Heaven Is Ten Zillion Light Years Away

Or Is Heaven Anywhere?

I missed a week - family stuff. So here we go.

Stevie Wonder, Los Lonely Boys, Three Dog Night, Hall and Oates, and some thoughts on heaven.

Ten Zillion Light Years

One light year is about 6 trillion miles, or 9 trillion kilometers. This is old hat to you science people - the speed of light is 186,000 miles per second. The driving distance from DC to NYC is about 230 miles, so you could make this trip about 809 times in one second at light speed. In one year, at light speed, you could travel the roughly 239,000 miles to the moon about 25 million times (to be precise 25,105,602 times). No wonder the stars get blurry when Han and Chewie make the jump.

The notion that heaven is ten zillion light years away means it is physically unreachable, given current and envisioned technology at this moment. Is it that far? Well, that depends on your concept of heaven. Is your concept that even the idea of heaven is ridiculous, like my father (more on that later)? Is your concept that heaven is a physical place? Is it that heaven is a spiritual place? I’ll leave hell to another day, although my general thought is that people create their own hell wherever they are, and that deserves no energy from me.

What and Where Is Heaven?

This Webb image (more here - and what an awesomely beautiful rabbit hole) could make me believe there is a physical heaven out there. Maybe travel time does not matter at death, if that is the time when you get to see heaven. Perhaps your soul transports instantaneously upon admission, or maybe with the right access code belief system people go now and decide never to return (who could blame them?). Not that we’d believe anyone if they told the story. Well, some would believe them, others would likely declare them crazy, and sadly others would likely torture them to steal the way there themselves, humans being who they generally are, historically.

The concept that heaven is a spiritual place makes its timing (that is, when you get to go/experience it) and location dependent upon your spiritual beliefs. I think we all know folks who tell us that their deceased parent/sibling/relative/friend/pet comes to visit in dreams or otherwise, or that at the moment of death there was a vision or visitation. I am not talking about people of whom we question their grasp on reality. We all know someone we respect who believes this. Who is to say they are right or wrong? This can neither be proven nor disproven.

If your concept is that heaven is ridiculous, it just cannot be, you cannot prove it, and therefore it does not exist, where does that leave you if it does? Is belief a requirement for admission/experience/however heaven works? This, also, cannot be disproven.

Can heaven be a physical place? How would one get there?

Is there a Lake Woebegone hidden away somewhere? Maybe it is or is similar to Wakanda. Just like the origin of our universe, it seems these are questions to which we will never have any reasonable answer. Heaven is a belief. There is no right or wrong to it.

My Father

I started this piece more than two weeks ago. I have no idea why, other than I heard “Heaven Is In Your Mind” on Underground Garage and felt like writing something about it. My father is at least agnostic, perhaps deeply areligious, and more likely atheist. Anyone who has painfully engaged in a discussion with him regarding just about any religion would conclude this (he most definitely enjoys pugilistic conversation). Two days ago, he was quite close to death. He’s 99, turning 100 on August 9. Here is what he said to me then: “I feel like I am levitating 10-12 feet in the air. Something is trying to take me to heaven, even thought I do not believe.” Was this a delusion from his oxygen-low brain? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

Was this pending event a trigger, either unconscious or otherwise, for me to write this? Forever to be unknown. When I started writing this, my father was old and otherwise remarkably healthy. He has since had a fall with some resulting difficult times, although he appears to be, remarkably, recovering to live another week or month or year. He is well past his statistical lifespan.

If your mind is open, you often experience things that challenge your beliefs. What I do know is that I have experienced quite a bit of luck. Was it because I worked myself into a spot where I could get lucky? Did some fate or guiding force push me there? Did I incept my luck? Or has it purely been chance? Forty years ago I would argue that heaven, religion, and spiritualism are shams. All I can comfortably say now is that I do not know, and the more I learn, the more I think that there is something out there.

“Call it luck

Call it fate

Call it a shame that we have met so late”

Hall and Oates: Had I Known You Better Then

Thank you for reading. All feedback is a gift.

Sundry

• I just finished David Frum’s How We Got Here. It is worth reading. Like Jill LePore’s These Truths, I promise you, agree or not, it will make you think. Also, both of these helped me better understand the fights happening regarding history teaching. Humans have a strong bias towards writing history that is favorable and not necessarily factual.