What If Heaven Were A Place On Earth?

                I think modern religion has it all wrong.

                I think they have it wrong about a whole slew of things, but the major issue is this notion that all the good people on earth that follow God’s laws are going to Heaven. 

                We’re not supposed to be going to Heaven.   We’re supposed to be making Heaven.  Right here on earth.

                God is not a superior supreme all-seeing being watching and judging all that we do, including our very thoughts.  God is us. The good part of us, the positive energy in the universe.  We have been given the earth.  We can either make it Heaven or Hell.  The choice has always been ours.  Heaven is not a distant destination where people fly around with harps and sing, nor is it some other dimension where you meet past loved ones.

                There is no afterlife.  There is only here.  You can’t meet your loved ones after death because nothing truly dies.  Matter can neither be created nor destroyed; it only changes form. 

                This is Heaven.  This is also Hell. 

                Your loved ones are not gone because they never left.  There is no escaping here.  There never was. 

                Since the dawn of time, the greatest mystery has always been what happens after we die.  Where do we go?  I believe the answer is simple.  We’re always made it complicated.  We don’t go anywhere.  We stay here.  At the time of our death, we simply go into the next available body. 

                People that have died and been revived always speak of going down a tunnel towards a light.  Even when I was a kid, and heard these stories, I thought that sounded an awful lot like birth.  Yet no one else ever seemed to make that rather obvious connection.  Perhaps we’ve collectively pushed the obvious out of our consciousness.

                We think we don’t remember past lives, but I believe most of us do.  We just repress the memories because they don’t make sense in our current environment.  Occasionally we get that odd sense of déjà vu, of having been somewhere before or experienced something similar.  Science falls over itself trying to find an explanation for this feeling when the answer is simple.  The reason we feel we’ve experienced something before, or been somewhere before, or met someone before, is because we have.  It just didn’t happen in this lifetime, and since we’ve repressed the memories of our past lives, we can’t access them.  All we can recall is feelings.

                We started out as people who lived in caves scrawling on walls and eating raw meat with our claw like fingers, and we ended up here, in a world filled with marvels.  How?  Science likes to explain it as evolution, but the truth of the matter is every generation is smarter than the one that came before, how?  Why? 

                Because we get smarter every trip we make through earth.  We wonder why some people are born with extraordinary gifts, mind boggling abilities to calculate equations and play the piano and dance and write and paint and the answer is painfully simple.  They’ve literally done it all their lives.

                Hasn’t every generation improved our quality of life here on earth?  We are now living a life that was beyond the wildest dreams of our ancestors.  Doesn’t that support the notion that heaven has been here, all along, within our grasp?

                Some of you reading this may think I’m insane, but am I really?  Doesn’t this version of the world make a lot more sense then believing in a bunch of supernatural beings that never show themselves? 

               

                If you knew that you were supposed to be making heaven, and that your actions toward others mattered, how would your outlook on life change?

                If someone told you they were miserable, that they felt marginalized in society, that this life they were living is hell, would you feel more motivated to change things for them, so that we can all be in heaven?

                If you didn’t have the alleged words of God to fall back on as justification for rejecting someone, if you didn’t believe judging and excluding others would gain you entry to the mythical heaven, but do quite the opposite…stop us from achieving our goal of establishing heaven here on earth, together…would you behave differently?

                Either we’re all in heaven, or we’re all in hell.  Because if only a fraction achieve heaven, then the rest will do whatever they can to drag them back into hell.  If you knew that it was in your best interest to reach out to the angry, combative person and try to make their life better, would you do it?  If it was your responsibility, as part of a society creating heaven, to help everyone achieve that goal, would you treat people differently?

                Would you dismiss the complaints of the black community, since their problems don’t personally affect you, if the only way you could achieve heaven for yourself was by ensuring it existed for them, too?

                Would you fight to the death for a country if you knew you were pushing society further away from heaven and plunging us all into hell?

                Would you ignore the homeless person crying for help, turn in the illegal, snarl at the fallen, refuse to feed the hungry, if you knew that doing so pushed heaven further and further out of reach, not just for you, but for everyone?

                There are passages in the Bible about seeing God in every person.  And this is because God is everyone.  He’s not a man with a long white beard sitting on a throne in some heaven none us can see.  He is us.  All of us, together.  We can either work together to make this heaven, or we can stay in limbo or even be in hell.  Those were always our choices.

                Would you be angry at people kneeling during the national anthem if you knew that what matters is not the song, not the ideals of the country, but the feelings of the people kneeling?  That you are tasked with not protecting a country, but creating heaven with your fellow human beings?  Would you reach out your hand then, and pull them to their feet, and ask them why they kneel, and how you can make it better?  Would you kneel alongside them, until they achieve happiness, so that we can all find heaven?

                I was told that heaven was a place where everyone lived forever and never had to work and had everything they ever wanted.  That we would be rewarded for our good work here on earth.  I believe this interpretation is wrong.  Just like you are rewarded with the fruits of your labor when you work hard, we will be rewarded with heaven when we make it ourselves.  It’s up to us if we want to be there.  It’s not a place.  It’s a state of mind.  And unless we’re all there, none of us can be there.