Clawing at heaven

All I ever had

Redemption songs

These songs of freedom

Songs of freedom

(Bob Marley)

For the moment, I feel like raising some controversy. Some rumor. I feel the need to get people talking, perhaps shocking them a bit, that they may wake up, and open their eyes.

People are so comfortably asleep. They are comfortably hypnotized and believe everything they want to believe. They believe in the comfort of their lies, they believe in the promises and poses of their politicians. They believe they will go to heaven, they are reassured by every priest. And they believe, even though they are on the brink of extinction, that they will live forever.

So I’d love to tell you: heaven needs to die.

For the sake of the earth.

In the following text, I will be trying to kill heaven.

Because your heaven is your hell.

Our heaven is our hell.

Heaven is where we are suffocating, heaven is where we are killing the earth, killing our self, killing the soul and killing our mother.

It’s all scientifically logical.

So try to follow me.

Please. I invite you to.

It all starts with the insight that in the beginning of our human lives, as a dear colleague of mine, Jacques Lacan, has told us, we lose our spirited soul to an image in our head, an image that gathers its face and clothing from the mirror.

This image stays with us all of our lives, and it is our guide and our judge. It punishes us, it rewards us, it is satisfied or very angry. It makes us feel small and shameful. It makes us bow, and whatever your religion, and no matter how you choose to look at it, it is you that is seeing the image. The aware one, the subject, is you.

And you don’t know who you are.

You think you are the image, you think you and the image you are seeing are one and the same. But there is a gap. It is the gap that may save you one day, and it is a gap you should mind, you should see, you should notice and remark.

For how can you be what you see in the mirror in your head? You are here, seeing, and the image is there, seen. You are not your ego, you are not your image.

You are the aware one, and the image is killing you, controlling you, raping and suffocating you. The image is the devil. Clever perhaps, it may seem intelligent, but it is evil.

And it is by far not as intelligent as you.

If only you knew who you were.

For real.

So this image in the mirror, this demon that makes us bow and feel guilty and ashamed, this constant judge, it seems you cannot touch him. He is on his throne, he is not experiencing reality. And he may be happy or he may be sad, but are you? Perhaps you are feeling sad when he is happy, and you are happy when he is mad. Perhaps you should notice, perhaps you should be aware. It is the conflict of all conflicts. It is the conflict between the devil and your soul.

When you have a lot of people, a community of people who are all identifying with their ego, with the untouchable judge and ruler that stands above them, and is keeping them down, when all humanity is caught up in its ego, it becomes a special race, very different from the races of the soul. The beings of nature. The touchable ones. The ones doing all the feeling. The ones who may be happy when you are mad, or maybe sad when you are happy.

So that’s what it’s about for me, this identification with a superior being, and the living of life in a world resulting from that feeling of superiority.

It is as if the whole of humanity is living in a stilt village, raised high above the oceans of nature. Mankind lives on a superior level. He is above everything. He is above his body, above his nature, above his heart and above his soul. He is above the animals, the trees, the rocks, the rivers and the flowers, he is living higher than the air he breathes and god forbid, that he fall back into the waters he was born from.

Mankind is not living on earth, mankind is living in heaven.

The heaven of his mind.

And it is a heaven I would love to kill.

It is not heaven we must try and reach, it is the earth we must return to.

The ocean of nature.

But this is not a simple dynamic, and I realize that fully.

Still, as they say, there is no alternative.

Let us consider for instance the businessman, the CEO high up in his skyscraper, halfway to heaven, or perhaps higher than heaven, let’s just say, in his perfect heaven. He is looking down on the streetworker, the one standing halfway underground in the dirt trying to restore the pavement. The businessman is superior. Or thinks he is.

Let us take the streetworker, standing halfway underground in the dirt trying to restore the pavement. He ain’t no monkey, he ain’t no animal. He spits on the earth, he tramples the flowers. Perhaps he likes to kick his dog when he’s at home. He is superior. He knows he is.

So with all these feelings of being superior, we get a whole hierarchy, the hierarchy of the egos. It is therefore a little challenging to some, to look at life as made up of circles, not ladders. Systems theory tells us that all is made up of loops, feedback loops, and the small is as important to the great as the great is important to the small. The whole is nothing without the detail, and the detail finds itself as part of the whole.

But there is no judgment. One is not better. One thing is not superior. All are equal in truth. Everything is as important as the next. The part, the whole, there is no one better than the other.

In truth.

But people, remember, that race that identifies with an image they see, an illusion in their head, the first of many maybe, or rather perhaps, the center of many, the root of all their minding minds, people are not living in truth. People are living in delusion.

They do not feel their instincts, they do not trust their bodies, they never listen to their souls. They are insensitive, sedated and more asleep than awake. They are hypnotized, they are living from their head, from the illusion on its throne, judging them, scaring them, suffocating them and torturing them.

People are not realistic.

People live in heaven.

But the stilt village they are living in, high above the dangerous and evil waters of creation, is suffocating and killing the soul, it is murdering their mother, nature.

Heaven is killing the earth.

This urge for superiority, which is the first and foremost trademark of the ego, is what creates tension, suppression, repression. Socially and ecologically. Perhaps the ego is not a very social being. It cannot live with anyone or anything but itself. All the rest should be… down there, bowing, paying off their feelings of guilt. And it remains untouchable as long as you don’t know yourself, your true nature, awareness, the seer, not the seen, the subject, not the object, the toucher, not the touched.

So what is the result?

That that which is repressed, returns.

If there is anything Freud taught us, it was this: that which is killed, never dies. It returns. The unconscious returns. It insists, in repetitious symptoms, until it regains its authority and its freedom. Its being. Which is no more than saying that things denied just long to exist. They seek recognition, acceptance, a loving embrace. A place to breathe, a space to move. A life to live.

Life was not created to be killed, though we sometimes seem to think so.

Life was created to be loved. To be seen, to be embraced in loving celebration and affectionate recognition. In passionate fire.

So this arising of the soul, we can see it when the streetworker throws a brick into the glass walls of the CEO’s office, we can see it when nature starts to make us sick as it is dying.

It makes us question if we can really live in heaven, if we can really exist as beings of the stilt village.

Psychodynamically, this is a state of psychosis. The original awareness reconsiders its investment in the mirror-ego. The seer doubts the identification with the seen. The subject starts to sell his shares in the object’s business.

God no longer chooses to obey the devil, the soul no longer wants to live by the shadow. You could say that the earth no longer wants to live by the laws of heaven, or frame it however you want.

It is psychosis.

And it is the struggle for life of the ego.

For if you no longer see it, it is no longer seen.

Nobody else sees your ego.

It needs you.

So this struggle for the ego to keep itself up, is where it will play out all its tricks. It will preach, it will curse, it will rage and accuse. It will make you feel small, shameful, guilty and afraid. Its throne is crumbling, when you choose to no longer care. And it does not want to disappear. The demon wants to thrive all of your life long, comfortable in the sweet fabric of your consciousness, living off your honey, sucking at your heart.

Still, I believe you need to reclaim your sovereignty, reclaim your awareness, your feelings and your soul. You need to tell the devil he will cramp and suffocate your flesh and bones no more. And don’t believe it, never mind. You will not die. You will live on. You will breathe, perhaps for the first time in your life.

Our heaven is our hell.

The world is hospitable, welcoming to life, sustaining to the body and the soul.

Life is not our enemy.

You will not die, when you fall from your superiority.

You will not die, when you leave behind your heaven and your god.

You will find a safety net, you will find the world, life, your mother the earth and your grandmother the universe. You will find your heart and your original vision. Your eyes will open up and you will see through the illusions and delusions. You will become sane, intelligent and rational. You will become calm, strong and secure. You will have lost a lot… of fear.

The truth is there is a safety net, forever there for us under our scared and fearful asses, ready to catch us whenever we let go, to which we can surrender and in which we can fall back. The truth is there is a victory in surrender, we can win when we lose, we can triumph when we give up, we can find it when we’ve lost it.

We have to learn to trust life again, our daily bread, surrendering to the safety net.

Our heaven cannot grow any higher, our hell cannot get any hotter.

The gap between man and man, the gap between man and world, the suppressing and repressing, it has become no longer livable. Is there still one person, one animal, one plant or river, that can breathe anymore?

Let us come home from our fears and into our bodies, from our cramping into our breath, from our skyscrapers into the heart of nature, from our fictions of terror into the peaceful wonder of reality.

For the heart of reality has been passionately beating for us since the beginning of time and it is never far from home. It is right here, right there, right where you can find it, there where you can hear it, at home where you can love it.

It is not heaven we need to find, it is the earth, our mother.

We are all her children, and when children are afraid they scream ‘mommy’.

Mommy’s there, mommy’s here, mommy’s listening and mommy is feeling you.

Siempre.