by Michael Brown

 In this article Michael Brown explores
the fourth of the five universal truths in his novel
 Finding the Field: an adventure of body, mind and spirit.
Source website is www.findingthefield.com

Imagine that you are walking on a path through the forest, in a future very close to now.

Imagine, as you walk, the calming ebb and flow of your breath, the relaxed rhythm of your body, the soothing swing and tap of the walking staff in your right hand. As you walk, your thoughts come to rest and your mind clears until it’s like the surface of a tarn when the wind dies in the dawn. You become what is around you: the shale crunching at your feet, the totara tree guarding the path and, in its uppermost branch, the bellbird singing its summer song to the sky. All things, seen and unseen, come to fill your being and tell you that heaven was always here, where you are, on this very bend in the path. You are where you want to be and you want to be where you are.

A pleasant image, isn’t it?

But here’s the difficult part. The fourth universal truth is that wherever you are on your life path, that is your spiritual home. Whatever your circumstances, you are in heaven… now. You have only to open your eyes to see it. As Jesus of Nazareth said, “Heaven is right here in the midst of you.”

For many, that is outrageous. Many can point hotly to the fact that their paths are actually paved with broken glass and demand to know how even the best PR company on earth could represent that as heaven. Life, many perceive, is a valley of sorrows.

Perception is everything. It’s your perception that prevents you from accepting immediate ownership of heaven and moving in. But looking for heaven in your own life can be like going out to look for the horse. To find it, you gallop to the top of the hill, and when you can’t see it from there, you pull on the reins and gallop to the next hill, and when you can’t see it from there, you try the next hill…

Perception is literally everything, because you are entirely the creator of your own reality (the first truth). Your conscious thoughts accumulate in your powerful subconscious, which projects your life around you like a movie (the second truth). Of course if you know it’s a movie, it’s difficult to truly involve yourself, so your conscious mind—by design—has forgotten the process so that your experiences can be real. So, yes, life is an illusion at one level, and utterly real at another. You are both the movie director and the character.

Go deep enough and your projector-subconscious connects with those of all others. Let’s call that connected projecto-sphere Consciousness, that vast being that is all of us, and all things that are, were, and will be. Not God, because the word implies a being separate from us, and generates ideas of Satan and sin, judgement and death. It also generates the idea that heaven is a place somewhere else with restricted entry. And if we disagree on entrance qualifications, then heaven would surely need compounds with high walls and no windows.

Do you see where this is going? Change your perception and you change everything. Live now as if you were in heaven and you will make it so.

But don’t mistake me. That does not mean the elimination of pain. You will always generate painful challenges for yourself—that’s built in to the eternal adventure of Consciousness—at some level you want those challenges. But recognizing that you are in heaven now does have one handy little advantage.

You will stop suffering.

What? Pain without suffering?

Hypnotists understand this perfectly. Have you seen documentaries on surgery that uses hypnosis rather than anaesthetics? Some patients feel no pain at all. Others feel what seems to be pain but they don’t feel bad about it, as if they stand back from their own bodies and observe the pain from a distance.

Pain without suffering is a state of mind you can choose.

The poet Milton said, “The mind is a place in itself. It can create a heaven out of hell, or a hell out of heaven.”

Without doubt, the idea that you can make life heavenly by altering your thoughts is appealing. But is it practical in the ‘real’ world? There are two significant reasons for such doubts entering your mind.

First, you may be addicted to your own life drama. Think about it. If you can’t be without your drama, that’s addiction. There’s no blame here; this is not about fault, but cause. The cause is your accumulated gestalt of beliefs which began forming before you were born. But many people are so deeply mired in their dramas that their drama becomes who they are. To contemplate removing the drama can feel like contemplating suicide.

I can’t recommend suicide. It only works on the body.

Second. The prospect of instant heaven produces a condition-red, ego security alert. Your ego will push every alarm button it can reach.

The popular meaning of ego disguises its real potency. Your ego’s job is not to raise you above others, but to maintain you as a separate entity—disconnected from  Consciousness—so that you can go about your life with independent free will. That’s its job description. It knows nothing else. It needs you to think that you are not in your spiritual home, so that you will then long for the homecoming, and have creative adventures on the way back.

To boost your journey, your ego whispers the essential message: you are distinct and unique. Fine—you need that in order to be human. But ego doesn’t know how to stop; give it half a chance and it moves on to whispering: anything that is not your mind and body is not you. Then it discovers it can isolate you even more if it makes you afraid: you are isolated and alone; out there beyond your skin is stuff that can hurt you. Which means that you can live through entire incarnations blighted by anxiety, apprehension, and dread. And your ego can even whisper—listen to how cunning this is—your suffering makes you special.

You might then, without knowing it, be instinctively unwilling to stop suffering. Your ego makes a terrible master and it will willingly turn you into a slave. And where does it get all these destructive whisperings?

From you. It feeds on your thoughts. Whenever you dwell on the idea that you are alone, or separate, or isolated, your ego fattens. Many people spend entire lives feeding egos that reward them only with suffering. Isn’t it time to control who gets to dine in your restaurant?

Ask yourself this. If ego’s purpose is to maintain separation from Consciousness, and if that separation generates fear, how might that crop up in human mythology?

Satan. The religious symbol for ego.

Mainstream religions do not suggest that it’s desirable for God to rid the cosmos of Satan, because they intuitively understand that both separation and connection are fundamental to the adventures of the soul. Separation and connection are fission and fusion in equilibrium. The one has no meaning without the other. Together, they are the primary cause of all form, a dynamic dancing duo, exquisitely balanced. Cosmic tango.

So your ego does not have to be destroyed, only demoted from master to servant. Do that by deliberately turning your thoughts from your separateness to your connection with Consciousness. From hell to heaven. Accept, with all your heart, that heaven is yours for the taking, here on earth.

Start with this ancient story:

      An old monk and a young monk journey through a forest and eventually come to a stream. There, waiting anxiously on the bank, is a beautiful woman. She tells them she is afraid to step into the water, which is swift and swollen by the rains. To the astonishment of the younger monk, the older immediately offers to take her across. She accepts the offer, climbs onto his back, and clings tightly to him as he steps carefully through the stream and safely out the other side. She thanks him and waves the two monks farewell as they continue their journey.
     They walk in silence, until the younger monk can bear it no more; then, reproachful words pour from him.
     ‘How could you allow yourself to commit the sin of touching a woman?’
     The older monk looks at him in surprise and says, ‘Are you still carrying that woman? I put her down back there by the stream.’

 How long have you allowed yesterday and tomorrow to imprison you? How long have you been chained to a painful past? How long have you been shackled to an anxious future? What are you filling your now with? Do you have a now, or are you always living around the corner?

Now, you will see where I am going.

There is no absolute, fixed, past or future. There is no time at all, only a vast, ever-expanding now. Any physicist will tell you that the concept of time is a human invention. Modern science has known this for years, but in the West we have not known how to apply this truth to our lives.

Have you noticed how some people are most contented when alone with their hobbies? In that time, there is no time. They are totally focused on the minutiae of now. You can do it with any activity that absorbs you. You can do it with meditation. But you can also achieve that state while immersed in the everyday events of life.

To truly live in the present moment is to know heaven, regardless of time or circumstance. Whether you’re naked or clothed, hungry or fed, poor or rich, in pain or in pleasure, each of those can transform, right now, so that it becomes merely part of the vast riches of heaven. But if you insist on dragging a painful past or fearful future into the present, you can only wait and wait in life’s ante room.

Your ego will shout, it’s not as easy as that!

But it is. It really is that easy. And when you’ve tried it enough, you will feel amazingly light, as if a great burden has been lifted from your shoulders. You could also begin to wonder, “Who am I?” That’s a question you will keep answering here on earth, as it is in heaven. And you will keep answering it throughout eternity.

What if you could find
the nature of reality in a work of fiction?
Finding the Field: an adventure of body, mind and spirit

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