the day is longer;
somewhere the task is done.
Somewhere the heart is stronger;
somewhere the guerdon won.

Somewhere the load is lifted,
close by an open gate.
Somwehere the clouds are rifted;
somewhere the angels wait.

Somewhere, somewhere, beautiful isle of somewhere!
Land of the true, where we live anew,
beautiful isle of somewhere.

Beautiful Isle of Somewhere
Words by Jessie Brown Pounds
(c)1983 Hal Leonard Publishing Company

Ah got shoes, you got shoes,
All o' God's Chillun got shoes.
When Ah git to Heab'n gonna put on mah shoes
An gonna walk all ovah God's Heab'n.
Heab'n, Heab'n, Everybody talkin' 'bout Heab'n ain't goin' dah
Heab'n, Heab'n, gonna walk all ovah God's Heab'n.

Ah got wings, you got wings,
All o' God's Chillun got wings.
When Ah gits to Heab'n gonna put on my wings
An gonna fly all ovah God's Heab'n.
Heab'n, Heab'n, Everybody talkin' 'bout Heab'n ain't goin' dah
Heab'n, Heab'n, gonna fly all ovah God's heab'n.

Ah got shoes
Ruby Berkley Goodwin
(c)1937 Handy Brothers Music Co., Inc.

Nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky.
All we are is dust in the wind.

Dust In The Wind
Kerry Livgren
(c)1977, 1978 Don Kirshner Music and SBK BlackWood Music, Inc.

Imagine there's no heaven.
It's easy if you try.
No hell below us,
above us only sky.

Imagine all the people
living for today.

Imagine there's no countries.
It isn't hard to do.
Nothing to kill or die for
and no religion, too.

Imagine all the people
living life in peace.

You may say I'm a dreamer.
But I'm not the only one.
I hope some day you'll join us
and the world will be as one.

Imagine
John Lennon
(c)1971 Lenono Music Inc.

Some dreams must wait,
life isn't long enough.
Some dreams must wait
to come true.

Sometimes it seems life just begins and then,
all of a sudden it's through.
There's songs you won't sing.
There's stories that you won't ever hear.
Pages you will never turn,
words that you'll never know,
things that you will never learn.

It's nice to know there's all eternity
for everything you'd like to do.
There aren't any clocks.
There aren't any things like calendars.
No such thing as too late,
just always and evermore.

That's why I think it's so great
That Heavenly Father and Mother
figured it all out so clever.
There's never enough time,
and that is why I'm glad
we go on forever.

Forever
Lyrics by Carol Lynn Pearson
(c)1977 by Embryo Music

Chapter Nine

Contents