Heaven

Alexi Panos – I think heaven in the way that we’ve kind of constructed it mentally and linguistically obviously it’s just a construct. I do believe that heaven is here now, I do believe that hell is here now I believe it’s a state of mind. I believe that whatever you choose to live in you will choose to receive as your reality and a lot of people bank on heaven being this out-there concept but it’s here it’s now. Some days I’m in a heaven mindset where everything is glorious and some days I see when my mindset goes into a hell mindset where everything’s going wrong and one bad thing after another happens but it’s here and it’s here first and if we can choose to see that I’m creating my reality I’m creating heaven I’m creating the hell that I’m witnessing right now I’m playing a part in it I’m instrumental in it and responsible for all of it then we can shift it.

CLAY MILLER – Heaven is always there as your big “I” but you got the little “I” that judges but you can keep anchoring yourself in heaven and to all your little eyes that judge and need to do that and react it’s always there. It’s not someplace to arrive at but you have to sort of practice you know until okay, you move through life that way as much as you can.

JONATHAN YOUNG – I think religion is not something to be debated as yes or no, right or wrong, is there a heaven isn’t there a heaven, is there a God, isn’t there a God? I think these are matters of preference and style which one do you like do you like a world that has a Heaven fine, it’s a matter of taste do you like a world that has a God maybe one with a big white beard fine, why not, would you rather that it’s invisible like the forest and something mysterious is uh existing in the center of the atom that animates all life fine. I don’t think science is going to answer these questions or needs to. I think they are poetic questions and have to do with how we enjoy and savor the mystery they’re never going to be final answers I tend to think eternity is now and Heaven is how you live not some afterlife. I’m a little wary of the political implications of having people put off life to something after their death. So I think heaven can be gained now it’s all about what kind of consciousness one lives in.

Jerry Jampolsky – Well – it’s a state of mind it’s not a place. It’s a state of mind where the things are that I just described where there’s only love. It’s a consciousness it’s a higher consciousness where we’re the messenger and that which created us that’s all calling our creator uh helps us deal with all the perceptions we have on a daily basis from our ego, our fearful ego and helps us to let go of those it’s a process of letting go with what we thought was true and when the blocks begin to disappear and forgiveness becomes that your natural state uh you experience uh moments of this and I think as more and more experience we get the more moments we are able to experience and then it all has to do with not only experiencing that but it has to do with the consciousness of giving and helping others and making that as important as breathing.

1. EBEN ALEXANDER – My father, the academic neurosurgeon. He was very religious he would take me to our Methodist Church uh, every Sunday. I wanted to believe what I heard in that church but I was very you know, scientific and very uh doubting and very skeptical and I wanted proof of anything. I was going to believe uh and I will say that over many years in neurosurgery uh learning more and more about the brain I was mystified how could conscious awareness survive the death of the brain and body, to me, that was a very deep mystery and my coma journey showed me very clearly how that is the case because in fact, what it showed me is our brain uh is not the creator of consciousness. The consciousness is primordial and is the supporting base on which the whole universe exists now. Heaven to Me uh before my coma I had a pretty conventional view I uh, it was basically I based my ideas of Heaven on uh what I’d read in the Bible and um that was really it and I thought that our existence was one incarnation and then eternal uh heaven or hell uh and of course as I said that kind of faith uh left me over time just because of my work in neuros-surgery and trying to figure out how we could have conscious awareness after ending of the uh of the body and brain. Now my conception of Heaven shifted completely 180 degrees very radically shifted. Heaven is absolutely real concrete solid rock solid real all around where we are the thing that is not as real is this material world. In many ways the material world the four-dimensional spacetime in which we exist is set up as a stage I kind of like, I like to look at it as a Hollywood facade like they would film an old western or something that’s what this material world is but it’s a very important facade in fact I would say the entire uh reality of this universe exists to support this kind of Illusion of the four-dimensional space-time and our sense of beings incarnate for a finite period in these physical forms uh and in fact what I came to realize is that our deep real eternal ongoing home of the now is that heaven uh and that heaven is very rich it is something that generates all of this uh kind of Lutheran material realm out of it and that is our true home and we can, we are there all the time. Important to understand that it is very much about love and about oneness. Near-death experiences is I often say are the tip of the spear uh now I would say that all of our religious concepts spiritual concepts going back for Millennia have come from people having near-death experiences and similar epiphanies extraordinary uh challenges to their worldview where they were able to glimpse through the veil and see the reality of the Heavenly realm now it turns out that you know, for Millennia uh those results were basically occasionally handed down as the word of prophets and mystics. They are what emerged into our religious system well it turns out that in the 1960s things shifted up a bit and this was no accident uh doctors gained the ability to uh resuscitate Cardiac Arrest patients and in essence uh in the last 50 years they have brought back tens of millions of souls who have been to the other side and come back to tell the to story. So in fact near-death experiences are very much the tip of the spear in this awakening to the reality of our spiritual essence that is our true home and an understanding of it uh it is something that near-death experiences the vast majority of them come back knowing they have no fear of death they realize death is not an ending that in fact it’s a great comfort to be released from the shackles of the physical brain back into that higher realm where we go through our life review, reunite with our higher soul with our fellow soulmates, plan up that next incarnation come back in to do it again uh, and important concept to understand there is our notion of time is undergoing a complete revision in the modern scientific thinking. Our current physics and cosmology really have no remote idea what time is but I can tell you from my journey time flow is very different in that realm there’s what I call “Deep Time” and there’s causality kind of an ordering of the events of our higher spiritual souls in their work in that ascendance that trumps anything about the flow of time and causality down in this realm. In this realm, it’s all set up as a stage on which the drama unfolds for beings in their incarnations to learn and teach these lessons but in fact, time flow itself is uh very much a concept in flux.

GARY RENARD – The truth is we’ve never really left God. You know, I said that this is a dream well, if it’s a dream it’s not true and the best analogy I can think of is when you’re in bed at night in your dreaming when you’re in a dream for all intents and purposes that dream is your reality. It seems real you respond to it as if it’s real uh you’ll have you know, all kinds of uh responses to it until you wake up then when you wake up you’re surprised to find out that you never left the bed you were there the whole time, it’s not that the bed wasn’t there it was just out of your awareness which is uh the way that my teachers taught so we’re in a dream right now seems very real but I’ve had dreams in bed at night that were so real when I woke up I was actually surprised that what was going on wasn’t true and that’s what this is. All your time is spent dreaming you know, so you dream that you’re born you dream that you have this, uh, strange life. You dream that you die you dream that you have this in-between time period you dream that you come back again to another strange life and all your time is spent in dreaming and it keeps going until you wake up but when you uh attain enlightenment you realize it’s just a dream and that you never really left the bed and in the bigger sense of the word, the bed is heaven. You never really left Heaven uh there’s a famous quotation that says “You at home dreaming of exile but perfectly capable of awakening to reality” and reality is this uh permanent state you know it’s a constant state it doesn’t shift or change uh the truth is God, God is love and love is what’s real and even in this life this dream life when you think about it what is the most real thing that we have in our lives. The most real thing that we have that never goes away is love. 

You know, if somebody who you love passes away they die and I know this because I’ve lost most of the people in my lifetime who have been very close to me and what happens is after a couple of years hopefully after 3 years uh the hurt will start to go away you know the pain will start to go away but you know what doesn’t go away is the love, it’s the most real thing that we have and isn’t it interesting that the most real thing that we have is something that you can’t see. You know something that you can’t prove you can’t prove love you can’t see it you can see love In action but you can’t see the cause yet it’s the most real thing that we have and the most real thing that there is something else that you can’t see. It can’t be seen with the body’s eyes but it can be experienced you know even while you appear to be here is possible to have that great mystical experience that the masters of history have talked about of actual union with your source where you actually experience that perfect oneness with your source and that experience is the most real experience that you’ll ever have because it is real instead of a phony illusory experience and a temporary one this is something where you get the experience of something that is real and permanent and invincible and it simply blows away anything that this world you know, has to offer and when the masters have had that experience they’ve all said the same thing that has to be reality because it’s so much more real than this is.

Jerry Jampolsky – By believing in something within, our consciousness not seeing as a place and relooking at their the ego fearful voice that is always so critical and you’re not good enough you don’t deserve to feel love uh you’re a loser, and that you experience loss and you should be afraid of death and believe that that’s the end of life and I think as people begin to shift their gears and what they believe in uh they begin to sense a sense of freedom, a sense of laughter at things they used to be upset about. They also learn not to live in the past Bill Thetford likes to say, we need to practice Celestial Amnesia that’s a beautiful word to say let’s go over the past and just experience the love that we’ve been given and receive and let everything else go.

Gary Renard – This illusion always leads to pain eventually. Yes, there are good things too because this is a world of duality and in a world of duality and seeming opposites. You always have opposites good and bad, up and down, life and death, abundance and scarcity but because you have that duality eventually it’s going to lead to scarcity and death where in the world that you awaken to which some people call Heaven uh the world that you awaken to doesn’t have any such thing as scarcity or any such thing as uh you know death. Because it’s perfect oneness and you can only have those negative things in a world of duality where you have some kind of a split, some kind of an opposite. So it’s going from a world of opposites back to a world where there are no opposites where there’s no such thing as death there’s only life there’s no such thing as scarcity uh there’s only abundance and it’s possible to experience that even while you appear to be here it’s possible to experience complete abundance. You know, I say that you know the uh self-help movement and what is real spirituality have become totally confused with each other uh the self-help movement is about getting what you want making things happen achieving your goals and that’s fine and I’m not here to put that down because I’ve used it myself successfully so I’m not going to be a hypocrite and put it down. 

At the same time, I’ve come to learn the difference between the self-help movement and real spirituality. Real spirituality isn’t about just getting what you want it’s about being happy, and peaceful, and strong regardless of what happens whether you get what you want or not, whether you achieve your goal or not, whether you have a healthy body or a sick body. No matter what happens real spirituality is there for you to make you totally peaceful and totally happy regardless of what happens and that’s a real strength that’s real power because now it’s not dependent on circumstances which are all temporary by definition. So do you want to have your life uh and your happiness dependent on something that is totally temporary and is only going to change because that’s what this world does, this is a world of shift and change or would you rather you know put your faith in something that cannot shift or change? A changeless reality, it that is a constant you know, the truth is a constant. The truth was the truth 2,000 years ago the truth is the truth today and it’s going to be the truth 2,000 years from now whether you understand and agree with it or not you know, the truth is not subject to our interpretation the truth doesn’t care what we think about it the truth is a constant and it will always be there and the question is how long do we want to go through this you know kind of like illusion of being separate from the truth when we can have the whole thing.                                                                            

Jonathan Young – Heaven or Nirvana living a life of delight, living in the radiance in my mind is finding very fulfilling activities finding ways to connect with other people that go into the true beauty of the human experience, finding ways to be on the planet as an animal with animals, finding ways to create to express the inner mysteries those are the activities that lead to heaven in my mind.

Jerry Jampolsky – What stops people? What stops me from that is my judgments, my belief that what I see is really true, and yet what is true is something that doesn’t change.

Dr. Eben Alexander – I think what stops us is we get sucked into the kind of secular material uh version of things and we forget that divinity within us all, that love, the power of that love uh and it’s by recovering the power of that love that really gives us the ability uh to come to all of this knowing in this Incarnation. Now one thing that I strongly recommend to people who are serious about uh kind of coming to know this many people say, oh I want my own near-death experience but the key is you don’t have to wait till you die or almost die to come to know everything. I know about these realms you can come to know that through a practice of going within uh centering prayer, deep meditation this is why I do a lot of the work that I do with sacred acoustics to provide tools for people to go into very deep transcendental meditative states. Once you realize the physical brain does not create consciousness you begin to realize that going within consciousness is actually a way of getting out into this universe. The modern uh scientific model that is replacing that old uh worn out and untrue production model you know, that the brain produces consciousness is called, “Filter Theory”. 

The idea that consciousness is primordial, it preexisted the Big Bang. Consciousness is the big creator of the universe. Many of us come to see that fantastic consciousness as God in a near-death experience or similar spiritually transformative experience but that uh knowing of that wisdom is something that is within us all. The brain allows consciousness in a tiny little trickle it’s an illusion just the tiniest little smidge of el illusory here and now and by going within we can actually work our way to the other side, go beyond the veil that people transcend in a near-death experience or other types of spiritually transformative experiences and come into that universal and infinite consciousness in all of its power. It’s a tremendous source of guidance of creativity uh the ultimate source of health if one wants to heal in any sense and I would say that all physical mental emotional health fundamentally involves spiritual health. All of the illness and injury and hardships in our life at its very origin are opportunities for spiritual growth and it’s how we deal with those hardships, how we continue to bring back that memory of the infinite divinity within us all of that oneness and connectedness. That by connecting with that one mind that we get to through that uh meditation or centering prayer uh what we’re doing is connecting with all other beings all of this creation because any sense of separation is right at the heart of the difficulty and the distortion in understanding and of course that’s part of our language uh as Renee Descartes said, “To define is to limit”. 

Well, all of the definitions of our language give you this false sense of separability of everything and that’s why I love meditation going within it’s a top-down approach that allows you to see the big picture to see that all of this is really one process. We’re part of one truth and by going within we can come to glimpse that in fact, I would say it’s one of the Hallmarks of the difficulty with our current scientific paradigm. Our conventional science right now uh is what is called “Reductive Materialism” First of all it believes that the material world is the only thing that exists which is false the thing that exists is consciousness. The material world as I said earlier is the illusion uh but in fact, uh, when one comes to realize that and realizes that reductive materialism our conventional science splits everything down into subatomic particles the smallest pieces possible, and then assumes that we can use the laws that govern those interactions to then figure out how the whole universe works they’ve got it completely backward what we need is that top-down approach that one can get to through deep meditation. This is why to me uh any approach to physics and cosmology can involve both that, the subatomic physics and particle work but also combined with that top-down that uh, deep uh approach into consciousness uh and its rich source of creativity and understanding of the nature of the workings of reality to come up with the real way of understanding how this universe works but as long as we depend fundamentally on that reductive materialism as our model for understanding all of truth and all of reality in the universe we are forever stuck in this tiny little back corner of the bedroom closet thinking that we’re seeking truth right here where it can be found only because that’s where uh we understand things the best and so it really is a completely different way of looking at things the top-down approach meditation realizing that the universe is one and that any act of uh compartmentalizing and separating it out into pieces introduces distortion and confusion.

Jonathan Young – The hero’s journey is the initiatory process toward enlightenment, if you will toward the culmination of what the development process is all about the integration of the different resources we have as human beings, and I think a sublime quality, a true inner beauty can emerge from it. Some people would call that heaven on earth, I call it the radiance.