16 Heaven on Earth

16 Heaven on Earth

Today’s sermon was inspired by my efforts to reconcile a troublesome paradox in my life: I have preached Heaven on Earth from this pulpit many times, and I have tasted firsthand the fruits of heaven and breathed the rarefied air of eternity—and yet there are times when the weights of life bear down on me, and make me forget that nothing in this world is as important as it seems; indeed these pressures make me forget that nothing in this world is as real as it seems. I needed a reminder that all my worries and frettings are miniscule lumps in in the grand fabric of existence--that I need to rise above my mundane troubles and stay focused on the higher reality that my faith points to, but my sin occasionally obscures from spiritual sight.

So, I did a search on the internet for “Heaven on Earth” and came up with a pile of quotations which pertain to the subject. I have attempted to take this material and synthesize it into a coherent presentation, with some point to it, but the main point is in the title and can’t be improved that much—Heaven is here on Earth. Nevertheless I found some deep aphorisms that bear repeating in or out of context.

To begin:

The following words are attributed to a variety of people including Mark Twain, Satchel Paige, and William Purkey:

Sing like no one is listening.
Love like you’ve never been hurt.
Dance like nobody’s watching,
and live like it’s heaven on earth.

That’s the trick isn’t it? To live LIKE—as if-- it’s heaven on earth; as if earth is NOT heaven, but it is LIKE or similar to heaven. As we have noticed many times, spiritual experiences, spiritual perspectives, are mind states achieved by CHOICE. The implication of “Live like it’s heaven on earth” is that we can CHOOSE to live AS IF we are in heaven; and if we CHOOSE to so live, we create the Heaven on Earth out of our own subjective reality. Thus, though earth is NOT heaven, it is LIKE heaven because we choose to project our intuitive image of heaven onto the physically REAL THINGS of earth, thereby bestowing on those THINGS heavenly attributes. The question is whether such attributions are REAL, or imaginary—moreover, the question is whether imaginary entities are REAL. 

Jules Renard says it like this:

“On earth there is no heaven, but there are pieces of it.”

From the article Where Is Heaven on Earth?, by Jonathan Parnell, we read:

“Until God’s new creation overwhelms this old one, the way that heaven touches this world is through his people. 

We are “ambassadors for Christ” — his new-creation representatives in this old-creation world.”

2 Corinthians 5:20 

“Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, 

God making his appeal through us. 

We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.” 

“And when we pray the way he taught us, that God’s kingdom come and his will be done on earth as it is in heaven, we know that it must first happen in our own lives — and then through our own lives.” 

Thus, in the spirit of the Catholic allegiance to the “Salvation through Good Works” doctrine, we create heaven on earth through virtuous acts on the mundane level. By assuming the Christ Identity we become an ACTIVE Christ. So, as “ambassadors for Christ”, we touch the world with heavenly energy, by example-- by performing acts characteristic of heavenly activity, imbued with heavenly love and tolerance. By performing Christlike acts, we assume the Christlike consciousness.

We read an expression on the same theme in On Earth as It Is in Heaven: The Tasks of the College of Teachers in Light of the Founding Impulse of Waldorf Education by Roberto Trostli:

“What is most important is that earthly matters be informed from the point of view of the spirit and that spiritual matters be informed by down-to-earth practicality.”

In Fourteen Questions About Heaven Peter Kreeft states: 

“The link connecting the Church Militant with the Church Triumphant, the link connecting Heaven and earth, is the incarnate Christ. We participate in what Christ does, and Christ links Heaven and earth. He is still on earth as well as in Heaven (1) by His Spirit and (2) in His Mystical Body, the Church, His people. Christianity does not worship an absent Christ. And just as He can be on earth even when He has gone to Heaven, so can we in Him. The cells in the one Body are all living cells, but only a very few of them are living on earth.” 

As you can well imagine, Joseph Campbell has much to say on the subject:

“The experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life. Heaven is not the place to have the experience; here is the place to have the experience. 

Our world as the center of the universe, the world divided from the heavens, the world bound by horizons in which God’s love is reserved for members of the in group: That is the world that is passing away. 

Apocalypse is not about a fiery Armageddon and salvation of a chosen few, but about the fact that our ignorance and our complacency are coming to an end.”

If our religion is based on salvation, our chief emotions will be fear and trembling. If our religion is based on wonder, our chief emotion will be gratitude.”

My new hero, G.K. Chesterton says it like this:

“The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground. 

I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”

Indeed, wonder and gratitude have become leading concepts in my current musings on spiritual doctrines. I have found that feelings of gratitude put me closer in touch with heaven than any other feeling I can willfully manufacture in my mundane mind. Furthermore, feelings of gratitude lead, as night the day, to acts –EXPRESSIONS-- of praise. Thus, through acts of praise, acts of creativity, I create the heaven on earth I prefer, and see the side of the face of God I wish to see.

Notice, in that last paragraph I have mentioned “the side of the face of God I wish to see”, implying that there is more than one Face of God, and I have a choice as which one I choose to worship. To a doctrine in which there is only ONE God, this might reek of blasphemy, unless we remember, with Dante--as he approached the face of God, the immutable, eternal, changeless face of God—that the face changed with every change in Dante himself. Can we humans ever hope to become the One True God, or must we be satisfied with the little corner of God that we can apprehend with earthly intelligence? As we have heard C.S. Lewis say many times, the more we become like God, the more we become our true selves. Carl Jung says something similar below: 

“The whole point of Jesus's life was not that we should become exactly like him, but that we should become ourselves in the same way he became himself. Jesus was not the great exception but the great example.” 

Jung also gives us a hint as to the LOCATION of Heaven on Earth:

“Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”

Heaven is INSIDE us—the outer is a dream, the inner is the reality. Jung goes on to comment on the experience, I have had many times, of hearing an inner voice that tells me things that often contradict the apparent messages of my physical senses: 

“In each of us there is another whom we do not know. He speaks to us in dreams and tells us how differently he sees us from the way we see ourselves. When, therefore, we find ourselves in a difficult situation to which there is no solution, he can sometimes kindle a light that radically alters our attitude - the very attitude that led us into the difficult situation.”

Thus we realize that the INNER Heaven is inhabited by an INNER SELF—a self who views reality from a wider-angle perspective than our physical eyes can apprehend. He goes on to suggest that this inner self may lead us to enlightened experience by shining the inner light on the outer world, and, thus, illuminating it with heaven heavenly rays. 

“Filling the conscious mind with ideal conceptions is a characteristic of Western theosophy, but not the confrontation with the Shadow and the world of darkness. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. Enlightenment doesn’t occur from sitting around visualizing images of light, but from integrating the darker aspects of the Self into the conscious personality. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.”

The use, above, of the expressions “conscious” or “conscious personality”, is tricky because they can refer, in a general way, to several different states of mind. In this context, the word “conscious” must mean “literally conscious”, or “mundane consciousness”—a perspective visible to the literal mind, merely. So, “by making the darkness conscious” and “integrating the darker aspects of the Self into the conscious personality”, he means: by using the light of heaven to reveal the poverty of the darkness of the mundane state of mind; the shadows of our worldly understanding are dispelled by the light of Heaven drawn down into the physical by an act of will—an act of will enabled by this HIGHER SELF who speaks to us in dreams, and, coincidentally, in art.

As an artist I am compelled to insert this summary of the artist’s role in the cosmic design, especially because, as Jung points out, the conflict between the light and dark of higher and lower reality is expressed in the micro-cosmic arena of art:

“Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument...

The artist's life cannot be otherwise than full of conflicts, for two forces are at war within him-on the one hand, the common human longing for happiness, satisfaction and security in life, and on the other a ruthless passion for creation which may go so far as to override every personal desire ... There are hardly any exceptions to the rule that a person must pay dearly for the divine gift of creative fire.”

As we know Jung is concerned with the collective unconscious, and archetypal forms—patterns which conform to a heavenly template, but which integrate the human into their radiant being. Here, Jung points out that the “pattern of God” exists in every man, and this pattern, when manifested outwardly, reveals the heavenly component of even the most earthbound entities:

“I cannot define for you what God is. I can only say that my work has proved empirically that the pattern of God exists in every man and that this pattern has at its disposal the greatest of all his energies for transformation and transfiguration of his natural being. Not only the meaning of his life, but his renewal and his institutions, depend on his conscious relationship with this pattern of his collective unconscious.”

It is a most provocative thought that all our human institutions depend, for their mundane structure, on the CONSCIOUS (that is to say literal) relationship between this inborn God-pattern and the collective unconscious. In a further broad definition of the meaning of life, Jung asserts:

“As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.

The sad truth is that man's real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites - day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil. We are not even sure that one will prevail against the other, that good will overcome evil, or joy defeat pain. Life is a battleground. It always has been and always will be; and if it were not so, existence would come to an end.

We are living in what the Greeks called the kairos- the right moment- for a 'metamorphosis of the gods', of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing.

We meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life.”

And finally the kicker:

“The unconscious psyche believes in life after death.”

Why, I wonder, does the unconscious believe in life after death? It must be because the unconscious was never born of this world to begin with, so it simply exists as life before, during, and after carnal life. As Jung says:

“The unconscious has no time. There is no trouble about time in the unconscious. Part of our psyche is not in time and not in space. They are only an illusion, time and space, and so in a certain part of our psyche time does not exist at all.”

Another deep thinker of the 20^th century is Aldous Huxley. The following quotes are taken from his magnum opus, The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell. One of Huxley’s basic premises is succinctly expressed below. His message is very much the same as Jung’s, but Huxley makes an effort to bring medical science and linguistic science into the mix:

“To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he or she has been born -- the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it be-devils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.” 

Notice that this opening sentence: 

“Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system” 

This concept hints at why most of us are denied access to the Higher Mind as a normal condition of earthly existence. The idea is that SURVIVAL on Earth is way too complicated for us to be able to freely shift between dimensional modalities—if we did, we might end up driving off a cliff and find ourselves in Heaven ahead of the schedule dictated by our predestined cosmic timetable. The grand design has ordained that most of us need to focus on Earth on Earth, and save Heaven on Earth for later. I remember, a long time ago, awaking from a nap and finding myself floating on the ceiling. I was excited by the possibilities of astral projection that I had read much about, but just as I was about to take off exploring, I heard a voice say, as clear as a bell, “Get back in there.” I dropped back into my body with a thump and was never permitted that type of astral recreation again.

Edgar Cayce says: 

“The reason we don't remember our former lives is because our vast soul memories are not transferred to our baby brains at birth. All we know in this life is what we have learned, most of which is a partial memory of things we learned in past lifetimes. At the beginning of each lifetime, we are cleared of all past prejudices, learning blocks and wrong teachings, and are ready for a fresh start - just like a new term in school - and, like school, when we have learned enough of life's lessons, we graduate and don't have to come back to this Earth anymore, except as volunteers to teach stragglers."

At another point Cayce likens life on Earth to a deep-sea diver plumbing the depths of the ocean, insulated by one of those space-suit-like affairs with the large round metal helmets, with only a small tube connecting him with the surface. The storms and dangers of undersea life are enough for him to worry about without being concerned with the other world of the surface. Therefore, remembering a bunch of stuff that is not directly related to survival in this hostile environment would be a distraction from the main purpose of this undersea exploration (whatever it is).

Thus, as Huxley elegantly puts it:

“The self is coming from a state of pure awareness from the state of being. All the rest comes about in an outward manifestation of the physical world, including fluctuations which end up as thoughts and actions.” 

Going on with the idea we have professed many times, Huxley associates the limitations of earthly consciousness with the limitations of LANGUAGE, especially in terms of its eliminative function rather than its additive function:

“We can never dispense with language and the other symbol systems; for it is by means of them, and only by their means, that we have raised ourselves above the brutes, to the level of human beings. But we can easily become the victims as well as the beneficiaries of these systems. We must learn how to handle words effectively; but at the same time we must preserve and, if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world directly and not through that half opaque medium of concepts, which distorts every given fact into the all too familiar likeness of some generic label or explanatory abstraction.

Cambridge philosopher, Dr. C. D. Broad, has suggested “that we should do well to consider much more seriously than we have hitherto been inclined to do the type of theory which Bergson put forward in connection with memory and sense perception. The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.” 

It does not hurt to reprise the statement we read earlier—this is to reinforce the idea that the brain is a funnel whose function is to REDUCE consciousness not enhance it; it is also to reinforce the idea that language is the sculptor of our reality, and it is language that we will chiefly give up upon entering the Cloud of Unknowing.

“According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages.”

On the subject of REDUCING awareness William James suggests:

“The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.”

This must be true because the literal mind is always cluttering up the issue with non-essentials—non-essentials which appeal to the literal mind but which the heart integrates into a synergetic whole, in which details are absorbed into a blurry gestalt.

William James has other things to say in support of the idea that Heaven on Earth is a byproduct of an enlightened attitude: 

“Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.

Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.

It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.

Why should we think upon things that are lovely? Because thinking determines life. It is a common habit to blame life upon the environment. Environment modifies life but does not govern life. The soul is stronger than its surroundings.”

In these last three quotes, James draws a connection between heavenly (INNER) reality and faith:

“Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.

The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.

Belief creates the actual fact.”

This is a point we continually come back to: our inner reality creates an outer reality; furthermore, our contemplation of this self-created reality is what we call BELIEF. James says, “Belief creates the actual fact,” but, as faith is the EVIDENCE of things unseen, it is just as true to say that the actual fact creates the BELIEF. Heaven manifests on Earth in so many innumerable tangible ways, such that it takes a blind man not to see it, and an incredibly bull-headed man not to believe. The ego is tough, and makes, sometimes, superhuman demands on the will and the intellect, but just let one crack in that armor of self-centeredness let a tiny shaft of the light of truth leak in, and Belief flowers like a torrent released from its terrestrial dam.

C. S. Lewis always brings a voice of clarity to the argument:

“Well, I would say that the most deeply compelled action is also the freest action. By that I mean, no part of you is outside the action. It is a paradox. I expressed it in Surprised by Joy by saying that I chose, yet it really did not seem possible to do the opposite.”

On the radio, I just heard Nadia Bolz-Weber, the founder of the House for All Sinners and Saints Church in Denver, say something similar: when asked what she did to get closer to God she indicated that she got closer to God, kicking and screaming, but that she had no choice—God called her and she must answer—in short, God got closer to her. In thinking about this we must not forget the concept of inertia—once you start along the path with God, it is pretty difficult to break loose or backtrack. Thus Heaven on Earth tends to become more and more Heavenly, and this without any particular act of will, but merely a willingness to go along with the flow. Indeed, the most titanic act of will is the act of saying NO to God, rather than pronouncing a humbly submissive YES. Resisting God is really much more difficult than submitting to God—Satan is incredibly strong—it takes enormous will-power to be miserable. Thus, when C.S. Lewis states, “the most deeply compelled action is also the freest action” he means that the force of God’s compulsion toward Himself is the action we take freely as we tend toward our true selves, and our purest pleasure. His yoke is easy and His burden is light.

Specifically on the subject of Heaven on Earth C.S. Lewis says:

“Aim at heaven, and you will get earth thrown in; aim at earth, and you will get neither.” 

Don’t forget that as Alaskans living out in the bush, we have a MUCH easier time living in Heaven on Earth than most city folk, because we live in the center of a magnificent ejaculation of divine forms, trembling like volcanoes within the natural forms that surround us, and call to us. On this subject Rabindranath Tagore says:

“Trees are the earth's endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.”

Finding Heaven in the forest is one of the more effortless of all human excavations.

On the subject of being IN the world but not OF the world, Deepak Chopra says:

“The world sometimes feels like an insane asylum. You can decide whether you want to be an inmate or pick up your visitor's badge. You can be in the world but not engage in the melodrama of it; you can become a spiritual being having a human experience thoroughly and fully.”

Chopra encourages us to find heavenly bliss within ourselves. He speaks of this bliss as if it never wasn’t--as if it has been there all the time waiting for us to reconnect with it:

“Nothing is more important than reconnecting with your bliss. Nothing is as rich. Nothing is more real.”

Indeed, affirming the REALITY of Heaven on Earth is the key. Remember that there are two contradictory theories of human evolution; the theory of entropy states that the universe is declining into entropy, a “lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder.” However, many spiritual philosophers, including Deepak Chopra say something like this:

“The universe is constantly moving in the direction of higher evolutionary impulses, creativity, abstraction, and meaning.”

Perhaps the first major proponent of this philosophy was Teilhard de Chardin. We find, in his book The Phenomenon of Man:

“The unfolding of the material cosmos, is described from primordial particles to the development of life, human beings and the noosphere (the sphere of human thought), and finally to his vision of the Omega Point in the future, which is "pulling" all creation towards it. He was a leading proponent of orthogenesis, the idea that evolution occurs in a directional, goal-driven way, argued in terms that today go under the banner of convergent evolution.”

I hope this review of commentaries on the subject of Heaven on Earth has been of some comfort. I myself need constant reminding that that trials of Earthly life are just that—tests of our power to stay focused on God, and nothing more. I need daily reminding that Heaven is all around us and in us, and all we have to do to see it is to SEE IT. Thus, with Boethius I say:

“So combat vice, dedicate yourself to a virtuous life oriented by hope, which draws the heart upward until it reaches Heaven with prayers nourished by humility. Should you refuse to lie, the imposition you have suffered can change into the enormous advantage of always having before your eyes the supreme Judge, who sees and knows how things really are.”

Let us pray: Jesus, we know that You never left Heaven in all your Earthly travels. Help us stay the course that leads to You and the Divine Mansions waiting for us. Amen.