“‘Finite existence in the here and now, with every limitation, is… when rightly regarded and accepted, identical with the infinite existence, which is everywhere and always. To live on Main Street is, if one lives in the right spirit, to inhabit the Holy City.’

…[T]he other world is this world rightly seen.”

Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything, p. 467, quoting, in part, Findlay (Emphasis in the original)

The problem with heaven is that most of us make it a there and then phenomenon, a reward we’ll merit once we’ve suffered enough here, or earned our right to then and there for what we work for here and now. Or maybe earthy suffering is a series of trials which allow us to merit the infinite. Still others believe this finite existence is a kind of prison in which we’re trapped, or that we’re being punished here in a crucible to burn off or metabolize our sins, our bad karma for prior bad acts.

The quote at the top of this post gets rid of all these ideas. It dismisses them. It states that paradise – to the extent it is identified with the concept of endlessness – envelopes us here and now.

The acceptance of this fact answers why God could permit injustice, suffering and imperfection in the universe. It says they don’t really exist, except as imagined states that our minds make up as a kind of collective and individual hallucinations. We make them up as a kind of belief in lack. We lack health, and must draw it in from the outside. We lack wealth, and must gain that from the outside, too. Our suffering is almost the result of some sort of insufficiency which exists because we have these made-up membranes called skins. Or sometimes, our pain results from something within the membrane –some waste product or negative energy – we feel we must get rid of. But it’s investment in our belief in the boundary itself that causes our suffering. And this belief exists at such a fundamental level that we perceive the boundary as existing on a material level. It seems to have substance, to have a reality independent of ourselves and our minds.

The quote at the top of the post more than suggests that we’ve got it all wrong, and that we don’t have to wait or suffer or earn or merit the infinite. We just have to see things differently, to see reality for what it is. This does require a new decision. And it requires meditation in the sense that meditation is a form of seeing and listening in an entirely new way. It requires us to wake. That’s all that ever needed to change: a new awareness in which we awake from one level of a dream to another, and then another progressively, until the dream is no more. This is all that reality – that the infinite – is. And it’s all around us, right here, right now.

The initial boundary is the membrane by which we define and identify ourselves as individual selves. The ultimate boundary is the one by which we define the cosmos itself. Yet these are more inner boundaries than external ones. The dream we experience, like the dream of sleep, are inward projections. We’re not surrounded by the infinite in a spatial sense, since space, as a physical dimension, is unreal. And we don’t extend into time forever, since time is also unreal. The infinite and the eternal are not physical states. That, in fact, is our whole problem. We so identify with spacetime in a physical sense and define it as our reality that we have a hard time imagining the infinite and the eternal as anything but in concrete terms. And that is on route to transcending the physical limits we’ve imposed upon ourselves and our consciousness: imagining.  Instead, we try to define the limitless, while it transcends definition.   We try to comprehend it, and it can’t be understood rationally. We try to measure it, and by its nature it’s immeasurable. We try to quantify it, and by its very nature it cannot be counted. It represents a qualitative leap beyond the physical dimension, the material realm of space and time.  By all these means and methods, we attempt to access it on our terms and impose conditions upon it, when by its nature and essence it is unconditioned and beyond all terms. Our whole mistake is that we try to contain the uncontainable. That’s what all our boundary drawing and defining and languaging and mathematizing really is: an attempt to possess and control that which can never be and had never has been possessed.

We think we’ve destroyed its innocence by possessing it, and this gives us a false sense of ease because then we don’t feel or deal with the mess of an uncontained love. Yet were innocence capable of being taken or possessed or destroyed, it would never have been innocence to begin with, we only think we’ve contained it through our boxes of space and time. But innocence is eternal and endless and only in a nightmare have we ended it.

What is necessary then? It’s to let go of our perceptions of space and time. Of our mad dreams of war and penury, urging us on to greed and lust and vengeance. It’s too realize that we are, in fact, dreaming.

The only condition is to not impose any conditions, and to accept reality without them, which is to embrace reality without conditions since a boundary is a condition. Since I am conscious, and the only power and reality I have is consciousness, it is to recognize that conscious as an ‘act’ is focus, intention, and concentration. And that by focusing on the limitless, I naturally withdraw my focus on time and space. When I do this, I naturally relinquish my concept of boundaries. I don’t try to change the limits I see about me. I recognize that they are identical with the unbounded reality, that they are coextensive with the limitless.

Boundaries are imagined, and they can be unimagined. Yet it’s important to offer no resistance to the limits I think I see about me, since to realize that they are already identified with the infinite is to transcend them in the here and now, even as a I still see and sense them. It’s not to pretend they’re not there, but to acknowledge them as the infinite, as part of the limitless, with no boundary between experienced entities and the remainder of reality.

When the boundaries fall away, I realize that I’m already in heaven, in paradise, an enlightened being, having attained nirvana along with everyone and everything else. In this way, we’re all saved, all enlightened, al chosen, with no one and nothing left out. No one is cursed. No thing, no place, no time. This is the true meaning of forgiveness. Let’s begin it now.

© 2023 by Michael C. Just