heart – Muriel Stockdale

Tipping Point

This Heaven is Here blog is because I am noticing things in the world that show how amazingly blessed and supported we really are. Today I think we have reached some kind of tipping point; I was stunned to see that Oprah’s show was all about John of God. Since Oprah shied away from ‘spiritual’ topics a few years ago because she was roundly trounced in the media for her shifting focus her shows have been very careful around the, as she put it today; “Woo woo” stuff. But we all know there is no subject that Oprah cannot tackle with grace. Everything she touches becomes mainstream. This show was/is amazing; try to catch it somehow. Also there is an article in O magazine about John of God entitled, ‘Leap of Faith‘.

I have heard of John of God for many years, and I am heartened to know that he is doing his wonderful work; work that is miraculous. His presence and the presence of so many other ‘healers’ who work in mysterious ways are definitely evidence that we are in Heaven. Throughout the course of Oprah’s show we heard from many people healed or not healed, or even perhaps healed without knowing they needed healing grapple with a sense of reality as previously known coming undone. This is the true miracle. A skeptical doctor concluded by sharing the thought that maybe we are not really the physical beings we appear to be but something else. How many times do we hear this from the great masters?

We are on the cusp of miraculous awakening, the evidence is all around us. Things are coming at us faster than ever and in the fray of information, choices, worries, disasters, manufactured drama, political noise and financial dismay the Truth stands out. Watching Oprah’s show and listening to the sensitive way her guests spoke of their experience I would describe as a refreshing pool of wisdom, a respite from the noise. Anything that opens the mind and reminds the heart of it’s own miraculous power is a gift to be savored. This was a daring show for Oprah and I thank her for it. Psychic surgery is very mysterious and also very threatening to status quo in our current medical industry. When you have millions of people and a whole economy propped up on the illness of a great proportion of our population, a man who performs miraculous healing for free is not welcome. John of God does not recommend that people stop using their medications or avoid conventional treatments. Clearly now is the time for us to move on to the understanding that we are not simply the physical form, to grasp the understanding that our greater Self is far more powerful than we think.

johnofgod.com

The Song in the Heart

Well, I am back. Just when I resolved to write everyday and amassed a nice list of subjects to inspire me my back went out of alignment and I couldn’t sit for a week. When it’s hard to sit, it’s hard to think and my goal here is to inspire not grumble. This was the old practice from my mother of, “If you don’t have anything nice to say don’t say anything at all.” Maybe not exactly that but similar.

So today, I abandon my inspiring list and just free-associate. What is it like to live with pain and still know this is heaven? I don’t really know because I am very lucky and only get these occasional back spasms and cramps unlike many who suffer more kinds of pain than I can imagine. But I want to share my experience. Even though I was a bit miserable and whining a lot about the pain there was a song in my heart. This is the key to heaven. This song is always there, it makes me smile, it makes me see the world as it is and not as it is manufactured to be.

If we listen to the news and our panicking neighbors we can get very stressed out and miss the moments right in front of us. The song in the heart is always there, sometimes it is known as a whisper, sometimes the “still, small voice” and often the silence. AHHH! It is always available in spite of all outer events and activities and all personal conditions. All we need to do is listen. So my back was cramped and twisted and very noisy with aggravation and yet that unmistakable call to pay attention to the inner vibration of my own essential core called to me and sweetened my experience taking me beyond the limits of my own form.

I am now in physical therapy again and making very fast progress to general comfort, thank goodness for brilliant therapists who understand the workings of the human body with amazing clarity and specificity. So I can sit here and write again without distraction. I want to point out another thought about the song in the heart – it manifests outside ourselves too in the birds and in music, in the rustle of wind in the trees, the roar of the waves, AUM and other sounds.

Right now I am watching a small family of purple or house finches flutter on my deck. There’s a nest of almost ready to fly chicks under the deck right there. The ones flying were in a nest on the other deck just a few weeks ago. The noise of their voices is delightful, the mist wraps all the way up to the corner of the deck rail making it seem outside like we are at the corner of the world and high in the mountain peaks. The air is perfectly still. This is heaven.

It’s all in the VIBES!

You may have noticed that I have been speaking of Heaven as a state of being and you may also have noticed that I am emphasizing that it’s all about the attitude. Well, at this point I want to revise that ‘attitude’ and bring the calling to a higher frequency. When thinking of attitude changes we are looking at choice and judgment. For example if you see the glass half empty rather than half full there seems to be a choice there. There also seems to be an attitude of comparing, judging and of worthiness. Let’s just skip all that and jump straight to the mark. It’s about the energy.

When your energy frequencies are up you naturally see things with a brighter view, you see the wonder in the world. Simple things become awe inspiring like the fact that an apple or a banana is a perfect food packet miraculously designed in size, wrapping and deliciousness to satisfy your nourishment. Focusing on management of your energy is much simpler than wrangling with attitudes and emotions. When we slip into those low energy, self-destructive places basically the not-heaven states where everything looks bleak there are ways out but it can be very very hard. It is especially hard by our selves that’s why we have help. But help only comes when you ask for it, when you are ready. Then the infrastructure of the ages appears in front of you or, “The teacher appears”. What I mean by infrastructure is all those paths created and maintained to lift your energy frequencies and lighten and brighten your outlook in this blessed life which is in Heaven.

Let’s look at the paths, I am not referring to religions but maybe to the practices offered through religions and spiritualities. Personally if I feel down I can count on Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s qawwali singing to lift my heart. It is instant and palpable. This is what chanting does. It circumvents the mind from its groove of downerness and elegantly slides in a new program that lifts the heart to wrap the mind within its natural joyfulness. Whirling does this, meditation does this, perhaps your art or your atheletics do this too. It doesn’t matter, all that matters is that you hold your state as sacred and that you diligently restore it whenever it begins to slide into the mundane and even below that. This is an extraordinary magical place of miracles and joy, it is Heaven and it is our birthright to know that. Not just know it with our head but to Know it with our being.

This is my personal mandate, to Know my most pure and highest self and I am so blessed to be gifted with understanding that shows the way. Last night I again met Robert Young at the META Center here in New York City. While Robert talked it was interesting and very important and yet what was really going on was a simple, profound transmission of energy. Robert explained how we can all change the energy and lift it up. He demonstrated lifting the energy in the room and depressing it. He worked with each of us as individuals in the room and also with us as a group. There was none of the usual visualization exercises, chanting, meditation, invocations or other remarkable tools for shifting states but just simply a focus on awareness and intent which produces result. What it felt like to me was periods of intense heat, so hot that my chair felt heated. It also felt like a buzzing in my heart, not palpitations or fluttering but a warm humming that felt good. There was a profound stillness that became apparent, a stillness that I have met before only in very deep meditation but here it was enveloping everything, supporting everything, nourishing everything. To me this is the stillness of the causal realm, the place from which all things come. It is the divine womb of creation which pours out anything and all things and yet remains un-depleted. In fact this place is so full that not only does it hold anything that is, was or ever will be but it holds all that will never be. In modern sports parlance it is the, ‘zone’.

Robert explained that we are consciosness and that our consciousness is not trapped inside our physical form; it flows around us and is in fact eternal. He demonstrated the energetic frequencies of our consciousness and how we can very simply lift them up. He emphasized the importance of lifting not only our frequencies but also the frequencies of others that we encounter. We can do this quite simply with a smile. If permission is granted we can welcome someone else’s frequencies to match ours and take them on a delicious ride of appreciation.

Robert reminded us that this energy of consciousness which flows within and without us is that which forms our world, I called it the causal realm earlier and that is it. My father always used to say, “You can’t get something from nothing”. Well, I have to say I disagree in a big way, everything comes from nothing. The universe comes from nothing, our bodies come from nothing. Our consciousness is what attracts the somethings of our lives and we are moving into a reality where that process will seem more and more miraculous. But think wouldn’t your cell phone look miraculous to your great-great grandmother.