The Kingdom of God, oh if only we understood those words and didn’t think they were a physical location. To Christians, it means heaven. To New Agers it is other dimensional. To many it means the splitting of worlds, a hard take on the heaven/hell story only for the less religious.

Bodies separated by time and space need time and space, a place, a physical location to be and that’s the only possible option for beings ruled by their minds.

What if it’s not about bodies at all? What if we are looking at the mystery and applying separation logic to the story? What if Jesus had it right when he said, ‘My kingdom is not of this world,’ only he wasn’t pointing to a place, another world, to heaven, but to this which resides within and as you already?

Folks are trying so hard to get some ‘where’, any ‘where’ other than here, here where life is hard, where loss is guaranteed, where we will lose everything, where everyone we’ve ever loved will die, where all our possessions will turn to dust, where our status will be stripped and even our sense of self will dissolve into nothingness, that we can’t imagine that heaven is already here, living within us all.

We make up stories about the chosen, about who is worthy and how to enter the gates, stories that only serve to separate us into factions, into people to hate, people who fail to validate our chosenness. We believe we are separate so we create stories based in separation.

It doesn’t matter if you are religious right, Christian Nationalist, Muslim, Jewish, New Age or just call yourself spiritual, if you are looking at somewhere else, a time in the future, a world that is different from the one we live in, you are on the ‘get me the fuck out of here’ treadmill.

If Jesus rose again, which is possible, but the Bible IS filled with analogies and parables, he was showing us what each of us is capable of through his stories. He was demonstrating the truth about death and dying: that we don’t; we were not born and will not die.

But we don’t listen. Even if we are open enough to allow that yeah, we aren’t really separate — we are connected — or whatever story you’ve allowed in — the separation story is still running strong. some of us kind of get it, but not really, not deep down, balls to the bones.

Those concepts are good fallbacks though, just in case. In case what? That the mystic’s stories actually prove to be true? Gotta hedge your bets now. Despite those fancy contingency plans, most don’t really believe them — there’s a reason people fear death — and are imprisoned by the accepted communal belief in separation. Good Lord, it sure looks like we are separate. You’d have to be a fool to believe differently.

The belief is embedded and will be, until that big lie cracks into a billion pieces and dissolves into the nothingness it has always been.

Beliefs are interesting. They make us feel real, but all of that is storytelling. Everything we believe is our story. There is nothing but story propping up the idea of a physical world, the world that is not my kingdom.

Until we see through our stories, recognizing them for what they are, until the stories themselves release us from their grip, until we have been given enough experiences to allow that seeing, until those experiences break open the truths behind our fixed rigidity, our rightness, we will see what we have always seen. We will continue looking at the world searching for the next perfect kingdom and will miss what is right here, what has always been right here, what is not to be found else ‘where’.

He is Risen. What a beautiful pointer, not to what we think, but to the truth of us when we are no longer hounded by ideas of a more perfect world. The empty tomb is not what you think. It is not somewhere outside of you, somewhere to go. It lives within each and every one of us.

Amaya is the author of 7 books, the latest Actuality: infinity at play. It is available at Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and IngramSparks.
Actuality: infinity at play by Amaya Gayle Gregory, Paperback | Barnes & Noble®

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