Episode 120 - What is Heaven? Celestial Realms with Tobias Churton

Ken sits down with returning guest Tobias Churton — historian of Western esotericism, Gnostic scholar, and one of the most wide-ranging thinkers in the field — to explore his latest book Celestial Realms, an ambitious attempt to map humanity’s ideas of heaven across cultures, religions, and time.

Beginning with Tobias’s own early spiritual experience, the conversation expands outward into a global survey of how different civilisations have imagined the afterlife — from ancient burial rites and Mesopotamian pessimism to Egyptian moral judgment, Eastern philosophies, and the evolution of heaven as both a metaphysical reality and a psychological projection.

What emerges is a sweeping and often provocative exploration of heaven not as a fixed destination, but as a mirror of human consciousness, culture, and desire. Along the way, the discussion touches on psychedelic interpretations, near-death experiences, religious power structures, and the uncomfortable possibility that our visions of the afterlife reveal more about us than any ultimate truth.

This week:

Tobias Churton’s new book Celestial Realms
The first global history of heaven across cultures
Ancient burial practices and early afterlife beliefs
Mesopotamian pessimism vs Egyptian moral judgment
Heaven as projection: “as below, so above”
Near-death experiences and personal encounters with the divine
Psychedelics and the idea of a “backdoor to heaven”
Eastern perspectives: Hinduism, Buddhism, and liberation beyond heaven
Chinese cosmology and the bureaucratic heavens
The role of power, hierarchy, and politics in shaping heaven
Why most early cultures believed heaven was not for humans
The evolution of moral reward and spiritual aspiration
Imagination, culture, and the limits of describing the infinite
Heaven as hope, illusion, or something more