"Heaven is a mixed neighborhood"

[BurtWorm]

That's a bumper sticker slogan I saw many years ago in the Adams Morgan section of Washington, DC, while I was undergoing what seemed to me then to be a mystic experience, but which in retrospect I believe was some kind of manic episode. I didn't believe in a a separate eternal "place" called "Heaven" even then. I understood "heaven" to mean "here and now," and the bumpersticker aphormism to mean that heaven was right under your nose, wherever you were and with whomever was around you right then. I happened to be in one of the most exquisitely ethnically and economically diverse neighborhoods in Washington at that moment, so it was especially apt. I really did feel like I was in paradise.

As a child, when I hadn't sorted out my beliefs about god, etc., and when I took for granted that adults weren't lying about matters divine, I fantasized about heaven as being a city like Boston--not a shining city on a hill, but a gritty, dirty, rambling cluster of streets, low and high rises, coffee shops, record stores, gas stations, going on for ever and ever in every direction.

In the spirit of this moment in this forum, I offer my own heaven thread. What does "heaven" mean to you? Is it a real place to you, or a metaphor? If a metaphor, what form does it take in your head?

[Evoman]

1. Lol...I am not taking this bait.

People will call me dogmatic, and say that I am uneducated and that I am not a scientist!

[BurtWorm]

2. I'm assuming you agree with me that heaven is here now.

If you attend to it. Otherwise it's nowhere never.

[Evoman]

4. No. I don't believe there is a heaven on Earth or in the sky.

This world will never be heaven. Even in that economically and ethnically diverse community, who knows what kind of debased crap was going on behind closed doors.

Life can be pleasant and life can be interesting, but it will never be heaven. Unless, that is, you change the word heaven so much that it becomes almost meaningless.

[BurtWorm]

5. I hear you.

I guess my point is that if you're living your life with the expectation that the finest, purest moments will happen to you after you're dead, you will almost certainly miss that the finest, purest, most exquisite moments can only happen to you while you're alive. Heaven used to mean exclusively the literal city of God, but it has come to mean the state of the sublime. We tend to think most Americans, anyway, mean the former when asked if they believe in Heaven and answer that they do. But if that's what Heaven is, it's just a wish. If it's the latter, than it's real, and it's available to us here now. (So too is hell.)

[cosmik debris]

3. Shangri La

A fictional place created in the mind of a pretty good writer.
(unlike Evoman who doesn't write like a scientist)