The Structure of Heaven

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

Menu
  • Home
  • About Me
  • Contact Me
  • 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 Judgement 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 In the spiritual world
    • Time in the planes of illusion
    • Memory in the planes of illusion
    • 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
        • Human 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
Menu

The Universe according to Emanuel Swedenborg and Frederick Myers

Emanuel Swedenborg

 Emanuel Swedenborg (1/29/1688 – 3/29/1772) was an eighteenth century genius and mystic who was the first “spiritualist.”  It was he who first described a detailed structure for the spiritual realms that was not based on biblical scripture.  His original insight led him to conclude that the spiritual world was composed of concentric spheres surrounding the sphere of God, which lies in the center.  His representation is pictured below.


The spiritual world according to Swedenborg
Inner Spheres=good=closer to God,
Outer Spheres=bad=closer to the outer darkness.

According to Swedenborg, the “heavens” are innermost, closer to God at the center, while the “hells” are outermost and closer to the “outer darkness.”  In the outer darkness, spirits are isolated from the light of God.  Note that the earth sphere stands in a gray area.  This is because the earth is equally affected by both good and bad spirits. 

Frederick Myers 

Since Swedenborg’s day, nearly everyone has become accustomed to viewing the heavens and God on HIGHER levels while evil exists on the lower levels.  This is the result of the influence of Thomas Aquinas on Christian theology and Western thought.  Aquinus visualized the earth, to which heavy objects fall, as the home of “fallen” man.  The “heavens above”, was the realm of God and his angels.  The center of the Earth, the lowest point to which things could fall, was Hell, where the devil lives.  

Frederick Myers was born in 1843, and died in 1901.  He was a famous classical scholar and one of the five founders of the British Society for Psychical Research (The SPR).  The founding principle of the society was to investigate the reality of psychic phenomena using scientific methods and to discover if, in fact, there is a link between psychic phenomena and a spiritual world in which the spirits of the dead could exist as conscious entities without physical bodies.  

Myers spent a good portion of his early research debunking fraudulent mediums and magicians who claimed that their illusions were actually magic.  Philosopher William James, his famous American compatriot and colleague, in a posthumously (after his death) channeled book, complained of the enormous number of fake mediums that he investigated who used fraudulent tricks to con ignorant clients out of their money.  However, Myers and his associates also discovered a large number of genuine mediums who were never debunked, and who delivered large quantities of truthful and verifiable information about the deceased friends and relatives of their clients.  

Myers’ investigations led him, over time to develop a strong belief in the existence of what we today call psi phenomena, and that mediums could present powerful evidence that extrasensory abilities were very real.  However, proving that these phenomena could actually link the spirits of the dead with the living proved to be more problematic.  

In some cases, he found that accurate information could be produced about a person known to a sitter who was originally thought to be dead, but later turned out to be alive.  In one experiment, a sitter concentrated on a fictitious personality prior to a sitting, and then found that the medium would produce communications from that fictitious personality.  This proved that these people were acting as psychics, and not mediums.  They had powerful paranormal gifts, but were NOT necessarily in contact with the dead.  

This, however, was not true for all people who claimed mediumship.  Many appeared to be genuine mediums who consistently produced information that could not be debunked.  Over years of this sort of observation, Myers eventually concluded that a spiritual world does, in fact, exist, that the human spirit continues to exist after death, and that spirits can communicate with the living using human psi facilities.

Myers wrote extensively during his life. The most famous of his written works was the very long Phantasms of the living, which contained approximately 700 anecdotes about the psychic experiences of ordinary people.  His most important book written while he was alive was Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death.  He is also remembered today as one of the spirit authors of the Cross Correspondences (explained in depth in chapter 23).  

After his death in 1901, his spirit began the posthumous dictation of two books to a famous medium (never debunked) named Geraldine Cummins who channeled spirits through automatic writing.  The first, and most famous was The Road to Immortality, written in 1932, thirty -one years after Myer’s death. 

Geraldine Cummins was a famous medium known for her integrity and the accuracy of her psychic insights.  She lived and worked in the early twentieth century.  Both Myers and his channel, Geraldine Cummins have a history of integrity and were honest searchers for spiritual truth during their lifetimes.  Cummins never knew Myers during his lifetime, and The Road to Immortality was written through her hand 31 years after Myers’ death.  Even though Cummins knew next to nothing about Myers, her channeled prose accurately reflected his personality, and was authenticated by people who knew him personally including the famous physicist Sir Oliver Lodge who was a close personal friend of Myers.  Lodge and others vouched for the accuracy of style and the similarities of personality demonstrated by the channeled commentator to that of Myers himself.

In The Road to Immortality, Myers names seven planes of the spiritual world, and for completeness, I will also name them here.  

(1) The Plane of Matter.
(2) Hades or the Intermediate State.
(3) The Plane of illusions.
(4) The Plane of color.
(5) The Plane of Flame.
(6) The Plane of Light.
(7) Out Yonder, Timelessness.

In The Road to Immortality, Myers discusses the various spiritual planes that he experienced or learned about after his death.  The first plane is the material universe including the earth and everything on it.  

He called the second plane “Hades”, but in spite of its connotations, he does NOT equate Hades to Hell.  “Hades”, as Myers uses the term translates into what we call the “earth plane” or the “plane of earthbound spirits”.  This plane is of immense importance to those of us still living on this earth, and it will be discussed in much more detail in the next chapter.

 The third plane is what Myers called the “plane of illusion.”  The plane of illusion contains, in the words of Emanuel Swedenborg, “many heavens” and “many hells.”  Each heaven or Hell is populated with spirits who produce their own environment through the resources of their own imaginations.  That’s why they are called the planes of illusion.

A Map of the Spiritual Realm >>>

<<<< The Structure Of Heaven

You can buy this book on Amazon.com

This book is available in both an eBook and a paperback. I don't advertise on this site, and the sale of this book is the only way I can recoup my hosting fees. I wrote this as a public service. Everyone has a right to understand that No One Lives Forever, but No One ever Really Dies!

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.

©2023 The Structure of Heaven