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moments. Curious. Studying the greedy
fascination of the many faces, each drinking in death with every
beat of what seemed to be a collective heart. Drinking in the agony
of the dying as if being in death’s presence bestowed life,
bolstered their living.
    He should have felt disgust, fury even, but
he felt only sadness. True compassion now for the so terribly
misguided need of these poor people.
    For a while longer he remained, high above
the square, until the remnants of his charred abode finally came to
rest: still now in a sea of fire. Soon he could hear, as the word
spread, the rising cheer: the evil is dead, the world once again
made safe for us by the Holy Church. And so they began to
dissipate, these poor people, ignorant beyond ignorance.
    Again, he should have felt disgust,
irritation, hatred even, but all the true Bruno could feel was
compassion.
    Then he sighed and ascended.

:: 7 :: (Tusita Heaven)
     
    The Tusita Heaven, to where the not-long-ago
Giordano Bruno was now headed, could do with some explaining.
    The time and the place we call now and here
on planet Earth is, of course, not the only time nor place there
is. A glace up into the night-time sky—with its trillions of
glittering thens and theres—should make the point nicely.
    And as you glance, find a
single star, or what looks like one. What you see is a speck of
light: perhaps it is a star, perhaps it is a distant galaxy, or even a group of
untold numbers of galaxies, its light many millions of years on its
way across the cold and vast, to finally reach you here and
now.
    But what arrives, what
settles in your eyes, is not a now, what you see is a then , just arrived. The
current now for that source of light is just setting out on its
million-year journey to eventually be seen by your
way-in-the-future offspring.
    Perhaps, in the current now of that
light-source, there is a planet similar to ours where someone,
looking in your direction (perhaps through a very powerful
telescope) is wondering about the when of our local star, Sol; and
whether there might be someone in its planetary system looking back
at him or her or it across the cold and vast.
    Wondering, guessing, but never knowing, for
distance—especially of this magnitude—is a formidable fortress.
    And beyond these untold
theres and thens—or above, or below, or perhaps in a wholly
different direction—lies an elsewhen , six of them, so the story
goes. Or four. Or five. It can vary, for these elsewhens do not
exist unless and until someone is born into them and by residing
there creates them. We here on Earth like to call these elsewhens
“heavens” for in them everything is lighter, airy.
    Bodies are lighter and often transparent,
light is lighter and always kind. Devas are born into these realms
as a reward for lives well lived, perhaps here on Earth, perhaps
elsewhere. Perhaps elsewhen.
    Tusita is that heaven, that
elsewhen closest to Earth, where—so the same story tells—the most
joyful of Devas dwell, and it is also the heaven where the
Bodhisatta Setaketu lived before (some thousands of years ago) he was reborn
as Siddhattha Gotama —who, as you may know, refused to rise from beneath the Bodhi
tree until he knew , and in that giant act of will succeeded in so knowing and
became the Buddha Gotama.
    Those who dwell here are
three thousand of our feet tall and live for 576 million years,
give or take. This may sound like a lot of Deva and a lot of years,
but don’t forget that when it comes to size everything is
relative—dwellings and all surroundings (trees, grasses, rivers) in
the Tusita Heaven are of course to scale, and no Deva thinks of
himself (or herself—yes, there are female Devas, of course there
are, else how could that pleasure be enjoyed, that pleasure which
in Tusita is so far above and beyond what we know here on Earth as
sex, as to make the diluted sensation that goes by that name here
seem like so much faint promise), thinks of himself or herself as
three