Is it true? Does Heaven exist on Earth? If so, why don’t we see it and how can we find it?

Heaven on Earth is the ordinary world transformed in awakened consciousness. It is always here when we are awake enough to see it. I see it every day. And you can, too.

When I began to explore the world’s religious traditions, I was amazed at how many of mystics talked about Heaven on Earth. For them, it was simply an obvious and everyday awareness. Because mystics are more alike than their religions, this consensus was hardly surprising. Indeed having witnessed Heaven on Earth since childhood (and we all experienced it then), what I have always found most surprising was how few of us remember the divine world or see it now.

Sadly, most of us are too busy to stop and look. Instead of seeing the divine world, we see what we think. Remember the Buddha’s words, “We are what we think. Everything we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world.” In this thought world, we experience only our concepts, beliefs, stereotypes and prejudices: a run-down building, an old man, an irritating family member, a chair or table, a frustrating job, an alcoholic. These concepts filter our experience so completely that we stop witnessing what is right before us. Instead, we find scarcity, competition, hardship, struggle, and danger. All the pain, fear and conflict that dominate our world arise from these filters.

Try this experiment. Let your eyes settle on anything around you. Begin to examine it carefully, intensely, and without thought. Heighten all your senses to take in its color, texture, design, smell, sound, even temperature, weight, and reflected light. Examine the object as if you had never seen it so clearly before or had no idea what it was. If you do experiment sincerely, you will discover that the world is not what you think! Now take the experiment even further. Imagine you had been dead for 1000 years and got to come back for just one day. Step outside and be astonished by the pristine beauty, incredible diversity, wondrous magic, and ever-changing patterns of light and shadow that make up this Eden-like world. Many who do this experiment drop to their knees in gratitude for the abundant grace and blessings that surround them. When you look deeply into the world as it is, you are literally looking into Heaven on Earth.

I should add here that I am not a Pollyanna. I do not wish to deny or distort reality with “happy” thoughts and platitudes. As a practicing clinical psychologist for three decades, I have seen the pain of the world. I know what happens to people. But I also know that here, too, our filters play a tremendous role in determining how we experience a situation. When we experience our problems in awakened consciousness, seeing through our countless projections and fear-based beliefs, even terrible situations change in character and meaning. But once wounded, we must pass through the pain and darkness of our original hurt for there is no end-run around buried emotional pain and no one retires in enlightenment. As we work through and erase our wounds (and the thought-patterns that keep activating them) and begin to experience the world as it is, then the doorway to Heaven on Earth truly opens. As I wrote in a song recently,

This is the Garden.
We’ve been here all the time.
It is we that make it ugly.
It is we that make it shine, make it shine.
Let it shine.

What happens when we step through the doorway into the divine world? In the heightened consciousness of Heaven on Earth, people and things become incredibly beautiful, infinitely precious, and immanently holy. In this realm of experience, saturated with the Presence of Divinity, “problems” are discovered to be merely thought forms that dissolve like water vapor in this radiantly new consciousness. As the poet William Blake told us, if the doors of perception were cleansed, we would see the world as it truly is: infinite.

Returning to the divine world, however, also requires that we take a journey. We need a map of the human psyche to more fully understand where we are stuck and how to find our real home. Indeed, this is the universal mystical journey that moves from the conventional world of beliefs and problems (the “World of Man”), down through our underlying confusion and suffering (“Darkness”), and then into God’s Presence (“Divinity”), where the everyday world is perceptually transfigured back into the original Eden. (“Heaven on Earth”). As you begin to take this journey, life itself is increasingly transformed and every problem becomes an invitation to cleanse consciousness and return to Heaven on Earth.

Explored throughout mythology and literature, and shared by every religion and tradition since the dawn of time, the experience of Heaven on Earth is the crowning achievement of consciousness and the fulfillment of the spiritual life. And as the mystics often say, if you don’t find it here, you won’t find it anywhere. The purpose of spiritual life on Earth is to find Heaven here and now, and to create, moment-by-moment, a new world filled with peace, justice and love for all. From famous saints to everyday mystics, anyone can learn to find and live in Heaven on Earth.

Biography: John Robinson holds doctorates in clinical psychology and ministry and is an ordained interfaith minister, author, and mystic. He has taught extensively at men’s gatherings, professional conferences, hospitals, churches and retreat centers and is the author of three previous books on the interface of psychology and spirituality. His new book, Finding Heaven Here (O-Books), endorsed by Mathew Fox, Andrew Harvey, Malidoma Some, John Mabry and Jeremy Taylor, will be published early in January 2009. Dr. Robinson lives on an island in the Puget Sound of Washington State.

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