Many mythologies take a hierarchical view of the Divine. Humans are so good at projecting their own preferred structures on “heaven”! I think these projections are restricted and inaccurate, both about how the physical universe works, and how I think the “afterlife” works.
The Physics
The cosmos gives us all sorts of clues that the structure of the Divine is likely not a hierarchy of higher and lower angels, with condemned human souls at the bottom.
Reason being that the physical universe isn’t structured that way, either. It’s shaped like a really big fabric, with stars, galaxies, planets and other material entities nestled into grooves created by gravity. They are drawn into themselves by nuclear forces at atom level and smaller, and wrap themselves in electromagnetic energy that they project out into the grooves of space (space is groovy!).
There is a progression from the very small to the very large, from the very whispy to the very dense, but that’s about it. No planet is “higher” in value than another, no galaxy necessarily lords it over the others in its neighborhood. It might take energy from them, but that’s all part of a natural, flowing process where everything knows its role automatically.
The Metaphysics
So, what’s the afterlife/heaven really like? What about the admittedly theoretical existence of a place either inside or outside the universe where something like God exists, a deity who at least started up the universe, whether it interferes with it afterward or not?
God is One. Period. There are no Others to build a hierarchy around. Angels, for example, are simply our interpretation of some facet of our experience of the Divine. Like when we get a glimpse of a face behind a veil. I’ll bet it’s groovy to be “there,” though, even without gravity. 🙂
So, what about us? When we are not incarnated here on Earth, I believe we are One. Period. There is no higher or lower, good or bad. No time. Just being, is-ness. The circle is closed and all within is one energy, vibrating. Simply vibrating.
When we want to create the experience of Other, time, and space, we can think of it as a twist of that circle into an infinity symbol. The sparks from that twist spawn new universes, new worlds, new beings who imagine themselves separate (and who create hierarchies for themselves).
There are folks who’ve been incarnated in this particular space-time fabric more than once. Before we are born as those sparks of infinity, we decide what role and what level of awareness we’ll be coming in with. When we are not here, there is no distinction. So we can come into this lifetime with any level of spiritual awareness, regardless of how many lives we’ve lived here before.
The game while we are here is to become aware of the being-ness we came from. If you’d like to talk about your journey into that awareness, contact me. I’d love to hear your story.