Paradise 

Experiencing Heaven on Earth

Imagine paradise.  The gentle wind breezing across the valley.  Sunlight streaming through sky.  Leaves dancing on trees.  Bliss abound.  All you feel is peace.  Everywhere you look all you see is love.  The true nature of nature revealing itself to you as you perceive it.  This is heaven on earth, the kingdom having come, truth experiencing itself.  How is it that paradise becomes your experienced reality rather than simply your imagined fantasy?  What bridges the gap between dreams and reality?  

What makes this seeming leap is simply the reference point from where you view and your recognition as the viewer of it all.  How do you shift your reference point?  Through taking off your armor which keeps you viewing life from a separate person-object perspective and opening into the subject, the seer, the knower of all that is.  Due to our conditioning and thus sense of being a separate person-object it can be hard for our minds to fathom anything but the perspective of being a separate person in a world doing things independently from other separate things.  However it is that very perspective that must be dismantled in order for us to know reality beyond our mind’s limited construction of it, which is often assimilated to be some version less than the blissful paradise we desire.  

From the perspective of separation there will always be doing, trying, getting somewhere, going somewhere, progress and work to do.  In paradise there is only the eternal now.  The present that is always present.  Completely perfect and still in its movement.  Metaphorically speaking many of us are wearing suits that are too tight, staying in perspectives that are so limited in their view, constricting us, making it hard to breath and move freely, and yet we don’t realize that our perspective is completely 100% in our hands.  That we are the ones creating the perspective that we see through and that we are the “Perspectiver.”  No one has told us this.  It like the hidden truth that is in plain sight for all to see if only the curiosity and hunger to look is cultivated.   

Living Armor-less 

Taking off your armor

Inherit in perceiving ourselves as a separate object-person there is a need for self-protection and thus armor.  Armoring can be physical in the way we hold tension in our muscles or body, it can be emotional in the way we allow or don’t allow certain feelings, and it can be mental in the ways we analyze, justify, rationalize and defend ourselves with words or ideas.  That self-protection appears (from the perspective of separation) to keep us alive and out of harms way from objects that are other than us that could potentially hurt us.  Objects could be other people, thoughts and emotions (ours or perceived others), sensations, and other seemingly solid or non-solid structures.  When we are choosing the perspective of separation there will always be perceived things that we need to protect ourselves from.

To be willing to take off our armor of self-protection we must begin to see ourselves beyond being a separate person.  We must be willing to give away our identity, our need for significance, validation, justification, being seen or heard, being right or liked, and also our fears.  We give our power over to what we fear more than anything else.  If we fear we will always perceive the need for self-protection and defense.  Fear is a lack of trust and insisting on separation when there isn’t any.  Love is knowing that no-one and no thing is to blame, that nothing is out of place, and that nothing could ever go wrong or be wrong no matter how detrimental or devastating our mind tries to make it.  

Moving beyond separation requires suspension of our inner judger, or our inner “righter/wronger”.  This little sucker is loud.  It is running the show most of the time and we are asleep to it.  We unconsciously allow it to determine what our experience of life is without even questioning it.  Thus we suffer and create suffering.  We experience wrongness where there is no wrongness.  We see hate where there is only ever love.  Our perspective is so out of sync with the true reality of paradise and we continue to allow it, and beyond that we continue to create it, and re-create it and re-create it, 100 million times a day.

The good new is that you are not and do not need to be a passive agent in the process of waking up any longer.  You truly have never been disempowered, you’ve only failed to recognize your power.  You are and have always been an active participant.  Your now conscious active participation is what is required to bring the perspective of heaven to earth.  It lies within you to do so.  In fact you are the only one who can.  

Dr. Amanda Hessel, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado