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Kant, Immanuel - Quotes - Where is heaven and ascent
Identifier
015118
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Notes in Dreams of a Spirit Seer
If one speaks of heaven as the seat of the happy, common conception likes to place it above, high up in the immeasurable universe.
But one does not consider that our earth, viewed from those regions, must also appear as one of the stars of heaven, and that the inhabitants of other worlds, with as good reason, may point to us and say, “See there the dwelling-place of eternal joys, a heavenly abode, prepared to receive us some day.”
For a queer illusion makes the high flight which hope takes, always to be connected with the idea of rising physically, without considering that however high we may have risen, we have to descend again to land eventually in another world.
According to the ideas just mentioned, heaven would be properly the spirit-world, or, perhaps, the happy part of it, and this we would have to seek neither above nor below, because such an immaterial whole must be conceived of, not according to the further or nearer distances of corporeal things, but according to the spiritual connections of its parts with each other.
Its members, at least, are conscious of themselves only according to such relations