Faith & Spirit Quote by Hans Bender

Bender’s plea isn’t metaphysics so much as triage: stop turning the afterlife into a real-estate diagram. By targeting “above you…in heaven,” he goes after a deeply Western habit of mapping moral value onto vertical space. Up is pure, down is fallen, and the psyche learns to rank everything - people, emotions, even grief - along that invisible ladder. His first move is disarming and almost therapeutic: “Please” signals he’s interrupting a reflex, not issuing doctrine.

“The concepts above and below are products of your mind” lands as a cognitive reframing. Bender, writing in a 20th-century psychological milieu that had to contend with both religious imagery and the rising authority of science, tries to relocate “soul” from cosmology to experience. The phrase “does not swing upwards” subtly mocks the cartoon physics of popular spirituality: the soul as an elevator, death as vertical travel. He’s not denying meaning; he’s denying the spatial metaphor that sneaks hierarchy in through the back door.

Then he offers his alternative: the center. That’s a loaded, quietly radical word. Center suggests integration rather than escape, a self that can face loss, desire, fear, and transcendence without declaring one direction “higher.” “Orients itself in every direction” reads like an ethics of multidimensional attention: instead of chasing purity “up there,” you turn toward the whole field of life. The subtext is a democratization of the sacred - not above us, not owned by institutions or elites, but immediate, internal, and plural in its angles.