Hello and welcome back to another chapter of the good stuff! Please excuse my mad scramble to catch up with the passing months, but better late than never, as they say. In this edition I am including the June and July editions together in one package. In this June edition I will be discussing the idea of Heaven on earth. I will come back to the final installment of the Twenty-six Healing Keys in September.
The idea of Heaven operating in our daily lives has come in and out of my consciousness several times over the last twenty years, but it has recently congealed into some specific ideas that I have found very helpful, and I will share them with you.
My inspiration for this discussion came from a dream that I had recently. I was actually in Heaven in the dream and was free to roam around and do what I wanted. I found various groups of people engaged in activities. Some were in classroom settings being taught various skills. I quickly realized that I was not meant to be stuck in a classroom, but to learn from my casual interactions with others. I left and found that there were other people grouped together into social structures, living in fortresses, based on where they had lived in their physical lives, and these people were involved in dramas revolving around their being in competition with other groups of people from other areas that lived in fortresses as well. I found all of this to be pretty pointless but humorous to watch.
Finally, I ended up in some sort of dorm room where a blond woman was talking to her boyfriend and a group of young women. She was complaining that she had gone swimming and the chlorine had wreaked havoc on her hair. I commented that since we were all in Heaven, there was obviously no chlorine in the water. To my surprise, the entire group of people looked at me with irritation and disgust and simultaneously snapped, “It all depends on your beliefs!” I had to laugh at myself as I realized that, of course, being Heaven, your experience comes from your desires, so it would have to respond to the nature of one’s beliefs. In other words, the experience of Heaven corresponds to the nature of each individual’s personal baggage that they are too attached to to let go of. For some people the physical experience itself is “Heaven.”
From what Spirit has told me, there is no “physical plane” really, simply a mode of relating to reality that presents itself in this form. So, technically, we are all like the girl in Heaven who insists on having chlorine in the pool despite the fact that it is unnecessary, unreal and hard on her hair. We are having the experience that we crave, even though that means temporarily forgetting who we really are and creating a substitute identity out of illusions. But, once we have acknowledged that this is our situation, there only thing really holding us back is our attachment to ideas of frustration and pain and our need to try to control reality. We are living in the ideal reality already and we are just figuring out how to best “drive” through it. We don’t have to die to get to Heaven, being that we are already there and just don’t realize it.
In Heaven, the individual is fulfilled by their experiences. No aspect of experience is frustrated from being fulfilled. There is no scrutiny of one’s desires based by a Puritan God who judges them on their “sinfulness” or merit. Personal desires are never dismissed as being unimportant, no matter how trivial. The individual is fulfilled in all ways. This is the case because all desires are important to the individual who has them, even if they are unimportant to others. Likewise, all frustrations are important to the effected individual. Because, in Spirit, beings cannot hurt one another and therefore there is no limitation on the illusions that an individual is allowed to create in their mind, alone or in conjunction with others.
So, the individual goes about following their interests and is fulfilled by their experiences in Heaven. If they have a desire, they are brought together with the fulfillment of that desire in a timely manner. They learn from every experience that they have, alone or with others, and this is their personal learning curve that makes up their evolution of consciousness. They don’t have to seek to educate or enlighten themselves, because this process happens automatically and comes from God. It is built into every situation and every interaction with others. God always uses the fulfillment process as the teaching mechanism.
I’d like to talk about some of the blockages we have to overcome in order to embrace the process of being “in Heaven” in our daily lives. At the most refined level we assume the stance of “individuality” against others and God. In Heaven we can function as an individual or collectively. I believe it is our collective function that is the most difficult to understand but potentially the most satisfying. The love, sharing and intimacy of co-creating are probably the most exciting experiences possible.
When we assume the mantle of identity, we cut ourselves off from that kind of involvement to a great extent. We wander off to pursue individual goals. To reenter Heaven now is to understand that every goal we pursue is fulfilled in part by others. To share the pleasure of our fulfillment is the highest fulfillment, because there are always beings in Spirit that share our learning and pleasure whether we know they are doing it or not. We might as well experience fulfillment in being aware and sharing in their fulfillment that they draw from experiencing portions of our life. We are teachers who don’t consciously set out to teach, but our students are everywhere. The success of our teaching is a testament to God’s overarching plan to use every experience to benefit everyone.
In Heaven, all information and knowledge is open to us. But, we may become involved in efforts aimed at finding and learning certain information. By acknowledging that God will fulfill our desire for information, we can let go of the struggle to self-educate. And, in the process we will be able to see that God knows both the best time and manner to teach us as well as the nature of the information that will truly satisfy us as well.
When we take on the self-education function without God, we naturally withdraw from Heaven and engage in a struggle to learn and figure out what is important. We also may self-consciously take on the role of teacher to fill some perceived vacuum of knowledge in the world. This can lead to a sense of ultimate frustration and failure. God knows best how to make us teachers, what we need to teach each person and what is the most important curriculum. It frees us up to focus purely on what we want and drop manipulation tactics.
In Heaven, we can experience the fulfillment of our fantasies, because Heaven is ultimately a mental/non-physical experience. But it is also a very immediate and real experience, by its own nature extremely fluid and flexible. If we withdraw from Heaven, we may fill our minds with fantasy in an attempt to “escape from reality.” The hollowness that grows within us never seems to be filled by our repeated attempts to make fantasy a fulfilling activity. We may even attempt to force our fantasies into reality. This can lead to the disappointment of outright failure or of actually succeeding to some degree and realizing that the actuality is less fulfilling than we imagined. There are a lot of rich, miserable people in the world.
God knows how to stimulate our imagination and creativity in the best possible manner. In Heaven we can pursue creative and artistic achievement and actually find it. We find the right medium to express ourselves and we succeed in bringing our fantasies to life. Furthermore we can enjoy the fulfillment of sharing our achievements with a truly appreciative audience.
Our emotional needs, including love and sharing, caring for others and supporting others, as well as our need to be supported are all brought to fulfillment in Heaven. We can seek and find any kind of personal intimacy or involvement. We can seek support and find it. When the relationship has served its purpose, we can detach without fear of hurt feelings. We can fulfill our need to nurture others as we find the perfect people to receive our attention. We don’t have to seek out mismatched and unwilling people to force our attention on. And, our giving will be appreciated and reciprocated.
God knows our deepest emotional needs and can fulfill them all. If we withdraw from Heaven, we struggle to both give and receive, and may feel that we have hurt others or feel hurt by others as we struggle to find and give love.
Heaven offers us the perfect opportunity to hear and communicate. We can hear the answers to our deepest questions, share information with others and communicate in a way that fulfills us. If we turn away from Heaven, we may fill our lives with empty communication that fails to deliver our true message. We may replace real content with chatter in a failed attempt to overcome loneliness and connect with others. God can connect us with the right people and the right form of communication to achieve the desired result.
We often feel disempowered in our lives. In Heaven, we feel powerful in our ability to have what we want, which in turn disengages our need to build elaborate ego fantasies and power trips over others. The tragedy of aging and death show us that our attempts to hold sway over life and to dominate it can lead to despair. Our attempts to dominate people into doing what we want are also equally tragic. God knows how to make us fulfilled and empowered. He gives us all the power and fulfillment we want by educating us about the true nature of our desires. We can find real success in Heaven because it does not come at a cost to others.
Heaven offers the best gifts in terms of our personal welfare and survival. We can live a fulfilling life and pass on easily after having fulfilled our physical desires. We can have our most fundamental needs met while being led to the most satisfying means of employment. Our finances and resources can become increasingly large and flexible. We can enjoy our careers or build a career if we don’t have one yet. Along the way we can meet people and be put in the path of resources that best serve us.
This can all happen if we allow God to be God and to fulfill our needs without the need to plot, plan and navigate our careers in a struggling, artificial manner. For many of us, we either sell out to enter careers we hate for the trade-off of making great money, or we give up on the rat race and make do in menial and unsatisfying work. We randomly bounce from job to job without direction. Or, we may claw and climb our way to the top in a struggle that leaves us devoid of a personal life, exhausted and unfulfilled.
Heaven asks for the most fundamental shift of perspective in the areas of career, work and survival. It asks us to simply do what we want, follow-up on what we desire and trust God to provide. I think that this can be done in small and reasonable steps. Don’t put yourself at great financial risk that you are not ready for. In fact it is not necessary to take any additional risks with your work or finances. Simply stop struggling mentally and allow God to guide your circumstances along the most logical course from where you are now to where you need to be. Along the way you will know what you want to do, and when you do it you will be supported. You don’t have to struggle, plot and plan the process. If you find yourself still doing it, relax and simply remember that God is doing it. It will become second nature to trust God to provide for you.
Exercise: Abdicating responsibility to God
It is important to boil this whole process into four basic ideas. First, you must assess your own mental state and behavior and find out where you are experiencing frustration. Get out your notebook and a pen and write down one area of frustration in your life. Now, see how you are plotting, planning, fearing, struggling and holding on in this area. Say, “I allow God to fulfill God’s function in this area of my life.” Think about this area of struggle. Say, “I abdicate my responsibility over (name this problem/area of your life). I allow God to fulfill God’s function in teaching me how to live in the present moment in happiness when I fall into struggle in this area. I follow my true desires in this area without exception. I place my trust in God to bring fulfillment to this issue before my fears, doubts and resistance.”
This last statement about placing trust in God before fear, etc. is a way of saying, “I may not be able to realistically have deep faith in God at this point or be able to dispel my fears and doubts, but I place my trust in God surrounding this issue in front of all of that negative thought. This creates a space in my life that God can operate in, because it creates a space in my mind that God can change, because I have given God permission to change my thinking in this area.”
So, in each area of struggle we allow God to fulfill God’s will in that area by solving our problems and fulfilling our desires while teaching us through experiences during the whole process. We simultaneously abdicate our sense of personal responsibility to find a solution to that problem. God will find the way as we follow our desires in this area. As we move through the receiving end of this process we will find two byproducts appear.
The first is that we stop running away from our current situation and our present moments. We start living in the now and enjoying it. Secondly, we start to pursue our desires and trust our instincts. We speak less but say more. We do less but accomplish more. We stop conflict with a kind of peacefulness that emanates from our being and creates a kind of peace in others. We stop manipulating people, lying about our feelings and struggling to get to some sort of ideal future. We find the happiness we are looking for right now. Allowing God, abdicating responsibility and placing trust in God, living in the now and pursing one’s desires are the Holy Foursome of this process.
I personally did not embrace these ideas until very recently. Even so, in a short period of time I have seen many examples of my needs and their fulfillment coming together. I had to precede these experiences with a kind of willingness to have faith, rather than having faith itself. I simply wanted to believe and I wanted to see my faith rewarded with real experiences, and it came to pass. In every small way that this happens on a day-to-day basis, I find that I am making progress. I am coming to see that there are no “good days” or “bad days,” but that in fact every experience turns on a dime, and that dime is faith. We can reach the highest heights from the deepest lows if we simply examine what is going on in our minds, seeing what is keeping us out of Heaven.
Take me home!
Ok, so it’s time for more of my metaphysical babble. Hopefully it will be good babble. Today we will be discussing the resolution of seeming contradictions between various ideas in reaching for the truth. As we work with the idea of God and our own unique life we run into level after level of (seeming) contradictions that need to be dealt with. As we identify and then work through and finally consume these apparent contradictions, we make progress in gaining higher understanding. I will try to identify some of the major contradictions that people run into along this path of progress and throw in some useful insight. Regardless of how advanced you are, there will always be another, and then another contradiction to deal with, but these are some that I have faced so far.
The first contradiction is human “goodness” is seemingly unrewarded in so many cases vs. God and Spirituality are real. You can see many examples of this in life, where good people are not only unrewarded for their self-sacrifice but also are actively used by other people around them. I think the answer to this issue is in the process we go through in returning to God. We may have an idea of what is “good” for the world and other people. We engage in causes, help the poor and the sick and give of ourselves at work. However, some part of us may feel used and burned out by this process. We yearn for a better life that doesn’t seem to come. We resent our previous sacrifices occasionally.
If good deeds allow us to drop guilt to some degree, then they are a major step in the right direction. But we have to get past the perception of free will, which in turn demands that we decriminalize everyone around us. This requires a certain level of forgiveness. When we understand the concept of no free will, we see that there is nothing to be forgiven and there never was, as there is no “doer” of any action, just a series of causes and effects without an ego.
The concept of God introduces us to the idea of an ultimate Truth. The Truth does not make room for other truths. Part of that truth is that reality is purely a consciousness process without any materiality. Our current experience seems to be contradictory to that truth, but material existence is purely an appearance with no substance. Our seeming separation from each other and God is both unreal and impossible, a sort of perceptual sleight of hand where we hide our true self and create a false self in doing so, allowing for the experience of a false world.
One falsehood that we have to overcome in this process is the idea of “goodness” itself. We have to acknowledge that in reality no being can hurt another, because each being owns its own internal experience. If that being chooses to imagine having an external experience and a “physical” body, then that fantasy comes entirely out of their own desires and can include the fantasies of other complicit beings to bring it into being. There are simply no victims in reality. “Goodness” from God’s perspective is the fulfillment of all of our desires. Our physical life-fantasy is such a fulfillment. When we finish with this fantasy, any remaining desires will be fulfilled as well, without exception. We won’t be denied anything. There is nothing broken in reality that needs to be fixed, and the object of the physical world is not for it to be a utopia. It is exactly what it is supposed to be.
We have to, in the light of this understanding, drop our artificial expectations of what is good. As we sacrifice all our desires, we become more miserable and resentful. We have to find a way to pursue our desires in a way that doesn’t produce more guilt. As we work more deeply with God, we find that our desires are often fulfilled without our asking, and problems are resolved in many cases. As we progress we learn what it is that we truly want and we get it. The closer we get to an inner self-knowledge and the more we approach the fulfillment of our desires, the more empowered we become, and the greater our ability to help others. Ultimately, our new definition of goodness is self-fulfillment. It might lead us back to helping the poor and the sick, as well as everyone else around us, but in an entirely new way. We can drop the martyrdom and still be Divine in our intent.
When our desires become mixed with fears, the process seems to become more confusing. How can we want what we fear? For example, we may want to become thin but fear the emotional and physical risks that dating might create. But we can’t deny what we really want either. The solution is to specifically state what we want in such a way that in getting it we would experience little or no fear. We might desire to lose weight and to find the right person for a long-term relationship without dating. We can involve God in this process. In desiring without fear we get closer to fulfillment.
The second seeming contradiction is our “free will” vs. God’s Will being the only will. Because we only have the illusion of free will, and that is sufficient for our needs, then there does not need to be any conflict between our will and God’s. God doesn’t wish for us to suffer. Rather, we wished for it ourselves as part of the illusion of “life” that we have created in order to have a particular experience that creates a particular kind of understanding. We have desires on many different levels, some more “concrete” and some more abstract.
God’s only will for us is to have all our desires fulfilled. This desire we are living out now is entirely ours and does not stem from God. However, it is God’s will that our desires be fulfilled because this is how he causes our consciousness to be evolved and transformed. So, God gets what God wants through our getting what we want. The closer we get to true fulfillment, the closer to true Love and God we get. The heights of romantic love can take to the fringes of Spiritual or transpersonal love. We are getting what we want in a very fundamental way. We simply fail to expand that love to include all beings, instead seeing the object of our love as the source, rather than the means by which that feeling is generated by ourselves, internally.
The third seeming contradiction is between time and need. We have needs and those needs are not always met, despite the fact that we have the need. Then, over time, we might have that need met. But in reality there is no time or need. Time is created (imagined) so that we can have “experiences” that involve time and an identity separate from reality. It seems that time is in contradiction to our having what we want, immediately, in the present moment.
Despite what we have said earlier, that our physical experience is a desire and that we can’t always fulfill two desires at once, it should be said that God can even overcome this seeming contradiction. However, in order for that to happen we have to reposition our understanding of God and time. The laws that seem to run the physical world, including time, as well as gravity, financial realities and so forth, are all easy to see and understandable. However, they are also entirely fictitious. They are simply not true. There are no such laws and you are not bound to them. This doesn’t mean you should throw yourself out of a window thinking you can fly. But it does mean that there is no force out there in reality that keeps you from flying.
It seems foolish to question the physical laws around us, until we understand the nature of agreement. We have agreed on rules to define our physical experience, and we share in our involvement with those rules. However, we have to ultimately remove ourselves from those mass agreements when we approach God to return home. We can only keep one, God, or our agreement in believing and abiding by physical laws. Obviously we keep God and let the other go.
God’s nature is such that we have to see with our own eyes at some point in our development that these laws are not true. How can we do this if we still believe in these laws? It is our willingness and desire to see past these laws that allows us to have “miraculous” experiences that clearly fall outside of these laws. Consider this as an invitation to enter God’s house, where these laws no longer apply. Wipe your feet of the grime of these particular beliefs and you can enter freely.
Once you have these experiences that defy natural law, they will become more commonplace. Ultimately you will not only accept and believe in the non-existence of these laws, but will be comfortable living in a world without them. God doesn’t create fear by pushing us too far too fast. Your current rate of progress is ideal for where you are right now.
Exercise: Reaching for God
This is a simple exercise that you should practice on a repeating basis from this time forward. It works best when used approximately five times a day or more. That seems like a lot, but it only takes seconds and produces great results. First, concentrate internally. Imagine that you are reaching out with your hand for God. Count upwards slowly, feeling your imaginary hand reaching upward while saying, “I am reaching out for God.” As you reach, you will feel the fabric of your identity being pulled farther and farther into God’s energy, which feels like intense love. When you reach a point that feels somewhat uncomfortable in its intensity, stop and end the exercise. As you reach out for God you are making space in your mind for God’s mind. You will notice an internal calming, increased happiness and a sense of fulfillment, etc. Good luck until next time!
