CHAPTER 8
Between Heaven and Hell. Aren't You Dying to Know?
As your world becomes smaller with the development of your planetary nervous system, communication media, you are developing universal access to a huge variety of ideas. Religions are spreading to all corners of your world. There are few people left on the planet who have not heard of all of the world’s largest religions and the most basic of their doctrines. Even the more obscure points of view have reached many parts of the modern world. The New Age religion is making rapid inroads into modern cultures now. This amalgamation of doctrines into a person centred religious dogma, as opposed to the God centred doctrines of traditional religions, is still a religion. It is a more flexible view-point, allowing individuals to choose the doctrines they like best. It does, nonetheless, encourage certain beliefs and doctrines and is therefore limited and limiting.
We have suggested owning your own philosophy instead of adopting ours or anyone else’s. Validating your own universes and choosing what you most deeply desire in the moment opens up infinity to your exploration. Giving your power of choice to God or Angels or Saints keeps you in a box as smaller than they are. You need not be smaller than God or Angels or Saints to be safe. Indeed, being infinitely large ensures your security like no other perspective we know. Embracing ideas of all the different cultures you now have access to widens your perspective. All of these different ideas are valid in and of themselves when seen through the eyes of love. One of the greatest values that these philosophies can have for you is to stimulate your development of a philosophy from which you live your life. Ideas like reincarnation, heaven and hell, hierarchies of angels and such stimulate your questioning of the reality of this Earth. If life has eternal validity, how important is this solid world? Question! Rebel! Choose ideas that seem right for you right now and with the next right now, question them. The path to opening to the moment by moment awareness of infinity is riddled with questions.
From this point of view, let us look at the eternal validity of your identity. What happens after you die? First, you have come to assume that you die. Remember what we have said about how your beliefs have structured your reality? Death and dying are not things you have experienced internally. You have projected your beliefs out into the world and perceived death in the world. We suggest you suspend the belief for awhile and see what changes inside you. There are other possibilities after all. We use the phrase, the eternal validity of the identity with the serious intention. We do not suggest that you become your soul at some point. While this may be your choice, it is not required of you. Neither is dying required of you. It is simply a choice available to you.
Your identity is not something limited by time and space. It does not have a duration after which it ceases to be. It does not have a body with which to measure its size, content or life span. These are created attributes which contribute to the development of an identity. While your soul is already infinite and thoroughly aware of that largeness, your identity is expanding, pushing against the limits of your present self-definition. This expansion is the experience of identity in all of its sweeping, consuming growth. Your experience of life is stimulated entirely by your self-definition. If that identity changes, your experience of life changes. If you embrace a much larger self-perception in your next moment, you will leave behind the world you perceived in the moment before. It will be as if you died and awoke in a totally different universe.
Death, then, is an acquiescence to change from the world you have known as solid and real to a potentially much larger and more vital reality. You need not die to this world in order to step into the next. Death is not the enemy here either. It is a legitimate way to expand your universe. It simply is not the only way. Your solid world does not have to dissolve for you to experience a larger, more subtle existence. You will have to adjust your attention a little though. As long as you focus your attention on the solid world to the exclusion of more subtle flows, you lock yourself into death as the only option to release yourself from form. Open yourself to other options then. See where else you can experience life while you walk this Earth of yours.
Expanding your identity is a natural flowing process. You began in childhood, including your family into your identity. Often, this meant including some harsh ideas as well but all of it is valid and part of the wholeness. As you have gone through life you have naturally sought this chance to expand. You have become a member of groups and teams and circles of friends. By identifying with a group, you have sought a broader base for security, a sense of validation, of belonging and of connection. By expanding your world and yourself in this way, you have fostered a larger identity than just of your self in a body. Your spiritual questing has served this same purpose, expanding your identity into larger spheres. You may, with practice, learn to function in those larger spheres well enough to expand beyond your identification with your physical body and be free from its temporal demands.
The potential inherent within your being to experience your life in its wholeness is far more real than you know. As your yearning to connect and identify with your soul grows with each passing moment, the possibility grows ever closer. Even death would not mark a failure in your seeking as your yearning will propel you into your soul’s awareness as you release your identity from the physical world. There, in that infinite experience, you will have your identity in its wholeness. All of your potentialities experienced in that moment. Without your deep yearning for your soul, you may remain stuck in your identification with your body and your Earthly life. Still, the potential for you to expand into your wholeness within what you define as your lifetime is not to be ignored. As you reach out to touch your infinite self, you open to this wholeness more and more. True self love is the key to this opening process. Accepting all of the possibilities for your life experience will be required of you in order to reach this expanded state.
Many of these alternative aspects of your self you have only been willing to explore when they are externalized into functions and historical figures and past lives. The cruel, brutal, murderous aspects of yourself are portrayed by distant figures only mildly related to you, certainly not part of your identity. Embracing those aspects of your self is not the easiest task. As you look out at your world, see those aspects and more that you would deny as part of you being reflected back to your perception. Accepting your divinity means embracing even that. You might be encouraged by knowing that accepting even these attributes of whole human potentiality is making it possible to attain your loftiest goals and to escape death as some ultimate punishment from God.
Embracing the wholeness of your self goes well beyond the “human” aspects of your psyche. This whole discussion of death and dying opens into an exploration of your existence as a non-physical being. While you may choose death as a doorway into non-physical existence, if you persist in holding onto your identity as a physical being, like you do right now, you will experience little change in your state of awareness even after death. You will thrust yourself back into physical form once more, replaying your life and its vast array of choice yet again. You will seamlessly rebound from formlessness back into human form as an infant because of your attachment to your identity as human. This is not a condemnation. Simply, your choices lead you back to the beginning. You will experience your life differently because your choices have evolved. You will experience this life again with a larger identity, not a different identity. It can be hundreds of runs through your life before your identity enlarges enough to free you from physical form. It can be just this one. You get to choose. That is why you are here, reading these words and thinking these thoughts.
Experiencing your physical manifestation right now does not prevent you from knowing your spiritual self. Simply, expand your self-definition in this moment and into the next and into the next...
We have proclaimed that stepping into this larger experience is a source of tremendous joy, a joy like you have yet to know. Your resistance, right now, to this level of joy will not be diminished much by the simple fact of your death. Address that resistance as directly as you can in every moment of awareness to ensure your freedom from the cycle of your life and death. Open yourself to joy. You can use the suggestions we have offered or make up your own. Indeed, making up your own is even better. We speak not of contentment or happy here but of joy, opening to spirit and its pure feeling states so far beyond emotion as you know it.
As your state of consciousness expands to explore realms that are thoroughly non-human or meta-human, you gain greater liberation from the constraints of physicality. While you continue to define the contents of your experience in physical terms, you are limited to a very small universe of manifested ideas. Spirit is just a rumour to you then and it can only be felt in relation to your mundane experience. How sad to be so limited and so small.
Another effect of defining all of creation in physical terms is the view of Heaven and Hell that both haunts and entices you. You have grown up with such concepts and they are well established in your psyche. These are not spiritual concepts, however. They are physicalized descriptions of internal states of being used to explain your spiritual nature. As teaching tools, they served their purpose well at one time. Now, they offer convenient places to stop searching for who you really are. We suggest you consider our suggestion that your experience of the “afterlife” will be based upon your definitions of reality just as your physical life is structured. Should you be liberated from physicality enough to move into spiritual experience upon death, you will find nothing so mundane as clouds and winged angels and heavenly music or for that matter, hellfire and torture. These are metaphors of the grossest kind. These humanized definitions would drive you back into human life in a big hurry.
What you would find, should you be free of human definitions for spirit will be more akin to the incredible expansion of heart and mind in your most exalted meditative experiences. Your identity will swell beyond your present recognition. You will gladly release your stranglehold on your identity to merge with the more inclusive identity of your soul. At this level of expansion, you embrace the wholeness of all the possibilities that life has and could have offered; no mistakes perceived and no judgements applied. The totality of your soul’s experience will be yours; no holds barred, no exceptions and no deletions. This, you offer to All That Is as your expansion continues. Expansion is the experience, logarithmic (sort of) expansion. It will be, to you now, as in a blink of the eye, but you will experience it entirely until you merge with God. Wheeee! The ultimate amusement park ride!
The point is that it is, was and will be, nothing like your physical experience. The subtle dimensions of existence through which you travel unknowingly in each moment, while accessible to your awareness even while you wear a body, are vastly different from and not nearly so compelling as a body. You will have to set aside your identity as a physical being to experience those realms, if for only a moment. You already do that, of course. You are never out of touch with your wholeness in all of its glory. You simply are not yet trained in being aware of that.
Your belief in the supremacy of your conscious mind is a sizable barrier to becoming aware of any other form of consciousness. We have spoken to you several times of the direct experience of NOT being. Have you any but an intellectual grasp on our meaning? There is a constant blinking on and off of consciousness passing through many layers of organization as it cycles. All occur outside the bounds of time as you define it because those layers of organization perceive reality differently than you consciously do. The largest barrier to this shifting awareness is that you are only conscious of what you believe exists. Thus, you unwittingly shut out the bulk of your soul’s awareness as it takes place. If you could suspend your conscious beliefs about reality as we have suggested in previous writings (chapter one for instance), by immersing yourself in silence, you would open more and more to this vast assortment of awareness of which your conscious mind is a part.
Perhaps as you set about to relax your belief that your conscious mind is the only mind you have and that setting it aside occasionally could result in your “losing your mind,” you will confront some very real fear. Releasing your identity is no small task. Imagine being confronted with this task immediately upon your death. Your window of opportunity opens. Do you have enough awareness of your self as a whole being to step through it? Might this be so frightening that holding onto your humanness at all costs would seem like a great idea? You could step into your wholeness for the ride of your life. You would be safe, although you would not know much about what was happening to you. It might seem pretty Hellish to you. You may just dash back into your body once more just for the safety of its familiar confines. The memory may begin to linger after a few times and colour how you approach your life experience. A few more cycles and you may be willing to set up a new program which offers more joy to the death experience until it stops being so infernally terrifying.
If you are not well ready to confront your soul in its, your, wholeness, be it before or after dying, you will choose your humanness over and over, bringing new perspective to your identity with each pass. It will be your same life with its infinite variability, occurring simultaneously in the spacious present. You will have new histories, new experiences and make new stories with your evolving identity. The choice will always be yours. No judgement is ever levelled upon you except, perhaps, your own. The cycling of death and rebirth is yours to choose as well. Even though that cycling takes place within your self and its vast experience of life, instead of over some historical fiction of life on your planet, the effect of the cycling is similar to the models of reincarnation you have encountered. The point is to evolve, making your identity expand towards the wholeness of your self. There is no source of cosmic presence to do this in one stroke because you are that source. Every choice you make in life influences the path and pace of your movement into infinity.
You can make some definite choices towards this goal that will point and push you on your journey. One such choice is to practice turning off your conscious mind. Your conscious mind does this anyway. It happens many times in every second. The rate of change from on to off is not regular either. It increases and decreases in waves, like biorhythms, weaving in and out of your life experience, affecting them deeply but completely unknown to you. Your experience appears seamless, no breaks or pauses. Because your conscious mind recognizes and embraces only its own contents (what it believes exists) none of the other experiences of awareness are available to it. It is these experiences of alternative states of awareness that you seek with meditation. You could seek them with drugs or extreme sports or death defying lifestyles but meditation is the easiest to integrate into your daily existence.
Go back now to chapter one and read it once again before continuing. We will wait here. Go ahead. Don’t cheat yourself.
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There now! You have your instructions. Practice daily opening yourself to the silence within. Just take a few minutes to sit and brood. It is the most therapeutic, soul satisfying, life enhancing thing you can do in a day.
In between the flashes of awareness that describe your conscious mind and that construct the reality that you perceive are flashes of other realities and kinds of consciousness. You, as a being, live in these realities as much as the you which you identify with lives on Earth in a body. These layers of reality are all valid, including your own. Each layer is connected to all of the other layers in spite of their differences. Being plunked into another one, even one closest to what you are used to thinking of as yours, would take some getting used to, to say the least. Those closest to NOT BEING, would be terrifyingly foreign to your present state of awareness. With practice you will have chances to explore here. Indeed, you already do just that. You have some pretty interesting definitions for such explorations also. Some touches of other realities you define as psychic experiences, some are flights of fantasy. Still others are as foreign as the dreams which fill your nights but never make it to conscious memory.
We suggested in “Your World is a Metaphor” that you attempt to remember more of your dream life. We do suggest this once again. It is much less important that you figure out what your dreams mean than it is to remember the experience of dreaming, how it feels and what your thoughts are like as well as the details of the dreams. These states of consciousness are very valid explorations of your self. They are obviously quite different from your conscious mind and so your conscious mind begins to cast familiar images onto your experience as you return to wakefulness. There are experiential sub-texts going on even in those dreams closest to wakefulness that can illuminate the layers of awareness that you intersect with in your sleep. They are much of the purpose of sleep in the first place. The more you can inject your conscious mind into your sleeping state of experience, the more you can allow your sleeping consciousness to infiltrate your waking consciousness during the days. Perhaps you can look at your waking state as the dream life of your soul and entice your soul to come awake in your daily life. For you to come awake in your dreams will open you to states of consciousness much broader than you now know. You will access states of intensity and joy that are unavailable to a consciousness that admits only itself.
We spoke before of your conscious mind blinking on and off, following a rhythmic pattern. Sleep too, serves this rhythm. As your conscious mind holds sway for so long, it cannot simply let loose its stranglehold and open to the rest of your being, so it shuts down altogether. In its silence, the rest of you has room to exist. Your belief, as we said, stops you from recognizing the experience which you are having. It is going on nonetheless. As you work toward erasing the solid line between waking and sleeping, you will disrupt this rhythm. That may prove discomfiting at first. New rhythms will be established, then broken, established, then broken. Hang in there! Your discomfiture will take many forms, some quite disconnected from your sleep pattern. You will feel them in your emotional life as vague, odd feelings that you just can’t put your finger on. Your mental life will change as well and you will begin to have ideas that are foreign to how you have defined things. New ways to look at the world will just pop into your mind. It can be an exciting experience if you are open to it.
The experience of dying is very much like the experience of waking up in the midst of your deepest sleep. The landmarks are unfamiliar in the extreme. It takes tremendous courage to sit in them until you change enough to make sense of your new world. The temptation to “go to the light” is very strong. That light is familiar, the physicalist experience of spirit. Like sitting in darkness until you adapt your senses and can once again see, opening to the sudden experience of spirit begs patience and faith. Accepting the unfamiliar and standing faithfully in your safety and integrity become important skills in the “afterlife.” The lure of the familiar leads right back to human forms. The more willing you are to explore the depths of your being, the more open you will be to your own soul. Even if you do run back to your life on Earth, you will take a little more depth back with you for having invested some of yourself (being with what is) at this pass.
The same principle is true in your present state as well. The entire experience of some of your life’s transitions (previous death experiences) do not add up to the amount of spiritual depth you can achieve with a single session of meditation in your present. Of course, in other such transitions you go far beyond your entire present life until now, so don’t get cocky. You get to choose this dynamic also. You can make leaps now as large as you might be willing to make. Take the risk to your sanity to redefine what sane is. Knowing more of who you really are is far more sane than your present death grip on the tiniest portion of your self, your conscious mind. The physical life you have lived as though it was the be all and end all is but a minuscule flake of the life you could be experiencing. Turning your attention inward and away from the compelling but limiting world of manifestation has rewards across the spectrum of infinity. Even your tiny physical existence will improve as a result.
When you begin to focus your attention on your dreaming experience, let go of the old perspective of looking for the meaning of your dreams in terms of your physical life. This approach is just another example of your addiction to physicality and as such, it will slow your progress towards liberation. Viewing your dreams as messages about your physical life places that life in the centre of your universe as it has nearly always been placed. That precludes your seeing past that part of your being to the larger portion of who you are. It is safer and easier in your dream life to take a new approach which can eventually filter into other areas of your attention. We suggest you view your dream life as the experience of the real you as it is filtered into the tiny box of physicality.
Consider the possibility that your physical life is the metaphor, that IT is the message from the larger portion of your self. Try to bring your whole dream experience into your life instead of bringing only the portion that you see connected to your physical existence (images in physical terms for instance). Try to embrace the whole experience without judgement. Feel the feelings in your dreams, think the thoughts of them. Accept them as valid even though they are radically different experiences than your waking life. Your intellectual judgements will stand in the way of your being successful at this effort. The rules here are, at times, radically different and so, suspending judgement is of vital importance.
We discussed in “Your World is a Metaphor” that your dreams are the life experience upon which your daily existence and the reality that you perceive there, is built. It is a state of consciousness more fundamental, more subtle and far larger than your waking state. It is so fraught with creative potential that without this regular immersion that your sleep habits offer you, your physical world would quickly begin to crumble. As you practice opening yourself to more of your dream experience by relaxing your intruding judgements, you will begin to immerse yourself in a state of being more fundamental to your soul. You come into ever closer contact with the state of being to which you will be exposed upon your death. Use your intellect here and you will find yourself in the Twilight Zone quite often.
You will find that bringing more of the experience of dreaming back with you into waking consciousness will have certain effects on your waking state. You will begin to access brief flashes of altered consciousness as your life goes along. Drifting, lazy moments where internal and external imagery begin to overlap or flash back and forth, first one then the other holding sway, vague emotional states that sure seem unconnected to your life, and increases in creative thinking states are among the results of turning your attention ever so slightly away from the physical world. This movement fosters greater detachment, creativity and awareness that will allow you to live your life, on all levels, more effectively. It also exposes you to deeper impulses that make moving in the direction to which your deepest self longs to go into a natural, flowing and fearless activity. It is your rational judgement which makes moving into the life your soul desires to express seem risky and dangerous.
Shifting back to the discussion of the “afterlife,” you may have seen that, from one perspective, dying is a state of existence as valid and natural as living is. It is, of itself, not an abrupt ending but a normal, natural transition in the cycle of life in the universe. What makes it seem so terrifyingly distinct from life as you know it now, is your preoccupation with the physical world as the only world. You experience after death consciousness every time you sleep. You drift off to sleep with relative ease. You can slip into death just as easily. You could also learn to access that state of awareness in your waking life. Do that and death becomes a non-issue. Tap that creative awareness and you become able to create your life consciously.
Given such a view of dreaming consciousness, the concepts of Heaven and Hell may not seem so mystical and ethereal anymore. The vastly foreign experience of deep dreaming states would translate pretty poorly into Earthly counterparts. A self-tortured psyche, wracked with guilt and fear, would experience deep dream states as quite Hellish. The disconnected and outlandish imagery of dreaming, translated into physical terms, might put Dante to shame. The descriptions of Heaven have similar sources. Someone with a deep faith in God’s Grace might experience subtle swells of dazzling glory and peacefulness. Seeing such glory in the daily world would tax the intellect a great deal. Attributing such visions to the “afterlife” is an easy leap.
In today’s reality, concepts like Heaven and Hell satisfy a broad range of emotional needs. The search for meaning in life is universal and yet assuming the responsibility for creating your own meaning is a considerable hurdle. Creating an agenda for God that makes you accountable though not responsible is much easier. Also, divorcing yourself from a whole huge section of your existence (death and sleep are but two examples) simplifies things considerably. It also limits the genuine possibilities for self-awareness. Your willingness to consider other possibilities opens a whole new universe to your exploration.
In your daily, waking life, you can open yourself to states of being that are common to the “afterlife.” Working with your dreams and your practice of meditation will automatically begin to allow such states to infiltrate your waking consciousness. Implanting into your conscious mind that these other states exist and are accessible will help to open doors to them. Your conscious mind is geared to recognize itself only. It needs to be relaxed in its grasp of control in order to reveal those doors. You must convince it of its safety by planting the belief that other realms of existence, over which the conscious mind has no jurisdiction, have validity, purpose and life enhancing potential. Plant in yourself through repetition and practice, the belief that it is safe to turn your attention away from the physical world in order to explore these other realms.
Your feelings, for instance, have constituted a world that you have, at times, refused to explore and experience. Compared to the subtlety of dreams, feelings seem pretty mundane and common. Still, they have stymied you in the past. Redefining your feelings as legitimate and as a normal portion of human existence has fleshed out your life dramatically at times. The process is the same for the more subtle layers of your self. Practising on the emotional level and then on the mental level will teach you much that you can apply to the subtle internal flow of thought and feeling and imagery that is constantly moving beneath the sensation experience of the physical world.
The barriers, too, are similar between opening to your feelings and opening to your deepest states of awareness. Each new layer of experience that you add to your daily waking consciousness adds a new level of intensity to your existence. While the drive to experience intensity is pretty common in your culture, it is most usually in the form of more intense physical sensation; more sex, more food, more entertainment. A certain degree of emotional intensity is introduced by adding components of fear to those of sensation. Skydiving, having sex with strangers, engaging in conflict with family and co-workers and so on will contribute to the intensity (drama) of your experience to a small degree. The allure of extremes is the allure of an added intensity. These may not be the best approaches to achieving such an increase in intensity however.
Let us take the example of opening to the flow of emotion in a life situation, as opposed to adding an artificial emotional component by risking life and limb. If you allow yourself to love the person you are having sex with, for example, a high degree of newness and sharpness is added to the experience of having sex with every encounter. Though the body you are touching stays the same, more or less, the heart you touch by opening your own will be different every time. It will open and close just as yours does as you explore one another on this added level. There is a high degree of vulnerability possible in this activity and so a high degree of fear can be experienced too, but it is a life affirming approach. You open to more experience of life, of love. It has the potential for more intensity than the death defying activities which encourage you to close off the fear component of your experience. Such potential for intensity makes for tremendous excitement and challenge. Trusting your self in the face of that level of tension and joy and potential for loss and gain, spurs remarkable growth and learning and loving.
Increasing the intensity of your experience of life is a facet of your soul’s longing for manifestation. Opening to higher degrees of intensity is opening to more direct impulses from the soul. To feel more and think more, and embrace more inspiration is to live more of your wholeness. It is unfathomably large, living so. It is unfathomably satisfying as well. Scary as it is sometimes, the reward for opening to life in its wholeness is always worth the risk. The risk is an illusion anyway. Pain is just intense sensation after all. Staying relaxed and trusting turns even pain into a source of joy, odd as that might seem.
And so, Heaven and Hell are more important terms on Earth then they are in the “afterlife.” Your beliefs about them determine how you experience the “afterlife” in the first place. They also structure how you live on Earth. Refusing yourself Heaven on Earth, with all of your dreams fulfilled in the hope of attaining God’s blessing of Heaven after you die, speaks loudly of your distrust of your self and of God. What you give to your self right here and now will continue on into your future, even beyond death. If that is not love unconditional, don’t expect to receive love unconditional later. The onus will be on you to recognize and accept it even then. Begin now to open yourself to an all loving God who gives you everything you ask for. Accept ownership of what you have asked for, warts and all. It is precisely what you have now. Learn to work with God to create Heaven on Earth from the inside outward. Accept and embrace what you see in the world. Love it in its perfection as the reflection of your inner world. Embrace and accept yourself and the immensity of potential straining for expression. Love your self for the divine being that you are and your life will be Heaven on Earth.
On to Chapter 9
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