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1017. Spirits have said that they inhabited the third, fourth, and fifth heaven, etc.; what did they mean in saying this?
"You ask them which heaven they inhabit, because you have the idea of several heavens, placed one above the other, like the stories of a house, and they therefore answer you according to your own ideas; but, for them, the words 'third,' 'fourth,' or 'fifth' heaven, express different degrees of purification, and consequently of happiness. It is the same when you ask a spirit whether he is in hell; if he is unhappy, he will say 'yes,' because, for him, hell is synonymous with suffering; but he knows very well that it is not a furnace. A Pagan would have replied that he was in Tartarus."
The same may be said in regard to other expressions of a similar character, such as "the city of flowers," "the city of the elect," the first, second, or third "sphere." etc., which are only allegorical, and employed by some spirits figuratively, by others from ignorance of the reality of things, or even of the most elementary principles of natural science.According to the restricted idea formerly entertained in regard to the localities of rewards and punishments, and to the common belief that the earth was the centre of the universe, that the sky formed a vault overhead, and that there was a specific region of stars, men placed heaven up above, and hell down below; hence the expressions to "ascend into heaven," to be in "the highest heaven." to be "cast down into hell." etc. Now that astronomy, having traced up the earth's history and described its constitution, has shown us that it is one of the smallest worlds that circulate in space and devoid of any special importance, that space is infinite, and that there is neither "up" nor "down" in the universe, men have been obliged to cease placing heaven above the clouds, and hell in the "lower parts of the earth." As for purgatory, no fixed place was ever assigned to it.
It was reserved for Spiritism to give, in regard to all these points, an explanation which is at once, and in the highest degree, rational, sublime, and consoling, by showing us that we have in ourselves our "hell" and our "heaven," and that we find our "purgatory" in the state of incarnation, in our successive corporeal or physical lives.