Heaven on Earth

Heaven on Earth:

A Different Perspective*

Joseph Mancini, Jr.

The notion of Heaven on Earth is hardly new, but it has been gaining a new momentum during the past decade or so. More and more Lightworkers -- those individuals who consciously seek to bring Light to the Planet, to raise the vibration of Earthly life -- are talking about such an event occurring in the not-too-distant future.

But what does Heaven on Earth actually mean? For some cultures, it suggests that which may follow an apocalyptic period, an end time, a cosmic purification: the coming of a New Age of love and wellbeing throughout the Earth's populations. For instance, according to the Hopi, we are nearing the end of the Fourth World with the same highly destructive disconnection from Mother Earth that humanity experienced at the end of the first three Worlds. As before, humans will have another chance to get it right, this time at the beginning of the Fifth World. Similarly, while some students of the Mayan prophecies that are coming to fulfillment probably at the end of 2012 envision a complete destruction of the Earth, others suggest that what will occur is more like a radical change in consciousness. This is conceived as a movement totally away from a denser frequency very little regarded toward a higher frequency of being that will be the tipping point for a rejuvenation of the Earth and its residents. Likewise, many of the more recent regression subjects of world-renowned hypnotherapist Dolores Cannon have told of a New Earth in a new dimension that will accommodate those who have moved to a higher, more loving frequency while the Old Earth will still be populated with those with denser energies.

However different these and other descriptions of Heaven on Earth are from one another, each suggests that change is leaving behind the old, a movement mostly away from that which has been. Such change can be clarified by looking more closely at certain words that have been used to label it. One of these words is transmutation, which may be defined as a change from one essence or substance to another. This is what the Alchemists tried to achieve in changing base metal into gold. Another change-word is transformation, which is change in structure, form, or arrangement, rather than in essence. This is the change that water goes through as it moves from a gas to a liquid to a solid, while remaining H20. Still another pertinent word is derived from Roman Catholic theology: transubstantiation, which is a change of essence without a change in outward appearance. In the Catholic liturgy, bread and wine do not lose their identifying appearance, yet their essences are believed to change into the Body and Blood of Christ.

Any of the change-words discussed above, in one manner or another, may be used to describe the shift from the present situation to Heaven on Earth as conceived by, among others, the Hopis, the interpreters of the Mayan prophecies, and the visionaries speaking to Dolores Cannon. But there is another change-word that may provide a different understanding of Heaven on Earth. This word, transfiguration, also comes from a Christian Source. In Matthew 17:1-9, Mark 9:2-8, and Luke 9:28-36 (and in the Synoptic Gospels, 2 Peter 1:16-18 and John 1:14), Christ goes to a mountain with Apostles Peter, James and John; there he becomes transfigured, "radiant," "glorified" before them while speaking with Moses and Elijah.

What, then, does it mean to become transfigured and therefore radiant (luminous, shining, beaming, bright, brilliant, glowing)? What is suggested, I believe, is that Christ's hypostatic union of two complete natures, Human and Divine, in one person is fully manifested to the awestruck disciples. This union is very high frequency -- hence the radiance -- and is generally considered beyond merely Human understanding (though not beyond Human experience). In fact, "union" is probably an inadequate and dualistic description; it may be more to the point to see this phenomenon as the simultaneous presence of what appear to be two separate frequencies, but which are ultimately inescapably interdependent. One could say also that the Human and Divine are really two versions of the very same thing, much as a photon, which is a measure of light, is simultaneously both a particle (something localized) and a wave (that which is diffused). In our merely Human apprehension, we can, as Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle posits, perceive usually only one of the aspects of our beingness at a time and so falsely see them as totally separate. Nevertheless, during the process of transfiguration, in the glowing forth of our true multidimensional beingness, we apprehend our own, hypostatic Christ Consciousness.

Transfiguration, then, may be more akin to the true meaning of Heaven on Earth. In this conceptualization, Earth IS Heaven, though not to us until we realize Earth to be what it has always been and always will be. Here is where the notion of change according to Gestalt Therapy is pertinent: the Gestalt therapists believe that an individual changes not by becoming someone new, but rather by becoming, showing forth, manifesting, making luminous more of who he or she already is. Thus, in contrast to the other notions of Heaven on Earth mentioned above, the change that is Transfiguration is not a leaving behind of anything, but rather a fulfillment, a thorough realization of that which is now. A kindred view is found in one of the Buddhist scriptures, where the Blessed One is asked where does one go to seek Nirvana; in answering, the Blessed One details the rising of the soul through a hierarchy of heavens, at the pinnacle of which, the soul begins the descent back down through the heavens to arrive where it had first embarked on its journey: Nirvana is here, now, in the flesh illuminated by high consciousness. Similarly, in "Little Gidding" (the last of Four Quartets), T.S. Eliot writes, "We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time" (p. 59). And, as Immanuel says through Pat Rodegast, "The human condition is not the antithesis of heaven./It is the reproduction, within a limited vision,/manifest in physical form./There is nothing in human experience/that does not exist in spirit" (Book I, p. 4).

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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.

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 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).

3. Illusion and Darkness are indispensable to the development of Human and Divine Consciousness. I want to elaborate further on what I have said above: if the "illusions" of separation, darkness and the material body/world are an indispensable aspect of the Divine -- the way the Divine becomes the Divine, that is, becomes conscious of Itself -- then, when we ourselves properly use separation, darkness, and the material body/world, we, too, become conscious of who we really are: "You are a god living a life -- being, desiring, creating," says Seth. "Through honoring yourself, you honor whatever it is God is, and become a conscious co-creator."

This is what Job found out many centuries ago. At the beginning of the

Biblical Book of Job, God and Satan establish a wager: God bets that his humble and devout servant, Job, will not curse Him if Satan is allowed to bring all manner of horrifying situations down upon the man; Satan thinks otherwise. So, Satan brings major calamities to Job, including the brutal deaths of his children, thereby reducing him almost to despair. In hauntingly beautiful poetry, Job laments his dire losses, especially since he cannot understand why God would allow such a thing to happen when Job has been so pious, always doing the right thing.

In turn, three men known as "comforters" come to Job and basically tell him that he must have sinned in the conventional way because God would not otherwise do such a thing to him. But he rejects them all and virtually demands that God show Himself and give an accounting of the matter. To Job, the situation is becoming very grey, not black and white. Finally, God comes out of the whirlwind and seems to put Job in his place, asking him where he was when God created the world, complete with Leviathan and other gargantuan monsters. In response, Job drops to his knees and says, "I have heard of Thee, but now I know Thee." Yet, God then mysteriously directs anger at the "comforters" who have not spoken truthfully about Him, and praises Job for speaking the truth.

What is going on here? If we see God and Satan not as separate beings, but rather as two aspects of the same Entity, then we see that Entity working through man to understand Itself. As Anwan, channeled through Christine Breese in Reclaiming the Shadow Self, says, "If you find yourself fighting with someone, realize that God is experiencing through the other person as well. God is fighting with himself" (p. 253). In other words, says Anwan, "The opposing forces are both God, not just one or the other. God is not just the light. The darkness is God too" (p. 247). So, as Job struggles with the comforters and, ultimately, with God Himself, this contest reflects the challenge set by the Light and Dark sides of God. What Job -- and God Himself (in His pretense) -- is not aware of at first is God's Dark -- that is, Unknown -- side represented by Satan. When Job demands that God address him and explain Himself, God is freed from being stereotyped as merely Light and is then able to claim and display His Darkness in the form of the monsters of the deep. In his unwillingness to give in to despair and curse God, Job somehow knew that there was something more to God than the one-sided version promoted by the comforters. At the end of the story, Satan does not appear as a separate being, for God now implicitly owns and embraces His own Darkness. So, too, does Job; for his only sin was in not sinning, in not seeing that one-sided perfection is incompleteness and not God-like. To be an image of God is to be both Light and Dark. So, the Divine needed the Human to know Itself, and the Human needed to know its Divine face and essence. Once again, we have Heaven on Earth as Job and the Divine together experience a moment of epiphany, of co-creation, of Transfiguration.

4. What we call Illusion and Darkness are necessary to our own and God's exercise of free will and the recognition of Heaven on Earth. Since All That Is is all that is ("I am that I am"), if it stayed in that state, there could be nothing outside Itself by which It could become conscious of Itself. So, All That Is has to pretend to forget some of Itself, an aspect, as noted above, that becomes a mirror in which All That Is sees Itself. As Suzuki notes, "The godhead ceased to be the Godhead [in the creation of "the ten thousand things'] in order to be himself (p. 33)." In doing so, however, the Divine changes through expansion; for each aspect of creation, in mirroring back the Divine what It is, does so through manifesting and exploring in its unique way one or more of the infinite, seemingly latent possibilities of All That Is. This is the central paradox of the Divine: It is simultaneously all that It could ever be, and It is also constantly expanding/changing. So the pretense of forgetting Itself through the Creation allows All That Is to have the free will to discover Itself by in turn granting free will to Its Creation (Its camouflaged Self) to be all that It can be. There can be no free will without "room" to maneuver. There can be no true discovery, no real expansion, unless there is free will to examine and experience all possibilities. Thus, when All That Is remembers Itself, It discovers more of Itself because of the exploration of Itself during the forgetting and remembering of Itself. Through creating the world by forgetting Itself, All That Is, as the Gestaltists say, becomes more and more conscious of what It already Is.

Since we are aspects of All That Is, we experience the same kind of forgetting of our Divinity in order to remember more of who we already are. As Walsch's God notes, "...there is only one way for you to know yourself as Me, and that is for you first to know yourself as not Me." (p. 26). Walsch's The Little Soul and the Sun illustrates this process quite well. At the beginning of this tale, the Little Soul, imaged as a boy, wants not merely to know he is the Light, but rather to experience himself as the Light, especially that part of it called "forgiveness." When God tells him that the only way to do that is to experience also Darkness ("forgetting" that he is also the Light) for contrast, the Little Soul is eager to do so, but can only see Light Beings around him. Fortunately for him, the Friendly Soul, imaged as a girl, steps forward to offer her assistance. Noting that they have already worked together to experience many complementary aspects of life, she offers to incarnate with him, become very dark and do something really nasty to him so he can experience forgiving. Immanuel's words provide a gloss here:

"The separation from God began a journey of love. The individuating consciousness seeks, through the experience of Human reality, to know itself fully and completely so that it can return to the Oneness with a greater light and a greater understanding. This adds to the reality of the Oneness for all things are in a state of continual expansion and creation" (p. 39).

So the Little Soul is exuberant at the prospect of experiencing forgiveness, rather than just knowing it. However, the Friendly Soul warns that she may create so much darkness in order to do this task that she and he may thoroughly forget who they really are and will need someone else to come along and reveal their multi-dimensional nature. She seems to be worried about the possibility that Transfiguration and the recognition of Heaven on Earth will not occur, that the process of using darkness and illusion to reveal the Divine where it seems not to be will go awry. Here is where Lightworkers might well intervene.

5. In order to fulfill their mission as powerfully as they can, Lightworkers must understand the true nature of Heaven on Earth, that is, of Transfiguration. Everyone and everything in all creation is ultimately a Lightworker, revealing the Darkness as Light in very small to very large ways, in ways seen and unseen by others. However, those whom I am referring to here are the ones who see themselves as knowingly and explicitly bringing Light to the Earth plane by helping individuals raise their frequency, i.e., their consciousness. To avoid getting lost in the Darkness as the Friendly Soul feared, these conscious Lightworkers may find it essential to experience Transfiguration themselves. This notion is more than is expressed in Abraham-Hicks' view of experiencing darkness as a necessary contrast by which we realize what we really want. More important, it is about revealing the Darkness as an indispensable, necessary aspect of the Light. Three issues often get in the way of this process: 1) Many do not want to be here on Earth, do not want to be embodied. 2) Quite a few insist on being the "Good Ones" in contrast to the "Bad Ones." 3) Because of that refusal to embrace Human life and the Bad Ones, many do not know how to handle the power that they summon within themselves.

Over the past two years in my Spiritual Hypnotherapy practice, I have found that some Lightworkers who consciously want to bring Light to the Earth simply do not want to be here. While this is a small subset of all Lightworkers, nevertheless, they exhibit a trend that may well be pervasive among the larger population. I am not talking about their having suicidal ideation; I am referring, instead, to a common sense of not belonging here and not wanting to belong here. Although many of these individuals recalled having significant psychic experiences in their present lives, they either did not understand them, did not know how to develop and use them, or did not like them because of the fear and pain these phenomena produced for the individuals. Usually after about a half hour or so of doing the initial intake, I would gently ask the person, "You don't want to be here, do you?" and, invariably, they would say, "No, I do not!" Then I would hear about the individual's never quite feeling at home on the Earth, never really fitting in anywhere, and having ambivalence about all of that. On the one hand, the pain of not being like others, of having experiences that might seem "weird," could be excruciating; on the other, the alienation might be welcomed as the cost of being oneself.

Digging deeper into this phenomenon, I found that many experienced the Body as confining, restrictive, very heavy and dense, and even downright "icky," as one young woman put it. Quite a few exhibited physical problems that inhibited either mobility or other abilities. When I would take such individuals back into past lives to find out the source of their rejection of and sometimes repugnance to Human life, variations of two scenarios would usually appear; some had endured being ostracized, tortured and even murdered for being different, almost always in Spiritual matters. Others discovered past lives on other planets with less of the "icky," dense materiality. Nevertheless, however reluctantly, all had chosen to come back at this time of major change in the energy of the Earth and its inhabitants, both for their own benefit and that of other beings.

The fundamental obstacle to achieving their mission of Light-bringing is their reluctance or refusal to be here fully, that is, to be completely embodied, to be grounded in Human life, to experience Transfiguration and therefore Heaven on Earth. Most of these would-be Lightworkers still see materiality as mere darkness and illusion that must be shuffled off for the Light to shine. But, as I have argued above, this perspective is just the opposite of what it needs to be to complete their mission of revealing Light especially where it seems not to be. Immanuel, notes, "It is within your Humanity that you will learn to recognize your divinity....There is Divinity in all things and in order to find that Divinity one must work with the material at hand" (p.4). And I contend that that material is an aspect of the Divine Itself, which, when revealed as such, is the revelation of Heaven on Earth!

Heaven on Earth as Transfiguration, the showing forth of the Divine and the Human as two aspects of the same reality, is, I believe, the core mission of all Lightworkers, no matter how many other missions, personal and otherwise, they have. In fact, those other, more personal missions are likely to aid the more basic one. Lightworkers can raise consciousness to fullness, their own and that of others, only by being fully here and embracing the very "restrictions" they often repudiate. There is no doubt that, for most of us, it is often extremely difficult and painful to navigate the physical world whose low, slow vibration provides a lot of intractability. Yet, when there is a shift in perception, we can experience this restrictivenss as boat builders experience the set dimensions of a boat: as a stimulus to being creative, to making each facet of the boat serve multiple ends, such as a table serving also as a bunk bed or storage space. What Lightworkers with limited vision need to see is that the alleged illusion of the restrictive material world is itself an illusion. It is simply that aspect of the Divine waiting for Itself to be realized as such and therefore becoming more conscious of Itself. If Lightworkers stay outside of this world, if they hover "above it all" trying to effect a transformation, if they try to leave behind the Darkness, they will not succeed other than in producing more duality and greater Darkness. While such distancing can serve some karmic purposes and may well be deserving of compassion, nevertheless, the ultimate goal is to meet and greet the Darkness. Thus, as long as they repudiate the Body and other Illusions, they repudiate the very thing they are seeking to find and embrace.

If, however, they become fully grounded in Human life, they will see and experience the Light of God; for, to repeat, Human life is an aspect of the Divine. That profound truth cannot be experienced in any other way, yet we are all afraid of the Darkness because it seems to be not-God. Still, that is the challenge: to experience the Darkness, even the darkest Darkness, as the Divine; to reveal the Divine exactly where it seems not to be. This is perhaps one of the points made to Joan of Arcadia in the TV series of that name: God speaks to her through people she least expects to manifest God, such as "lowly" sales people, street vendors, and street people. In his movie about his amazing life, Neale Donald Walsch dramatizes a story that illustrates experiencing the darkest Dark as Divine. One day, as he was giving a lecture in a bookstore after the publication of the first volume of Conversations With God, a middle-aged woman approaches him in tears. It is clear she is overwhelmed with anguish and anger as she tells her story. After trying in vain to get pregnant, she said she had adopted a young boy. At some early point in the child's life, the child found out that he was adopted and demanded to know his birth parents. The adoptive mother was quite distraught and calmed the child only when she promised to do everything she could to help him find his birth parents when he turned eighteen. When that day finally came, the adoptive mother got ready to do as she had promised, only to be told that her son had been killed in an automobile accident on his way home. Now, at the bookstore, and with rising anger, she shouts at Walsch, demanding to know how his God could let this happen. Shaken himself, Walsch prays for guidance and then, after a few very tense moments, tells the woman that she had kept her promise. For the birth mother had already passed on, and the only way the adoptive mother could keep her promise was to accept the young man's decision to pass over to find his mother. As the viewer looks into the face of the adoptive mother, it is clear that this woman hearing this news, is experiencing a moment of Transfiguration, of seeing the Divine in what for her was the darkest Darkness.

To be willing to enter fully into the Darkness, the chaos, the seeming godlessness, is the only way to experience Transfiguration. Extending ones toe into the ocean is no way to experience the ocean fully. I am reminded here of some words of Barbara Winter: "When you come to the edge of all the light you know and are about to step off into the darkness, faith is knowing one of two things will happen -- there will be something solid to stand on, or you will be taught how to fly." Such is probably the essence of the teachings of the great Mystery Schools of the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians and other ancient civilizations that took initiates into the seemingly treacherous Darkness for initiatory rites or what I call Transfiguration. Faith -- and the meaning or Transfiguration it seeks -- is also the "strange attractor" of Chaos Theory, which, amidst Darkness, Disorder and Confusion, draws to it the elements of a new order that is always inherent, implicit in the Craziness. When faced with seemingly utter Darkness, a Lightworker exhibiting faith expects an affirmative response when he or she has courage to ask, "How is this Darkness a manifestation of Light, of the Divine?" This is a request for Transfiguration, for Heaven on Earth.

When some Lightworkers do not have enough faith to enter and embrace the Darkness and be fully embodied, they gravitate toward exalting their status as the supposed Good Ones, who tend to be exclusionist, arrogant, lacking in compassion and profoundly dualistic. For the Good Ones cannot be the Good Ones without the presence of the Bad Ones, those who are Dark. This Good/Bad contrast allows the Good One to deny or discard his or her own Darkness and project it onto the Bad One, who then carries both his or her own and the Good One's Darkness. Not perceiving the Darkness in the Bad One as ultimately the Divine in Camouflage, the Good One seeks to be "pure," free of all the "taint" that the Bad One has now to carry for the Good One. This can lead in the Good One to caricatures of positive behavior in rigid adherence to, for instance, "pure" food and word choices, exaggerated caring for the Body, and always "positive, elevated thoughts," accompanied by a perpetually happy, "blissed-out" face and an always cheery profession of "love" for everyone. The concepts of balance and moderation escape the minds of the "Good" Lightworkers.

And compassion for those working deeply in the darkness to realize the Divine -- e.g., the adulterers, drug addicts, thieves, even murderers -- is non-existent for these Paragons of Virtue. That is not at all to say that punishment should not be meted out to these Dark Ones, for taking the consequences -- all of them -- may be an important means of revealing to them and others the Light in their Darkest moments. As God, in Walsch's Conversations with God, Book I, notes, even Hitler went to Heaven. Christine Breese writes similarly: "Hitler taught the world what it would be like to live under the tyranny of...the misuse of power....something the human race was considering experiencing more of in its future" (p. 136). This is not advocating victimization; in fact those who died horribly in the Holocaust not only were on their own personal missions of experiential awareness, but also were enormously brave and loving volunteers in this staging of what Humanity should never do again. Hence, those who experience the darkest Darkness may well be volunteers for bringing experiential awareness of the Divine to the Divine (and thus to all of us) in those conditions many of us find impossible to Transfigure. We do create our own reality without exceptions; but, the greater the Darkness we engage in while accepting all the human consequences of doing so, the greater the eventual realization of the Divine Light. Yet the Good Lightworkers tend to turn their backs, set up walls instead of boundaries with the Dark Ones, refusing them the compassion that acknowledges the Light waiting to be revealed in them. And in so doing, the Good Lightworkers defeat their own noble purpose of bringing Light to the World. They then do not speak truly of the Divine, as was the case with Job's Comforters, and even Job, himself, before he opened to and embraced the Divine Darkness.

Another consequence of some Lightworkers' having disdain for embodiment, for embracing the Darkness, is that they also have a problematic relationship to the power they need to be effective in the world. Some are afraid of exercising the power that they know they have (but often try to forget or minimize), partly because of the indifference or persecution they endured in past lives. But the fear is based even more on the fact that, without being fully here, fully embodied, they cannot access the connection to the Divine that is Human life. So their power is unsure, tentative, not fully operative. Thus, these Lightworkers frequently feel that their power, even if they are willing to use it, is ineffective and diminutive. They don't feel supported by Heaven on Earth because they do not perceive that reality. Consequently, power has to be "brought in from somewhere else," certainly not from Human life itself.

In contrast, some other Lightworkers, sometimes in compensation for feeling powerless, get seemingly "drunk" with their power. They get mesmerized with what they can do energetically, for instance, communicating with all entities without discrimination of intent and without regard to any negative consequences or implications for themselves or others. In their disdain for the merely human, they may also arrogantly deny aid to those most enveloped in the Divine Camouflage, those who have chosen to illuminate the darkest Dark as Divine, but, as the Friendly Soul feared might happen to her, got lost in the endeavor. What these power-inebriated Lightworkers lack is focus and a discriminating intuitiveness, the ability to bring their power to bear on the revelation of Darkness as Divine; as a consequence of not tapping this ability, they simply produce more Darkness. And while all Darkness is ultimately capable of Transfiguration, there is great value in ones being unstuck sooner than later so even more revelation in other more challenging venues is possible. Without consciously being fully committed to Human life and to the revelation of the Human as Divine, the disembodied Lightworkers' use of power becomes indiscriminate and ungrounded and often causes violations of the personal space of others, especially those considered Dark. Power then becomes its own end.

Beyond using body work (acupuncture, massage, yoga, etc.), increased sensory awareness, continuing orientation to the Now, and other grounding modalities, such as certain visualizations and running and/or other exercise, some Lightworkers may need other resources to deal with their power and embodiment issues. One is Past Life Regression, whereby the individual's soul reminds him or her of restrictive and tragic circumstances in other incarnations that are no longer operative to the same extent today. Or a Lightworker may be reminded of other, past-life instances of ungrounded power with horrific consequences, a reminder that can serve as a goad to become really grounded in this incarnation. Another tool is Spirit Releasement, whereby the Lightworker is released from entities that constrict his or her exercise of legitimate power and that attached to him or her because of the host's not being fully grounded here in the Divinely Human realm. Work with Parallel Lives and Future Lives may also help the Lightworker experience alternative, embodied possibilities for working with grounded power effectively. And doing a Life-Between-Lives session may reacquaint the Lightworker with his or her purposes for the present incarnation, including bringing awareness of Heaven on Earth. The techniques may also be used by those not consciously, intentionally serving as Lightworkers. Still other technologies may eventually emerge, based on the presupposition that we are the Divine helping the Divine to know Itself. Such Spiritual technologies will operate, consciously and simultaneously, at the Human and Divine dimensions or aspects.

One final consideration: Even after working on their embodiment and power issues, Lightworkers can fall back into dualism if they believe that there will be an end at some point to the revelation of Heaven on Earth. If they stay merely in the framework of time, that will seem to be so; yet, though Time is also an aspect of the Divine and not "just" an illusion, It coexists with that other aspect of the Divine wherein past, present and future are simultaneous. Time might thus be considered the Dark Side of Eternity. Perceiving from the Light Side of the Divine, the Earth is eternal, and so, too, then, is Heaven on Earth. For if the Divine is Infinite, then It will never cease to become more and more conscious of Itself, endlessly using the projection of Itself as Darkness as the means. Each person -- and each vibrating string and atom, each molecule and cell, each galaxy and universe -- as a continuing, everlasting dimension of that Divine Darkness ultimately brings its unique perspective to the Divine's becoming conscious of Itself. Not one of these glorious beings, however infinitesimal or gargantuan, can ever be lost in the Oneness to which it contributes consciousness in its own special way. For such loss would be the loss of a bit of essential consciousness of and for the Oneness. As Immanuel declares, "The ultimate Oneness is mutuality, not the erasure of self" (p.22). The eternal interaction between Divine Light and Divine Darkness ensures that that is so.

Ultimately, then, Heaven on Earth is an "event" only in terms of time. In terms of eternity, it is neither in our future nor in our past; it is instead an everlasting now moment with no beginning and no end. Only when we orient exclusively to time does our perception of Heaven on Earth seem time-bound. Suzuki has the last word here: "The oneness dividing itself into subject-object and yet retaining its oneness at the very moment [italics mine] that there is awakening of a consciousness -- this is satori" (pp. 23-4). Satori is Transfiguration, the immediate perception of Heaven on Earth; and such is our eternal perception and being.

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Joe Mancini, Jr., Certified Clinical Hypnotherapist, helps individuals with their personal, business or transpersonal development. In addition to hypnosis for mild depression, anxiety, and other issues, Joe offers Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Medical Support Hypnotherapy, Cellular Release, Spirit Releasement and several kinds of regression hypnosis, including Past-Life Regression, Natal Regression, Couple's Regression, and Life-Between-Lives Sessions. He can be reached at 301 424 5390 or visit www.lifetransforminghypnotherapy.com, for more info about him and his services.

soulsrvr@erols.com