Heaven Is the Worst Thing On Earth

Heaven as a Place Holder For Dreams Deferred

One of the biggest complaints that women in romantic relationships with me have had is that it feels like I can live without them. They are right. I have never been in a relationship with anyone or anything that I wasn’t living without before they came into my life—with the possible exception of my mother. In fact, everyone of us has lived without everyone and everything in our lives at some point or we will eventually. This is a reality of the human experience.

However, despite this being the objective reality of all humans ever, we have somehow developed the imaginative capacity to create an illusory construct of a world where no one or thing that we have ever loved is ever away from us. And that construct is usually projected onto the idea of a heaven—the happy place where nothing bad ever happens, no one we have loved is ever lost, and we have nothing but an endless flow of time to bask in the ecstasy of never distracted love, adoration, and attention all focused on us. And you can’t forget all the stuff you ever wanted.

People don’t like to admit it. But, for most people, this heaven is nothing short of a repository for all of our best dreams no matter how short we fall as humans. I remember when people in my childhood churches used to always talk about the mansion they were going to get and the jewels in their crown they would receive when they died. I even had one friend tell me he couldn’t wait to get to heaven so that he could take a bunch of bricks off of the streets of gold to make necklaces and chains and fill his mouth with gold teeth. He was so excited that I probably shouldn’t have explained to him how metaphors work. Because once I did, he gave up on being a “good person” since he couldn’t see what was in it for him.

You see, for most Christians in particular, “heaven” is a “place” where all emptinesses are filled. And until we get “there”, most of us try to fill our emptinesses with relationships, stuff, or fantasies. And if for some reason or other we can’t satisfy those temporary hungers while we wait to die and go to heaven, we tend to make a hell out of this world for robbing us of what we could imagine but not actualize. That seems to be the deal for most people on this plane. And that is why many women had a problem with me. They unconsciously wanted me to be their relational placeholder for heaven and wanted to be mine. But, I refused to be empty. And so they could not fulfill me. And I refused to see them as empty. And so, I had no allusions that I could fulfill them.

Now, if you’ve been indoctrinated into the romantic fantasies of movies and novels, then you probably think there’s something off about what I am saying. You may even be thinking, “I see why these women left this guy.” But, before you pass judgement on me, ask yourself, why do we normalize the false belief that something is lacking in us that has to be filled from the outside? Is the problem that people like me don’t want to participate in the illusion or is it the illusion itself? Or is it neither? Is it possible to normalize relationships grounded in Oneness and Wholeness?

Heaven Is the Worst Thing On Earth

If you’ve been paying attention, you will have noticed that what people kill each other over the most in this world is their beliefs about what happens to us after we die. You know it’s true. And if you think about it, you know that it is stupid. There’s no two ways about it. Killing people over a belief about what happens after we die is objectively ignorant. If you don’t think so, read this sentence out loud and listen to how dumb it sounds.

“I think it is worth killing and/or dehumanizing any person who disagrees with me on what I was taught by someone else about what happens to us after we die. Because I somehow know with no verifiable proof that the stories that were handed down to me about what happens after we die are better than the stories that other people were handed about what happens after they die, I must defend myself against the tyranny of the inheritance of other dead people’s imaginations at all costs. And I don’t care who we have to get rid of as long as I don’t have to question what happens after I die.”

This is basically the programming that a majority of us are running underneath everything that we think and do. And as I said in previous posts, it all comes down to terror management. So much of our lives are based on the denial of death that we barely know how to live. And even worse, because we don’t know how to live, we can’t let other people live either. We won’t admit it. But, because of the false belief of safety in numbers, we think that the more people who agree with us, the safer we are. This is why we perceive disagreements as threats and will do almost anything to establish agreement—even if it means torturing someone into submission or killing enough people that whoever is left over is afraid to admit how they really feel. And it’s all heaven’s fault. Or at least our earth-based ideas of a heaven.

You see, for most of us, heaven is just another way of saying, “the best possible earth that I can imagine.” The only problem is, when the best possible earth you can imagine collides with the best possible earth someone else can imagine, one of your best earths if not both is going to be severely damaged if not destroyed. You see it everyday. All conflict is basically collisions of people trying to create a better earth with them as the center. It is just a recipe for disaster. And while one does not have to be religious or even believe in some kind of afterlife to be a part of the problem, it is very often the people who do that make a hell out of earth.

Heaven Is Here, Now

When I was a child, my grandmother used to tell me how much she was looking forward to heaven. Like a lot of Black folks who couldn’t imagine having a happier life on earth, she was obsessed with what came next and earning her place in the Good Place. That’s why she was always trying to get people saved and had me right out there with her handing out tracts that told them they better love God or else. The only problem was that she was scared to die or suffer. Graciously, she just dropped dead in a Hardee’s eating a breakfast biscuit with the friends she did mall walking with.

I’d like to think that after she dropped dead, she instantly found herself in the heaven of her imagination—the one we talked about for hours and hours as a child. And I wondered if once she got there, she’d be able to answer a question I asked that she was never able to connect with while in the body—”Am I going to already be in heaven when you get there?”

When I asked her if I was going to already be there, my grandmother thought that I was asking if I was going to die before her. I wasn’t. I was asking if, since everyone she ever loved was going to be in this heaven that she longed for and it was assumed that she loved me, then in order for her heaven to be everything she thought it was, I would have to be there as well. Otherwise her heaven would be incomplete and therefore unable to be the fulfilling state that she imagined.

Even though I didn’t have the language to articulate my question in a way that made sense to my grandmother, I was asking my question from a non-linear experience of time. I was asking from an eternal vantage point where Here and Now are all there ever is. And, if this doesn’t make sense when I say it, check out these other thinkers.

From Time to Eternity

C.S. Lewis said that “The present is that point when time touches eternity.” He also said, “There is no other day. All days are present now. This moment contains all moments.” I agree. And so from that perspective of the eternal Now, the question I asked my grandmother makes perfect sense.

Days after my grandmother died, my family was doing what families tend to do, they were in their feelings about “unresolved issues” and different ways that people make meaning out of life and death. I didn’t want to participate in the drama. All I wanted to do was honor her journey. But, my energy got pulled in a little. I was feeling pretty heavy. So, I decided to check in with my grandmother about what she was experiencing outside of the clutches of time.

To do that, I grabbed a pen and paper, asked my question, got still, and waited until all sense of a separate self dissolved. Then once I became nothing, something emerged. It was this poem I titled From Time to Eternity:

It is five minutes past tomorrow,
And Yesterday is on its way.
The world thinks I’ve just passed on,
But I was born today.
There are no more “it’s over”s
Or “where did it all begin”s
I just slipped into eternity.
No beginning, no end.
Time is now immeasurable,
Because now I know it never was.
I now have always been where
God always was.
Eternity in Love.
I have never been too far from you.
Behind the veil is where I stand.
Just open your eyes to reach for me.
I will hold your hand.

My Children, I Am with you always.
There has never been a “time” when you have been that I have not.
This will always Be. Where I Am, you will always Be.
You are forever in me. In a like manner, my Home is within you.
This is Eternity.

© Copyright 2004 Pedro Senhorinha Silva

Connection Is Based On an Illusion

As the poem was emerging, I knew that I was with my grandmother Now, just as we have always been. But, it as something that I couldn’t explain using linearity. I knew that I was/am eternally One with all of Life Now. This is who we are. And the false notion that there is any other reality besides this is just an imaginative exercise that spans the blink of an eye.

As the poem finished expression I realized that in order to connect with anyone, we must first be separated from them. But, in order to desire for connection, we must have at one time known what it is like to be One with that which we are desirous of connecting. In other words Oneness is our primordial state. We are always One. But, for a blink we forget. I am choosing not to. That means releasing both time and connection as constructs and living as One.

In the beginning, there was nothing
And this is exactly what’s true
It is imperative that we believe this
If we’re ever to see the real You
Everything You aren’t
Leaves everything You are
And this is how I find You
Then I discovered that I’m not far
In the middle of this madness
Is the birth of the “Son”
Who came to me in my clouded mind
To tell me I’m the One
But if I’m the only One,
Can there ever be a two?
He says that this is impossible
“Because the One is always You.”

© Copyright 2004 Pedro Senhorinha Silva

You Can Have Time or Eternity. Not Both.

Julian Barbour is a physicist who calls BS on this whole time thing. He is featured in a book written by Astrophysicist, Adam Frank called About Time, which looks at emerging minds that are flipping the script on ideas of cosmic order such as the Big Bang, string theory, and other ideas. The way Barbour approaches his challenges to some of sciences sacred cows is to drop the whole time thing altogether. He simply says that “Time does not exist.”

From Barbour’s cosmology, what we experience as time is an illusion created in our minds as we try to order independent “Nows”. As he sees it, a “Now” is an independent arrangement of everything in the Universe that exists at the same time as every other “Now” and that we mark what we experience as change in an order that we call time which we use to construct a flow of sorts that goes from ”beginning to end” in a linear fashion that does not actually exist. As he describes it in the book, “The cat that jumps is not the same cat that lands.” And in that cosmology, the cat can land “first” and then jump, outside of the illusion of linearity.

This is where I usually lose people. And I’m cool with that. For the first thirty years of this journey, I lived what I am calling a non-linear experience. If you know what I mean, I don’t have to say more. If you don’t I could never say enough.

Then for the past almost 21 years, I forced myself to live linearly through body identification with the story and personality construct of this character that people know as Pedro Senhorinha Silva. Now, after 21 years of focused attention on this identity, both in and out of linearity, the linear journey led me back to non-linear being through the teachings of Unity. I guess its true that the journey leads you back to where we started from.

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
T.S. Eliot

I Choose Eternity

I won’t pretend that what I am suggesting is something many can get behind without some significant inner struggle. If I learned anything from this foray into linearity, it is that. I’m basically saying that the foundational building blocks of most of our societies and most global exchange don’t even exist. Like money, time is an idea that we humans have thoroughly “invested in”. We even tell ourselves that time is money. That’s why we use the same terms to express both–spend, waste, save, etc. Furthermore, we experience both as being in limited supply and create mechanisms of every kind to try to “hold on to” as much of both as we can. And as a result, we consistently participate in manipulative activities in order to control the “amount” of both that we “have”.

What most of us don’t realize though is that the very word “invest” simply means to clothe or cover oneself in, like a garment or “vestment” like priests wear. Essentially, we cover ourselves and take on the attributes of time even though the reality of who we are is not bound by time. Once you realize this, you should be able to—in theory—take time off and on just as you would an outfit. Can you imagine that? I can. And in writing this, I am inviting you to imagine the implications of this with me. If Barbour is accurate; and there is no such thing as time, how would you experience life Now?

Divesting From Time

Nothing contributes to a sense of “choicelessness” like the belief that we lack resources–whether they are time or money, both, or something else we invest into such as the illusory need for validation and approval. Our investment in time and all of its correlates is the bottleneck in our flow of infinite resources. When we divest from time or at least come to the realization that this is an option for us everything changes. We discover that the heaven that we were looking for out there is always right here right now. We re-member that there is no emptiness in us that needs filling and that no thing or no one can add to or take away from us. We are whole as we are. And so is everyone else.

In the video below, the music leader of the community I serve sings a song called “Already There” by Allen Stone. It is about the realization that what we think of as heaven is eternally present within us. I recommend that you listen to it as well as the other song, Heaven is Here by MC Yogi.

When I hear these songs, I hear the truth that has never been hidden from us. We’ve just been closing our eyes while being shrouded by teachings the spiritual masters like Jesus never taught. Like my grandmother who longed for heaven, many of us allow the illusion of separation which fosters the need for the false solutions of time and connection, to distract us from what is right here. But, as you can read below from the Bible, when the Pharisees tried to invest the “kingdom of God” with time, Jesus divested from time and told them exactly when and where it was—wherever you are right here and now.

Once Jesuswas asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, ‘The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed;nor will they say, “Look, here it is!” or “There it is!” For, in fact, the kingdom of God is within you.’
Luke 17:20-21

Do It Yourself Heaven

Now after reading all of this, you might assume that I simply abhor the idea of a heaven and think that people who believe in a heaven out there somewhere are missing the point. Well not exactly. What is more accurate is that I don’t believe that there is any “out there” out there. Like Jesus is teaching, I believe that heaven and everything else we perceive is an inside job. In other words, it is all consciousness.

As John Milton wrote in Paradise Lost:

The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

In consciousness, there is no loss, no separation, nothing missing and nothing that can be added because we are One with All that is. Heaven is remembering this for ourselves and the perceived other. Hell is temporarily forgetting. When we remember, we are at choice and can make a heaven out of every situation. When we forget even having everything you think want will never satisfy you.

In every moment, we can decide with our attention whether our experiences will be heavenly or hellish. Remembering this is the Pearl of Great Price that Jesus referred to. And when know its worth, we will gladly let go of our attachments to everything else including time, separation, and the false belief that something is missing from us in exchange for the incorruptible heaven making power of consciousness.

Nothing Left to Say

I am aware that I’ve said quite a bit. And I am mindful that all of these words amount to nothing if the thought of divesting from time feels like the threat that many people think it is. That being said, I want you to know that we have nothing to lose when we stop investing in the false promises of time. I hope to see you in Eternity.

Pedro Senhorinha Silva – Live Your IDEALS is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.