You know how when a person or animal you love appears in your dreams? (I hope you’ve experienced that because it’s magical.)
Well, one day, I was thinking about my dad and decided to see if I could bring him into my dreams. He’s been gone from the earth for almost a decade. So, as I was laying in bed, trying to drift off to sleep, I asked him, “dad, is there anything you’d like to tell me that you didn’t get a chance to while on this earth?” I don’t know what I was expecting, really. I guess I kind-of hoped something warm and loving. I didn’t get that. I got a mystery.
So my dad did appear in my dreams, and he said to me, “There are two heavens. The one in the sky and the other one.” And then he was gone.
The other one? What other one?
I assumed the one in the sky was the heavens above us—clouds, moon, sun, stars…the universe. But this other one has been niggling me for months. I assumed it was spiritual heaven, but what exactly IS spiritual heaven? There are a lot of different ideas.
I decided to Google yesterday and see if anything came up. As I said, there are a lot of different ideas, and most of the results refer to the Bible, and more than two heavens. A lot of them referred to a verse that talks about three heavens, but then (I was only reading the excerpts in the search results) I noticed some of them were disagreeing. I’ve found Christianity to be like that. But that’s okay. I don’t believe in definitive answers because, as we know from science, things change as you learn or discover something new. Thought evolves. Anyhow, I digress.
I finally found an article I thought was worth clicking into. This one: Heaven on Earth from a site called Atmos. I’m not sure what Atmos stands for, but I’m thinking Atmosphere, and that felt like synchronicity with what my dad said was the first heaven. As I read the article, I realized it spoke of a lot of the things related to the earth-based spirituality where my faith is landing.
I spent some time this morning with this question, “what are the two heavens” and I feel like this heaven on earth/oneness idea in the article can encompass oneness with nature, oneness as all of us together in the web of life, oneness with a higher power, or oneness inside yourself. To me, oneness inside yourself is you healing all the broken pieces of yourself. So, from there, I thought, “maybe the two heavens are the one outside you (that first heaven my dad spoke of, also including this planet earth) and the one inside you, where your soul lives. And maybe the goal is to merge the two. Nature is a healing force. Connecting to nature can help us heal ourselves. To me that seems like Heaven on Earth.
I’m going to ponder more on this, but I would love to hear your thoughts, too!
Image by Jan Alexander from Pixabay