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.

If you decide to take my advice and read any of the books I have recommended, then this is

I just read this book, The Witness Wore Red, written by Recebba Musser, who was the 19th wife of a polygamous cult leader of the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints (FLDS) I was horrified by some of the stories that she shared and I highly recommend reading this book. It is eye opening and insane that this is still going on in the world we live in.

Here are some of the passages that really stuck out to me:

Someone passing by our simple two-level redbrick home would likely never guess how many children lived in the basement alone. He would likely be shocked to learn that another large family lived upstairs; the only common denominator between the two families was one man who spent half his nights upstairs with his first wife and children, the other half downstairs with our mother- wife number two- and her children. This man was my father.

I was a “Wilson” and not a “Wall” at my school, and why I could only rarely play with the sweet little girl across the street. If she learned about me- about my brothers and sisters and our family living secretly in the walkout basement- we would risk being discovered.

We wore love-sleeved shirts, girls’ long prairie dresses and skirts, and exceptionally long braids. Mom said we were special, but it wasn’t until I went to kindergarten that I understood we represented a tiny fraction of the population around us.

We worshipped diligently at church, but our people did not have a temple of our own. Someday in the future, it was foretold, we would build one. But for now, we simply had to endure life. We had to suffer pain and sacrifice, because eternity was what mattered.

  Soon Warren restricted everything from forbidding dances, operettas, plays, and even parades. From the pulpit, Warren demanded stricter rules among the people, like completely forbidding anyone to wear the color red, and reiterating that passion and pleasure in the bedroom were for men only. As holders of the Priesthood their passion was meant to fulfill God’s will.  Warren was taking every last thing from the community that gave a sense of purpose or joy.

On September 8, 2002, Rulon Timpson Jeffs passed away (he was the old man on the cover of the book and the leader of the FLDS church). He had prophesied that he would never die, and we had believed him. We all relied on the Prophet for our eternal salvation. And Rulon had promised he would be renewed! Even as we prepared for our Prophet’s funeral services and the people mourned, we kept expecting Rulon to bang on the lid of the coffin and demand to be let out! But there was no sound.

“The minute you revolt from anything that comes from God, you will be under the power of Satan and not be able to resist. One night, Father is going to have you do some things that you may first reject. I’m telling you, be silent and pray for a testimony that you will not reject and that your heart will be open. If you are pure in heart, you will know that this is a truth.”   I sat there, unable to believe how this man was so adept at twisting words and using our beliefs against us for his own purposes. When we obeyed him to the letter, he called us “Father’s Heavenly Angels”. If we voiced a single fear, however, he would say that Satan was finding a place in our hearts.

Up until that point, I wholeheartedly believed in my religion. I did not like Warren and I didn’t agree with his maneuverings, but I believed that I was in the truest church the world had ever known. Had we been told the next step was to drink purple punch filled with cyanide, I would have done so without question.

 I had based my whole life on God’s directive, only to discover it was actually man’s opinion being labeled as God’s will.

(Upon her questioning Warren if this is what God really wants for her) Warren’s eyes turned to steel, filled with cold malice. “I. Will. Break. You.” he said, with deliberate pronunciation on each word. “And I will train you to be a good wife. You have had too much freedom for too long, Becky. No matter who you marry, I will always have jurisdiction over you”.

Right before dawn, avoiding security camera and the prying eyes of any early risers, I slipped over the Jeffses’ six foot high, wrought iron gate. The spikes at the top were tricky to manage in my long skirt, yet nothing compared to the half mile walk I had to trek to meet Ben, fighting my urge to bolt back to my sister-wives, whom I was having great difficulty leaving.

I had tasted freedom, and to go back and witness the strict manipulation of my people broke my heart. I did not judge them, having once “been” them.

On August 29, 2006 I was taking a lunch break with colleagues from a real estate class when I received a call from Sheriff Doran. Quickly I excused myself outside. “Becky, did you see the news?” Warren Jeffs was caught last night outside of Las Vegas!”  I sat down in shock. Warren had been on the run for so long, I hadn’t been sure this day would ever come. Doran told me that the Nevada Highway Patrol had pulled over a brand-new Cadillac Escalade with paper license plates during a routine traffic stop. The trooper did not recognize Warren, but sensed something was wrong when Warren nervously shoveled his salad in his mouth and wouldn’t make eye contact. After calling for back up, they realized that the brand new Cadillac Escalade had been paid in cash and they also found $54,000 in bills in the vehicle, plus tons of letters and cash from his followers. There was also a police scanner, 15 cell phones, walkie-talkies, laptops, credit cards, and keys to many other luxury vehicles. They had wigs and sunglasses and all sorts of accessories.

While on trial this statement came out from Warren’s own record. “There is a girl  the Lord wants me to take. She is thirteen. Oh, I just want the Lord’s will.  If the world knew what I was doing they would hang me from the highest tree.”

The jury went out for deliberation on August 9, 2011 and it only took them 30 minutes for them to return with Warren’s sentence: life plus twenty years.