THE AFTERLIFE: MANY ARE THE LEVELS OF HEAVEN, AS ALSO THERE ARE IN PURGATORY

THE AFTERLIFE: MANY ARE THE LEVELS OF HEAVEN, AS ALSO THERE ARE IN PURGATORY

There are the gorgeous valley floors, the foothills, the endless highlands; no prairies; no deserts; a wide and lofty place – the crown of the world, and then higher; large fields of grass – gold grass; blue flowers, flowers on two-foot-stems, goldenrods; fantastic animals (but no mosquitoes); a pergola of vines; numerous birds; huge butterflies; animals not of the earth; new forms of life. All share in beauty. We speak here of Heaven (according to so many testimonies).

“The trees, shrubs, and flowers were perfect,” is an account. “They had no dried leaves anywhere. Even plodding on vegetation did not damage it. It was not only the beauty of individual flowers that impressed, but the way they were arranged in the gardens and how they complemented each other in color and size.” A blade of grass plucked from the "ground" begins to grow again when it is dropped back down.

Fantasy? Even doctors describe such during their own brushes with the hereafter.

There is no death.

No dead branches (or leaves, though one can bet on colors more splendiferous -- vastly -- than any Vermont fall).

“Time didn’t seem to matter,” said another we must quote. “I felt like I had all the time in the world just to stroll down the lane and enjoy the feeling of peace and serenity.” That ethereal atmosphere is preparation for still greater, higher realities.

The longer one travels, it is said, the more impressive become the surroundings.

“Those who die go to different states or places and do not see each other at all times,” said a girl named Daisy Dryden who “died” as a child, “but all the good are in the state of the blest.”

If there are many ways of existing in hell and purgatory (and we should remember this, during November: when we are reminded to pray for the deceased), so too are there the many levels of Heaven.

We can surmise that the Blessed Mother is at the very top (which is why she is not immediately prevalent in many such episodes). She is in the highest reaches. In Georgia, an unusual image appeared on the future grave of a woman. It was taken to be an angel (this was a Baptist cemetery). It looked very much, too, like the Blessed Mother.

One man from Louisiana wrote to me about a severe heart attack – so severe that doctors had to induce a coma. When they did, his organs shut down. He was given no chance of survival. “I was awakened not in this world,” he said, “but face to face with Our Lady who told me it was not my time to come.” 

Where she is, where Christ is, are too the highest orders of angels.

How many orders?

We could not know. But we will.

“Small flower-lined paths led up to individual homes and the houses seem to be small and occupied by individual family members,” said Lundahl and Widdison. Or families occupy whole areas. A celestial picnic?

There is not the need for food as there is in the physical reality but those in Heaven can choose to “dine” if they desire.

Some see trees with “fruit,” others vast forests of oaks and elms and trees that are unfamiliar to earthly eyes – all towering and symmetrical and accenting the light.

There is the countryside but then, dramatically, there may be what seems like a city – or a series of “cities.” This is where some have seen the place of evaluation. It is where others have seen what seemed like vast libraries – so vast as to be “endless” (like all the buildings in Washington together, in the words of one). An experiencer named Dr. George Ritchie (see: Return From Tomorrow) described the library he saw as “the size of the whole University of Richmond,” where he gazed into rooms lined floor to ceiling with documents “on parchment, clay, leather, metal, paper.”

The thought came to him (as to others who have seen a similar place) that “the important books of the universe” were assembled here. During his experience the psychiatrist entered another “building” that seemed to have a hushed atmosphere and was startled to see people in a passageway. “I could not tell if they were men or women, old or young, for all were covered from head to foot in loose-flowing hooded cloaks which made me think vaguely of monks,” he wrote. “But the atmosphere of the place was not at all as I imagined a monastery. It was more like some tremendous study center, humming with the excitement of great discovery. Everyone we passed in the wide halls and on the curving staircases seemed caught up in some all-engrossing activity; not many words were exchanged among them. And yet I sensed no unfriendliness between these beings, rather an aloofness of total concentration.

“Whatever else these people might be, they appeared utterly and supremely self-forgetful – absorbed in some vast purpose beyond themselves. Through open doors I glimpsed enormous rooms filled with complex equipment. In several of the rooms hooded figures bent over intricate charts and diagrams, or sat at the controls of elaborate consoles flickering with lights. I’d prided myself a little on the beginnings of a scientific education; at the university I had majored in chemistry, minored in biology, studied physics and calculus. But if these were scientific activities of some kind, they were so far beyond anything I knew, that I couldn’t even guess what field they were. Somehow I felt that some vast experiment was being pursued, perhaps dozens and dozens of such experiments.

We discern. Heaven or a realm just below it?

“The eyes of faith permit us to see that the heavenly and earthly cities interpenetrate and are intrinsically ordered to one another, inasmuch as they both belong to God the Father, who is ‘above all and through all and in all,’” Pope Benedict XVI told a pontifical academy. Cities? Work?

Others have viewed souls busy with tasks that could not be determined. And far different scenery. “I felt just wonderful,” said a woman whose death occurred in 1960. “I felt no pain. I felt like an observer, floating there between two worlds, one that I knew well and one that I didn’t know existed. In time it seemed as though the ceiling was paved with blue-white clouds, and the air seemed sprinkled with gold dust. It became very bright.”

--Michael H. Brown