Paradise

From a really young age, I've been dreaming of heaven, even before I was a Christian. And from time to time the ache comes back. The homesick ache.


Ecc 3:11
He has set eternity in our hearts

I'm heading to Switzerland this summer, I hope. Close to heaven. Close, but never there. It will always evade us until we find the true Source.

I typed Paradise on my Google and went on Wiki to check it out.

Wiki:
Paradise is an idealized place in which existence is positive, harmonious and timeless. It is conceptually a counter-image of the miseries of human civilization, and in paradise there is only peace, prosperity, and happiness. Paradise is a place of contentment, but it is not necessarily a land of luxury and idleness.

Paradisaical notions are cross-cultural, often laden with pastoral imagery, and may be cosmogonical or eschatological or both.

In eschatological contexts, paradise is imagined as an abode of the virtuous dead.

In Christian and Islamic understanding heaven is a paradisaical relief, evident for example in the Gospel of Luke when Jesus tells a penitent criminal crucified alongside him that they will be together in paradise that day.

In Native American beliefs, the other-world ia an eternal hunting ground.

In old Egyptian beliefs, the other-world is Aaru, the reed-fields of ideal hunting and fishing grounds where the dead lived after judgment. For the Celts, it was the Fortunate Isle of Mag Mell.

For the classical Greeks, the Elysian fields was a paradisaical land of plenty where the heroic and righteous dead hoped to spend eternity.

The Vedic Indians held that the physical body was destroyed by fire but recreated and reunited in the Third Heaven in a state of bliss.

In the Zoroastrian Avesta, the "Best Existence" and the "House of Song" are places of the righteous dead. On the other hand, in cosmological contexts 'paradise' describes the world before it was tainted by evil.

So for example, the Abrahamic faiths associate paradise with the Garden of Eden, that is, the perfect state of the world prior to the fall from grace.

The concept is a topos' in art and literature, particularly of the pre-Enlightenment era, a well-known representative of which is John Milton's Paradise Lost.


He has truly set eternity in our hearts.

No culture, no man can run from that longing.