Warning: this post begins a bit heavy but ends on a Light note

It’s interesting to me how most “paths to heaven” include the traveler and the path but little or no consideration of the destination beyond romantic idealization.  “How do I get there?” is the primary question; few ask, “What is there?”  Philosophers waste a shit load of candle wax pondering the question “Who am I?” Or, if they are feeling more humanitarian, “Who are we?” Ritualists’ throughout the ages sell “their” paths as if they are truth revealing itself, for the small fee of your concentrated attention (i.e., your life). 

The only reason, they insist and we agree, that we haven’t “made it” yet is that we haven’t followed the path to its fruition.  People have their Yogis, Senseis, Teachers, Priests, Sergeant Majors, etc. all telling us which way to go.  Folks, just like these leaders, none of us are going to get there by way of a path!  Yet we trod along, sometimes dutifully, sometimes not, judging our progress and that of others.  Doo-do-doo, dumm-da-dumm, walking along, running, tripping, whatever. 

Some people reach a “stage” where they have an experience of the love of God and stay there, holding onto that “idol (get it?) thought” with their lives.  These are the ones who say, from the point of view of their separate identity, “We are all one!  We are God! We can change the world.”  They say they give love but they are terrified.  Separation is terrifying, I know.  We may find comfort in friendships but nothing save convenient fantasy seems to bind separate beings.  If you are a witness to war, desperation, sickness, loss, heartache, etc. you are not in heaven.  OK? Heaven is Love is Peace is Safety is Strength.  Bringing a memory of love into the present only substitutes your memory (read “illusion”) of love for the real thing.

Love is here now.  It can not be found in any other time, because there is no other time.  If we ever arrive in heaven it will have to be now.

Let me illustrate this.  In western cultures, the ritual of the journey or evolution of awakening often begins by passing through two pillars.  Some call these strength and establishment…or something like that.  They represent on opening, a doorway (from one way of being to another) like the one between our mother’s legs. They have many names.  These many names, whatever they may be, serve to illuminate to the mind that there is some pre-existing structure and function that we enter into; call it the world.  You can find these pillars in Cabalism, Freemasonry, Egyptian symbolism, architecture, etc. etc. 

I assert that these two pillars only provide strength and establishment to illusion, specifically to the illusion of time and the lives that are born and eventually die in time.  As we pass through them, we use them to provide support to our illusions of life, to the illusion that we are important and that our worldly teachers have something meaningful to teach us.  It is only the space between the pillars that is of value and may offer us a glimpse of truth, not the pillars themselves or the path that lay ahead.

Let’s imagine that one pillar represents the past, the other the future and between them is an unobstructed reality, the open door to heaven.  In the rituals, a person passes through the pillars with little consideration of what they mean.  To the initiate it is the path beyond the pillars that matters, their personal transformation or self-acceptance.  But today, let us pause between these pillars before deciding to move on through another’s ideas of the Journey or the Work.

When in between the pillars of the past and future, we notice that we are blocked on the left and on the right.  We can neither move in either direction, nor see through the pillars to what may lay beyond. They are solid, unlike the space in between, where we are.  They are not at all like the space in between in any way.  The present is in no way like the past or the future because it is here and they are not. 

What?  Aren’t we a product of our past, our parents, our culture, the alignment of the stars, something?!!!  Sorry folks, our ideas of the past are just that…our ideas.  There is no reality to the past, even though it appears undeniable that there is; that what was somehow became what is.  We are creating this entire universe in our minds now and it is a substitute, a replacement for true reality; a reality that we are doing our very best to avoid.

The tired ass monk says, “What? That is nonsense.  How could we have come from nothing?  God created the universe and we are in that universe, you dirty rotten blasphemer.”

Here is the amazing truth.  It goes against everything we think we know about ourselves, about the world, about anything.  Are you ready?  Now don’t run through the pillars too quickly.  Try to stay in one spot when I say this. 

OK, here goes...

We do not exist (as separate selves). 

Metaphorically speaking, this is a dream one mind is experiencing about having a serious case of multiple personality disorder.  When It wakes up, the dream goes away in its entirety.  That means us, folks.  We do not wake up in the dream…It wakes up from the dream. 

Anyone who says they are awake here in the dream is a fraud. 

We are figures in a dream folks.  Just as when you dream at night, all the people, including yourself seem perfectly real; so do we seem real to ourselves here in the world.  Before making a b-line back into the matrix, hang with this thought because it leads us to the thought of truth. 

What is truth?  It is not the facts, Jack, as they apply to this world.  Facts happened.  The Truth is happening.  We can recall good and bad times in the past and look forward or not to good and bad times in the future.  But the only good or bad times that come close to existing are here, right now.  However, only good times right now make any sense at all.  Why?  Bad feelings cannot be manifested without some reference to a thought of the past or a fear of the future. 

What reason can you find now to feel bad?  She left me---past thought.  The stock market---past thought.  He said so-and-so---past thought.  I did what?---past thought.  Jesus died---past thought, etc. The reason that happy thoughts may be a true present experience derives from the one true fact that we can actually know, that the past is not here now.  Therefore, it cannot, unless we let it, have any effect on our reality. What is left over when all threats ("bad" thoughts) are gone?  Peace, Happiness…happy thoughts.

OK, back to the door to heaven metaphor (remember all that pillar mumbo-jumbo).  Standing in the doorway, so to speak, we can indeed experience at least the memory of truth.  Being dream figures, we aren’t really experiencing anything, shocking as it may seem.  But as the dreamer, we can remember who we are by what must be. 

Point one: Either asleep and dreaming or awake in truth, we are here now.  So, even as a dream figure of our self, as one of our many dream personalities, truth is present here and now. 

Point two: We can see through this portal (the present moment) into truth because we are present and the truth is present.  Someplace, same time.

Point three:  The truth is Real and everything else is not real.  Our seeing does not make truth what it is, but it will tell us who we are by what it is.

What must the Truth be?

(I know I have written it in other posts, but what else is really worthy of writing about.  Besides it might help to confuse you again.)

Back to point three:  Truth is and nothing else is.  This means that there is no competition.  Illusions (competitors of the Truth) have no reality no matter how badly we wish they did.  No competition means no threat.  No threat means peace, no need for defenses, no anger, no fear, nothing to judge, nothing to condemn, nothing to change, nowhere else to go, because here is good. 

What is the feeling of this reality?  Happiness.  To accept happiness, then is to accept reality and vice versa.

Allowing ourselves to remain in this thought leads to an expanding knowledge of Truth, of Love.  To feel Love is to know Love.  

Lastly, if God is real, and reality is only to be experienced in the present.  And since the present moment, free of the threats of the past, is therefore the sole domain of happiness and love.  And to experience Love all we need to do is call upon the present moment  And since love feels good, then...

...as the title of this post asserts…and reason maintains…for a good time, call God!