Jonathan Pageau explains the esoteric view of Heaven

The biggest problem in trying to understand the Bible today is that it was created in a very different time, when materialism was not the ruling paradigm. When we hear about the creation of the world, we automatically go straight to the idea of physical objects coming into existence. Most of us can't even conceive of it meaning anything else, because we've always lived in a materialist worldview. We take it for granted, and we believe everyone else takes it for granted, at all times and in all places. But there was nothing like a materialist worldview in the ancient world. Science didn't exist yet. The world and everything in it were understood in a very different way.

I just stumbled across a set of books by an author named John Walton called The Lost World series, referring to the fact that the ancient world is largely lost to us today, because it operated under very different assumptions than the ones we operate under today.

Here's one of the books: The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate

That link will open the Read Inside. If you read through it, including the section at the end of the book, it gives a good breakdown of what the book is about. Walton has studied the ancient Hebrew world in great depth, and has discovered a few things that change the game considerably. One of the biggest is that the word usually translated as Creation actually didn't refer to a physical bringing-into-being, but rather bringing-into-being in a functional sense. Existence in Biblical times didn't refer to the physical existence of an object, but it's function in a system.

As an example, when we talk about something existing, we're referring usually to its objective, physical existence. Like a chair for instance. But we do have another meaning for existence, like for the existence of a corporation. Does it mean a building? A group of people? In some sense those things are a part of a corporation, but they're not the entirety of it. It's much more nebulous or non-physical. It exists in legal terms because certain documents were filed, certain I's dotted and T's crossed and the right signatures placed on the right lines. And not because of the physical documents or the actual ink or graphite atoms used in the signatures. It's more like a system of ideas that everyone accepts as legally binding.

Well, that's enough for my mangled attempt to explain it. For anyone interested, click on through and read the sample for yourself. At the end of the book there's a synopsis of his major points that's very helpful. The ancients didn't think of the sun as a ball of fire around which the Earth rotated. They had no ideas at all about evolution or biology, and they didn't think in material terms. That wouldn't be possible for a few millennia.

Genesis was not about the creation of the physical Earth, it was about the dawning of conscious awareness. Let There Be Light didn't refer to actual light, but to awareness/understanding. Consciousness. From what I was able to read, it sounds like he's saying the material creation of the Earth and of humans and animals etc would have happened long before what's described in Genesis.