Is Heaven Real?

What Happens After We Die?

There is life after this life. Your personality goes on and you can learn and grow in eternity with the people you love. Heaven is real and the journey is rewarding and exciting.

How Do You Get to Heaven?

Survival after this life is a gift, it is not earned by believing in a special doctrine or tenet of a religion. That said, there is a need to strengthen the spiritual part of ourselves. We are both animal and spiritual. The animal part of our person will perish at our death. The spiritual part will survive. But there must be some degree of a spiritual part of you to survive onward.

How Does the Spiritual Part of You Grow?

The spiritual part of us grows when we care about other people. When we care about others’ needs more than our own, we are developing a set of higher values. The more we use these values in our daily lives, the more our spiritual part grows so that it begins to dominate our actions.

How Spiritual Do You Need to Become to Get to Heaven?

There is no minimum level of spirituality you have to develop to make it into heaven. You just need to be able to recognize that being considerate of the needs of others is important; to recognize that such caring is a higher standard than being self-centered. The ability to get to heaven is based on just wanting to express goodness no matter how successful you are at it.

You Will Get to Contact People You Know

Once you get to heaven, you are given a new home. Then you get ten days of free time before you start your spiritual training there. You have time to find and visit your loved ones and other earthly friends who arrived before you.

There Are No Shortcuts

When you get to heaven, you will resume your spiritual growth at the exact level where it was interrupted by death. Between the time that earthly life ended and the time that you wake up in heaven, no new knowledge is gained except for the fact that you survived death. You pick up where you left off and then you learn and do all sorts of things. There is an almost endless series of schools and chances to get on-the-job training that fit your needs and interests.

You Will Wake Up in a Real Place

Heaven is often described as a formless place in the sky full of clouds. 

But heaven is a real physical place that we actually go to. Heaven is a vast universe of planets that we travel through as we become more and more spiritual.

You Will Meet Your Guardian Angels

Artists have often depicted angels with wings. They don’t actually have wings. We will probably be surprised when we actually see these heavenly friends who have been helping us, invisibly, throughout our earthly life. 

Your guardian angels (there are a pair of them) will be visible to you upon your awakening in heaven. In your current life, they guide you into new and progressive experiences to help you grow spiritually.

Cooperating with the guidance of your guardian angels does not mean a life of ease. Your angels help to put you in situations that challenge you to make moral decisions and grow spiritually.

The Grand Adventure Through Heaven

God is in the midst of a grand adventure that includes your personal involvement. Participation requires a vast amount of education and training on your part. The first part of this learning experience is your achievement of mastery over yourself—your ability to have self control and control your impulses. Ideally self-mastery can be achieved in this mortal life, or it can be addressed in your first educational steps in heaven.

You will learn that self-mastery enables you to work for the welfare and benefit of others. You will quickly realize how fulfilling that is.  Finding joy in putting others first makes you more Godlike. To take joy in putting others first makes you more like God. In heaven, becoming like God will be your goal.

What Does It Mean to Become Like God?

When you practice self-mastery you can more often choose kindness, cheerfulness, forgiveness, patience, and so many other positive values.

There are no shortcuts to the effort needed to make these choices. All of the choices to foster positive values come with challenges and with some amount of struggle. It’s not always easy to be kind when you are irritated, for example. However, there are many rewards for adopting these values. It takes effort to turn these values into habits.

Simply getting to heaven does not instantly make you a loving and happy person. Values need to be cultivated. As you more frequently exhibit these values in your daily life, you become more like God.

Heaven Is a Vast School

Education in the afterlife is designed to be interesting and engaging. You will be doing things you enjoy and are eager to do and learning at the same time. It is unlikely you have ever experienced anything similar. Every support and encouragement is provided to you.

Your primary contribution in this is your desire to make progress. If you want to become increasingly more real in loving behavior toward all persons and things, then you will cooperate in your growth and you will enjoy learning.

Your Survival Is important

The universe has been set up for each of us to succeed in this adventure. Immense efforts are spent to include us all.

The grand adventure is directed toward experiencing step-by-step progress in going from imperfection to perfection. As a result, helping us grow out of our imperfections—even our vices and our corruptions—are a privilege for all the angels.

Is Heaven Real?

None of us have been there; this is an overview of some of the ideas that The Urantia Book presents about what happens after we pass through that portal. Someday we will personally know the answer to the question: Is heaven real? 

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