Eden, Heaven and Hell

This evolved from a post on a Christian-Buddhist list discussing the nature of Heaven according to Christian mystics. Finding the common ground of historical messiahs and teachers in the common ground of human nature fascinates me.

You express the concept well. And that is apropos from where I stand as I see the ability to conceive, and communicate the resulting concepts, as both the apple itself and as the result of biting it.

The sparrow lives in Eden and has never left it. It does so by attending to to the needs of the moment according to its nature, the plan you speak of. It does not imagine the future in place of reality. The sparrow feeds its chicks and so enters Heaven.

We are given a mind which can imagine futures and relive versions of the past, which can exaggerate our worst fears and built fantastic model realities around them, which can shut out the glory of what is in favor of the fear of what might be. What more intensive hell could exist than the one we each build around our own secret nightmares?

Likewise, there is heaven in serenity. No need to predict an afterlife - we can live in the moment free of the legacy of the apple and see what death brings when we die. Resisting sensual distraction is an early step - later comes accepting sensual input without becoming engrossed with it. The Kingdom of Heaven is all around us - it is us. The Gift is what is right now - sin is ignoring it in favor of what we arrogantly think should be, what we neurotically fear will be, what we thanklessly insist was better.

We build these Rube Goldberg realities in out minds and then fritter away our entire lives struggling to force reality to fit the molds we have crafted. Hell is realizing that ice cream, sex, romance, cruises, intoxication, status, academia, control and prime time TV are empty pursuits. Grace is discovering they are unnecessary.

 In tradition after tradition, the lesson has been to step back from the insanity of living in a world created from conceptual thought. That we do have such a capability is right and normal - it is human. That we become enmeshed to the point that we forget it is just perspective is a downfall of the ability. The traditions are all built around the teachings of someone who saw this clearly and felt impelled to pass that discovery on to others.

To see for yourself, experience what is - like the sparrow.

D