Finding, Losing and Recovering Heaven on Earth:

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Finding, Losing and Recovering Heaven on Earth: A Personal Journey

Submitted by on Thu, 05/15/2008 - 15:06.

Expanding AwarenessHealth & Wellness

Like

most people, I first witnessed Heaven on Earth as a child. Sublime

beauty, sensuality, timelessness, serenity and wonder permeated

creation. I needed no words for this experience and naturally assumed

everyone shared my joy.…

By age seven, however, only glassy-eyed stares met my attempts to

share creation's magical luminosity. Soon I, too, doubted the world's

radiance; worse, I began to accept in its place the concept-driven

World of beliefs and values imposed on me. Opening to the shining world

again as an adult required significant inner exploration, facing fear

and darkness that originated in childhood.

At age 54, an episode of atrial fibrillation brought me into the

emergency room for cardiac defibrillation. Incredibly, this electrical

shock to my heart triggered body memories of the open-heart surgery I

had at age 14—exactly 40 years prior. It soon became apparent that I

had, in fact, been awake during the original procedure.

Creating Space for Transformation

The scientific name for this experience is anesthesia awareness; it

means waking up in surgery and happens when the anesthetic levels drop

too low to maintain unconsciousness but nerve-paralyzing agents prevent

the patient from communicating this nightmare to the surgeon. Feeling

the surgeon open my chest and place his hands inside my heart produced

unparalleled horror in my young psyche, and the entire trauma was

automatically buried in my unconscious.

The cellular recording activated by the shock went on for three

years. Unable to keep working as one horrific memory after another

resurfaced, I closed my practice and devoted myself to healing. I kept

following a golden thread of intuition and memory back to Heaven on

Earth. In time, and trusting direct perception, my seeing grew brighter

by the day.

At first, I dismissed what I saw. Perhaps I was crazy, I wondered,

but as a clinical psychologist, I also knew otherwise. Then, drawn to

study world religions like a lost man searching for his map home, I

soon discovered that mystics from every tradition said what I deeply

knew—that Heaven on Earth is already here when you know how to look.

Living Stories

I learned that the meaning and impact of an event is directly

related to the stories we tell ourselves about it. Because the stories

that came to my young mind during the surgery were terrifying, the

event was experienced as extremely traumatic. A positive story would

have prevented this trauma. More importantly, I realized that any story

separates us from direct experience of the Divine as Being itself.

As the medieval Catholic theologian and mystic Meister Eckhart said,

"God is like nothing so much as being" and "God's being is my being …

wherever I am, there is God." How differently I would have experienced

surgery from a mystical experience of sensation as God's play of

ever-changing energies.

I also learned that surrendering my professional identity, community

and income—a via negativa of enormous proportions—served to "cleanse

the doors of perception" of the belief-filters that had been obscuring

my vision of Heaven on Earth in the first place. Ideas about who I was,

what I was doing and where I lived filled consciousness to overflowing.

If Heaven on Earth is the immediate and direct experience of Divinity

as the world itself, I can experience it only when I stop thinking and

start sensing.

Reframing `Earth Changes'

How differently we relate to one another and to the Earth when we

experience the holiness and perfection of Heaven here and now? This

visionary transformation is no small event nor is it imaginary.

As ph proclaimed, "This is Eden. When you see the

kingdom spread upon the Earth, the old way of living in the world is

annihilated. That is the end of the world. The end of the world is not

an event to come; it is an event of psychological transformation, of

visionary transformation. You see not the world of solid things but a

world of radiance."

My world has changed significantly. I now have huge feelings of love

for my wife, children, grandchildren, friends and the world itself. I

also experience increased creativity: song writing, drumming, writing,

story telling and play. I have a greatly increased sense of

freedom—that I am not the events in my life or the reactions they

evoke.

Every time I heighten awareness and tune in, I sense that space is

alive, aware, intelligent and loving. I have many moments of `radical

amazement,' wonder and gratitude at the astonishing beauty of life. I

also sense that I am holy, one with Divine Being, my own beingness. I

know my place now is to be a spiritual elder, to show up and love

unconditionally, rather than to take charge or fix things.

In sum, the stories and concepts I held about life had repeatedly

cost me the Heaven on Earth. I was never expelled from the Garden of

Eden (another name for Divine World); my loving consciousness had

simply been hijacked by the power of my own beliefs. Eden is not lost;

we simply need to remember how to open to it. Then life is an amazing,

living adventure. Please join me!

, PhD, D. Ministry is an ordained interfaith

minister, author and mystic. His dedication to finding Heaven on Earth

involved collecting a chorus of mystic voices (more than 100 citations

in all), creating a model of the religious psyche describing why we

don't readily see Heaven on Earth and how we can, which led to a new

book, Finding Heaven Here (O-Books, to be published in early

2009). He has taught extensively at men's gatherings, professional

conferences, churches and retreat centers, and is the author of three

previous books on the interface of psychology and spirituality. Dr.

lives on an island in the Puget Sound of Washington State. He

can be contacted by clicking here or emailing jcr416@....