We have arrived we are already in Heaven, this is it. So if it does not feel like heaven does that prove that this is not heaven? What are the qualities of heaven? Let’s take a stab at it: perfection, freedom, bliss, joy, communion with the divine and with each other, all needs met on physical and spiritual planes, opportunity to flourish and be fantastic, appreciation of what we are and what others are, and probably much more that I am not thinking of. I would love to hear your qualities of heaven.
Where exactly are we on this path of reaching heaven? It’s a bit like what, I think, Tom Sawyer once said to Huck Finn, though I can’t find the exact quote: something about if his great Aunt was there in heaven he surely wouldn’t want to be there. The idea supposes restrictions on heaven, it supposes that heaven doesn’t have room for differences and for appreciation of those differences. Much the same as here. I guess it shows that our idea of heaven is a function of where our mind set is right now. We live with an overwhelming awareness of the limited, we perceive that if it’s not this it’s that, there is very little room for qualities of difference or for gradations toward the exquisite. I guess I’m talking about the glass being half empty versus half full.
For us today we have the most amazing opportunities, we can try on someone elses viewpoint on a daily basis. With the prevalence of media we can live the stories of others with vastly divergent views from us without committing. We can taste another’s dreams, trials, striving, failure and successes. Is that why we are so enraptured by the lifestyles of the stars? Don’t their lives look like heaven from the outside? Yet too many times the curtain is pulled away and we become aware of a despair that leads to tragic consequences. So can we definitively say that fame, wealth and success are heaven? We spend so much of our time scrambling to make a “perfect” life but what defines a perfect life? We as humans have the amazing ability to live in astonishingly different circumstances, from igloos in the North to grassy huts all the way on the Equator. Much of our ideas of perfection are not even ours, we find ourselves being sold on all kinds of things, or activities that will produce qualities of enjoyment, success, delight, perfection or whatever. It all comes at us from the outside in a torrent of choices. Our perceptions of what is delicious for a life or a heaven are uncountable. What would we find in THE heaven?
I would like to share what I think we would find: Our consciousness would dissolve out of phenomenon into the noumenon, first we might be blissfully blinded by the brilliant light of our own primordial Self. That Self that is the essential core of us that was the initial separation from the ALL CONSCIOUS. Then we may blend into the chaos of the emptiness, which is really all things in potential and all things that will never be and all things that will be. There we rest in perfect equilibrium for eternity, needing no thing, being no thing, thinking no thing. It is our natural state and is inexpressibly delicious. This state is ours to have even while we are separated into form, for this is the state that nourishes the form and propels it into being. This state is available at all times in all places and the doorway is meditation. I invite you to meditate on your heaven, taste the deliciousness of your breath that reveals the pathway inside to that sacred space. This is how you will know that heaven is here.