The universe, I’ve come to believe, is not a single room with a locked door but a house still being built—its foundations laid in matter, its upper stories rising through light. What we call creation is not finished; it is ongoing architecture, widening in both stone and spirit. I write this as someone who has watched those walls breathe, who has heard the Builders at work in dream and craft alike. This essay is a map of that experience: a glimpse of a cosmos that is layered, porous, and still unfolding—where the Heavens are plural, the worlds converse, and expansion itself is a form of love.
Invocation: Between Worlds That Keep Expanding
They say the universe is still expanding, and I believe them. Not because I’ve solved an equation, but because I have stood on a riverbank at dusk and felt the shoreline move — not outward in miles, but inward in meaning. Space does this too. It opens. It makes room. Creation, in every register, behaves like breath.
When I say the Heavens are plural, I do not mean metaphor. I mean strata of reality — some near and dense, some lucid and far — that touch us the way fog touches cedar. These worlds are not stacked like plates in a cabinet. They flow. They braid like currents, refuse to be reduced to a single plane or a single word. And if I reach for the old names — Above and Below, the Seen and the Unseen, the Worlds of Persons and Powers — it is because the new names have not yet earned their river-smell.
This is an account of that plural cosmos. Not to argue anyone into agreement, but to set out a map I have walked — a map with water-stains and fingerprints, a map that expands as I read it.
What It Means to Live in a One-World Age
A great flattening has become the common sense of our time. On one side, strict materialism: only what can be weighed counts. On the other, a fashionable monism: everything is one, therefore difference is merely ignorance. These are twins who pretend to hate each other. They agree, at bottom, that the universe is a single surface and that depth is a trick of the light.
I tried living that way. But a one-world life cannot hold ancestors. It cannot account for the dream that leaves a mark you can’t point to but also can’t deny. It has no language for the day a fox crosses your path and the path crosses you back. It can describe the dust in the beam of sunlight, but not why the room suddenly becomes a place of listening.
The loneliness that follows is not cured by louder claims. What heals is the recognition that our intuitions were not wrong: there are more rooms in this house than we have been allowed to name.
A Return to Many Heavens
By cosmological pluralism I mean this: creation is an ecology of worlds — layered, porous, and reciprocal — each with its own integrity, laws, and kinds of personhood. The material world is not the basement of a spiritual mansion, nor a disposable stage-set. It is a world among worlds. The Heavens are not a single elsewhere but a family of beyonds. The Unseen is not behind the Seen so much as alongside it, alive with intelligences whose bodies are made of a matter appropriate to their realm.
This is not a new proposal. Many traditions speak in plurals: heavens, worlds, spheres, directions. What is unusual is to insist upon both plurality and coherence — to resist the slide into either hierarchy that crushes or oneness that dissolves. My cosmology seeks something trickier and truer: patterned difference with living seams.
The Expanding Universe as Theological Witness
The physics of cosmic expansion does not embarrass theology; it bears witness to it. Space itself stretches. Galaxies move apart not because they are fleeing but because the fabric between them is becoming more. This is not emptiness increasing. This is capacity increasing — room for relation. Creation is not a completed artifact displayed in a glass case. It is an act that continues.
In that light, the plural Heavens are not fixed terraces of perfect stillness but widening rooms of intelligibility and communion. Love, in the deepest sense, is a making-space-for. The cosmos participates in that: it enlarges the dwelling where persons may become themselves together. Theologically, we might say: the Maker keeps saying “Let there be,” and the sentence has not yet found its period.
Therefore I do not imagine salvation as escape from matter to light, nor enlightenment as the realization that matter was illusion all along. I imagine a more demanding hope: becoming responsibly real in many worlds at once — letting the widening of creation find us faithful where we stand, and where we cross.
A Prose Diagram of the Worlds
What follows is not doctrine but a working diagram, the way a river-pilot keeps a mental chart of currents, shoals, and stars. The names here are functional; they point to places of encounter.
1) The Seen World (Material Realm).
Dense, fragrant, measurable. Stone, sinew, bread, rainfall. Its persons include humans and more-than-humans: animals, rivers, mountains. The laws here involve gravity and growth, decay and repair, speech and silence. Reverence here is practical: mending nets, setting bones, boiling water, telling the truth. The Seen World is not a veil; it is a face.
2) The Unseen World (World of Spirits / m’n’tu’k).
Coextensive with the Seen but not reducible to it. Its persons are ancestors, powers of place, the intelligences that accompany species and seasons. Contact is made by consent: through dream, prayer, omen, craft, song, fast, and the moral posture of attention. The laws here are kinship and reciprocity; what you take demands return, and what you refuse to see will still see you.
3) The Heavens (Plural).
These are not one remote paradise but a gradation of clarity — realms of increasing lucidity where patterns are apprehended before they condense. Think of them as orders of meaning and communion that are no less real for being more luminous. Here dwell the great intelligences: angelic orders, archetypal forms, thrones and rivers of fire. The laws here are proportion and praise: things belong and sing the belonging.
4) The Beyond-External (The Still Sea).
Not above the Heavens but outside the frame, the circumference that reminds us the frame is mercy. Here speech thins to listening. It is not nothingness; it is the place to which every name bows. Approach is by humility. The law here is unknowing that clarifies.
Between these worlds run thresholds, not walls:
- Ritual is a threshold.
- Grief is a threshold.
- Making anything well is a threshold.
- So is forgiveness, which reorganizes realities across planes.
The Seven Directions
To move among worlds is also to move among Directions, which are not only compass points but stances of relation:
- Above: receiving order without domination.
- Below: grounding without confinement.
- Ahead: responsibility to futures not yet born.
- Behind: fidelity to those who carried us.
- Within: the chamber of conscience and presence.
- Without: hospitality without erasure, boundary without bitterness.
- Center: not a coordinate but a practice — the living point where the directions meet and a person stands balanced in prayer.
The Directions teach that location is ethical. How you face is who you become.
The Rivers Between Worlds
There are established crossings:
Dream is a lawful bridge. In the night, the Unseen makes introductions the day could not bear all at once. Discernment is learned by consequences: true meetings produce coherence and courage; counterfeit ones consume attention and leave a taste of flattery or fear. We do not worship dreams; we practice truth through them.
Craft is another bridge. Work done with care trains a body to carry pattern from the Heavens into wood and thread without violence. The point is not to smuggle symbols but to make honest things. A well-made thing is a treaty.
Story is a braided ferry. It moves persons across without unhousing them. The old stories do not beg belief; they demand participation. When told rightly, they do not explain the worlds — they rehearse them.
Prayer is the ford a person carries inside. Some words are ladders; some are rafts; some are silence which steadies the water enough to see the stars reflected.
Ethics in a plural cosmos is not a set of abstract rules. It is right traffic at the crossings: ask permission; leave gifts; take responsibility for the ripples you make; refuse to treat any person — human, animal, river, angel — as raw material.
Resonances and Refractions
Plural worlds are not provincial. They resonate across lineages:
- In Abrahamic sources, the Heavens appear in plural, sometimes mapped as seven, with thrones, gardens, and fires as more than metaphor.
- In Kabbalistic teaching, the Four Worlds articulate descent without contempt: emanation, creation, formation, action — each real, none dispensable.
- In Islamic metaphysics, malakut and jabarut distinguish imaginal and power-realms that meet the material without dissolving it.
- In Hermetic and late antique thought, the spheres are not mere orbits but thresholds of intelligence.
- In Indigenous and animist cosmologies, the Seen and Unseen interpenetrate as a matter of course; directions, beings, and places are persons in relation, not objects at hand.
- In process thought, reality is more event than substance, more relation than brick — an intuition of ongoingness that sits comfortably beside expanding space.
I do not gather these to flatten them into a universal soup. I name them as lights seen from a river at night: each a hearth; together, a shoreline.
Living in Many Worlds
What changes, practically, when the Heavens are plural and the universe is still widening?
1) Stewardship becomes sacramental.
If the material is a world among worlds, then mending, feeding, cleaning, planting, and building are not chores at the edge of spiritual life; they are spiritual life. A clean workshop is a liturgy. So is a carefully worded message to a stranger. So is choosing not to waste what someone else will need.
2) Speech slows down.
Words are bridges with a weight limit. Naming becomes careful, not to satisfy fastidiousness but to keep crossings safe. “I don’t know” is not an apology; it is a sound engineering decision.
3) Boundaries become merciful.
Plurality without boundaries becomes harm; boundaries without hospitality become cruelty. The rule is simple and hard: keep your form so you can offer it; do not take what is not given; say yes where you can. The Center (that practiced stance where the Directions meet) is maintained by rest as much as effort.
4) Art and making change their job description.
The task is not novelty for novelty’s sake. It is to let a form arrive from a truer place and to give it honest matter to live in. If I make an icon, a bracelet, a story, a prayer, I am not decorating the world; I am assisting a small crossing.
5) Time is more than sequence.
The expanding universe does not contradict sacred time; it dignifies it. Calendar and kairos interleave. Anniversaries are not repetitive; they are spiral staircases passed again at a higher landing.
6) Authority is redistributed.
Expertise has its place, but in a plural cosmos the test of truth includes fruit across worlds: Does this teaching produce steadiness in the Seen? Reciprocity in the Unseen? Praise in the Heavens? Humility at the Still Sea?
The Expanding Heavens (A Meditation)
I return to the claim that startled me into relief: the universe is still expanding. I imagine, with the permission of both science and reverence, that the Heavens are doing likewise — not changing in essence, but opening in hospitality. More room is being made for persons to become persons, for stories to braid, for justice to grow actual hands.
This does not abolish sorrow. Plural worlds give sorrow its right size. Grief is not error; it is the precise testimony that love took form and that form was broken. In a single, flat world, grief is an argument against meaning. In many worlds, grief is a door that is not a trap.
If there is a commandment that covers the crossing, it might be this: Do not refuse reality where you find it. If a river demands respect, respect it. If a dream demands testing, test it. If a law of a higher world cuts against your pride, bow. If a hungry neighbor demands bread, feed them first and revise your cosmology after.
The more I live this way, the less interested I am in triumph and the more interested I am in right traffic: the foot on the ferry, the palm on the cedar, the word that does no violence, the generosity that lets matter be holy. I want my work — writing, craft, prayer — to function as small bridges that do not collapse under honest use.
The universe is still expanding. The Heavens are still widening. Somewhere, a door opens that did not exist yesterday because someone told the truth and then kept telling it with their hands. Somewhere, a child sleeps because a stranger turned down their music and filled the birdbath. Somewhere, an old story walks ashore in a new language without losing its bones.
I do not need to be at the center of that. I need to be at the Center — the practiced balance where Above is honored, Below is tended, Ahead is prepared for, Behind is thanked, Within is quiet, Without is welcomed, and the ferry lands exactly where it should. From there I can say, without irony or fear: Many worlds are real. They meet here. Let me live as if that is good news.
On Method
If this reads like theology and field notes braided together, that is deliberate. Cosmology is not only what we claim; it is how we carry water, how we greet a fox, how we ask permission, how we write about what we cannot weigh. A plural cosmos requires plural methods: parable and paragraph, prayer and paragraph break. The point is not to be exhaustive. The point is to be faithful enough that the next crossing can be made safely — by me, by you, by those who will inherit these banks long after our names are stones under moss.
The worlds still unfold. May our lives be wide enough to receive them.