Ooh heaven is a place on earth!

I may be in danger of breaking into song here – and anyone who has heard me sing will confirm that you don’t want to be there when that happens! Seriously, thought, the well-known hit song does actually say it like it is – “Ooh heaven is a place on earth”! Confirmation of this fact comes from the most unlikely of sources – I quote the late Cardinal Cathal Daly who made the following telling point in his wonderful book, “The Minding of Planet Earth”: heaven is not a place that you will find when you die – the only place that you will find heaven is in the time-less here and now. That will come as news to most of us – because, if you’re normal, you could hardly describe your life as heaven on earth! So, what does this possibility actually mean? In fact, I believe the proposition is directly related to the question asked of me by many clients: “Is there really such thing as reality and, if so, what is it like?”

Reality does, indeed, exist and it can be heaven – it’s simply up to you to make the courageous choice to use your mind differently from the sad norms of so-called normal living. Reality exists quite separately from the many personal versions of reality that people fashion for themselves. Indeed, there are probably as many versions of reality on this planet as there are people because it is our subconscious mind that creates our version of reality for us. Unfortunately, however, the subconscious mind’s methods are flawed – it takes what is actually happening (the real reality of the moment) and tries to “makes sense” or it using what psychology terms “stored knowledge”. And that’s where the wheels come off! The big problem faced by all of us is that we learned most of our stored knowledge during our childhood years and, nowadays, our subconscious mind pays particular attention to those bits of stored knowledge that give us a negative impression of ourselves and of what’s going on. So, in trying to interpret reality for us, our subconscious mind gives us a negatively skewed mess – using our stored knowledge, we make a nonsense of the present moment. As a result, most people are living in their own version of reality which is closer to hell than heaven.

This nonsense, what passes for the normal life, does not take away from the fact that real reality is actually happening before our very eyes. Just because we’re not aware of it, because our vision is so clouded and obscured by our stored knowledge, doesn’t mean that it isn’t there. It is – and it is beautiful. In reality, we live in a world free of negative thought and worry – which are, after all, only useless thoughts concocted by your own subconscious mind and which are completely irrelevant to the actuality of the here and now. Again, in reality we live in a world full of possibility and opportunity. The fact is, however, life’s abundant opportunities are invisible to the normal person who, by choice (albeit a default subconscious choice) would prefer to allow their subconscious wander through the dark alleys of a past long gone. In reality, we live in a world where anything is possible – all you have to do is tune into it.

How are you going to tune into reality? Well, reality is actually experienced by ignoring the stored knowledge which is constantly and frantically churning out your useless thoughts – up to 50,000 of them each day. You have to open your eyes – quite literally – to see reality, it is found if you actually go looking for it. You’ve got to switch your attention, change your mental focus, stop paying attention to your stored knowledge and start paying attention to what your five senses are actually telling you – free from your habitual misinterpretations of that all important sensory data. You’ve got to experience the world as you once did, as a child, using all five senses. In other words, you’ve got to retrain your mind to pay attention to what you are actually seeing, actually feeling, actually hearing, smelling and tasting. When we drink a cup of coffee – for the umpteenth time – our stored knowledge says “that’s a cup of coffee – I know what coffee tastes like – now I’ll get back to paying attention to the crap in my head!” As a result, you never taste the coffee – not like you did when you had a cup of coffee for the first time. You’ve got to break the link between experiencing and thinking that you know what you’re experiencing.

You’ve got to devote time – perhaps five or ten minutes each day, preferably in the morning – to simply experiencing, freeing your mind to be where it is – in reality. Stopping paying attention to the noise in your head is the only route to reality – the only route to heaven here on earth. In doing so, you will discover that time elapses in the warped way that long sunny summer holiday days seemed to last for ever when you were a child – heaven is time-less.