Throughout religious and spiritual literature we are taught that the Kingdom of Heaven is within – but what on earth does that really mean?
I am writing this from my own perspective and state of consciousness, so it may or may not resonate with everyone – but hopefully, it may trigger memories of heaven, no matter how vague or distant. Most people I talk to don’t remember the mind before time was, so don’t feel like a failure if you can’t. As the spiritual path actually goes backward, we have to do a lot of soul-searching and shadow work before certain memories and knowledge are restored to awareness. If the truth is too threatening to the mind it won’t be able to process it. It will just present as ridiculous because the fear of the light is so intense.
I remember the experience of mind before selective perception came into play. We can most easily reach a heavenly state of mind through being in love, meditation, listening to peaceful music or by aligning with unified thinking as much as possible. If you’ve ever had a general anaesthetic, taken psychedelics, or been heavily sedated you may recall the comfortably numb feeling of oneness. This is one of the closest feelings to a heavenly state one can experience here, but it is only temporary and seen as being created by external circumstances.
When we are aware this world was created by the ego “as a place where God could enter not”, it is easier to understand why religion and spirituality seem so mysterious, confusing, frightening and out of reach. Some religious teachings have been distorted by the ego so much they are more akin to the Anti-Christ than a helpful pathway to God. It is easy to see why many people choose to be atheist or agnostic. The illusion is considered reality and spiritual sight a fallacy. Of course the ego loves it when you stay stuck within the walls of the illusion for fear of losing or being seen to lose your marbles. But lose your marbles you must if you want to attain the Kingdom of Heaven.
This world is an impossible situation, a matrix, a trap because it’s based on the separation principle which is about as un-Godly as it gets. One of the sneakiest things about the illusion is that there are many beautiful places, experiences, and wonderfully kind people in the world. The ego created enough loveliness and hope to dupe us into thinking God created it.
If you’re like me, you probably had much loftier expectations of God and always suspected something was distinctly not right. It’s just too difficult to be consistently happy here and avoiding death is simply not possible. If life is eternal, then human experience can’t be life – and would a loving God create pain, suffering, lack and death?
Any religious path based on a dualistic mindset will never find unity, despite its best intentions. To realise unity, one must transcend duality altogether, because duality is an unresolvable paradox. We need a lot of help to do this because unified mind is antithetical to dualistic mind.
Learning to experience life through a unified lens is startlingly simple but very different from experiencing it through our normal dualistic lens. As Heaven is abstract and earth is concrete, it is natural to take spiritual teachings too literally and fall into the ego’s sneaky trap. This is why a spiritual teacher who resonates with you is very helpful. Learning to discern the difference between the ego’s offerings and those of the Spirit is the work. In a nutshell, the ego seeks to divide and separate and the spirit seeks to unify and heal.
You can see which thought system was at play during Covid with the masking and social distancing mandates. The ego seeks to minimise fear and make it bearable without entirely getting rid of it, but this leads to cognitive dissonance and what the world sees as mental health problems. From an awakening perspective, it is necessary to break mentally before you can consciously make progress spiritually, but you have to be tough enough to make it past external stigma. Fortunately, consciousness doesn’t go backwards and everyone will transcend eventually.
A Course in Miracles teaches that God didn’t create this world because what he creates is formless and eternal.
This world is described as a mortal dream in which we get to be a separate self. This dream was born from an idle thought to be our own boss, which leads to us feeling anything but happy and free. The guilt and fear we feel from making this choice is unconsciously projected onto the external world which can seem disturbing and insurmountable. In unity, there’s nothing to free ourselves from, but in duality, it seems as though we must free ourselves from almost everything. We become locked on the wheel of karma trying to physically carve out freedom, when in fact freedom can only be found by reverting back to a unified way of thinking. Our fear and guilt traps us over and over until we have to look at it and heal. Our dualistic thought is manifest in physical form and we mistake this physical dream for reality. It’s quite a convincing trap. The ego created the mortal dream and we experience the aspects of it we align with in mind.
In truth, we are still in heaven but dreaming of exile – and God is keen to free us from our separation nightmare.
God and heaven are abstract, not physical because only the mind is real. God and his separated Sons are all connected in mind and this mind is really all that exists. We confuse ourselves for the powerless figures in a dream without realising we are actually the powerful dreamer of the dream.
In its heavenly state, the mind is in a constant state of joy, where love is extended and received eternally as one state.
Dualistic thinking makes the world seem real and because our thoughts form the physical world the illusion reinforces itself. God sent the Holy Spirit/Intuition to help us think in a unified way which enables us to see the forgiven world. The world is neutral or innocent until we project our misperceptions onto it. As many of these misperceptions are shared they are assumed to be truth, but they are anything but. It is possible to heal the world by thought alone because it is unhealed by thought alone. The enlightened mind knows that dualistic interpretation is the only problem and corrects its thinking accordingly.
As thinking creates emotion and subsequent perception we hold all the power within us to change the world. This is how we experience the Kingdom of Heaven. Once you see everyone and everything as love, you’ve cracked it and don’t need others to change.
In A Course in Miracles, Jesus states that heaven is formless, but we can create the experience of heaven on earth whilst we are still in a body. When the mind has fully unified the illusion of a physical world will cease to exist and this is what heaven truly is.
It would be too frightening for us to instantly let go of our human character and revert to knowing ourselves purely as spirit. For this reason, the awakening journey is usually a gradual process where our mind shifts steadily from fragmented perception to unified knowing. All fear, guilt, shame, anger, and envy must be healed in order for the 3D world to no longer be desired.
There’s no visual aspect to heaven because sense perception does not exist there. There is nothing to sense because there is no physicality. The senses are the domain of the ego or anti-christ and an important component of the illusion.
Imagine the consistent feeling of warmth, trust, peace, contentment, joy, bliss, connection, fulfillment and safety all smushed into one. That is what heaven is like. It’s a knowing/feeling and that is all. In physical terms it is nothing, but in truth it is everything. It is what remains when dualistic thinking and its physical manifest world have vanished. We think these feelings are created through sensory experience, but the mind projects these feelings onto the sense organs. Mind is the only cause on planet earth- it exists beyond time and continues after physical death. Some people are psychic and prophetic because they can see more of the illusory world than most.
Heaven is reached by the unified mind not physical death. The concept of death must be transcended to reach heaven and we can only achieve this by identifying as Spirit rather than a body. The choice to be separate is what made us seem to leave heaven, and, only a complete reversal of this decision can restore heaven to our awareness.
The ego tries to convince us that the perfect acquisition of external circumstances can conjure heaven, but only the complete relinquishment of desire for externals can. The spirit’s mission is to reverse the ego thought system and this is why the spiritual journey can seem so painful. What the separate self desires, the unified self knows it must undo. The overall aim is the same, but the ego’s approach doesn’t work and the Spirit’s does.
A Course in Miracles refers to this world seen through a unified lens as the forgiven world because it is the closest experience you can have to Heaven whilst in a body. To achieve this you must see everything as a harmonious and loving whole despite its outward appearance. Essentially you are looking past the outer presentation, removing the boundaries between objects and choosing to live in the knowing/feeling state of unity. It takes much practice but becomes easier over time. Forgiveness and non-judgment are key to experiencing the world as innocent.
Imagine having a dream at night that you killed someone. When you wake up in the morning you feel guilty but shrug and think, oh well thankfully it was just a dream. The prospect of being punished in reality for a dream misdemeanor is absurd. God doesn’t see this world but if he did he would see it in the same way as this. You can’t really be punished for dreaming because dreams are not real. It is so much easier to forgive the world when you know it is simply the result of a tiny mad idea.
I have used an image of sky and clouds to depict heaven but really there is no visual aspect to heaven. As Jesus says, words and images are symbols of symbols twice removed from reality. They are used to explain something in a way that is helpful for us from our level of consciousness, but they are also misleading because of their visual nature.
