Heaven, the Heavens or Seven Heavens, is a common religious, cosmological, mythological, or metaphysical term for the physical or transcendent place from which heavenly beings (such as a God, angels, the jinn, and sky deities like King or Queen of Heaven, Heavenly Father, Heavenly Mother, Son of Heaven, heavenly saints or venerated ancestors) originate, are enthroned or inhabit. It is commonly believed that heavenly beings can descend to earth or incarnate and that earthly beings can ascend to Heaven in the afterlife or, in exceptional cases, enter Heaven alive.
Heaven is often described as a "higher place", the holiest place, a Paradise, in contrast to Hell or the Underworld or the "low places", and universally or conditionally accessible by earthly beings according to various standards of divinity, goodness, piety, faith, or other virtues or right beliefs or simply the Will of God. Some believe in the possibility of a Heaven on Earth in a World to Come.
Another belief is in an Axis mundi or World tree which connects the heavens, the world, and the underworld. In Indian religions, Heaven is considered as Svarga loka, and soul is again subjected to rebirth in different living forms according to its karma. This cycle can be broken after a soul achieves Moksha or Nirvana.
Read more about Heaven: Etymology, Entry Into Heaven, Bahá'í Faith, Buddhism, Chinese Faiths, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Jainism, Mesoamerican Religions, Polynesia, Theosophy, Near Death Experiences, Criticism of The Belief in Heaven, Postmodern Views
Famous quotes containing the word heaven:
“Just as the French of the nineteenth century invested their surplus capital in a railway-system in the belief that they would make money by it in this life, in the thirteenth they trusted their money to the Queen of Heaven because of their belief in her power to repay it with interest in the life to come.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (18381918)
“Speak, nameless, power and might;
when will you leave me quite?
when will you break my wings
or leave them utterly free
to scale heaven endlessly?”
—Hilda Doolittle (18861961)
“War and culture, those are the two poles of Europe, her heaven and hell, her glory and shame, and they cannot be separated from one another. When one comes to an end, the other will end also and one cannot end without the other. The fact that no war has broken out in Europe for fifty years is connected in some mysterious way with the fact that for fifty years no new Picasso has appeared either.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)