Into The Mystery Podcast Ep. 14: On Heaven

What is “heaven?” Is it a place? Another dimension? The reward for a lifelong avoidance of sin? Or rather, is it a state of presence that we can embody and enjoy right here in physical reality? In this episode, we contemplate the experience of heaven, as well as the barriers seekers face to being Heaven’s embodiment. “Finding” heaven is both simpler, and trickier, than you might imagine.

Transcript

What does the food look like?

HealthVers Conc bitten Do we want to talk about heaven or do we want to talk about this reification of ego that we do?

I think they're related.

Before we started,

I looked in the index of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali to see what he had to say about heaven and it landed me on the very second sutra which of course is Yogas Chitta Vritti Nirodha,

That yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind stuff.

Perfect segue.

Yes,

It's a perfect segue between heaven and the exploration of the reification of mind.

Please continue.

Well,

First of all,

Maybe I should preface this by saying that heaven as the West commonly conceives of it based in the Judaic and Christian traditions is sort of this nebulous place we think we're going to end up after this life.

Yogic practice and the great masters have been trying to tell us forever that no,

Heaven is wherever you make it.

Heaven is the thing or the state that you can find yourself in depending on how you orient yourself to the world.

It's always available.

It's always within us and it has a lot to do with the way we perceive things.

I think Patanjali and the Yoga Sutras makes the point,

Or the entire point of yoga practice is to help us to disidentify from what's happening in the mind,

The fluctuations of the mind stuff which is the stories and the naming and the frameworks of reality that we have set up that sort of act as a barrier between us and our experience of heaven.

That busyness in our minds,

The thing that we're always trying to transcend in meditation or in yoga class,

That's what's making us miserable.

That is our hell on earth in a way.

To find heaven,

We simply need to reorient ourself in a way that does not invoke the mind over and over and again as we're experiencing a moment.

Yeah.

At a certain level of speaking,

I don't think that this encompasses the whole truth,

But at a certain level of speaking,

Heaven and hell are states of mind.

Heaven is the yoga.

When I am united,

Yoked with my heart's deepest desire,

That's heaven.

When I'm not,

It is because I'm somehow caught in the patterning of mind stuff of the past.

And so there's this.

.

.

Buddha said that,

All great masters say that,

But Buddha said your reality is determined by what you think.

What becomes really tricky about talking about this is that heaven actually is an independent realm.

Yoga is the cessation of the mind stuff.

Heaven is realized in the cessation of mind stuff.

If we don't have a thought that pulls us away from that heavenly center or home,

Then heaven is here.

Heaven is here.

Right.

Right.

The mind is so tricky in the ways it seeks to reassert itself over and over again.

And it's not just.

.

.

I mean,

It's a lot of things.

It's the naming of things.

It's the emotions that it will entertain.

It's relationships.

The mind does a lot of mechanical stuff,

Like just translate reality into words with language.

And that's one aspect of it.

But there's also a habitual orientation to that reality that we don't even know we're sort of locked into.

So for example,

If you.

.

.

And I think this has a lot to do with our upbringing.

If you habitually perceive the world as a place that you have to sort of battle against or fight with all the time,

Then anything that comes into your experience is going to be automatically seen through that lens.

And the mind doesn't have to think about that.

We just do that automatically.

And these are the sorts of very subtle layers of perception that we can only identify when we can silence the mind long enough to kind of let that wisdom fill the space.

Yeah,

I think that you're speaking to a deeper dimension of what Patanjali means when he says mind stuff.

Because part of what he's implying when we really get down to investigating it is not just thoughts,

But what you're describing,

The reference points from which we operate.

Reference points,

Yeah.

That are deeply written into unconscious action,

Behavior,

And perception in such a way that they are,

Like you said,

A lens that we're looking through that we don't even realize that we're looking through.

And they're very difficult to uncover.

They're very difficult to pierce and penetrate.

One of the most sophisticated reference points of the egoic mind is its search for heaven.

Oh,

Say more.

Well,

We think of heaven,

Like you said,

We think of heaven as a place to be found or an experience to be found or a feeling to be found.

And so one of the really subtle reference points of the egoic mind is its search for that paradise.

We find ourselves searching for it without even knowing that we're searching for it.

We may not call it heaven,

We may call it something else,

But we may call it bliss or joy or our life purpose or whatever it is.

But part of what characterizes egoic existence is perpetual searching.

And the reification of our mind is largely around that searching.

And what are we searching for?

The ultimate search is for heaven.

As you were speaking,

It reminds me of the way we sort of interpret,

The way the mind tends to interpret something like love.

Like we have this,

And this is written into our cultural kind of collective consciousness as well.

So we're kind of automatically taught this by osmosis.

But the idea that love is this explosive,

Blissful,

All satisfying experience,

And you come to understand that that's really not true.

That love is so much more subtle than that and so much more sublime and profound and even quiet in a way.

So our brain is busy looking for this kind of grand experience of love when it's all around us all the time and we're just not looking for the right thing.

And so I think what you're talking about with heaven is similar to that in that we think the brain thinks it's going to be an experience or a place or something it can point to and say,

Yes,

I have found this and I have achieved this and hurrah,

When in fact we have to kind of invert our thinking or abandon our thinking in order to find it in the first place.

Looking for love in all the wrong places or in all the wrong ways.

Yes,

Most often I think in that search for love we're searching for something more like a fascination or a … Infatuation.

Infatuation,

Yes.

It's like we're searching for something similar to that.

Yeah.

I mean infatuation is lovely but it's temporary and we make the mistake of thinking that that's love.

Yeah.

Well,

It's still of egoic consciousness.

I mean there is some power and expanse to love but it's not in the terms and in the ways that the ego is searching for it.

Yeah.

You know I was writing an email to somebody earlier this morning and another writer and I shared that poem I wrote called Longing,

You've read it,

That was inspired when I was … We have a lot of hummingbirds around here and I was looking out the window and watching one at the feeder and just kind of idly musing and I thought,

Oh,

Well you know a hummingbird probably doesn't think in language but I'll bet it perceives nectar as love.

You know when it finds the nectar that must feel like love to it,

You know the sweetness and the filling of the belly and the satisfaction of its drive to feed,

Et cetera.

And so I kind of worked back from that and you know started with the cloud making rain and that that was an expression of love and then the rain goes into the ground,

Et cetera.

And my thinking around things like love and heaven,

These inexpressible concepts has gradually evolved to that more sort of a holistic understanding that love is the energy that makes everything move and that informs everything and that heaven is kind of the awareness of that or the appreciation of everything that we've taken for granted as being … You remember Einstein said,

You know,

There's two ways to perceive the universe,

Either that nothing is a miracle or that everything is.

And perhaps heaven in that sense or our experience of heaven is coming to that recognition that everything is a miracle and we're just so … Our minds are just so used to it that we take this to be ordinary and think there's going to be something greater than this one.

In fact,

You're standing right in the middle of it if you just have the eyes to see it and the senses to feel it and appreciate and everything has been given to us.

And we kind of make this huge mistake.

We create our own help by thinking we have to chase it or compete with each other for it or delay it until after death.

Yeah,

Like I'll just be miserable now for this lifetime and then I'll get my reward somewhere else.

That's our huge mistake.

Yes,

That is our original sin.

That is our huge mistake.

And what you're speaking of is spoken so well in the Gospel of Thomas where the disciples are asking Jesus how they'll recognize it,

Heaven,

And where it'll be found and when it'll be found.

And he's saying,

You know,

It is beneath your feet and you don't see it.

You don't see that it is here,

That it is now.

And I love what you said there,

There's something very beautiful about conceptualizing heaven as an ultimate state of appreciation.

I mean,

There's something so deeply true about that.

And also what you were referring to there is nourishment,

That we're seeking the nourishment of our true place,

Our true station,

Our true home.

And that's what heaven provides.

It provides that sense that not that you will find nourishment,

But that you are nourished,

Just as the hummingbird is nourished with the flower.

That is the love.

It's one of the aspects of love,

That nourishment.

Yeah,

And that it's automatically ours and that it's effortless.

I always think of,

You know,

We talk about the call to home that drives us on the spiritual path sometimes and that seeking of a place of perfection or of final satisfaction,

Heaven.

You know,

I think in a way we're longing for the womb as well,

You know,

That initial experience of simplicity and perfection and just everything being continuous and right with the world and are being perfectly part of that.

I have had that experience in myself and I've walked through that experience with a number of people where some people have actually been able to actually remember the womb and it is.

We're craving in a sense because our mind becomes so material,

Matter-based that we seek heaven more like we seek a breast or the womb.

And right,

In some sense there's like a lot of truth and beauty to that and then in another sense it misleads us,

It takes us away from the now-ness of heaven,

The hereness of heaven.

Thinking that we'll find some ultimate breast to suck on or ultimate womb to snuggle into rather than right here,

Right now,

This is where you are,

This is where your feet are.

Right.

That's because the brain is so material and we need to sort of detach.

We need to perhaps remove its attachment to that very physical,

Concrete conceptualization of heaven as a state.

I think you're right on,

Yeah.

At that level it is mistaken as a state.

So heaven is what we ultimately are,

I mean,

Or are if we're able to see that.

Indeed,

Yeah.

I mean,

It's like,

It's not only where you are,

But it's what you are.

And this points back to Patanjali again,

Because part of the reification of our mind is the reification of,

I'm an entity,

I'm an object and I'm in a world full of objects.

And then it's figuring out how this object relates to all those other objects and where's the object called heaven?

Is it up there?

Is it behind that door?

And me as an object is going to find that object.

And as long as we're stuck in that pattern of consciousness,

We're constantly reifying the sense of self as a thing,

Which automatically makes heaven a thing to be found.

And we don't see that confusion.

We don't see the cycle of that happening over and over and over again.

Right.

It's almost like the brain thinks in a language,

Well,

The brain does think in a language of objects and so we have to learn a new language in a way,

Which is hard because there is no language for this.

So we need to kind of transcend our habit of thinking.

Well,

Not to interrupt you,

I'm sorry,

But the language is what we spoke of in our last podcast.

The language is the logos.

Right.

That's the language of existence.

But it's not words and it's not objects.

It's what we could think of as an ontological pattern.

It's a pattern that is existential.

It's being.

Our last thing we were talking about,

Well,

The last thing I mentioned was the language aspect.

I was about to go off on a tangent about reification and how the mind uses language to keep recreating itself.

Well,

There's something very useful there because this becomes,

I think,

A useful component here,

Which is there are two ways of looking at your mind.

One is as the thoughts which you have,

Which when believed,

Reify and reestablish that entityhood,

That sense of who I am,

What I am,

What my life is,

What my story is,

What I like,

All of it.

And then there's the mind,

Which is the spacious container in which those thoughts and reifications are occurring.

It's not just the thoughts we're transcending.

It's the container as well.

The ego takes notice of that,

I think.

Well,

The container I'm speaking of is more akin to the mind of God.

Oh,

Okay.

Well,

Then maybe continue.

Well,

Let's say I wake up in the morning and for a half second there's no story,

There's no narrative.

I don't even know what day it is for a moment.

There's just pure experiencing of the freshness of morning.

And then I very gradually piece back together my name and what my tasks are and how I'm feeling and whether I want coffee or tea or blah,

Blah,

Blah,

Any of the details.

So I've reified,

I'm beginning to reify myself,

Put myself back together in the morning.

But prior to that,

There's just a spacious openness.

I called it a container,

But it's a container that doesn't have form.

So it's not appropriate to call it a container.

And if we can see- Well,

Our mind has to assign an object,

So we'll call it a container.

Let's call it what it is.

It's a spacious openness.

And if we can see that our constant activity is to reify,

To reestablish a sense of who I am,

What I am,

What my life is,

What I'm going to do,

What I want,

What my obstacles are,

And that all of that is a neglect of that spacious openness that's there behind or underneath that activity,

Then that spacious openness becomes in a sense a gateway,

A doorway to heaven.

My brain is blanking out now.

Have you gone into spacious openness?

Maybe.

Maybe that's what's happening.

You're very close to heaven.

You can't reify anything.

No,

That's exactly it.

I have no thoughts right now.

I had a whole string of logic or something I was going to tell you,

And then we paused and it just evaporated.

Will you speak to us from this place of no thoughts?

Okay.

The funny thing that happens when the thoughts slow or begin to disappear,

I find myself in this,

It's almost like a vacuum,

Like this spacious vacuum that nothing can travel through because there's no medium in it.

There's no water or air or vibration,

So I'm just kind of in this vacuum.

In that place,

The interesting thing is that my physical boundaries dissolve as well.

I'm noticing that I'm about as big as my house right now if I wanted to be.

This is a very strange sensation.

Wow,

This is very strange.

Let me see what will come in.

The movement of wind in the trees.

Silence.

The texture of silence.

If this is an experience of heaven or some touching of that aspect of my awareness,

Then it's not,

As I was saying earlier,

It's not this explosive,

Unbelievably joyful bliss.

It's a contentment.

It's an absence of demands by my mind or anything else.

It's an absence of the need to move or speak or chase a desire or validate myself in any way.

It's that piece of simply being aware.

It's very soft,

You know,

It's a soft textured silence that really is kind of bottomless and has no edges to it.

It's sweet.

There's a sweetness to it.

So beautiful.

This is what you just articulated here.

I hope that those who listen to this can really receive the transmission of what you just gave because you gave to those who listen the experience of no mind.

You're giving the transmission of that spacious openness,

What we refer to when we talk about emptiness.

Emptiness as it really is.

That's why you called it a vacuum.

It's empty.

It's void.

It's spacious.

I would say that heaven has many aspects to it,

But if we could characterize heaven as a scene,

Metaphorically,

Symbolically as a scene,

You're describing the sky.

The sky of heaven.

The spacious openness of heaven.

One of its facets.

You know what's interesting because I'm still kind of perceiving this and it's almost like the vacuum displaces the mind stuff.

Even though it's empty,

It has kind of a swelling quality to it that kind of pushes everything else outward or away or kind of evaporates it.

It's almost active.

There's no gravitational center.

Yeah,

That too.

There's nothing to pull the thinking in toward a center,

Toward an object or entity called me.

Right.

It's just an openness.

Oh,

Yeah.

That's an interesting component.

That's the reification.

I always use the metaphor of that old Windows screensaver where you have the little colored ball that floats around on the screen and it blows apart.

Behind it,

There's this black screen,

But the ball blows apart.

It comes undone.

Then our reification is how that ball,

That sense of self comes together again within that open spaciousness.

I love that metaphor.

That's great.

In the reification,

It's like we ignore the open spaciousness once again.

Yeah.

As it bounces around the screen,

Your attention is automatically following it no matter what.

You can't help.

On the object,

Yeah.

Yeah,

Because the mind will automatically perceive or pick an object out.

We're trained this way.

This must come from prehistoric times when we had to chase animals to survive and you sense a little movement in the brush and your attention would automatically go to that.

I think that's part of it anyway.

Definitely part of it.

Or if you've got a black and white scene and there's a red thing in it,

You're going to see the red thing.

We're just … Well,

Part of it too is just gives us this capacity to live,

To function as an individual unit with a name and a certain set of talents and all those things,

To be able to differentiate yourself from everything else around you in some sense.

That kind of begs the question,

I think,

Is how do you live in the world needing to function as an individual with a name and everything you just mentioned and also,

I don't know,

Maybe keep one part of your awareness in heaven or in touch with that?

Well,

Is the black backdrop of the screen on which that ball explodes and comes together,

Is it affected at all?

No.

Right.

And it's necessary.

It's necessary for the ball to be realized.

Well,

To some degree.

It depends on which level we're speaking but with what you transmitted to here in your transmission of that open space,

I didn't see any conflict.

You were able to speak.

You were interacting with me.

There was no conflict as you were experiencing that.

That's true.

I think there's one of the great tricks of our mind is the idea that we need a self,

We need a strategy,

We need a plan,

We need an identity in order to function.

But we really seriously have to question that.

Do we really need that?

Yeah.

That is a function of also of the mind's need to either or things.

We're always like,

It's this or it's that.

It can't be both.

If this path has taught me anything,

It's that many things can coexist simultaneously without there being a conflict.

The mind has a hard time seeing that because we want to say that's a tree but that's a cat.

Right.

And that they're totally separate items when in fact it's all part of the same field and everything flows together and everything is,

I'm still sort of in this wordless place,

But that there are so many points of observation or places from which we can consider what reality is that we don't have to choose one.

It can be all of those things in any given moment and the mind has to kind of relax enough to accept that the things don't have to fight each other.

One thing does not have to displace another or invalidate another.

This is to me why the exploration of the chakras is very useful because I don't know if you recall from our time together in yoga,

But I look at the chakras as one level overlapping over another.

If you think of seven levels of consciousness,

We could expand on that if we wanted to,

But seven levels of consciousness that are all interwoven with each other,

It's not like we are subject to only one level of consciousness.

We have several types of consciousness available to us and where we see the harmony in them,

The unification and let's say the truth that they are all unified and interwoven,

It becomes discernible to us,

These different levels and how they are all harmonious with each other,

But we can't achieve that from the point of view of our mind stuff.

It's an organic experience that we are having.

So in a sense,

One more aspect of heaven would be discovering the ability to allow all of these things to coexist and to have that be right and true and proper.

Yeah.

You know,

It's like there's this great comfort with paradox that emerges in it.

Yeah.

Yes,

There's a comfort with paradox.

I remember saying to you years ago when we first started working together that,

Oh my God,

There's so many paradoxes,

I can't,

You know,

I'm paralyzed by it,

But at some point you realize that that's just a prejudice that the mind has against allowing.

It needs to be right.

It needs to choose.

It needs to know the right way to go and what the rules are and the rules all sort of go away at this point.

It's the first strategy of our mind is the black and white,

The this or that tendency,

Good or evil,

Right or wrong,

To split everything,

To make everything dual and separate.

Ah ha,

Duality.

Yes.

So when we visit that heavenly ground of openness or open mind,

Truly open mind,

We can see that there's a resolution to duality there.

It's like duality is solved,

But not by having overcome it,

But by seeing what's sort of underneath,

What's closer,

What's more intimate,

More inward.

That's interesting.

I just had this sort of image come into my space here,

My spaciousness,

Of the intellect being sort of like an electron that can leap levels.

Like electrons will go up and down in their orbits depending on,

I think,

What the ion or ionic state is.

I am not a physicist,

So I don't remember all of this from college,

But it's something like that.

It's something like there are these various states energetically in which one interpretation would make sense,

But it doesn't really fit into the next or the one above or below.

But of course,

All of them are necessary and all of them are valid.

And so we kind of create a little hellish landscape in our heads by trying to pick one over the other.

It kind of reminds me of when people ask me questions about spirituality.

One of the most common ones is,

Well,

Is there a soul or is there not a soul?

And there's really no good answer to that,

Except I'll usually start out well.

It depends on what you're talking about.

And there's so much about this path that's like that.

In one realm or at one level or from one perspective or one aspect of something is like this or not like this.

And we could go on forever obviously.

Yep.

Well,

That's one of the big conundrums and that's why you and I have talked about this a bit in the past where when you look from one level,

There absolutely is a soul.

When you look from another level,

There is no such thing as a soul.

And so the mind absolutely cannot handle these paradoxes.

And that's why it's difficult because there is an answer to that question,

But it's an answer that comes from experience,

Not from,

Like you said,

Intellect.

There's a place where the intellect can't reach anymore.

Yeah,

Exactly.

And so our mind gets very frustrated because it just wants like,

Just give me the answer.

And it doesn't work like that.

I think anybody who's serious about their spiritual practice discovers at some point that you can read all kinds of things in a book,

But until you've learned it through experience,

You don't know it and you can't teach it.

It has to be something you discover experientially.

It's a very important message because it's one thing to talk about heaven.

It's another to experience it.

It's another to know it as it really is.

And the door is open.

The gate is unlocked.

So how do we step through it then?

For those who are kind of listening to this and going,

I have no idea what I'm supposed to do to achieve this.

Okay,

Good question.

Realize that your feet are already on the other side.

The place you're trying to get is already here.

Yeah,

It's giving up the search,

Isn't it?

It's a big part of it,

Yeah.

Surrendering.

Surrendering to the knowing that heaven need not be quote unquote sought.

Yeah.

Be still.

Yeah.

Be still and know.

You are in heaven.

Yeah.

You just need to recognize it.

I can even feel residual resistance rising up in me as I say those words.

I can feel the part of myself that's like,

Nah,

Are you sure about this?

You haven't earned it yet.

You're not worthy enough for it yet.

Yeah,

Exactly.

You haven't paid your price enough yet.

I'm not worthy.

I haven't suffered enough or still dwelling in that guilt state that we talk about in Course in Miracles all the time,

Feeling.

.

.

The guilt,

The unworthiness.

If anything is keeping us on the outside of the gate,

It's that.

It's that sense that that's not my inheritance,

That I don't belong there.

Yeah.

That I'm not good enough for that.

I will blame certain religions that I won't name here,

But I've talked about before for kind of using that metaphor to misinterpret the idea of heaven into the way we think about it as being a place where the angels bring you margaritas or whatever.

I'm kidding.

I know.

I know.

I'm not going to use that line about margaritas.

No,

Use it.

It's great because there's all kinds of versions.

There's the 72 virgins that you get in heaven.

There's always some version of what kind of earthly reward you're going to get in heaven,

Which is a joke.

That's true.

It's a joke.

Right,

Right.

So there is actually some validity,

And here's another paradox,

Because there is some validity to the idea that in spiritual practice we sit in the fire of our discomfort,

Of our pain,

Of our.

.

.

As we go through this process of coming to the recognition that heaven is everywhere,

There is a way that we do earn that because we have to dismantle our thinking and we have to go through all the prejudice that our ego holds and we have to reconsider and integrate our darkness and all the things.

None of that is easy.

So there is a way in which we do kind of—I don't want to use the word worthy,

But we cleanse ourselves and make ourselves the appropriate vessel for the experience of heaven.

Yes.

That is so important to say here.

Thank you for saying it.

You said it so nicely.

And it points to Patanjali's teaching on tapas.

In true Christianity,

Hell is not a place you go.

It's the purifying fire of God,

Which purifies and burns away all that is false.

That's what hell in a sense is.

If we learn to embrace it,

Like if we learn to embrace it in the way that we embrace tapas,

This burning,

This purifying fire,

Which will cleanse us of everything dense and heavy and untrue.

Yeah.

I got chills when you said that.

That's exactly right.

That's very important.

I'm so delighted that you said that because it's dangerous to say,

You're already in heaven,

It's already where you are.

Because a person can mistake that as,

Really?

Okay,

Well I'll just go get drunk tonight then.

You know,

And not really get what's being said there.

So to clarify that there is a need for purification is a very important thing.

So thank you for that.

Yeah.

I think there's one more aspect of you have to learn it experientially.

You can't just stand there and decide,

Well I'm feeling pretty satisfied with myself today.

I guess this is heaven.

No.

There's a term for that.

It's called the God realm.

It's like you temporarily think you've found heaven,

But you're just in a heightened state of delusion.

Right,

Exactly.

The ego's just having a good day.

Yeah,

Exactly.

That's what the ego,

That's about the best the ego can do is think heaven is a good day.

Heaven is a day where nothing unwanted happens.

Yeah,

There you go.

Totally wrong.

You can be in heaven and all kinds of unwanted things happen,

But you instead have the ability to recognize them for what they are,

Which is not relevant to your ultimate being.

And you're not consumed by them anymore.

Right,

Right.

Suffering.

We didn't even talk about suffering yet.

Heaven is a place where we have,

We may feel pain,

But we don't suffer over it.

Oh yes.

That's right.

So well said.

Yes.

Pain is natural to this human experience.

We won't escape it,

But to suffer is the difference between heaven and hell.

And what is to suffer?

I mean,

To suffer is to decide,

I want or I don't want.

I will move toward,

I will seek,

I will grasp,

Or I will fight,

Avoid and resist.

That's hell.

Yeah,

Yeah.

I don't want whatever is happening in this moment.

I don't want.

And then suffering because it's here anyway.

Yeah.

And Patanjali goes on in talking about the kleshas,

To talk about those two things as part of the fundamental structure of the ego,

Part of the fundamental structure of the mind stuff.

Right,

Right.

This grasping and avoiding,

Reaching for and rejecting.

If we look at our life stream,

That's unfortunately,

It's the majority of our life stream is either reaching for or rejecting something.

I mean,

To see the patterning of our mind,

To see the activity of our mind and how we reify and put ourselves back together is to see this constant activity of reaching for and rejecting.

You know what I just noticed?

You started talking about reaching for and the pattern of our lives.

And as children,

Assuming we're in a supportive,

Loving environment as kids,

We're kind of experiencing heaven.

Because we're just innocent and everything is available and open and we don't really have that self-consciousness that comes later.

And we're just moving through our experiences.

And I really connected for a moment with the exuberance of being,

Say,

Five years old.

And just kind of beginning to come to the awareness that I was in this world.

And people ask you,

What do you want to be when you grow up?

And you get this sense of there's just this menu of options and everything's available.

And I want to be an astronaut or I want to be president or I want to be a doctor,

Whatever.

And then we kind of move gradually into this hellish landscape where we realize that,

Oh,

There's competition.

I can't just be an astronaut.

It's not that easy.

I've got to do all these things.

And there are all these other people who want to be astronauts.

And so we start to kind of suffer over those roadblocks that we hit.

And then you hit maybe the juicy part of adulthood or entering into middle age.

And it's like,

Oh,

Now we're disappointed because we haven't gotten all the things that we thought we were going to get when we were five years old.

And so now we're moving through this whole different reckoning of what it means to be human.

And our task becomes becoming as a little child again,

As the Bible says,

Is reclaiming that innocence and that ability to remain undefined by the difficulties that we've encountered on our path through life without having to,

Again,

Choose whether we're worthy or unworthy,

Whether we've been successful or unsuccessful.

Or I know people,

And I maybe could even include myself in this,

Who the achievement of a relationship is sort of the highest goal.

And so they'll be miserable if they're not in a relationship.

And if they're in one,

Even if the relationship itself is miserable,

They're still trying to kind of duct tape it together because the relationship idea is the thing that they're chasing.

And then I don't know.

I suppose we proceed out of that either as a result of our spiritual work,

We can find our peace.

Or maybe we proceed into old age with resentment and create a whole different kind of hell on our way out of this life.

I mean the choice is with us every single day and all we have to say,

Oh,

Like it's easy.

It is easy.

You were on the right track when you started to say that.

It is easy.

Innocence is easy.

Cynicism is hard.

Opening is easy.

Closing down is hard.

Yeah,

But those things feel safe sometimes,

Right?

Well,

They give the illusion of safety.

Yeah,

Yeah.

It's so funny because I have a couple of friends who are self-described atheists and yet every now and then we'll be talking and they kind of tolerate me.

They tolerate my nonsense.

You mean you tolerate theirs.

Yeah,

I suppose.

I mean,

I don't look at it that way.

If you're atheists,

You're tolerating their nonsense.

I understand because I was one once and so I respect where they are.

But I can tell that they're curious about what do I know that they don't or what have I seen that they haven't?

And this curiosity will start to kind of step out gingerly and then I'll say something and they'll just snap right back into the cynicism that if I can't see it,

Feel it,

Prove it scientifically,

Then it's not real.

It doesn't exist.

These airy-fairy spiritual theories that you're talking about are not.

I can feel the fear in that.

I can feel that it's not that they don't believe.

They want to believe that there's more and that there's something that they haven't seen and yet the ego,

The intellect can't,

You know,

There's still this fierce grip on staying defended from it because nobody wants to look naive.

Nobody wants to be pointed.

Yeah,

That's very true and quite often too I find with atheists that the God that they refuse to believe in is a God I don't believe in either.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I mean obviously there's something very valuable about skepticism.

If it doesn't go that added step into cynicism,

All one needs do is visit that place of pure innocence in themselves to know that there is something here that is very real,

Very touchable,

Very tangible,

Very knowable and it lives in us as that quiet innocence.

It doesn't have to be conceptualized as a God or some ulterior realm or some,

You know,

Explosive experience.

It can just be known quietly through that innocence.

You know,

If we look at ourselves here as,

I often refer to this as the cross or in recently in a group we refer to it as the crux.

We are the crux.

We are the meeting place between heaven and earth.

We're right there at the center where X marks the spot.

Yeah,

I like that.

And so you are the point,

You are the place in which heaven is intended to manifest and it's going to manifest through your behavior,

Through your speech,

Through the way you conduct yourself.

You see this is the problem with looking for heaven as some place to find you is that you've absolutely forgotten that you are it.

You are the place where God is manifest and to bring all of the heavenly attributes into this material world,

Into the dark,

If you will,

Into the deep and to be that breath of God,

To be that breath of spirit which breathes its life into what is said,

What is done,

How we are moved and to be that breath of God is to exhibit all of its characteristics.

That's why it's said that we are made in the image and likeness,

That we are here to exemplify the love,

The spaciousness,

The beauty,

The power,

All of those things that are truly intrinsic to our divine nature but we are that place.

We are X marks the spot.

I like that so much.

I had never thought about it that way.

The idea that we are the intersection between,

How did you say,

Heaven and earth,

Quote unquote?

The vertical or horizontal,

Heaven or earth,

However you like to characterize it.

Real and immaterial,

There's a lot of ways you could speak of it.

Not even between heaven and earth,

As the intersection of heaven and earth.

You are created in a God-like manner and interacting with this matter,

This flesh.

I feel like I really want to flesh that out in more than five minutes.

Yeah,

Let's just do a whole episode on it.

Okay.

Next episode.

Well,

Let me read my poem.

This one is from Meister Eckhart.

When I read it,

It induced a sort of sense of heaven in me.

It's called Beloved.

God held the earth as if it were his lover and spoke with the most tender of feelings to all in existence as he spoke to me.

Look,

Dear son,

I have made a bride for you but she is shy.

So how are you to consummate?

I want all souls to consummate with me so I devised a plan.

As each soul nears heaven,

Differences will dissolve to such a sublime extent that when the heart looks upon any object in this world,

It will cry,

Beloved,

And passionately run into an embrace with me.

That blessed grace I now know.

I now see my beloved everywhere.

Heavenly.

Heavenly.

Yes,

Meister Eckhart always has that capacity to deliver us straight to the gate.

Yes,

Meister Eckhart always has that capacity to deliver us straight to the gate.