Ah, this book…..the second book from my favorite author, Eben Alexander.

I couldn’t put it down….BUT i would HAVE to, because it was so beautiful, and so real….

that I had to take it in installments.

His first book, Proof of Heaven, can be found HERE

I read it, fell in love, bought it for everyone on my christmas list, and then wrote a review of it here.

Here are my absolute favorite passages from the book {careful…there are MANY}.

To all courageous souls whose loving hearts yearn toward the truth of our existence.

Medical people and hospice workers who see death regularly will know immediately what I’m talking about. Suddenly where there was depth there is now only surface.

The body becomes, in essence, like an unplugged appliance.

We are one part Earth and one part Heaven.

Though we now know that heaven isn’t literally up there, many of us continue to sense that there is a dimension or dimensions that are “above” the earthly world in the sense that they are “higher” in a spiritual sense. One that is very real, but also very different from the earthly one we are familiar with, and in comparison to which the entire observable physical dimension is as

a grain of sand on a beach.

We have to recognize that we are spiritual beings with souls existing in a spiritual world as well as material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world.

A reader sent in a letter and here is an excerpt from it: “I was out in my garden, when suddenly this feeling went through me. It was overwhelming. It was a feeling of an unbelievable amount of love. It was the best “high” you could possibly imagine. I stood up, wondering: What on earth was that? Then it went through me again. It happened three times in all. I knew my mother had passed. The feeling was like she was hugging me but going right through me. And every time she did, I felt this supernatural, unbelievable, immeasurable amount of love.

I went into my house, still in a fog as to what had happened. I sat down by the phone to wait for the call from my sister. After ten minutes the phone rang. It was my sister. ‘Mom just passed away’, she said.”

In this book, I share what I have learned from others-about what I call the Gifts of Heaven. These gifts are the benefits that come when we open ourselves to the single greatest truth that those before us knew:

there is a larger world behind the one we see around us every day.

That larger world loves us more than we can possibly imagine,

and it is watching us at every moment,

hoping that we see hints in the world around us that it is there.

Each of us carries a memory of heaven, buried deep within us.

Bringing that memory to the surface- helping you find your own map to that very real place- is the purpose of this book.

A near-death-experience (NDE) can be described as having seen a reality that was MORE REAL than the reality of earth, and that created in them an unshakable certainty that human life continued beyond death.

Another reader submitted this letter and here’s a portion of it:

“On August 19, 1999, my dad had been in our local hospital’s hospice unit for 13 days. He had had a series of strokes that left him in an unresponsive state. After much discussion with his doctors, it was the family’s decision to “let him go”. We were at his bedside 24/7 those last few days. Someone was always in the room with him. At around 4:00 am, he started that particular breathing pattern that lets you know the end is coming.

Dad took his last breath. His feet and hands were already cool. Then something caught my eye. It looked like a piece of dust had settled on dad’s temple. Then I thought, how can I see this “dust”? The room is almost black yet I can see this.

Then, as I watched, something started to extricate itself from the side of my dad’s head! My eyes were wide open and I was breathing very slowly, trying to understand what I was seeing…….

A small orb, no larger than a quarter inch, very slowly surfaced from under my dad’s temple. It was the color of that beautiful intense blue you find at the base of a candle flame. It was radiating white rays. They reminded me of 4th of July sparklers, but the sparks were radiating in slow motion. After maybe a minute, the entire orb had emerged and appeared to be resting on dad’s temple. A tiny blue globe radiating white sparking rays.

After a few seconds, the orb slowly levitated to maybe two feet above dad’s body and hovered there for a few seconds. Then it slowly drifted higher and toward the west side of the room and then rose and went into the ceiling and was gone.

I was still in my chair, turned to be looking to where the orb departed. I turned around, expecting someone to say something- but nobody did. I didn’t want to ask any questions that would have me putting words in my sibling’s mouths, so I simple asked, “Did something just happen?”

My sister said: “You mean that light that just came out of the side of dad’s head?”

We have always known who we are.

That knowledge has emerged, sunk out of sight, and resurfaced more times and in more places than anyone could count.

Heaven isn’t an abstraction; it isn’t a dreamscape cooked up from empty, wishful thinking.

It is a place as real as the room or the airplane or the beach or the library where you are right now. It has objects in it.

Trees, fields, people, animals. But the rules of how things work there- the laws of heaven’s physics, if you will- are different from ours.

The one rule we need to remember from here, however, is that we end up, in the end,

where we belong, and we are led by the amount of love we have in us,

for love is the essence of heaven.

It is what it is made of.

It is the coin of the realm.

Click HERE to DOWNLOAD essence of heaven print. I made it in a 8×10 size.

 What death really is…not an ending but a return to our truest home.

Once you have had a glimpse of the higher worlds,  the sense of deep belonging that they inspire and that so much of life conspires to make us forget.

The fact is that many of the things people love to do, without being able to explain exactly WHY they love them,

make us feel good precisely because they are reconnecting us with that world.

You are not who you think you are.

You are something much, much larger.

But in order to become that larger being, you will have to die to the simple earthly person you are now.

You must become a heavenly one as well.

There is strong evidence that the brain acts as a kind of “reducting valve” for consciousness.

As human beings, we have undreamed-of potential.

We are only at the very beginning of understanding who and what we truly are.

The body holds countless clues to the true cosmic beings that we are in nascent form.

When things are working in concert, the body is not simply an anchor and obfuscation to our spiritual realities, but a tool for bringing those capabilities to earth.

So, too, we see from authenticated cases of child geniuses and prodigies, is the brain.

Make no mistake:

There is a reason we are spiritual beings having an earthly experience.

We are hear to learn, but we bring with us far greater tools to accomplish that learning than we currently realize.

The worlds above this one flow with emotion,

with warmth that is more than simply physical,

and with other qualities far above and beyond my ability to describe. But I can tell you this: I was ready for them. Though they struck me with a dazzling newness and freshness, they were also, paradoxically, familiar. I’d felt them before. Not as Eben Alexander, but as the spiritual being I was long, long before that particular embodied being came along, and that I will be again,

when the earthly elements that currently make up my physical body have gone their different ways.

To see this world for but one moment is to have your heart broken with the sudden inrushing memory of its reality.

But it is also to have your heart healed,

because you remember where you’re from,

what you are,

and where you’re going again, someday.

The earthly realm is, I believe, where we are meant to learn the lessons of unconditional love, compassion, forgiveness, and acceptance.

God is love, and so are we, at our deepest level.

When we drop this body that we’ve been living and learning in, we don’t vanish directly into those highest regions that we can’t even begin to talk about from where we are here. We go to where I went in my own NDE. It’s a “place” where we take on once again the entire life that we lived linearly down here, all at once. And what that produces, when someone else, another soul, sees it, is that person at their absolute, glowing best. If a person has lived a long time, they might appear physically in the full glow of their youthful beauty, but at the same time, they’ll be manifesting the wisdom of their later years.

Here is an account from the film critic Roger Ebert’s wife, written on his last few days before he succumbed to cancer:

“As we realized he was transitioning out of this world and into the next, everything, all of us, just went calm. 

Roger said that he didn’t know if he could believe in God.

He had his doubts. But toward the end, something really interesting happened.

That week before Roger passed away, I would see him and he would talk about having visited this other place. 

But the day before he passed away, he wrote me a note:

“This is all an elaborate hoax”.

I asked him, “What’s a hoax?”

And he was talking about this world, this place.

He said it was all an illusion.”

It’s fascinating, and always deeply moving to me,

how people on the verge of leaving this world can

-often after long and terrible suffering-

suddenly catch a glimpse of where they are going,

and of where they have actually been the whole time they were here.

Ebert, a man who had made his living by words,

wrote his wife a few words giving her what I am sure he felt was the MOST valuable gift

he could possibly leave her:

the truth about this world.

Ebert is right. This world IS an illusion- a hoax.

It’s not real.

And yet of course at the same time it IS real,

and wonderful, and deserving of our deepest love and attention.

We just must not forget that it is not all there is. 

Aldous Huxley, a write who died in 1963 after a long and painful struggle with cancer, dictated his final essay to his wife just a few days before he passed on. In that essay, Huxley said something remarkably similar to what Ebert wrote in that note to his wife.

“The world is an illusion”, Huxley said.

“But it is an illusion which we must take seriously, because it is real as far as it goes”.

We must, Huxley argued, “find a way of being in this world while not being in it”.

Because in truth, we are never fully, completely here to begin with.

We come from, and are destined to return to, elsewhere.

This world is not all there is.

There is a larger one, of which this seemingly complete earthly world is the tiniest slice.

That larger world is ruled by love,

and we are all on our way home to it,

so we should never despair.

Click HERE to download this PRINTABLE. It is sized for an 8 x 10.

All the people and animals you ever loved,

will be joined once again in that world beyond.

Heaven is here.

But we have trained ourselves not to see it,

and that is why so much of our world is beginning to resemble hell.

You can order MAP OF HEAVEN here.