High way to Heaven

"It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle

than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God." 

Matthew 19:24

The way to Heaven, Jesus seems to say, is by a completely mystical path.  Since it is entirely outside our 3D experience, we really have no idea what it is, where it is or actually how to get there.  Yet, the entire point of Jesus' ministry was to point us onto that path. He came to show us the way back to God. It is a mystical journey, not one paved with good deeds.  It is not earned nor achieved.  It is simply found by those who seek it.

While many others have come and gone offering wise and wonderful ways for us to return to God's realm of authentic presence and light, Jesus' teachings are very specific and yet it seems many of us don't understand what He was teaching us.  We try to fit His teaching into our materialistic worldview and when it doesn't seem to fit (which it doesn't) we cast it away or water it down, claiming it is obsolete.  We simply cannot see spiritually when our consciousness is focused outside and away from our inner mind.  We have trained ourselves to succeed in this outer world so well and so thoroughly that many are unable (even unwilling) to redirect their consciousness back into the silent stillness of their inner mind.

In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus advises us to "be passersby," which means exactly what it sounds like.  The holy way calls for total detachment from all snares, dramas and objects of our world. We human beings are like laundry baskets full of dirty laundry, stained from all our busy living that it is next to impossible for us to see clearly in meditation or even live holy lives.  We project our "stuff" onto each other and swear that it's the other person's fault.  Taking responsibility for our own undealt with issues to which we are blind is the first step to cleaning our inner spiritual lens.  Jesus talks about that at great length in scriptures such as "take the log out of your own eye before trying to take it out of your neighbor's," and "let those who have not sinned cast the first stone (of judgment and punishment)."  These themes sparkle with profound wisdom and even modern psychological understanding throughout the gospels.

It seems the worst "sin" of all is that of materialism, the love of wealth.  It is idolatry.  There just isn't any sugar coating it.  You cannot worship God and money (materialism) because the love of money does not want to worship God.  It wants to worship itself.  Our world has been in denial of this fundamental truth.  Greed, selfishness and an impossibly strong attachment to having more and more has locked and chained a rich person to this passing dimension that he is not able to relinquish that attachment, or the myriad of other controlling pride issues that usually goes along with it. 

When materialism becomes your god, then you have bowed down to the golden calf and worshipped matter over spirit.  When God is not at the center of your heart, you are truly powerless and  truly poor.  In the spiritual blindness of that poverty, so many of us seek false idols, like drugs, to fill the empty heart, which can only be filled and fueled by God's power. 

Heaven is a spiritual dimension outside the cosmos, which Stephen Hawking will never find with any telescope. Yet we can find it. We are able to enter it through our spiritual selves in prayer or meditation when we have dropped all our material obsessions. We can only enter when in all sincerity we have set our will to honestly put God first, and when we are genuine in our desire to enter the spiritual path.  By switching our internal channel from materialism, greed, elitism, and even controlling power, and then surrendering to the holy way, we begin to cooperate with God's grace which is always magnetically drawing us deeper into our inner being where we can and will find the way.

I have often thought that beautiful first Christmas in which Christ was born in a humble manger on a cold starlit night was also symbolic of this holy way.  When in the deep, dark manger of our hearts, Christ is born, we have experienced the most beautiful miracle of our lives. When you have let Him in, He will change our tears into light beams of unsurpassing bliss.  He is the king of the way that leads us out of this dark world, as contrasted in the Gospel of Luke, with Herod, Israel's "king" who lead deeper into the lie and illusion.  God's way turns our world upside down.  The less attachment you have to material stuff, the more you are freed up to enter into the unknown, where truth is found.

Lately, as I've heard Christmas advertisements already announcing the upcoming big shopping season, I've heard in my heart the scripture from Matthew 21 in which Jesus tosses the moneychangers out of the temple, adamantly condemning them for making His Father's House a den of thieves. If the Christ light, the presence of God can only be met within the human heart, then the heart is the temple.  It seems clear that Jesus is furious with those who have turned their inner consciousness away from God and are drunk with money and false power. As Christmas is the celebration of both the birth of Christ in a real historical way as well as a mirror of the spiritual birth of Christ into the human heart, it seems our crazed Christmas shopping is like those money changers.  Lately,  I'm increasingly choked up that people would think they could celebrate and honor such a sacred and holy event with any form of materialism.

Rather than worship the god of materialism in the name of Jesus, perhaps we should all go out on Christmas Eve and look up at the stars and hold each other and allow that love to enfold us and fill our hearts with the light of heaven.  That love cannot be bought and sadly any materialism only takes the focus away from the truth.  It's hard enough to be passersby in this highly materialistic world, but to distort the meaning of the birth of Christ even further away from the truth is truly heart breaking.

Seeking the sacred other

Love is the subjective essence of consciousness.  It is the glue that holds people in relationship, connection, with each other, despite distance, through time, even over many years. Love doesn't see age differences, or even physical impairments.  It sees with the heart, blindly, sailing into heights of joy when the other is present. When the essence of the other is not present, the void may become unbearable.  Since nature abhors a vacumm, that void will long to be filled, and if it cannot find its lover, it will seek to be filled by a substitute.  And, that's when the human soul suffices materialism for its sacred other.

There's a term in nutrition called "pica," which is a phenomenon in which a person who is virtually malnourished will crave something unhealthy rather than the nutrient it actually needs.  For example, years ago it was noted that hungry children were craving and eating paint chips, which were full of lead.  They actually were craving lead.  Nutritionalists soon discovered that these malnourished children, who were severely in need of calcium would go into a state of pica and seek out poison rather than the real nutrient.  They weren't craving milk, rather they were craving lead. Often people who need iron, will crave carbohydrates, especially chocolate.  And, everyone's familiar with the diabetic's craving for sugar or alcohol.  

Love is like that.  It longs for that dance of relationship, the sheer bliss of loving another, which is a mere reflection of the divine relationship, but in a world so starved, malnourished for love, the collective human consiousness is now in love starvation and picas for idols of the sacred, for material objects, shiny things that are nothing, but in some twisted, false way feel like an adequate substitute.  After materialism, comes all the other array of earthy illusions: power, and false obsessions of the ego such as elitism, imperialism, all of which only build stronger walls against love.

The sweet tender flame of love eternally stands humbly before the darkness of the cosmos, and waits. Inextinguishable, yet cast against the dark tapestry of our age, it waits forever, hoping and believing that in the end, humanity will remember that only by its light will he find his way back to his true self, his true essence and cast away the idols of earth's illusions and settle for nothing less than true love's presence and embrace.