Where Is Heaven?

THE QUESTION IS IRRATIONAL. It assumes the word “heaven” refers to an actual place. For more than 2,500 years, however, rational thinkers in the West have known heaven to be a mythic location, not a physical reality.

Our image of heaven is a survival from a primordial model of the universe in which the earth was flat, heaven was in or beyond the sky above, and the dead “lived” a shadowy existence in an underworld below. The universe was imagined, basically, as a three-story structure, even if heaven or the underworld (later the medieval hell) were sometimes visualized as multi-layered.

The realization that this traditional, multi-storied image of the universe was, in fact, imaginary dawned as early as the 6th century BCE, when classical Greek thinkers began to see a spherical earth at the center of a system of orbiting celestial bodies (the sun, the moon and the planets). In the 2nd century CE, Ptolemy developed a standardized version of the geocentric (earth-centered) model of the universe that dominated cosmological thinking for the next 1,400 years. Then in the 16th century CE, Copernicus demonstrated the superiority of the heliocentric (sun-centered) model that has since proved to be an accurate representation of reality, making it possible, for example, for us to send men to the moon and rovers to Mars .

Even so, millions of people around the world invoke heaven, every day, in a variety of contexts from formal prayer practices to sentimental consolations on the death of a beloved pet.

Why, then, does an irrational, mythic image of heaven continue to hold sway in otherwise rational modern minds? It’s because rationality is not all there is to the modern human mind; because the development of rationality does not eliminate the value of the non-rational elements of the psyche.

Even though mythic images may not be factual, they may still carry important truths. Euhemeristic interpretations of myths, which reduce them to fanciful stories about actual people and events, miss (and dismiss) the persistent value mythic tales and images have in the human soul.

With the advent of depth psychology in the late 19th century, the truth value of non-rational elements began to come to light. Sigmund Freud recognized the therapeutic value of dealing seriously with non-rational elements emerging from the unconscious psyche, but downplayed their truth and persisted in reductionistic interpretations of the material. On the other hand, C. G. Jung, an early and important protégé of Freud who soon pushed beyond his mentor, recognized both the therapeutic value and the existential truth potential of unconscious images.

You already know some of Jung’s work, even if you haven’t read or studied any of his writings, because a number of his theoretical concepts have migrated into general use (and sometimes into common misuse). Jung, for example, developed the concept of a psychological “complex.” He recognized and named the behavioral differences between “introverts” and “extraverts” (which he always spelled with an “a” as it would appear in Latin, not with an “o” as it now appears in English dictionaries). In addition, you’ve almost certainly heard of the “collective unconscious” and (thanks to Sting, perhaps) the “acausal connecting principle” Jung called “synchronicity.”

The Jungian concept that’s most relevant to this discussion of heaven, however, is the “archetype.” While the term has roots in the ancient and immensely influential metaphysical speculations of Plato, Jung used it to conceptualize empirical observations. The clinical experience Jung brought to his theoretical work ranged from the treatment of schizophrenics, early in his career, to analysis with neurotics, and finally to work with “normal” people in search of meaning and growth in their lives.

The clinical data Jung collected and analyzed during his long career included some 60,000 dreams, plus visions, hallucinations, and even physical symptoms. He supplemented this empirical data with extensive research in mythology, religion and occult thought (including both gnosticism and alchemy).

In both his analytical practice and his theorizing, his fundamental hypothesis was that the psychic material is meaningful. His data not only affirmed his hypothesis, but also led Jung to the conclusion that the human psyche is a living system pursuing balanced growth along a human path toward a definite goal. Moreover, the data (and his own experience) showed Jung that this living system is “transpersonal” — it includes experience that transcends strictly personal experience.

In addition, the unconscious psyche tends to present its images to consciousness in recognizable patterns. When a pattern of images consists mostly of material from a person’s life, we call it a complex. When a pattern consists of mostly of transpersonal material, however, it is archetypal.

Jung concluded that the tendency of the unconscious psyche to manifest in archetypal patterns is a heritable feature of the human species. Akin to instincts in animals, therefore, archetypal patterns encode the evolutionary experience of the species and can act as guiding images for human behavior. Because we humans have a more highly evolved level of consciousness than animals, and we have crossed over into reflective self-consciousness, we have the power of choice and our behavior is not strictly determined by these guiding images.

Heaven is an archetypal image of the human collective unconscious. In fact, it appears to be an archetypal image representing a significant portion of the collective unconscious itself. Heaven is commonly if not universally understood to be the home of divine beings — of the gods in polytheistic cultures, of God, angels and saints, in the monotheistic religions. From a purely psychological and empirical point of view, regardless of whatever metaphysical status they may have, these divine beings are also archetypal images.

Psychologically speaking, therefore, heaven is an archetypal image of the “place” where our most highly valued and powerful archetypal images “live.” The fact that heaven is up above, in or beyond the sky, expresses yet another archetypal pattern that associates positive values with light and height, but negative values with depth and darkness.

So, where is heaven? Strictly speaking, it is no-place, as a Buddhist might say; or as an ancient Greek would say, it is utopia (no place). Psychologically speaking, it is the collective unconscious — or at least the positively valued portion of it.

Before you despair that I have just reduced an important spiritual belief to “nothing but” a psychological image or fantasy, you need to understand that Jung’s model of the psyche is radically open to the unknown. As an empiricist, Jung tried his best to avoid engaging in metaphysical speculation. He understood that the unconscious is ultimately just that, unknown.

To say heaven is an archetypal image, therefore, is to state an empirical fact. It says nothing about whatever reality heaven may have beyond our experience of it in the psyche (which is where all our human experiences occur in this life). The fact that our archetypal image of heaven also carries our most positive, our highest valuation may in itself suggest the image is pointing beyond itself to a transcendent reality. To say more would be metaphysical speculation.

When Jung was asked in a BBC interview, two years before his death, whether he still believed in God, the octogenarian famously replied, with an impish grin, “That is a difficult question to answer…. I know. I don’t need to believe.”