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HEAVEN ON EARTH: a Different Perspective, Part 1

Joseph Mancini, Jr.

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What, then, are the implications of the notion of Heaven on Earth as Transfiguration?  Five are at the top of the list.

      1.  The Body is Sacred because it is God’s Human expression—it is God.  For centuries most established religions have denied the essential Divinity of the Body or at least have seen the Body as simply the limiting and therefore suffering “garment” that the Soul takes on and inhabits and that is to be ultimately discarded—good riddance!  Christianity is well known for its disdain for the Body and its essential sinfulness to be redeemed fully only in the End Time.  Even when it contradictorily describes the Body as a “temple” for the Soul, the image connotes separation of the Body from the Soul.  When I was a boy growing up Catholic, I was nonplussed when a girl friend told me a nun had told her to have a rose beside her when she took a bath and to look at the rose instead of her Body—with the contradictory implication that one aspect of creation was way more worthy of appreciation than another!  (If the nun were correct, I wondered how it could be an article of faith that Mary was bodily assumed into Heaven as was Christ, who, in spirit after death, appeared in the body so that a disciple could put his hand into Christ’s wounds from the Crucifixion.) Even the Buddhist perspective falls into this dissociation, this dualism, when it overemphasizes the leaving of the round of karmic existences at the expense of honoring the karmic learnings of earthly, bodily experience.   As Andrew Harvey, in delineating his notion of "embodied mysticism" in his newest book, The Hope: A Guide to Sacred Activism, says, "Our inability to bless our own holiness, to see the infinite beauty of our own and others' bodies...has blinded us to the Light that lives in each of our cells and in each being and thing that surrounds us" (p. 149).

      One of my favorite films, City of Angels, addresses this dualism directly.  In the film, Meg Ryan, playing a doctor who is distressed at the loss of a patient, is attended to by an Angel played by Nicholas Cage.  During the course of the film, the Angel clearly falls in love with the doctor and suffers the dilemma of bridging the alleged Human/Spirit boundary.  With the help of another Angel, whom he suddenly discovers in Human form in the hospital and who is happily dying from an excess of indulgent behavior, he realizes that intense desire and intention will make him Human.  In a brilliant scene, the Angel stands on top of a girder at a construction site and chooses to fall off the girder and lands a few feet down, only to become ecstatic at being seen by astonished workers, at the blood trickling from his mouth, and at the pain coursing through his fallen body.  This process is clearly meant as a reversal of the Biblical Fall out of grace into the pain and discomfort of the merely Human.  Instead, the Angel falls into the grace that is Human life.  This hunger of Spirit for the Human expression of Itself is equal to the hunger of the Human for Its Divine expression.  And so, when the doctor, soon after they meet in the flesh, is killed in a bicycle accident as she literally shows her Angelic aspect—“taking wing” with arms outstretched on her bike—the Angel/Human experiences the depths of love through loss, the other side of the depths of love through embrace.  Both the Angel/Human and the Human/Angel experience Transfiguration, the Human and Angelic in each being contained and illuminated by one another.

      2.  If All That Is is truly All That Is, then nothing is truly separate from All That Is, including all that is considered darkness and illusion.  In another attempt at dealing with the alleged Heaven/Earth split, some suggest that the Body of the Earth and the Bodies of its inhabitants are Darkness, no more than an Illusion; thus, in that view, all that really exists is Heaven as distinct from Earth, which will ultimately fade away since it was never real anyway.  Another, similar argument is that all separation is an illusion; that there is only Oneness, that every Spirit, at least—forget the Body!—is actually, essentially One with all Others.

      Yet, even if the Body (separation) is really illusory, where did the capacity for Illusion come from?  D.T. Suzuki, in his charming little book, The Field of Zen, suggests an answer: that facility comes from the Divine Itself; in fact the ability to create illusion of any kind, including that of separation from the Divine, is an indispensable aspect of the Divine; without it, the Divine could not be conscious of Itself, and thus could not fully be Itself.  For consciousness of self depends on there being subject and object, an apparent separation; there has to be something conscious and something to be conscious of.  With regard to the Divine, this is a truly revolutionary concept.  So, by “pretending” a dimension of Itself is “not-God,” the Divine sets up a mirror, the “not-God” that seems to be separate from Itself.

“God now sees himself in the mirror of “the ten thousand things” (p.30),

says Suzuki.  (The “ten thousand things,” of course, includes, not only our current home and Human life, but all kinds of entities, universes, dimensions, etc.; what I say in the rest of the essay pertains primarily to Human life, but may well be relevant to all of the Multiverse and beyond.)  All of Creation, which is actually God in the darkness of camouflage, reflects the Divine back to Itself so It can perceive Itself.

In Suzuki’s own words,

“God becoming conscious of Himself was the movement by which the world

came into existence, but at the same time the world went back into him” (p. 17).

So, it is not just the capacity to create illusion that is Divine; the Divine is also the Illusion/Creation Itself.

“By creating the world, God became God (p. 16).

“There is constant communion and at the same time constant differentiation

[between the Creation and God].  There are two things, and at the same time

one thing.  Two are not two, two are one, one is two” (p. 16).

      Thus the “illusion” of separation is absolutely essential to the oneness; one cannot exist without the other, for each is as “real” as the other and contained in the other, as is imaged, for instance, in the Yin/Yang symbol Oneness is then also mutuality, not just sameness.

 As Suzuki notes,

“On the spiritual plane it is just one movement of going-out-and-coming-back,

not two…God goes back into Himself as He goes out, and this one movement

is enlightenment” (p. 18).

“When this seeing each other, not just from one side alone but from the other side as well;

when this kind of seeing actually takes place, there is a state of satori” (p.23).

This is what Suzuki calls also enlightenment, mutuality, co-responding.  When we experience this in ourselves on the Earth, when we pretend to separate the Divine from ourselves and thus set up a mirror so we can become conscious of our own Divinity, we can call that also Transfiguration and Heaven on Earth—the Divine sees Itself in us simultaneously as we see ourselves in It.

      We can find a similar perspective in the writings of some others.  For instance, God, in Neale Donald Walsch’s Conversations with God, I, says,

“My divine purpose in dividing Me was to create sufficient parts of Me

so that I could know Myself experientially…My purpose in creating you,

My spiritual offspring, was for Me to know Myself as God.  I have no

way to do that save through you…[and my purpose] for you is that you

should know yourself as Me.  “…our essence is the same…

We ARE the ‘same stuff’!”( pp. 25-26).

Seth, the “energy personality essence” channeled by Jane Roberts, gives a comparable account of the creation of the world in Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment, pp. 127-131). Elsewhere, he goes on to say in his typically exuberant manner,

“If All That Is didn’t want appearances, we wouldn’t experience any!

Yet appearances, the gurus say, are untruths, changing and therefore false.

Is my body an appearance, hence an untruth amid the truth, which is changeless?

Ah, dear body, then, how lovely and blessed your untruth, which is sensate

and feels desire through the hollowest of bones…The body’s untruth, then,

is holier than all truths, and if the body is an untruth then I hereby proclaim

untruth, and truth and all the guru’s truths as lies.

God knows itself through the flesh.  God may know itself through a

million or a thousand million other worlds, as so may I—but because this world is,

and because I am alive in it, it is more than appearance, more than a shackle

to be thrown aside.  It is a privilege to be here, to look out with this unique

focus, with these individuals eyes; not to be blinded by cosmic vision, but to

see this corner of reality which I form through the miraculous connections

of soul and flesh.” (The Unknown Reality, II, p. 697).

Continue to Part 2