Summary
Heaven was originally understood as an internal state of being—union with the divine within you—not an external place in the sky.
Post-Nicaea Christianity externalized heaven, changing it from a present reality accessible through consciousness to a distant reward after death.
This shift removed spirituality from daily life, leading to the degradation of art, architecture, and culture as industrialization prioritized profit over sacred expression.
Restoring culture requires reclaiming the original understanding: heaven is within you, accessible now through divine union in every act of daily life.
Podcast Timeline
00:50-03:31 — Introduction: The catalyst for exploring heaven
03:31-05:34 — Common understanding: Heaven as realm of the divine, peace, and union with God
05:34-07:41 — The great shift: From internal state of being to external place in the sky
07:41-10:02 — Post-Nicaea changes: The externalization of heaven in Christian doctrine
10:02-13:17 — Cultural consequences: How spirituality shaped art, architecture, and daily life
13:17-15:58 — Spiritual death: Industrialization and the removal of the divine from society
15:58-16:40 — Conclusion: Restoring culture requires restoring divine spirit
Intro Note:
A note before we begin: This article started as a Sunday morning voice note—an unfiltered exploration sparked by seeing beautiful art from 1901 and asking: what happened to us?
What you’re about to read is the refined argument. The full podcast captures the raw discovery, the complete historical journey from Jesus saying “heaven is within you” to the Council of Nicaea externalizing it, and the direct line from that theological shift to the death of beauty in our world.
If you want the unedited exploration—the full breakdown of mystical traditions, the industrialization connection, and the complete restoration path—become a paid subscriber to access the complete podcast archive.
For now, here’s the core teaching: Heaven isn’t up there. It never was. And that lie has cost us everything beautiful.
What is heaven? This place that we are continually trying to go to.
Greetings. This is Franklin O’Kanu here with Unorthodoxy, and this is a Spiritual Sundays podcast—a deeper exploration of a topic I want to discuss.
What is this place that we are constantly trying to get to? This morning, while going through my routine, I came across beautiful art from 1901—a beautifully made sofa, an exquisite chair. Thanks to Illuminate The Illusion for the post.
It sparked a conversation that many are having: what has happened to our art? What’s happened to our culture?
The Culturist discuses this loss of culture consistently.
This ties directly into the topic of heaven. I think we’re completely wrong on what heaven is. And I think our understanding of what heaven is is so misguided that it has literally destroyed our society, sending us in a direction we don’t need to go. So let’s talk about what heaven is, how we’ve lost track of it, and how that’s led to the degradation of our society.
The Common Understanding
What exactly is this idea of heaven? The common understanding across all walks, all religions, is that heaven is the realm of the divine. It is a place of peace, perfection, and union with God—or source, whatever you want to call it.
It’s described as being above the material world. It represents completion, the soul’s return to its origin, beyond pain, sin, and mortality. In Judaism, heaven is a spiritual domain where God resides. In Christianity, it’s union with God through Christ. In Islam, it’s paradise. In Sufi thought, it’s closeness with the divine presence attained through purification.
Long story short: heaven is this place of dwelling with the divine. But what’s very interesting is that nowhere in this core definition do we have an idea that heaven is somewhere external.
The Great Shift: From Internal to External
How did we go from this place which could be anywhere, internal, to now it’s somewhere in the sky? This is where history becomes crucial.
In the very beginning, as religion started, heaven was understood as a state of being—not a physical place. Every religion had their different understanding. The Egyptians had heaven and the underworld. In early Hebrew thought, it was “the height”—meaning symbolically higher consciousness. The Vedas in Hinduism recognized it as inner realization.
When Hebrew texts said “God is in the heavens,” they meant the height of consciousness. Even Zoroastrianism, with its duality, spoke of souls ascending or descending in consciousness.
Jesus himself, in Luke 17:21, states that the kingdom of heaven is within you. Multiple times, Jesus says that heaven is within you. “Within you” ties into this concept of heaven as a state of being with the divine—not a physical place, but the realm of the divine consciousness.
Heaven is a state of being that one can be in. Hell is also a state of being that one can be in.
The Christian Era Literalization
However, it was not until the Christian era that these concepts began to be externalized. This is phenomenal for us to understand. Post-Nicaea, post-Constantine, after the politicalization of Christianity, we see doctrines and ideologies being enforced that changed how we understand heaven.
Heaven is no longer within you, as Jesus stated. Now heaven is up there. Religion changes heaven from being here within you, in your daily life, to this place that you chase somewhere external.
This shift is fascinating because as we externalize heaven, we begin to lose out on the lessons these practices were attempting to teach humanity.
The Cultural Consequences
Not all practices lost this understanding. Around the 1500s to 1900s, you still had alchemical, gnostic, hermetic, and mythical views of faith. Practices like Sufism remained deeply mythical. These mystical traditions don’t look forward to an external heaven or worship God in only one prescribed way. Rather, they say, “I worship God in everything that I do, and this translates into my life here on earth.”
The idea is simple: I tap into heaven every single time I sit back and am in union with the divine.
When we had a society, a culture that was deep in spirituality and practice, this was reflected in the arts and culture. The individuals who built monuments and architectures did it as a sign of worship, as reverence to the divine. There was a deeper understanding of what heaven was and where we were supposed to go with this.
But as we move through time into the 1900s and 2000s, as propaganda and materialism take hold—particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries when industrialization transforms the world—we see the removal of spirituality from society.
The Spiritual Death of Society
Society becomes more mechanical, more mechanistic, more material. People no longer worship through the arts. People no longer worship in their works. People just do what they have to do, because 80% of what we do now doesn’t serve humanity—it serves corporations.
Corporations don’t care about the arts. Corporations focused on oil and steel only care about oil and steel, about what produces more money. These are things that should be used but not prioritized.
With the Rockefellers and the industrialization era, humanity begins to suffer spiritually, and it’s reflected in everything we do. We no longer have the arts—the beautiful sofas, the exquisite chairs, the masterful paintings. Our culture is gray, black, and white.
The spirit, the beauty of the divine that would manifest in humanity whenever we would tap into heaven—having that reflected in everything we live, say, and do—has been removed. Everything is colorless. There’s no more art, no more precision, no one loves what they do.
Restoring the Spirit
If we are going to restore culture, we must first restore spirit. And if we’re going to restore the spirit, it must be a divine spirit—one based in truth and rationale, not dogmatic thinking. Our current understanding of modern religions has become dogmatic, creating internal barriers to genuine conversation and understanding.
But blessed are those who have the courage to know the divine for themselves.
This isn’t just about religion. How does our understanding of heaven tie into our culture, our work, our living? There’s no wonder why society is off track, why people are dying, why there’s no joy in life, why people numb their senses, why people don’t invest in beauty and meaning.
This is what Steiner warned about. Society has become so removed, so spiritually void, that our world is a gray, black, and white space. And one of the biggest things contributing to that is the externalization of heaven.
We’ve taken this idea of heaven and ignored what the source tells us—”The kingdom of heaven is within you.” We’ve externalized it. And with that externalization, we’ve seen tremendous loss.
When we understand that heaven is not a distant place we reach after death, but a state of consciousness we can access now, in this moment, through union with the divine—everything changes. Our work becomes worship. Our creations become expressions of the sacred. Our daily lives become the practice of dwelling in heaven.
This is the understanding we must recover if we are to restore beauty, meaning, and spirit to our world.
As always, thanks for the time and attention. Have a great and wonderful day.
—Ashe,
Franklin O’Kanu
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