Love Is All That’s Real
There is a widespread belief that December 21, 2012 was predicted by the Mayan calendar to be the “end of the world.” Mayan scholars say, however, that it was not the end of the world that was predicted. Instead, it was the end of the world as we know it – in other words, a shift of perception. What does that look like? We are given a hint in two bestselling books, both by highly credentialed doctors who had near death experiences (NDE)and lived to share what happened when they left their bodies: Proof of Heaven by Dr. Eben Alexander* and To Heaven and Back by Dr. Mary Neal
When they left their bodies, both of them had very similar experiences that are in alignment with many other documented stories of people from all ages, all religions and all walks of life who also experienced an NDE: they found themselves in a place that was more beautiful than anything they had ever known; the light was incredibly nourishing; and they experienced the most intense love they had ever known. Most people didn’t want to come back when they were told it wasn’t their time.
Eben Alexander was a neurosurgeon, a highly trained scientist and a self-described skeptic until his NDE. Describing what unfolded while he was in a coma, he takes it one step further than most accounts. He says that most people think of heaven as being someplace else. Instead, he says that heaven is right here right now. Even science supports this when it says that everything is energy (Einstein) and everything is made out of light (David Bohm, grandfather of Quantum Physics)! Eben suggests that most of us don’t experience this energetic world of light that is everything because our senses are not advanced enough. I thought about that for a while and realized that, for me, this isn’t true.
Our main sensing ability for that which Eben is calling “heaven” is our hearts. When we were very young, our hearts were completely open, so we experienced the magic and beauty that he is calling “heaven.” If you spend any amount of time around a very young child you will see this. But for most of us our hearts were bruised and abandoned in our early life, so they closed down. That doesn’t mean that “heaven” went away or that we lost the ability to see it. It means that the truth of what is and always has been right here right now is obscured by our mental conditioning. I describe this in my new book, What’s in the Way IS the Way, using the metaphor of a meadow. The spaciousness and wonder you lived in when you were very young was like a beautiful meadow. Then, slowly but surely, the thoughts in your mind began to lower and swirl around your head like clouds until all you could see were the clouds of your own mind. The truth is, you never left the meadow! You just can’t see it through the thought-clouds in your mind!
Eben goes onto say that the core thing he recognized during his coma was: “Love is the reality of realities, the incomprehensibly glorious truth of truths that lives and breathes at the core of everything that exists or that ever will exist, and no remotely accurate understanding of who and what we are can be achieved by anyone who does not know it and embody it in all of their actions.”
How do we recognize and live from this place (the meadow} again? How do we release the walls around our hearts so that we can recognize the truth of Love? It is not by trying to get back to the meadow. That is only more of the clouds of our mind. We rediscover the meadow again by learning how to see and LOVE all of the stories, judgments, and struggles in our minds – the cloud bank that causes us to not recognize the meadow of Love that is here right now. And that is what What’s in the Way IS the Way is all about!
*Dr. Alexander will be interviewed by Oprah on her Super Soul Sunday on December 2.