Second Day: Heaven

‭[6] And God said, “Let there be a vault in the midst of the waters, and let it divide water from water.” [7] And God made the vault and it divided the water beneath the vault from the water above the vault, and so it was. [8] And God called the vault Heavens, and it was evening and it was morning, second day.

(Genesis 1:6-8 MEV‬)

Transcendent Narrative

One interesting thing is the narrative that God decided to divide the “waters”, which would also be that formless substance—showing us that we have an inherent capacity to grasp, even symbolically the realities of the Universe. Because, today we know that there is water in space, even though most of it is in its gaseous form, but still. Moses was able to formulate a tale that extracts transcendent content from its narrative.

For us to start discussing Heaven, let’s first understand the Hebrew word used to represent it. Raki’a means, according to Robert Alter’s translation of the TaNaKh, “a hammered-out slab”. We could say that it is the same as the action of “repeated blows in a thick plate” to form Heaven.

The literal interpretation of this brought the view that the Earth was flat and the sky was a huge dome, a vault. Unfortunately, there are still people believing in that, even though is already been proven that Earth has an elliptical shape. But what would be Heaven? Some might say that it is what is above our heads and that we perceive it with our naked eyes in the sky. But science has already shown us that there is so much more beyond what our eyes can grasp. Isn't that God Itself, the Expansion? Why limit God to our own limitations if He is the one who promotes expansion in His creation?

Science already figured out that even the Universe is expanding with dark matter. Heaven, then, would be the Expansion of Creation itself. It is the idea of everlasting growth that can be expressed in many different ways. One of them would be the simple notion of growing in scaffolds, section by section, block by block.

Material and Spiritual Perspectives

Through that, we can separate the notion of Heaven into two different views: a Materialistic one and a Spiritualistic one.

The first represents all that we can perceive with our material and naked eyes. That is the sky itself, the Universe with the stars and planets through the lenses of a telescope or cameras of high precision. The second one would be the opposite, that which we can’t yet perceive with our naked eyes.

Brother Paiva, in his book Sacred Guidelines of the Religion of God, of the Christ, and of the Holy Spirit - Third Volume (1991), writes in the chapter about his decoding of the Ecumenical Prayer of Jesus, the Lord’s Prayer, particularly verse 6, chapter 9 of the Gospel of Christ, according to Matthew:

“What is Heaven?

‘Our Father who art in Heaven’.

(Gospel, according to Matthew, 6:9)

Heaven is not only what we see surrounding Earth. Heaven, beyond the material Universe, also comprehends the spiritual, the ethical, the mental, the intellectual, the philosophical, the religious, the political, the scientific, the sportive, the artistic one… All of that, and much more, is Heaven, the Infinite.

Heaven was made by God, and God is good. The apparent dominion of evil is ephemeral. So Good is eternal. He is God Himself. To the degree that satan (“which is the sum of all human evil”, as defined by Zarur) only does what the Divine Law of Cause and Effect permits, according to the merit of the creature with its Eternal Spirit. As Christ teaches us, “to each one is conceived according to its own works” (Revelations, 22:12). Nothing more than that. Therefore, satan — which is not an entity, but a system composed of beings and/or spirits to the service of ignorance and evil — does not have strength by himself, because he is not the Creator. The human beings feed him with the sins that they practice.

‘Those who sow winds will harvest storms’, as it is said by popular wisdom.”

As we see here Heaven can pertain to a realm beyond the material one. The Greeks already discussed that, particularly Plato with his Ideal World, where lies the formless state of all ideas materialized in the world. As well as the notion of a place that represents a space prepared for all the spirits to “rest” after the phenomenon of Death. Our will here is not to discuss the different aspects of both perspectives, but to try to connect them.

We already understood that Heaven in itself is the action of Expansion that God promotes in Life. But, we can’t go further without discussing its counterpart: Hell, commonly translated from Hebrew Sheol. Here would be the counter representation of expansion, that is paralysis. So, it is the state where we put ourselves far from God. When we are in this condition, life becomes hell, because we sustain the suffering we are facing and thus maintain ourselves in this state.

Regarding the one that would be the ruler of hell, that is satan. We saw that it is “the sum of all human evil”, according to Brother Zarur, and Brother Paiva explains that it is not an anthropomorphic entity, but rather a system composed of the actions of humans and spirits that work to maintain this hellish state of paralysis in Suffering.

Common Ground

We are the common ground for both spiritual notions of Heaven. If we sustain hellish ideas we can materialize a hellish space around us and take it with us after death, then putting our spirits in a spiritual place where suffering is the sustenance of its materialization. Is that eternal? Only while we sustain it.

When we work to change and keep ourselves in God, we will be in that heavenly state and expand our minds, spirits, and lives. Growing in God and sustaining the existence of a Heavenly place for us to continue our journey, as Jesus Christ showed us when He was resurrected by His merit.

Transcendent Nature

I hope that we were able to understand that our lives depend intrinsically on this transcend nature. We need to expand spiritually, and morally. Otherwise, we keep ourselves in hell, for as long as we sustain it.

Mircea Eliade, in his book the Sacred and the Profane (1987), writes: “Life is not possible without an opening toward the transcendent; in other words, human beings cannot live in chaos. Once contact with the transcendent is lost, existence in the world ceases to be possible.”

Now, I would like to add here, for our future discussion that this transcendent nature is what actually makes us different from other animals and species. Even though there is the common comprehension that it is reason, I would question it, and say that it is actually our capacity to abstract ourselves and expand our view from what lies beyond our current material condition. Why? As we saw, for us to live we need to be in contact with the transcendent, because we have intrinsically in us religiosity and spirituality.