THE ROSICRUCIAN
FELLOWSHIP
An International Association
of Christian Mystics

Where is Heaven?

The Christ said "Heaven is within," and yet we are shown that at the time when He left His disciples, he ascended into heaven. to understand this, we must analyze the constitution of a planet, and according to the hermetic action "as above so below," we shall understand better if we first analyze the constitution of man.

The man has first the dense body which we see with our eyes, but that dense body is not as solid as it appears; in fact it is permeated by a number of invisible vehicles. It is composed of the solids, the liquids and the gases of the Chemical Region, but these, science tells us, are interpenetrated by ether, for man's body is no different from all other things in the world, and in the densest solid as in the rarest gas, science says, and says truly, every little atom is vibrating in a sea of ether. This ether is still physical matter; a considerable portion is specialized by man and forms an exact counterpart of our dense body, besides protruding about an inch and a half beyond the periphery of our visible body. It was this part that the doctors in Boston weighed by placing dying people on scales. They noted that when the last breath was drawn something having weight left the body and the side of the scales which had the weight on it fell to the floor with startling suddenness. The newspaper reporters claimed that the doctors had weighed the soul, but what they did weigh was this vital body composed of ether which leaves the body at death.

We have a still finer vehicle called the desire body, which is composed of what occultists call desire stuff, and it may be seen by one having the sixth sense unfolded as an egg-shaped cloud enveloping the dense body on all sides, so that the latter is located in the center of the desire body, as the yolk is in the center of the egg, with the difference only that while the white envelops the yolk but does not interpenetrate, this desire body permeates both the vital body and the dense body in every nook and cranny. There is a still finer material in the makeup of man which we may call "mind stuff," composed of the coarsest material of the world of thought, the material wherein we form our concrete thoughts, and this envelops the indwelling Ego.

The world is similarly constituted. Besides this visible world which we see, composed of the solids, liquids and gases, and interpenetrated by ether, there is also a Desire World which permeates every part of the Physical World and reaches out into space beyond both air and ether. Then there is the World of Thought, and that also penetrates every part of our planet, from center to circumference, reaching out into space still farther than any of the other worlds.

During earth life, man lives upon this firm, visible earth, but after death, according to the deeds done in the body, he may be still imprisoned here, as the Purgatory regions are everywhere around and about us, also below in the inner recesses of the earth. The First Heaven is also here in a certain sense, insofar as similar material to that of which it is constituted is around and about us, but the First Heaven itself, the place where the spirits who have been liberated usually dwell, is beyond our atmosphere. The Second heaven may also be truly said to be within, for the material of which it is constituted is here and the spirits who are there might visit us, yet the conditions here, the thought currents, etc., would be derogatory to their work and development. Therefore, they prefer to stay in the farthermost, outermost part of our planet, where the pure mind stuff is unsullied by our selfish and deleterious thought currents.

The Third Heaven is a place in which very few people at the present stage of development have any consciousness, because most of us are guided in our thought activities more by emotions and feelings concerning concrete things than by abstract thought, which is the peculiar faculty pertaining to the Third Heaven. When we think of love, we usually think of love in connection with some person; that is a concrete thought. But of Love in the abstract, very few of us are able to think. We can think of a house, an animal, etc., they are concrete, but we dislike to think of an abstract proposition such as, for instance, that the square of the hypotenuse equals the square of the other two sides of a triangle. Therefore, most of us have very little consciousness in the Third Heaven, and consequently very little of the material of that world is in the makeup of our planet.