Heaven

Heaven is the term used across many of the world's religious and mystical traditions to name a realm of ultimate goodness — variously described as the dwelling place of the divine, the destination of virtuous souls after death, and the state of consummate blessedness. Christianity traditionally locates Heaven as the realm of God, the angels, and the redeemed departed. Judaism speaks of Shamayim (the skies / heavens), sometimes reckoned as seven layers with distinct populations and functions. Islam describes Jannah — the Garden — as an eight-layered paradise of surpassing beauty. Buddhism and Hinduism describe multiple heavens (devalokas) as pleasant but ultimately impermanent realms in which advanced beings reside pending eventual return to further incarnation and, ultimately, liberation from the whole cycle.

Heavenly geography is often elaborately detailed in the source traditions. Dante's Paradiso structures Heaven as ten concentric spheres corresponding to the astronomical bodies of the Ptolemaic system, each populated by a specific class of blessed souls and culminating in the direct vision of God (the visio beatifica). The Islamic Isra and Mi'raj — the Prophet's Night Journey — describes the ascent through seven heavens, each with its guardian prophet. Kabbalistic tradition maps the seven heavens of Jewish mysticism (Raqia, Machon, Zebul, Ma'on, Aravot…) with their own populations and functions.

In near-death experiences and high-dose psychedelic reports, encounters with what experiencers name as Heaven (or its cultural cognates) recur consistently. The reported phenomenology often includes: overwhelming radiant light; a sense of being met, expected, and welcomed; a felt presence of deceased loved ones and, sometimes, of divine beings; a specific quality of unconditional love that experiencers routinely describe as impossible to convey in ordinary terms; and — most commonly — a reluctance to leave. The Bruce Greyson NDE Scale and the Griffiths et al. mystical-experience questionnaire both track these specific features as their consistent phenomenological signature.

Whether Heaven is a metaphysical location, a shared archetypal image, a specific neurological state, or all of these simultaneously, is a question the codex leaves open — as its founding traditions do.

Sources:
Wikipedia — Heaven
Wikipedia — Paradise