The Structure of Heaven

An encyclopedia of the paranormal, How Spirit is organized and how it affects your daily life

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  • About The Structure of heaven
  • Introduction
  • 1. Skepticism and Classical Physics
    • Skepticism/Humanism
    • Skepticism/Relativity and Quantum Physics
    • Skepticism/CSICOP
    • Skepticism/Why the Skeptics are Wrong
    • Skepticism/The advantages of belief
  • 2. The Human Soul
    • Why do we live in a material Universe?
    • The Human Soul and its Relationship to the Body
  • 3. God and Theodicy
    • Does God cause bad things to happen to good people?
    • Guardian Spirits and the Life Plan
    • What is Theodicy?
      • Zoroastrian Theodicy
      • Jewish Theodicy
      • Christian Theodicy
      • Why is Theodicy important?
      • Can Love conquer all??
  • 4. Psychics and mediums- an overview
    • What are psychics and mediums?
    • Why mediums can’t seem to agree about the afterlife
  • 5. The Structure of Heaven
    • The Universe according to Emanuel Swedenborg and Frederick Myers
    • A Map of the spiritual realm
    • Spirit Portals
  • 6. Heaven, Hell and the planes of illusion
    • Introducing The transitional plane (The Earth Sphere)
      • The functions of the transitional plane.
      • Crossing over
      • Time traps on the transitional plane
    • Evolution within the planes of illusion
      • The Summerlands and above
      • The Winterlands
    • The Hells
      • The Conditions in the Hells
      • Who goes to Hell?
      • Hell and the transitional plane
    • How spirits from different levels perceive each other
    • Vertical Stratification of the Spiritual Realm and How Spirits Progress
    • Horizontal Stratification and Spiritual Social Groups
  • 7. What happens when we die?
    • There is no external Judgment in the Afterlife!
    • Death doesn’t change a soul’s attitude
    • The life review
    • What do spirits look like?
    • Ghosts and their clothes
    • Zombies
    • Time 
    • Time in the planes of illusion
    • Memory in the world of spirit
    • What’s it like to be dead?
  • 8. Spiritual laws/The Law of Divine Love
    • Spiritual Laws/The law of compensation
    • Spiritual Laws/Spiritual Gravity
    • Spiritual Laws/Spiritual Frequencies
    • Spiritual Laws/The Law of Attraction
    • Spiritual Laws/The Law of Free Will and Good vs. Evil
    • The red devil and the white angel
    • The spiritual advantage of Living in a Material World
    • Why does God allow bad things to happen to good people?
  • 9. The Human Aura and Theosophy
    • The Aura as a Protective Spiritual Skin
    • The Aura and Spiritual infection (Obsession)
  • 10. Dr. Carl Wickland and Thirty Years Among the Dead
    • Dr. Wickland’s Spirit Dialogs
    • Spirit Related Insanity
  • 11. Spiritual Infection and Modern psychiatry
    • Emanuel Swedenborg’s Spiritual Insight
    • Wilson Van Dusen
    • Wilson Van Dusen’s Heavenly and Hellish Voices
    • Entities that invade the minds of the living
  • 12. Earthbound Spirits
    • Will I end up an earthbound spirit?
      • Three reasons that GOOD souls get stuck on the transitional plane.
    • Where do ghosts get their energy?
    • Human Spirit Obsession
    • Human Spirit Possession
    • Criminal culpability and spiritual infections
    • Enthrallment by the living and Hypnosis
      • Enthrallment and Abusive Relationships
      • Enthrallment: Cults
      • Enthrallment in the afterlife
      • Enthrallment by God and angels
  • 13. Angels and demons
    • The Provenance of Angelic Beings
    • The War in heaven
    • Angels and their function in religion
    • Magic and Wicca
    • Demonology
      • The structure of Hell
      • How demons infect a person or place
      • The five stages of demonic attack
      • Why do demons want to possess people?
      • The characteristics of demons
      • Thought Forms
  • 14 exorcim
    • Major exorcisms (also called imperative exorcisms)
    • False, or fake possessions
    • How Religion Views Demons Vs. Ghosts
    • Avoiding Demonic Repossession
    • Who can Remove Demons?
    • Removing Human ghosts
    • Exorcism and poltergeist activity in disturbed children
    • Haunted Dolls and Other Objects
    • Dealing with Family and Marriage Disturbances Caused by Ghosts
    • Goodness and ghosts
  • 15. Poltergeists, Ghosts and Hauntings
    • Poltergeists versus Ghosts
    • How spiritualists view ghosts
    • How Parapsychologists view ghosts
    • Children and Poltergeist infestations
    • Poltergeists that make the news
    • Ghosts and spiritual imprints
    • Ghosts of famous people
    • Why do ghosts seem bound to the same location?
      • Ghosts and sensory deprivation
    • A Ghost Story
    • Differentiating between Human and Demonic hauntings
      • Hauntings by Human ghosts
        • Ghost hangouts
      • Hauntings by Demonic spirits
  • 16. All about Psychics and others prone to spiritual infections
    • 1. Psychic Sensitives
      • Psi and the human brain
      • The five general categories of psychics
    • 2. Spiritual infection and mental illness
      • Are the spiritually infected mentally ill responsible for their criminal acts?
    • 3. Spiritual infection and Acquired Negative Lifestyles
      • Spiritual infection and drug and alcohol addiction
      • Spiritual infection as a result of negative personality traits
    • 4. Spiritual infection and childhood abuse
  • 17. Criminals and Spirits
    • Why are criminals more prone to spirit obsession than other people?
  • 18. Religion and Government
    • The birth of Morality
    • Religion = Spirit + Politics
    • The paranormal and religion
    • Human Nature-The REAL reason for religion
      • Sex and Religion
      • Religion and War
      • Religion vs. Secular law
    • Religious Dogmas
      • The Catholic Sexual Abuse Scandal
    • Spiritualism
    • Why are the dark spheres necessary?
  • 19. Spirit Lies and Tall Tales!
    • Edgar Cayce
    • Edgar Cayce and Atlantis
  • 20. Suicide and its Spiritual Consequences
    • Nondiscretionary Suicides
    • Discretionary Suicide
    • Why you should never choose to commit suicide
    • Suicide Terrorists
  • 21. Reincarnation (An Introduction)
    • Spiritualism and Reincarnation
    • Allan Kardec and the Spirits’ Book
    • Allan Kardec, a warrior for reincarnation
    • Theosophy and Reincarnation
      • Madame Blavatsky
    • A House divided
    • Karma
    • Swedenborg on reincarnation
    • The group soul (the oversoul)
  • 22. Reincarnation: The evidence
    • The evidence for possession as an alternative to reincarnation
    • The early church and the history of reincarnation in the West
    • Past Life Regression
    • Is reincarnation really a part of God’s plan?
      • Why would a soul choose to reincarnate?
      • The Pitfalls of Reincarnation
      • If a soul reincarnates, what happens to the old personality?
      • The ultimate fate of old personalities 
  • 23. The Cross Correspondences
  • 24. The Fox Sisters and the Birth of Spiritualism Page 1
    • The Fox Sisters and the Birth of Spiritualism page 2
    • The Fox Sisters and the Birth of Spiritualism page 3
    • The Fox Sisters and the Birth of Spiritualism page 4
    • The Fox Sisters and the Birth of Spiritualism page 5
    • The Fox Sisters and the Birth of Spiritualism page 6
    • The Fox sisters: Original report of the Hydesville Haunting
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Christian Theodicy

Note: The Structure of Heaven is a 325-page book that can be downloaded from Amazon.com in Kindle format by clicking here. It is also available in paperback format by clicking here.

Jesus, the man

Jesus was a living man.  He was Jewish, and in his early life he was, like his father, a carpenter.  As a young man, he witnessed the  oppression of his people under the heel of the Romans who had conquered Israel 63 years before his birth, as well as the hypocrisies and injustices imposed by Herod the Great who had been installed by the Romans as the “King of the Jews” approximately 37 years before Jesus’s birth.  It is believed that Jesus joined the Essenes.  Although not much is known about the Essenes, they are believed to have been a monastic community which was founded to practice and teach a fundamentalist form of Judaism based on the Torah and other apocryphal texts which were written by ancient Jewish prophets, and not included in the Torah.  It is possible that Jesus began his ministry as a wandering Rabbi preaching doctrine he learned from the Essenes.

Everything we know about the life of Jesus is contained in the four canonical gospels, which were written between 30 and 80 years after his death and which together form the text of the New Testament.  None of the gospels were written by eyewitnesses, and all are the end-products of long oral and written transmission.  Because of the nature of oral tradition and the fervency of the beliefs of the earliest Christians, it is impossible to know just how much of what we read in the gospels is true of the living man himself and how much is hyperbole based on the natural tendency of the earliest Christians to enlarge upon the stories told by their fathers.  

Jesus, the Son of God

However, this fact makes very little difference because most Christians today believe in the absolute truth of the gospels and the divinity of Jesus.  He represents all of God’s qualities.  He humanized the Jewish traditions of his day, which, even then, were saturated with local politics.  He preached the SPIRITUAL aspects of Judaism and was against the materialistic aspects which were very prevalent in the Jewish temple of his day.  

When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple courts he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money.  So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple courts, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables.  To those who sold doves, he said, “Get these out of here! Stop turning my Father’s house into a market!”           John 2:14-17

To Christians, He IS God in a more understandable and human form.  Since the earliest days of the earliest Christian church, Jesus’s name was synonymous with God!  To most Christians today, Jesus is the personification of God.  He represents everything that Satan (the devil) is NOT. He represents the light of God opposing the devil’s darkness.  He preached “righteousness” which can be freely translated to mean right versus wrong.  Biblical “righteousness” forms the basis of western common law and the customs which (until recently) formed the basis of Western civilization.

For Christians, God and Jesus are one and the same!

The evolution of the modern Christian faith

In the current (modern) interpretation of the New Testament, the struggle between Good and Evil is personified in the beings known as Jesus Christ and Satan.  Modern biblical Christianity, like the later versions of Zoroastrianism, (but unlike Judaism and the earliest forms of Christianity), introduces a devil and thus defines evil as a metaphysical substance that can infuse both humans and spiritual beings. 

This is principally because the various authors of the New Testament borrowed from the book of Enoch and a number of other apocryphal Jewish writings which were not included in the original Jewish Torah and which told a story of the war in heaven between God and “the dragon”.  The dragon’s intention was to devour the Child of the Celestial Woman.  (In the New Testament, the child is widely interpreted as Jesus, God’s son, and the woman is interpreted as the land of Israel.)  Later Generations came to see the dragon as the fallen angel Lucifer, who became known by the Old Testament name Satan.  

Instead of seeing God as the author of both good and evil, modern Christianity divides these qualities between God and the fallen Lucifer.  Christians now see a god who rules in heaven and strives to elevate man by eliminating material values, and a devil who rules in Hell and uses material values to bring about man’s downfall. 

This wasn’t always the case.  It certainly wasn’t in the early history of the Christian faith.  St. Augustine (354—430 C.E.), one of the earliest and most influential church fathers, wrote extensively on evil, and came to the conclusion that evil is simply the result of man’s human nature.  He (like Zoroaster) regarded evil as a corruption of goodness caused by humanity’s abuse of free will, and neither God nor the devil is responsible for the evil in the world.  He believed that evil does not even exist in and of itself.  For St. Augustine, the duality is only between competing spiritual qualities involving the use and misuse of free will. 

The early Catholic Church agreed with St. Augustine in denying the existence of evil, and deemphasizing Satan, however during the late sixth century, Pope Gregory the Great (540 -604) reversed this policy and codified evil in the doctrine of the “seven deadly sins”.  After Gregory, the Devil became an iconic, and malignant figure prominent in art and carved into the façade of every church.  Satan immediately became extremely popular because he represented material good… sex, money and power… all the things ordinary people secretly covet.

Thus, the concept of evil quickly assumed material proportions in the minds of the common folk.  After Gregory, it was widely assumed that the devil or any number of his minions could adopt human form and walk among us unnoticed.  This belief fed into the generalized ignorance and poverty of the day and accounts for many of the atrocities committed by both the church hierarchy and the general population during the long period we today call the dark ages.  To the common folk, the devil became a god of evil, and they attributed to him power nearly rivaling that of God.  Keep in mind that this is an entirely natural progression in nearly every religion as it “progresses” from its pristine spiritual state into its more politically aware maturity. 

This “materialization” of evil in the mind of the people had an enduring effect on the moral character of Western Civilization.  Now, anyone, spirit or mortal, could contain, or be composed entirely of evil.  One of mankind’s most natural tendencies is to concentrate evil into a material substance personified in the body of the Devil, and that is the reason that Pope Gregory the Great was the most popular pope of his age.  In the world of “bread and circuses”, evil is the most satisfying show on earth.  Unfortunately, it remains that way today.

The Catholic Church underwent an awakening after the protestant reformation, discarding its medieval beliefs concerning the nature of evil.  Today, the church hierarchy regards the devil as an intelligent spiritual being and tries to discourage the belief that he is a competing god. Those people affected by evil are regarded as ignorant and misguided in the eyes of the church.  The devil and his minions are not made of, or even filled with evil, but are simply angels devoid of God’s light.  As you will come to understand in the next section, this is NOT a distinction without a difference.  

The church hierarchy still considers the devil and his demonic angels as real spiritual beings devoid of goodness who can physically affect our material world.  Thus, they keep a secret coterie of exorcists on hand to do battle with the physical manifestations of evil.  The numbers of this secret fraternity of priests has vastly expanded in recent years, and they are constantly busy.  

Notwithstanding the church’s attempt to downplay the devil, the vast majority of ordinary Christians, Catholic and Protestant alike, still think of evil as a material substance which can infect anyone or anything.  The church still does little to discourage these beliefs, because a number of its core sacraments amount to little more than elaborate waste removal rituals.  This includes some of the most ancient church rites such as Baptism and the Sacrament of Penance. 

In Catholic teaching, baptism cleanses the soul of “original sin”, and the Sacrament of Penance is the method by which individual men and women may confess sins committed after baptism and have them absolved by a priest.  Both of these rituals imply that evil can be removed en masse like a load of dry sand, leaving the penitent free of sin without further effort. 

Note: The Structure of Heaven is a 325-page book that can be downloaded from Amazon.com in Kindle format by clicking here. It is also available in paperback format by clicking here.

Why is Theodicy important?>>>

<<<Jewish Theodicy

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Science, Math and God

Science, Math and God is the companion book, originally written as a preface to The Structure of Heaven. It's a book that explains why the skeptics are wrong, and why modern science no longer rules out the paranormal. Learn why God now has a place to live. (Also available as an eBook and paperback at Amazon.com)

The Lower Reaches of Heaven

The Lower Reaches of Heaven is a modern rendition of an of an old book; Thirty Years Among The Dead by Dr. Carl Wickland. It is essential reading if you want to understand Earthbound Spirits and the dynamics of their environment. It also contains lots of editorial comment and historical facts, as well insight into how ghosts think.

The Structure of Heaven is a 350 page book that can be downloaded from Amazon.com in kindle format by clicking here. It is also available in paperback format by clicking here.

If you have a question for me, you can email me at: author@thestructureofheaven.com. Be aware, however, that the answer to almost all your questions concerning this subject are best found by downloading the e-book or purchasing the paperback direct from Amazon.com

You can contact me directly by email: author@thestructureofheaven.com