Hello,
I am Don Joseph Gohe and the title of this talk is,
What if we are already in Heaven and don't know it?
It's a curious idea for sure,
One I would have laughed at before I had witnessed it with my own eyes.
Like so many people,
I was too afraid of the world,
Too angry with it,
Too caught up in trying to prove myself to the world,
Too self-condemning,
To see through the world's imperious illusion,
That block the divine grace,
That the mystics say can burn down the whole illusory world to the ground to unveil the kingdom of joy,
As Christ called it,
Which he said we have been living in all along,
Albeit unsuspectingly,
Which is another curious idea.
So let's take a look at this.
The Jesuit mystic Anthony DeMello says,
Life is a banquet,
And the tragedy is that most people are starving to death.
He cites an account about a group of shipwrecked people who were on a raft off the coast of Brazil,
Dying of thirst.
They had no idea that the water they were floating on was fresh water.
The river was flowing out of the jungle into the sea with such force that it flowed out for a couple of miles.
Fresh water was right there,
But they had no idea.
DeMello says that in the same way,
Within us and surrounding us is a reality of joy and happiness,
A reality of love and beauty and freedom,
Expressing the divine that lives in you,
As you,
With the creative power,
Energy,
And adventurous spirit,
To live a rich and meaningful life.
All the great mystics say the same thing,
But most people have no idea of this whatsoever.
So why not?
If you've listened to my other recordings,
You've heard me say this before,
And it bears repeating.
It is because our beautiful God-given nature and the beautiful reality that surrounds it have been trampled on by our culture beyond all recognition.
Our culture has trained us to want something other than our given nature.
We have been trained to value things more,
Meaning money,
Power,
Possessions,
Social status,
The acceptance and approval of other people.
We have been trained to believe that without this or that thing or person or outcome,
We cannot be happy or fulfilled.
We are programmed to regard fulfillment and self-worth not as inherent traits that our spiritual DNA naturally expresses,
But as something we acquire by making a success of ourselves as defined by society's criteria.
The neurological effect of this conditioning is that it amplifies activity in the brain's fear center called the amygdala,
Wiring us for fear,
Stress,
And shame reactions,
Plaguing us with the fear of failing,
Even as we are succeeding,
Beneath which is the fear that we are not good enough and will never measure up.
It turns us into neurotics,
With weird ideas about love and relationships,
About success and failure,
About right and wrong,
About virtually everything.
We are programmed to always look outside ourselves for the happiness and self-esteem we already have.
This conditioning is so pervasive in our culture that no one even questions it.
There is another kind of conditioning that also tramples on our God-given nature.
It's called childhood trauma.
The amygdala,
Again the brain's fear center,
Is a storehouse of traumatic memories that can cause the amygdala to be hyperactive throughout life,
Producing a more stressful,
Anxious,
Reactive way of relating to the world,
Perceiving and reacting to threats that more often than not are not there.
The amygdala is associative,
Meaning that it is looking for any match between a past trauma and what's happening right now.
It confuses the past for the present and projects that into how it sees the future,
In the form of worry.
When you are caught in the past,
You become depressed.
When you look to the future,
You become anxious.
These knee-jerk reactions are hard to stop because childhood trauma impairs the brain's inhibitory control circuits that,
In a healthy brain,
Suppress the amygdala just long enough to let you reconsider reacting.
As a result of our cultural conditioning and whatever childhood trauma we suffered,
We are likely to grow up feeling unwelcomed and unsafe in the world,
Even if in reality we are basically safe and accepted.
This produces an angry and aggressive or depressed and withdrawn adult,
Both of which,
At one point in my life,
Described me.
Of course,
I was indoctrinated by my culture to seek happiness and esteem outside myself,
And I was also raised by a stepfather who was violent and abusive,
And hell-bent on destroying my self-esteem.
The mantra my stepfather drilled into my brain was,
You turn gold to shit,
Excuse the four-letter word.
My stepfather must have said that to me a thousand times,
And it wired into my brain as my self-concept.
As a child,
Whenever my stepfather was in a bad mood,
Which was often,
My amygdala would go into flight mode,
And I'd hide under my bed.
As I grew into an adult,
My amygdala shifted to fight mode.
I became the proverbial angry young man,
Which is hardly the inner condition for seeing through to the kingdom of joy,
To say the least,
Let alone believing it was even there.
At least until,
Without me doing anything to deserve it,
The veil lifted.
So let's get to that.
Of course,
The mess my fear center made of me was not the whole story.
It never is,
For any of us,
Not even for someone like my stepfather.
Along with my hyper-amygdala,
I had a good heart,
A spiritual heart,
Humble enough to recognize when I'd behave badly,
To be accountable for it,
And to ask to be forgiven.
And the generous people in my life did forgive me,
Although often it was only me who had trouble forgiving myself.
So at any rate,
That was me,
A sort of Dr.
Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde.
Yet despite the inner and outer conflict,
I felt a mysterious grace surrounding me,
Working on my behalf.
This feeling of grace surrounding me wasn't anything I'd developed,
Such as through a spiritual practice.
It was just a force that was there,
And that had been there ever since childhood,
Showing me the way.
The closest description I have for it is from a poem by Kabir.
Here's how the poem goes.
Hiding in this cage,
A visible matter,
Is the invisible life bird.
Pay attention to her.
She is singing your song.
That's how grace felt to me,
As a loving spirit singing my song that I had forgotten,
Helping me remember it.
Then one day,
Grace did something for me that was wholly unexpected.
It burned down to the ground the whole of the illusory world I had subjugated myself to,
And lifted the veil blocking the kingdom of joy.
It was on a cold day when I was walking with two friends along a creek out in nature,
And at one point the path narrowed,
So we had to walk single file,
And I'd fallen far behind my friends.
Then,
All at once,
Without me doing or thinking anything,
Really out of nothing,
Grace entered my experience and I was transported to a quiet that covered everything.
The world and its noise went absolutely silent,
Including the rushing sound of the creek.
I have tinnitus in my left ear as a result of brain surgery I had years before,
And it rings constantly like the radio noise between stations,
But during this interval,
Out of mind,
Out of time,
Even the ringing of the tinnitus stopped.
Suddenly I was in another world.
I was in the same place,
But the place was in another world entirely.
It was a softer world of absolute stillness.
I felt absolutely free in a spaciousness as big as the sky.
In fact,
I was the sky,
And the sky was me.
It was the same with everything around me.
I felt at one with everything.
There was no separation at all.
The world I was used to,
The world of struggle,
Was gone.
I was in a reality where all was well.
Well being radiated in me and around me,
Permeating everything,
And my heart greeted it all with the wonder and the innocence of a child.
The silt-like stuff of thoughts on top of thoughts that a moment before had clouded my mind had all settled to the bottom,
And my mind was suddenly crystal clear.
I can't say how long the experience lasted because it was out of time,
But it was long enough to imprint on me.
Eventually one of my friends up ahead called to me to catch up,
And the experience receded.
I was back in the world more or less,
But something had unmistakably changed in me.
I thought at first that this was the big enlightenment,
But it wasn't.
Later when I tried to invoke the experience,
I couldn't do it.
But it was an intervention of grace for sure,
The kind of grace I'd been talking about.
To put it in terms of what I have been presenting,
Grace lifted me out of my program conditioning and set me down in the fullness of the reality it blocked.
If there was a point to it,
And I don't know that there was,
It was to realize my own immeasurable worth as a human being that I share with every human being,
And to see the beauty surrounding me and value it more than I had.
Anne Lamont writes,
I do not at all understand the mystery of grace,
Only that it meets us where we are,
But does not leave us where it found us.
That was true of what this experience did for me.
It opened me up.
Afterwards I began remembering times when I experienced what can be called enlightened moments.
Not the inexpressible peace and joy I experienced on that path along that creek,
But simple moments of ordinary happiness,
Moments of realizing how sweet life really is.
Like the time sitting in the living room,
Listening to the sound of my wife preparing dinner in the kitchen,
Loving her,
Cherishing our life together,
And appreciating the warmth and charm of the home we created together.
In that moment I was filled with gratitude for how blessed I was.
It was so real that I could see nothing in my life to find fault with or to complain about.
Is there any better definition of enlightenment?
It amazed me to feel that way given my old tendency to complain about even the smallest of matters.
I recalled another time when I was standing in the checkout line behind a mother with her baby strapped in in front and a baby carrier,
When the baby looked over at me and smiled at me sweetly,
And of course I smiled back.
My broad smile made the baby boy laugh,
And his laugh made me laugh,
It was so contagious.
It was joyful and it lit up the child in me,
And as I left the store I wondered if I had just had an audience with the Buddha.
There was another time,
Out in point rays on the California coast,
When I awoke just before dawn and stood at a big picture window looking out towards Tomales Bay,
Watching the dawning of the day.
It was glorious,
The way the first light entered the dark of night,
Turning it to mist,
The changed in color to a sort of watercolor lavender,
And as the sun rose higher,
How its golden glow took hold and warmed away the mist,
Till just a slender veil remained that the world of form bled through,
Shimmering in a kind of afterbirth of dew.
And for the first time I understood what the Buddhists mean when they say that everything comes out of emptiness.
I also had the feeling that nature was inviting me to make this moment conscious,
And so I wrote a poem about it.
Memories of such moments kept rolling in,
And I began to see that I was living in a world of joy,
Every day.
I was surrounded by it.
It wasn't that I was awake to it every moment,
But certainly it was inviting me to wake up to it every moment.
So let's bring you into this.
I invite you to recall a time that perhaps lasted a minute,
When Grace paid you a visit,
And enlightened you for a moment,
And that during that moment nothing came to interrupt your peace or your joy.
For that moment,
All was well,
And if you can't remember such a moment,
Imagine it.
Experience how quiet and at ease your mind becomes,
How expansive you feel,
And how clear and present you are.
Now imagine that that moment grows until it envelops you.
Such moments give us a hint of what it would be like to be free of the illusions that a fear-conditioned brain generates.
Without these illusions there'd be no fear,
No stress,
No doubt.
There'd be nothing to prove,
Nothing to attack or defend.
In the quiet of the present moment,
The false image of yourself would fade,
The image of a threatening world would fade,
Your fear of failure would fade,
And what would take its place is the happiness you experience right here,
Right now,
When you are not afraid of anything.
That is what I think of as the Kingdom of Joy.
