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Teachings
 Heaven |
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Heaven
is the state of tranquility, of desirelessness, From
News 148, Aphorisms
What is the Kingdom of God? It’s not a palace shining with gold, silver, diamonds, rubies and all kinds of precious stones. It’s purity, loving kindness, compassion, peace of mind. That’s the Kingdom of God. If we carry this Kingdom of God within us, then wherever we go we always feel that we’re in Heaven. So there’s no need to yearn for the life beyond and to shun the opportunities to serve our brothers and sisters here on earth while we’re still living. If we’ve already attained Heaven within, whether we live or die, it’s ours and no one can take it away. But if we don’t attain it, then even if we go to Heaven the outer environment of Heaven may not even penetrate inside our darkened souls, and we’ll still carry with us hatred, jealousy and bad, negative thinking within our hearts. Then Heaven is just another place in the universe for us, the same as everywhere else, because we haven’t changed ourselves. So if we
change, the situation changes. If we have Heaven within us, peace
within us, then everywhere is Heaven, everywhere is peace. That's
the purpose of being good, of trying to do good, of trying to
be good because that's the only choice. From
“When We Have Peace Within Heaven is Everywhere”
We may liken hell and heaven or goodness – I mean positive energy – to energies. In the universe, all matter, all things, are created by energy, and we call that the “Creative Force,” or we might call it the “Creator.” Because the energy has been scattered in different directions, all the energy has now scattered all over the place in the universe and become different worlds and different beings. These beings will acquire their individual states of thinking or levels of consciousness, and according to the inter-reactions among each other, they will generate another kind of energy. This kind of energy, we will divide into two categories. The first one we can call “positive” energy, or we say God nature, heavenly force, or Buddha nature. The second category, we can name “negative” power, evil or dark force, or the opposite of goodness. Now, the goodness and the positive energy are side by side with the negative. Whenever any beings, be they devas, angelic beings, earthlings or worldly people, generate goodness, tolerance, loving compassion, and cooperation with each other, then this energy will be categorized as good, the God force, or positive power. And then the more we think good thoughts, the more the beings generate this kind of goodness, the more positive power we have in our atmosphere, in our world. Whenever we or any beings generate hatred, bad thoughts, or any kind of negative tendencies, actions or speech, we add it to the negative storehouse of the atmosphere, which is what we call the evil force. This force will breed more hatred, more wars, and more disharmony in our world or in any world in which these people happen to reside. So that is the reason why we should always generate goodness in our thoughts and in our deeds. In thoughts, deeds and what else? Speech, yes, to derive the goodness that we have sown. That is why in the Bible it is stated, “As you sow, so shall you reap,” and in the Buddhist scriptures, it is stated that if you do good deeds, you’ll get good results; if you do bad, then you’ll reap the results thereof. Most scriptures mention the same things. In order to reach heaven, it is logical, now we know that we have to tune into goodness, to the positive part of the world. And the more we step into goodness, the nearer the goodness, the more we merge into this heavenly quality and the more we are near to heaven. The negative force may exist in our neighborhood, but it will not affect us. For example, we have lights in our house, neon lamps, and outside our house may be darkness, but when we step into our house and stay there, we can read, we can work, we can play, we can see our loved ones and all the surroundings. The darkness outside will not affect our light inside the house. So that is a very simple and a kind of basic explanation about good and evil, heaven and hell. If the negative power is very strong, then it creates a kind of very condensed atmosphere. Whoever happens to be drawn into it by his own or her own actions will experience the so-called hell, where the most intense agonies, repentance, and guilty feelings will torture them until they have paid off the bad thinking or deeds that they have done before. We can avoid that. We can avoid this stage of agony, which is called hell, if we turn to goodness now. There are
two kinds of heavens. One is temporary and one is permanent. The
so-called temporary heaven can be earned by doing good deeds,
by avoiding evil, and by practicing religious penance or believing
in some religion or the God of your faith, by prayers, reading
scriptures, and trying to live accordingly as much as you can.
Another kind of heaven, or kingdom, or what we call the ultimate
Kingdom of God, is the permanent, eternal, everlasting one that
requires more effort and that requires the grace of the Almighty,
the God nature, or the God within us. From
News 93, Pearls of Wisdom
Q: Most people say that God is omnipresent, God is everywhere, and God reaches from the highest heaven down to the deepest hell. God is present in all the beauty of life, when miracles happen. God is also present when everything is dark in our lives, when nothing is going right. Since God is omnipresent, then the qualities of God must also be omnipresent, such as the quality of love. What’s happening with the quality of love, when God is in the deepest hell, when everything is going wrong in life? M: That’s another form of love, to remind us to go back to the more noble side of the scale. It’s like a staircase. If we go a little bit up, then we can see more sunlight; it’s higher. If we stay down, it’s darker, down in the cellar; it’s like that. But it still belongs to the house. The darker side of God is hell; it’s our own conscience. When we deny God, then we don’t see Hirm. It’s not that God doesn’t exist at that time, but just that we turned our face away, because we did something ungodly. So hell is our own creation. Hell is just a place where our conscience faces it’s own retribution, it’s own judgment. There’s no God who created it. We’ve chosen many ways to exercise our power, even the power to be dark, to be negative, to be wicked, to be very ungodly. We chose to play around, we chose to explore the universe. We chose to learn, to know what else we could do, except just to be God as Hes is. We chose to do many things, many corners to explore for ourselves. When we chose to do something ungodly, then we had to face the so-called hell. That’s when we denied the noble quality of God. We chose to turn our back away, just to see what it felt like. This is the soul level, the mind is not conscious of it. If the mind was conscious of what it was doing, it wouldn’t do it. The mind is just an instrument of the soul. The soul wants to experience something new, wants to explore its own power, wants to go into the deeper corners of the universe and back, wants to go to the farther side of the cosmos to see what’s there, wants to do something terribly wicked to see what it feels like, and then relearn to be God, and noble again. It’s just another form of love. Hell is there
to remind you not to be like that. Not to be wicked, not to be
negative, not to be dark. Return! Return! Return! That’s it. When
you feel terrible, already you’re facing a corner of hell, you’re
facing the wall. You face corners and a dark and terrifying atmosphere,
and then sooner or later you have to return. So that’s another
form of love. God is there in that darkness to remind you to go
back to the Light. From
“Another Form Of Love”
The more
people know God, the more people contact God directly and become
happier, the more peaceful the world will be, the less war there
will be, and the more we can bring Heaven onto Earth. From
News 143, Pearls of Wisdom
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Ahimsa |
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