If your leaders say to you, “Look, the kingdom is in the sky,” then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, “It is in the sea,” then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you.
– The Gospel of Thomas, saying 3
His disciples said to him, ‘When will the kingdom come?’ Jesus said, “It will not come by watching for it.
– The Gospel of Thomas, saying 113
It will not be said, ‘Look, here!’ or ‘Look, there!’ Rather, the Father’s kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people don’t see it.”
Where is heaven? Is it above us, in the sky? In the afterlife, as a kind of reward? Only found in imagination?
Although I rarely use the heaven label, I am familiar with something the label fits on.
FLASHBACKS TO BEFORE THIS LIFE
As a child, before school age, I had flashbacks to the time before this incarnation – all is consciousness, a golden light, love, and infinite sense of being home, wisdom, and so on. I am consciousness and all of existence is consciousness, and it’s all a profound love and intelligence.
It was just a reminder. I didn’t think about it, I didn’t talk about it, I didn’t put any labels on it, it certainly had nothing to do with Christianity as I was taught it on Fridays in elementary school (which made me an atheist.) But later in childhood, I would wake up some mornings with a profound longing for something, which nothing – bread with jam, Donald Duck magazines, friends – could satisfy.
ONENESS SHIFT
Later, when I was sixteen, and out of the blue, there was a sudden oneness shift that turned everything inside-out and upside-down. Everything without exception was revealed as the divine. This human self was a temporary and local expression of the divine, just like everything else. Everything was the divine expressing, exploring, and experiencing itself in always new ways. Even the sense of fundamentally being this human self (which had softened and released the previous year in a way very challenging to this human self), was revealed as one of the infinite ways the divine is experiencing itself.
In other words, as I would say it now, my nature is fundamentally consciousness, and the world as it appears to me happens within and as the consciousness I am. The awakeness that’s here is not special, I imagine it’s the awakeness inherent in any “conscious being”, any consciousness over there. Our nature is nothing special, I assume that too is inevitably inherent in any “conscious being”. It’s what’s most familiar to all of us. It’s all we have ever known.
ONENESS AND FLASHBACKS
When my nature noticed itself in that shift, it was both profoundly familiar (since it’s what I am and all I have ever known) and profoundly surprising, shocking, and astounding (to the habitual mental patterns of this human self).
When my nature noticed itself, it was also clear that this is what the flashbacks were about. They were about all as the divine, consciousness, and so on. This is about all as the divine, consciousness, and so on.
Here, I also realized what the longing had been about. It was about this.
Of course, there is a difference as well. The flashbacks were to a disembodied time, when this human self was not around. The oneness shift happened with this human self around, at least most of the time apart from in some dreams and during dreamless sleep where the whole world falls away.
THIS HEAVEN INCLUDES THIS WORLD
That also means that this form of heaven includes the whole world. It includes this human self, with all his patterns. It includes the wider world, and all of existence, as it’s experienced by this human self.
This heaven is not a state of bliss. It’s not the end of challenges for this human self in the world. It’s not a state, apart from a state of noticing. It’s what already allows any and all content of experience to come and go.
This heaven sometimes even includes hell. It includes the wounds, traumas, and confusion of this human self.
This heaven sometimes forgets itself, when it gets caught up in the turmoil of this human self, and it often noticed itself.
HOME AND CAPACITY
It’s home beyond what the word usually points to.
It gets familiar to this human self over time, although it’s also profoundly in awe of it.
This heaven is capacity for it all – consciousness and the world as it appears within and as this consciousness.
It’s capacity taking the form of consciousness and all the changing content of experience it forms itself into.
WHAT EXACTLY DOES HEAVEN POINT TO?
“Heaven” is a mental representation and a label, so what does it most usefully point to?
Our nature whether it notices itself or not, and sometimes lost in (painfully) identifying as something within itself?
Our nature noticing itself?
Our nature noticing itself over time, and our human self exploring how to live within that context?
That, and our human self also deeply transforming – healing, maturing – within the noticing?
Or maybe any or all of it?
I tend to like definitions that undermine fixed ideas, so I like that it can – at different times – point to any or all of these.