Proof of Heaven

My experience showed me that the death of the body and the brain are not the end of consciousness, that human experience continues beyond the grave.  More important, it continues under the gaze of a God who loves and cares about each one of us and about where the universe itself and all the beings within it are ultimately going.

The place I went was real.  Real in a way that makes the life we're living here and now completely dreamlike by comparison.  This doesn't mean I don't value the life I'm living now, however.  In fact I value it more than I ever did before.  I do so because I now see it in its true context.

...the "voice" of this being was warm and--odd as I know this may sound--personal.  It understood humans, and it possessed the qualities we posess, only in infiniately greater measure.  It knew me deeply and overflowed with qualities that all my life I've always associated with human beings, and human beings alone: warmth, compassion, pathos...even irony and humor.

...I had already been taught the one thing--the only thing--that, in the last analysis, truly matters.  I had initially received this piece of knowledge from my lovely companion on the butterfly wing upon my first entrance into the gateway.  It came in three parts, and to take one more shot at putting it into words (because of course it was initially delivered wordlessly) it would run something like this:
     You are loved and cherished
     You have nothing to fear
     There is nothing you can do wrong.
If I had to boil this entire message down to one sentence, it would run this way:
     You are loved.
And if I had to boil it down further, to just one word, it would be (of course) simply:
     Love.
Love is, without a doubt, the basis of everything.  Not some abstract, hard to fathom kind of love but the day to day kind that everyone knows--the kind of love we feel when we look at our spouse and our children...in it's purest and most powerful form, this love is not jealous or selfish, but unconditional.  This is the reality of realities, the incomprehensibly glorious truth of truths that lives and breathes at the core of everything that exists or that ever will exist....

The (false suspicion that we can somehow be separated from God is the root of every form of anxiety in the universe, and the cure for it...was the knowledge that nothing can tear us from God, ever. 

Just as our brains work hard every moment of our waking lives to filter out the barrage of sensory information coming at us from our physical surroundings, selecting the material we actually need in order to survive, so it is that forgetting our trans-earthly identities also allows us to be "here and now" far more effectively.  ...being excessively conscious of the worlds beyond the here and now would slow down our progress even more.  If we knew too much of the spiritual realm now, then navigating our lives on earth would be an even greater challenge than it already is.  From a more purpose-focused perspective, making the right decisions through our free will in the face of the evil and injustice on earth would mean far less if we remembered, while here, the full beauty and brilliance of what awaits us. 

...That evil could occasionally have the upper hand was known and allowed by the Creator as a necessary consequence of giving the gift of free will to beings like us.

But free will comes at the cost of a loss or falling-away from this love and acceptance.  We are free; but we are free beings hemmed all around by an environment conspiring to make us feel that we are not free.  Free will is of central importance for our function in the earthly realm: a function that, we will all one day discover, serves the much higher role of allowing our ascendance in the timeless alternate dimension.  Our life down here may seem insignificant, for it is minute in relation to the other lives and other worlds that also crowd the invisibel and visible universes.  But it is also hugely important, for our role here is to grow toward the Divine, adn that growth is closely watched by the beings in the worlds above...

This is the true spiritual self that all of us are destined to someday recover.  But until that day comes, I fell, we should do everything in our power to get in touch with this miraculous aspect of ourselves, to cultivate it and bring it to light.  This is the being living within all of us right now and that is, in fact, the being that God truly intends us to be.
     How do we get closer to this genuine spiritual self?  By manifesting love and compassion.  Why?  BEause love and compassion are far more than the abstractions many of us believe them to be.  They are real.  They are concrete.  And they make up the very fabric of the spiritual realm.
     In order to return to that realm, we must once again become like that realm, even while we are stuck in, and plodding through, this one.

Om [the word he uses for God] understands and sympathizes with our human situation more profoundly and personally than we can even imagine because Om knows what we have forgotten, and understands the terrible burden it is to live with amnesia of the Divine for even a moment.

Humor.  Irony.  Pathos.  I had always thought these were qualities we humans developed to cope with this so often painful and unfair world.  And they are.  But in addition to being consolations, these qualities are recognitions--brief, flashing, but all important--of the fact that whatever our struggles and sufferings in the present world are, they truly can't touch the larger, eternal beings we in truth are.  Laughter and irony are at heart reminders that we are not prisoners in this world, but voyagers through it.

So was I communicating directly with God?  Absolutely.  Expressed that way it sounds grandiose.  But when it was happening, it didn't feel that way.  instead, I felt like I was doing what every soul is able to do when they leave their bodies, adn what we can all do right now through various methods of prayer or deep meditation.  Communicating with God is the most extraordinary experience imaginable, yet at the same time it's the most natural one of all, because God is present in us at all times.  omniscient, omnipotent, persona.---and loving us without conditions.  We are connected as One through our divine link with God.

Finishing Well

For the record (for my record, lol) I didn't particularly love this book.  I left it a very lukewarm review on Amazon.  But there were still a few thoughts worth recording.

"I believe that it is not dying that people are afraid of.  Something else.  Something more unsettling and more tragic than dying frightens us.  We're afraid of never having lived.  Of coming to the end of our days with the sense that we were never really alive.  That we never figured out what live was for.
           --Harold Kushner

...he (Harvard professor) stressed the fact that if his students really thought they only had a short time to live, they'd be spending it mending their relationships with friends, family, and God.  Deep down, they know it's about relationships.  But there they are, about to spend their next thirty years in a made scramble for family and fortune, with are antithetical to their declared values.

What keeps most of us from focusing on the things that matter is all the things that don't matter but add cost, particularly the cost of our most precious asset--time.  We end up spending ourselves dry, adding small increments to our "money and status" accounts--which we already have plenty of--while depleting our "meaning" accounts, including our relationships with God, marriage partners, kids, lifelong friends, and others we're called to serve.