Finding, Losing and Recovering Heaven on Earth
John C. Robinson, Ph.D., D.Min.

  I first witnessed Heaven on Earth as a child. A sublime beauty, sensuality, timelessness, serenity, and wonder permeated creation. I needed no words for this experience and naturally assumed everyone shared my joy. Recalling his own similar experience of Heaven on Earth as a child, the poet William Wordsworth wrote,

There a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.

“Heaven,” he said, “lies about us in our infancy.’

  By age seven, however, I discovered that adults had forgotten how to see Heaven on Earth. Only glassy-eyed stares met my attempts to share creation’s magical luminosity. Soon I, too, doubted the world’s radiance; worse, I began to accept in its place the concept-driven World of Man, a patriarchal system of beliefs and values imposed on every child that completely dominates “modern” civilization. Borrowing William Blake’s metaphor, my “doors of perception” became so smudged with fearful beliefs that my shining world was absent for decades. Wordsworth summed up this sad but universal loss as well, explaining,

It is not now as it hath been of yore;-
The things which I have seen I now can see no more…
At length the man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.
(from Intimations of Immortality from Rcollections of Early Childhood)

  But I never completely forgot the shining world. As in the Greek myth where Theseus followed Ariadne’s thread out of the Minotaur’s dark dungeon, I kept following my golden thread of intuition and memory back to Heaven on Earth. In time, and trusting direct perception, my seeing grew brighter by the day. At first, I dismissed what I saw. Perhaps I was crazy, I thought, but as a clinical psychologist, I also knew I wasn’t. Then, drawn to the study world religions like a man searching for his lost map home, I soon discovered that mystics from every tradition were saying just what I knew – that Heaven on Earth is already here when you know how to look. I eventually collected a gleeful chorus of mystic voices (over 100 citations in all), created a model of the religious psyche explaining why we didn’t’ see Heaven on Earth and how we could, and taught others to see it in classes and workshops. This singular dedication to finding Heaven on Earth also led to a 360-page dissertation, a Doctor of Ministry degree, ordination from an interfaith seminary, and a new book, Finding Heaven Here (O-Books, 2009). I was not going to let this vision get away again!
  But like Theseus’ winding descent into the Minotaur’s labyrinth, my journey required a frightening turn inward, for lurking at the center of my own darkness lay an equally horrific monster. I should explain. At the age of 14, I underwent open-heart surgery for correction an atrial-septal birth defect. Forty years to the month later, an episode of atrial fibrillation brought me into the emergency room for cardiac defibrillation. Incredibly, this electrical shock to my heart then triggered body memories of my original surgery and it soon became apparent that I had, in fact, been awake during the original procedure. The scientific name for this experience is anesthesia awareness; it means waking up in surgery and happens when the anesthetic levels drop too low to maintain unconsciousness but nerve-paralyzing agents prevent the patient from communicating this nightmare to the surgeon. Feeling the surgeon open my chest and place his hands inside my heart produced unparalleled horror in my young psyche and the entire trauma was automatically buried in the unconscious. The cellular recording activated by the shock went on for three years. Unable to keep working as one horrific memory after another resurfaced, I closed my practice and devoted my energies to healing. I had lost Heaven on Earth again.
  But traumas also offer unexpected gifts if, like Jacob, we wrestle with them, and the gifts that I received actually brought me further into Heaven on Earth. Here’s what I learned:

I learned that the meaning and impact of an event is directly related to on the stories we tell ourselves about it. Because the stories that came to my young mind during the surgery were terrifying, the event was experienced as extremely traumatic. A positive story would have prevented this trauma. But more importantly, I realized that any story separates us from direct experience of the Divine as Being itself. As the medieval Catholic theologian and mystic Meister Eckhart said, “God is like nothing so much as being” and “God’s being is my being…wherever I am, there is God.” How differently I would have experienced surgery from a mystical experience of sensation as God’s play of ever-changing energies.

I also learned that surrendering my professional identity, community, and income – a via negativa of enormous proportions – actually served to “cleanse the doors of perception” of the belief-filters that had been obscuring my vision of Heaven on Earth in the first place. Like most of us, ideas about who I was, what I was doing, and where I lived filled consciousness to overflowing. If Heaven on Earth is the immediate and direct experience of Divinity as the world itself, we can only experience it when we stop thinking and start seeing.

  In sum, the stories and concepts I held about life had repeatedly cost me the Heaven on Earth. I was never expelled from the Garden of Eden (another name for the Divine World), my consciousness had been hijacked by the power of thought. Eden is not lost, we simply forgot how to see it.
  Why is this discovery of Heaven on Earth so important now? The world most of us think we see is full of danger, suffering, scarcity and problems because we don’t see where we really are! The Earth is being raped and poisoned because we don’t know where we really are. How differently would we relate to one another and to the Earth if we experienced the holiness and perfection of Heaven here and now? This visionary transformation is no small event nor is it imaginary. When you learn to see Heaven on Earth, your life will change forever. As Joseph Campbell proclaimed, "This is Eden. When you see the kingdom spread upon the earth, the old way of living in the world is annihilated. That is the end of the world. The end of the world is not an event to come, it is an event of psychological transformation, of visionary transformation. You see not the world of solid things but a world of radiance."
  Gratefully, my heart healed both physically and spiritually. It longs now to awaken this vision of the Divine World in others through writing, teaching, and living it. In fact, the vows I spoke at my ordination as an interfaith minister concluded, “For me, this ceremony is not about being ordained for a particular ministry or work but to a Mystical Consciousness that reveals all life to be Sacred – not as a metaphor but as a lived and witnessed reality.” Join me: Heaven on Earth is here when we are awake enough to see it.