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The Big Question: Where Is Heaven?

Is heaven a physical place? Is it all around us?

In a past issue of Mysterious Ways, I wrote about one of the “thin places” in the world, the Italian town of Assisi, where the membrane between heaven and earth seems diaphanous. When we published that story, some of us asked, was it possible that some people might have the same capacity, seeing visions of the spiritual universe as though it were the everyday?

We didn’t have to look far, for there on the magazine’s back cover was a quote from William Blake, the mystical British poet and artist of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”

Narrow chinks of a cavern versus doors thrown wide open to the infinite. No doubt about it, Blake’s brilliantly colored paintings and profound poems reveal the sensibility of an artist engrossed in the world beyond: angels, demons, prophets, Jesus, God. His doors of perception were flung open. He always claimed he painted and drew what he did because that’s exactly what he saw. It was his reality. And those unearthly poems? Sometimes they came so fast to his pen because he was simply transcribing what a heavenly voice whispered in his ear. But he was also grounded in the real world, working hard as a printer and engraver.

Born in London to a working-class family, he lived almost his entire life in the teeming, pestilential city. For him it shimmered with the possibilities of a new Jerusalem. The most important book in the Blake household was the Bible, and the stories of the Bible, especially its imagery of cherubim, trumpets, prophets, stars and spears, lions and lambs, crowded his imagination. He would have heard that “Our God is a consuming fire” (Hebrews 12:29), so that when—as he later explained—at age four he saw God peering in his second-floor window, he did the only natural thing: He screamed in terror.

He loved to wander through the wooded hills on the outskirts of town. On a boyhood jaunt through an open area called Peckham Rye, he saw a vision of angels in a tree, their wings fluttering in the boughs. Incapable of keeping such an apparition to himself, he rushed home and told his parents. His father threatened to throttle him for lying, or indulging in some fantasy, but his mother was quite convinced of her son’s honesty and moved by his innocence. Later he baffled his contemporaries with his visionary talk, but he never felt constrained to edit himself. If he had seen God or angels or the prophet Ezekiel under a tree, as he once did, it should be reported. Why keep such glories a secret?

The great tragedy of his life was the loss of his younger brother, Robert, who died at age 19 from consumption. Blake had hardly left his brother’s bedside, nursing him, devastated at the anticipated loss. How could he go on without his beloved Robert? And yet, at the very end he observed Robert’s soul leaving its body and “clapping its hands for joy.” The moment confirmed for Blake that death was not an end in itself but a journey to another world, one that he felt he could reach out and touch.

Even after Robert’s death, Blake felt his brother close by. “With his spirit I converse daily and hourly in the spirit & see him in my remembrance,” Blake wrote. “I hear his advice & even now write from his dictate.” That phrase “in the spirit” is important. Blake was not claiming to see a ghost but was receiving messages from a loved one in God’s realm. The sort of comforting presence that countless others have found in grief, except heightened by a man who kept his doors of perception wide open.

Once when he was struggling with a perplexing problem in the engraving business, wondering how he could print a poem with a colored image cheaply, he received a vision of Robert taking on the task. With great thoroughness Robert performed all the steps, revealed the ink to use, the method. Was a vision ever more practical? Blake sent his wife out with half a crown to buy the necessary materials. The method, as described, worked perfectly.

As he grew older and his poetry and art grew more idiosyncratic—and more superb—Blake faced criticism and became increasingly remote from the world. “I am in God’s presence night & day,” he scrawled on a notebook page. In his late sixties his health began to fail, but he worked till the end, illustrating the Bible and Dante, working continually on a big painting of the Last Judgment. Among the last things he bought was a new pencil.

A friend of his observed, “Just before he died, his countenance became fair. His eyes brighten’d and he burst out into singing of the things he saw in Heaven.”

Today Blake’s prints, sketches and paintings of those visions are in the world’s finest museums. His poems are included in countless anthologies. He is a widely accepted mystic—and regarded by some as mad. But he was never institutionalized like his contemporary the poet William Cowper (who coined the phase mysterious ways), nor did he indulge in drugs, like Samuel Coleridge. His doors of perception were ones he felt all of us could open. If we let ourselves see what he saw, our world could be transformed too.

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John Burke, author of Imagine Heaven

“Heaven is a place, more real than our experience of earth. Just like a two-dimensional, black-and-white painting exists within a three-dimensional room of color, so earth exists within new dimensions of time and space in which Heaven and all its wonderful new experiences will be found.” 


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Michelle Myers, author of Famous In Heaven & At Home

“The Bible doesn’t give us a GPS to heaven’s location, but rather, the promise of a place where we will forever worship around the throne of God. Heaven is where God is, longing to be gracious to us, and where Jesus awaits the command from the Father for His triumphant return for all who believe in Him.” 

The Big Question: Where Is Heaven?

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Genesis 28:12

“Then [Jacob] dreamed, and behold, a ladder was set up on the earth, and its top reached to heaven; and there the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.”


Imaginary view of the Earth in outer space. View of American continent. Elements of this image furnished by NASA

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Jonathan Parnell, pastor and author of Never Settle for Normal

“Theoretical physicists say that there are at least ten dimensions in the universe, possibly eleven. We can perceive three…Jesus doesn’t take Peter, James, and John to a faraway galaxy light years out of sight. They just walk up on a mountain, and here on this earth, Moses and Elijah stepped in to talk to Jesus in his glorified form. For that moment, the curtain was pulled back, as it were, and the heavenly dimension that overlaps with our reality was seen.” 


Hands holding and caring a green young plant

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Stan Osterbauer, author of There Are No Mansions In Heaven

“We don’t know the physical location of Paradise. But the location of the New Earth will be right here…the Old Earth transformed!”


Young woman in sweater with heart shape enjoying beautiful cloudscape sitting on the car roof above the clouds on the sunrise. Image focused on the clouds

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Dr. Eben Alexander, neurosurgeon and author of Proof of Heaven

“Heaven is the natural home of our essential selves that we connect to from within—the entire, observable physical universe emerges out of that pure heavenly consciousness.”


Sunrays coming through the clouds over the ocean and reflects the light in the water

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Watchman Nee, theologian

“When the people built the tower of Babel, God said, ‘Let us go down’…David in praising God said, ‘He bowed the heavens down, and descended’…The apostle John saw a door opened in heaven, and he heard the voice like a trumpet speaking with him, saying, ‘Come up here’…There are many more verses that can be quoted. But these few are enough to prove that heaven, the dwelling place of God, is above.” 

Open doors on the summer meadow

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Rev. Dr. Calvin Butts, pastor

“Heaven is in another dimension. So you don’t necessarily have to look up but you can look out and see heaven. Heaven is a fourth dimension, if you will.”


Portrait of a beautiful young woman with face wrapped with a plaid scarf.

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Dr. Wayne W. Dyer, author of I Can See Clearly Now

“Heaven is a state of mind, not a location, since Spirit is everywhere and in everything.”


Silhouette of a woman with her arms raised to the sun

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Henry David Thoreau, poet and philosopher

“Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.” 


Young woman sits on a jetty above the lake, she is reading a book. Beautiful Autumn day in Italy

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Scot McKnight, Biblical scholar and author of The Heaven Promise

“Heaven describes the presence of God where God’s will is done. The New Testament describes the new heaven and the new earth, what most people call heaven, as the transformation of where we now live into the glories God has planned for it. So, heaven is not up there beyond the clouds, but what we see and feel and sense now—only much better.”


A little bit of sunlight shining through the rocks

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Dr. Rob Oberto, author of Intimacy with God

“Heaven is in the presence of God. Where God is, there is heaven also.” 

A ladder leading up to heaven.

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Saint Isaac of Nineveh, bishop and theologian

“The ladder that leads to the kingdom is hidden within you, and is found in your own soul.” 

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