Heaven Isn’t Where We Think It Is (And Why That Changes Everything About the Paranormal)
If you had asked me growing up what heaven would be like, I would have given you the comfortable, familiar version. I’d have said, it’s a beautiful place, filled with a gleaming city, streets of translucent gold, Jesus puttering around said streets in a flowing white robe, and all my loved ones waiting there for me. Once there, I’d have said we finally get to do all the things we enjoy for all eternity. Maybe that looks like fishing on a glassy lake (not a great eternity for the fish), walking through endless meadows of wildflowers, or yes, even sitting on a cloud strumming a harp if that is your thing. I’d have said a place of peace, pastel colors, and everything clean and bright.
It is a comforting picture, perhaps one I saw over the course of my long Sunday School career somewhere, and I understand why it has endured. It takes the longings we feel in this life and projects them into eternity, cleaned up and perfected. But over time, I began to sense that this version of heaven, while not entirely wrong, might be far too small. The deeper I looked into ancient Christianity, particularly through the lens of early Jewish thought and the teachings preserved in the Orthodox and Catholic traditions, the more I realized that heaven is not simply a destination. It is something far more complex, more structured, and in some ways, far closer than we ever imagined.
Heaven: Not a Place, But a Reality
One of the most surprising shifts for me was realizing that, in Scripture and early Christian teaching, heaven is not consistently described as a distant location where God lives and we eventually travel. It’s not quite like we were led to believe in the song When We All Get to Heaven. Instead, heaven is often spoken of as a reality or realm that overlaps with our own.
In the Bible, what we think of as heaven and earth were not originally separate. In Genesis, the Creator “walks” in the garden. There is no sense of distance, no barrier between Divine and human presence. The rupture in communion comes later. What we now experience as separation was not the original design, but a condition of a world that has slipped out of alignment with its Source. Nowhere does Scripture say the Creator “moved away.”
In fact, in the earliest Christian understanding, as in Orthodox and Catholic teachings, heaven is often described less as a place and more as participation in the Divine life. God does not “exist” in the same way created things exist; thus, he is not located somewhere. Created things derive their existence from Him. He is not one being among many. He is Being itself. As the Orthodox say, “everywhere present and filling all things.” Nothing exists apart from him. If that is true, then heaven is not merely where God is. Heaven is what reality looks like when everything participates fully in God.
A Layered Reality
Ancient Jewish cosmology, which shaped the worldview of the early Christians and the writing of the New Testament, did not imagine the universe as a flat, material system with us here and God somewhere far away. Instead, it envisioned a layered, structured reality, alive with both visible dimensions (such as us and the material world) and invisible (such as angels and spirits). These are not necessarily physical layers stacked above us like floors in a building. Rather, they can be understood as degrees of reality, each more fully participating in the Divine life and presence.
In this framework, what we call heaven and earth are not separate locations but rather interwoven realms. They overlap, intersect, and at times, become visible to one another. This helps explain why, throughout Scripture, moments occur where another dimension seems to break through into human experience. Angels do not always arrive with spectacle; sometimes they appear as ordinary men, only later recognized for what they are. Other times, their presence is overwhelming, accompanied by fear, light, or a sense of otherness that disrupts the normal order of things.
Visions in Scripture often follow a similar pattern. The prophet Isaiah sees the Lord seated on a throne, surrounded by seraphim, in a scene that is not described as a distant heaven but as something revealed to him in the midst of his earthly life. Ezekiel’s visions are even more complex, filled with layered imagery of wheels within wheels, living creatures, and a radiant throne, suggesting not fantasy, but the difficulty of describing a reality that does not fit neatly into human categories. In fact, he seems to be describing something quite alien.
The idea of a Divine council also emerges from this same worldview. In several Old Testament passages, God is depicted as presiding over a heavenly assembly. In 1 Kings, the writer sees the Lord seated on His throne with the “host of heaven” standing beside Him. In the book of Job, the “sons of God” present themselves before the Lord. These scenes are not presented as symbolic in the text itself, but as glimpses into an ongoing heavenly reality that normally remains unseen.
What is striking is that these encounters are not treated as violations of reality, but as revelations of it. The boundary between realms is real, but it is not impermeable. At certain moments, by the Creator’s will, it becomes thin enough for human beings to perceive what is always there.
The New Testament carries this forward. with references to multiple “heavens.” One of the most intriguing comes from Paul, who writes in 2 Corinthians of a man “caught up to the third heaven.” He speaks carefully, almost reluctantly, describing the experience as beyond the bounds of normal language. He equates this “third heaven” with “paradise” and emphasizes that what he heard there cannot fully be expressed in human words.
Early Jewish thought often spoke of multiple heavens, sometimes three, sometimes seven, as a way of describing increasing proximity to God’s direct presence. Paul does not map this structure out in detail, and the Church has never treated these numbers as a literal geography to be charted. Instead, his language reflects a shared understanding that reality has levels or depths, and that the highest of these corresponds to the immediate presence of God.
Taken together, these scriptural moments begin to form a consistent picture. Heaven is not simply “up there,” and earth is not sealed off “down here.” Instead, we live in a reality far more layered and alive than we typically perceive, where, at times, the veil lifts just enough for human beings to glimpse what has been there all along.
This raises a fascinating question for us today. If heaven and earth are not fully separate, what do we do with the many modern accounts of people encountering something just beyond ordinary reality?
Thin Places and Modern Encounters
Across cultures and throughout history, people have described experiences that feel like stepping just outside the normal boundaries of perception. Near-death experiences. Sensed presences. Moments of overwhelming transcendence. Places that feel different, charged, almost alive. What is striking is not only that these reports exist, but that they often share recurring patterns, even among people with no shared theology or background.
Near-death experiences, in particular, have become widely documented in modern clinical settings. Individuals who are medically close to death sometimes report leaving their bodies, observing events in the room from an external vantage point, or moving through what they describe as a tunnel or threshold of light. Many also describe encounters with deceased relatives, beings of light, or a profound sense of love and awareness that feels more real than ordinary waking consciousness.
From a materialist perspective, these experiences are often explained as neurological events occurring under extreme stress, oxygen deprivation, or chemical changes in the brain. That explanation may account for some aspects of the phenomenon. Still, it does not easily explain the consistency of certain details across cultures, or the reports of verifiable perceptions that occur when brain function is severely impaired. From a more layered view of reality, one possible interpretation (only a speculation) is that near-death experiences may represent moments when perception is no longer limited to the physical frame, allowing consciousness to register aspects of reality normally inaccessible. This does not necessarily resolve the question of interpretation, but it does open the possibility that what is being experienced is not purely internal.
In Celtic Christianity, similar ideas are often associated with “thin places,” locations where the boundary between heaven and earth feels especially permeable. While the term itself is later and more cultural than doctrinal, the underlying concept is ancient: that there are moments and places where the presence of God feels unusually immediate, as if the veil between visible and invisible reality becomes less dense.
Thin places often seem quite ordinary. A quiet island chapel where prayer feels unusually natural. A mountain landscape where silence becomes almost tangible. A forest path where time seems to slow, and awareness deepens. People who experience them frequently report a sense of peace, heightened perception, emotional clarity, or the feeling that they are being “seen” by something beyond themselves. Sometimes there is awe, not fear exactly, but the recognition that reality is larger and more alive than expected.
For example, pilgrimage sites such as Iona in Scotland or Glendalough in Ireland are often described this way by visitors. People do not necessarily report dramatic visions, but rather a shift in perception, an awareness that feels more open, more deeply connected than ordinary experience. In other contexts, cathedrals and ancient monasteries are said to carry a similar effect, not because of architecture alone, but because of sustained prayer, memory, and sacred association over long periods of time.
There are also places people describe as having a different “energy,” though that language is more modern and less precise. Some locations feel heavy or unsettling, while others feel unexpectedly peaceful or luminous. While these interpretations are highly subjective and vary widely, the persistence of such reports across cultures suggests that we as human beings consistently perceive differences in place that go beyond visual or environmental cues alone.
From a traditional Christian perspective, these experiences are not automatically affirmed as Divine. Discernment is always required. Not every spiritual encounter is from God, and not every sense of presence reflects truth. In fact, some reports are decidedly dark and lead to harm. Christian theology consistently warns that the spiritual realm is not uniform or safe in a simplistic sense. However, the existence of such experiences is not surprising if reality itself is layered and interconnected, with boundaries that can, at times, become perceptible.
The Dead Are Not Gone
This brings me to one of the more misunderstood aspects of traditional Christianity: the idea that we can pray for the dead and ask the saints for their prayers. For many modern Christians, especially Protestants, shaped by a very “separated” view of heaven and earth, this feels wrong or foreign. But within the older Christian understanding, it follows naturally from one key idea: death is not the end, but a transition.
If heaven is not a distant location but a deeper participation in the Divine, then those who have died are not “gone” in the way we often assume. They have not ceased to exist, nor have they been relocated to an inaccessible realm cut off from creation. Rather, they have passed through a threshold into a fuller experience of reality, one that is no longer constrained by physical limitation and is more real, not less. In that sense, they are not absent from reality; they are more fully within it.
In both Orthodox and Catholic teaching, death does not sever relationships. It changes their form. Thus, asking for the prayers of those who have gone before is not about elevating them to something Divine, but recognizing that they are still part of the same living reality, no longer bound by time or distance.
Praying for the dead follows the same logic. If love does not end at death, then neither does care, intercession, or connection.
All of this only makes sense within a cosmology where heaven and earth remain connected, where the boundary between them is real but not absolute. In such a world, death is not the end of anything, but a transformation of it. And those who have gone before us are not lost to some unreachable distance, but are, in a mystery we only partially perceive, still participating in the same life, just from the other side of the veil.
This also raises a question about many modern accounts of grief and mystery. Could this be why some people report encounters with deceased loved ones, moments of sensing a presence, dreams that feel more real than ordinary memory, or brief experiences of recognition and comfort that seem to break through the normal boundaries of perception? Within this older, layered understanding of reality, such experiences would not be treated casually or assumed to have uniform meaning, since discernment is always necessary. But they could be understood, at least in some cases, as rare and unchosen moments where the veil between realms feels unusually thin, allowing a glimpse, however partial and fleeting, into a relationship that has not been broken, only transformed, bringing comfort to those left behind in the physical realm.
What Heaven Is Not
In my wanderings through ancient Christianity, I also began to understand what heaven is not, at least according to historic Christian teaching. Heaven is not primarily about self-fulfillment or endless leisure. It is not an eternal extension of our current preferences, simply made more comfortable. It is not a backup plan for a life we did not fully enjoy here. Heaven is also not a place where we become disembodied spirits floating indefinitely, detached from creation or from the goodness of physical existence.
In the most ancient Christian teaching, the Christian hope is not escape from the material world, but its transformation. The resurrection of Christ is not presented as liberation from a body, but as the renewal and glorification of embodied life itself. The final picture in Scripture is not of souls escaping from earth, but of heaven and earth being brought back together in a restored creation. The language of Revelation moves toward this convergence, in which the “new heaven and new earth” are not separate realities but a unified order in which the Divine presence fully saturates creation once again. The recurring biblical image is not humanity ascending away, but God descending to dwell with humanity in a renewed world.
In that sense, heaven is not the end of the story. It is part of a much larger one. It is the healing of a fracture, the restoration of a layered reality brought back into harmony. Creation is not discarded, but renewed and made whole.
Within that restored reality, human beings are not passive. They participate. They reign and serve, not in domination, but in alliance with the wisdom and life of the Creator. The original calling of humanity, to steward and reflect the Divine within creation, is not abandoned but fulfilled. This is not an escape. It is fulfillment. Not replacement, but transformation. Which all sounds awesome to me!
A Parting Thought
If the ancient worldview is even partially correct, then we are not living in a closed, purely material system. We are living in a multi-layered reality where realms overlap, where the spiritual and material are intertwined, and where moments of encounter, both ancient and modern, may be glimpses into that deeper layered structure.
What if what we call paranormal is not a violation of reality, but an encounter with parts of reality we have forgotten how to see? That does not make every experience trustworthy, but it does mean they may not be as impossible as we have been taught to think.
We tend to separate the ancient world from our own, as if they lived in a fundamentally different universe. But we know that isn’t correct. We are descended from our ancestors, who were descended from their ancestors before, and on and on back through time. We are still living inside the same structure, only with a reduced understanding of these other realms and a flatter spiritual imagination.
Heaven is not a distant destination we eventually arrive at after death, but a present reality that is partially veiled, partially revealed, pressing up against the edges of our daily experiences in ways we sometimes mistake for intuition, coincidence, beauty, or longing. It is already here, not separate, but saturating everything, waiting to be recognized and entered more fully. I need a “mind-blown” emoji here . . .
And if all of this is even partially true, then the most astonishing shift is not simply that we will one day go to heaven, but that we are already standing at the threshold of something vast, something alive, something far beyond what we have been taught to notice, waiting to be seen, and in some mysterious way, waiting to be entered.
Grace and light to you all.