Keys to the Garden.

The difference between everyday living and in living in ….moments of ecstasy is the difference between being outside and inside the Garden

Joseph Campbell

The mystics from nearly every faith tradition tell us that heaven on earth is all around us and always has been.  We can see it, they say, when we awaken from our habitual absorption in self-centered fantasy and begin to experience the world as it really is.  Four steps can achieve this awakened perception:

• Stop thinking---it’s not that hard for a few minutes.
• Heighten awareness---as if there were a lion prowling outside your house and all your senses were acutely intensified
• Experience the world exactly as it is---to see, touch, and listen in an intensely sensory way
• Come into the divine Presence---that is, become consciousness of consciousness itself, for pure consciousness (cleanse of mind, time and self) is, in fact, divine consciousness 

Achieving these simple shifts in consciousness allows one to move from conceptual to perceptual awareness, that is, from a subjective world created by thought and imagination (variously called maya, delusion, or psychological projection) to a pristine, timeless, infinitely beautiful, precious and joyful, loving and holy Reality all around us. 

When you examine anything with this kind of intense and purified consciousness, you begin to notice exquisite dimensions of light, color, texture, and form overlooked in our customary impatient and egocentric awareness.  In fact, you are looking directly into heaven on earth:  the ordinary world transfigured by mystical consciousness into divinity itself.  In this way, even problems and emotional distress become doorways into the divine world.

John Robinson