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I wonder.


Dec
12

Book JOY- The Map of Heaven

 

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

1127_heaven-author_0

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.

 

essence of heaven

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.

ruled by love

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.


Dec
12

Proof of Heaven

 

 

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

THE ONE.

 

I couldn’t put this book down.

I watched an interview about it and I was hooked.

Here’s a clip of the interview.

 

 

I got it that night and finished it in 2 days.

It was THAT good.

Seriously, BEST book I’ve read all year.

Here is a summary of what it is about:

Dr. Alexander’s own brain was attacked by a rare illness. 

The part of the brain that controls thought and emotion—and in essence makes us human—shut down completely. 

For seven days he lay in a coma. 

Then, as his doctors considered stopping treatment, Alexander’s eyes popped open. 

He had come back.


Alexander’s recovery is a medical miracle. But the real miracle of his story lies elsewhere. 

While his body lay in coma, Alexander journeyed beyond this world and encountered an angelic being who guided him into the deepest realms of super-physical existence. 

There he met, and spoke with, the Divine source of the universe itself.

Alexander’s story is not a fantasy. Before he underwent his journey, he could not reconcile his knowledge of neuroscience with any belief in heaven, God, or the soul. Today Alexander is a doctor who believes that true health can be achieved only when we realize that God and the soul are real and that death is not the end of personal existence but only a transition.

This story would be remarkable no matter who it happened to. That it happened to Dr. Alexander makes it revolutionary. No scientist or person of faith will be able to ignore it. Reading it will change your life.

Here are some quotes that really resonated with me:

I know there will be people who will seek to invalidate my experience anyhow, and many who will discount it out of court, because of a refusal to believe that what I underwent could possibly be “scientific”—could possibly by anything more than a crazy, feverish dream.    

But I know better. 

And both for the sake of those here on earth and those I met beyond this realm, I see it as my duty

—both as a scientist and hence a seeker of truth, and as a doctor devoted to helping people—

to make it known to as many people as I can that what I underwent is true, and real, and of stunning importance. Not just to me, but to all of us.    

If you don’t have a working brain, you can’t be conscious.

  This is because the brain is the machine that produces consciousness in the first place. When the machine breaks down, consciousness stops.

My experience showed me that the death of the body and the brain are not the end of consciousness, that human experience continues beyond the grave.

Mine was in some ways a perfect storm of near-death experiences. As a practicing neurosurgeon with decades of research and hands-on work in the operating room behind me, I was in a better-than-average position to judge not only the reality but also the implications of what happened to me.

The place I went was real. Real in a way that makes the life we’re living here and now completely dreamlike by comparison.

Once I realized the truth behind my journey, I knew I had to tell it. Doing so properly has become the chief task of my life.

Now that I have been privileged to understand that our life does not end with the death of the body or the brain, I see it as my duty, my calling, to tell people about what I saw beyond the body and beyond this earth.

For the next seven days, I would be present to Holley (his wife) and the rest of my family in body alone.

 I remember nothing of this world during that week and have had to glean from others those parts of this story that occurred during the time I was unconscious. 

My mind, my spirit—whatever you may choose to call the central, human part of me—was gone.

Many victims of bacterial meningitis die in the first several days of their illness. Of those who arrive in an emergency room with a rapid downward spiral in neurologic function, as I did, only 10 percent are lucky enough to survive. However, their luck is limited, as many of them will spend the rest of their lives in a vegetative state.

Below me there was countryside. It was green, lush, and earthlike. It was earth . . . but at the same time it wasn’t.

But as you look around, something pulls at you, and you realize that a part of yourself—a part way, deep down—does remember the place after all, and is rejoicing at being back there again.

Imagine being a kid and going to a movie on a summer day.

Maybe the movie was good, and you were entertained as you sat through it.

But then the show ended, and you filed out of the theater and back into the deep, vibrant, welcoming warmth of the summer afternoon.

 And as the air and the sunlight hit you, you wondered why on earth you’d wasted this gorgeous day sitting in a dark theater.

  Multiply that feeling a thousand times, and you still won’t be anywhere close to what it felt like where I was.

Om (his name for God) told me that there is not one universe but many—in fact, more than I could conceive—but that love lay at the center of them all. Evil was present in all the other universes as well, but only in the tiniest trace amounts.

Evil was necessary because without it free will was impossible, and without free will there could be no growth—no forward movement, no chance for us to become what God longed for us to be. Horrible and all-powerful as evil sometimes seemed to be in a world like ours, in the larger picture love was overwhelmingly dominant, and it would ultimately be triumphant.

The only pain and heartache I felt was when I had to return to earth, where I’d begun.

Just as our brains work hard every moment of our waking lives to filter out the barrage of sensory information coming at us from our physical surroundings, selecting the material we actually need in order to survive, so it is that forgetting our trans-earthly identities also allows us to be “here and now” far more effectively.

I saw the earth as a pale blue dot in the immense blackness of physical space. I could see that earth was a place where good and evil mixed, and that this constituted one of its unique features. Even on earth there is much more good than evil, but earth is a place where evil is allowed to gain influence in a way that would be entirely impossible at higher levels of existence. That evil could occasionally have the upper hand was known and allowed by the Creator as a necessary consequence of giving the gift of free will to beings like us.

This other, vastly grander universe isn’t “far away” at all. In fact, it’s right here—right here where I am, typing this sentence, and right there where you are, reading it. It’s not far away physically, but simply exists on a different frequency. It’s right here, right now, but we’re unaware of it because we are for the most part closed to those frequencies on which it manifests.

We—each of us—are intricately, irremovably connected to the larger universe. It is our true home, and thinking that this physical world is all that matters is like shutting oneself up in a small closet and imagining that there is nothing else out beyond it.

Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.    —CICERO (106–43 BCE)

A story that as time passes I feel certain happened for a reason. Not because I’m anyone special. It’s just that with me, two events occurred in unison and concurrence, and together they break the back of the last efforts of reductive science to tell the world that the material realm is all that exists, and that consciousness, or spirit—yours and mine—is not the great and central mystery of the universe.


Nov
1

Pat Furlong

Pat Furlong is the founding president and CEO of Parent Project Muscular Dystrophy (PPMD), the largest nonprofit organization in the United States solely focused on Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy.

When doctors diagnosed her 2 sons with Duchenne in 1984, Pat immersed herself in Duchenne, working to understand the pathology of the disorder, the extent of research investment, and the mechanisms for optimal care.

In 1994, Pat, together with other parents of young men with Duchenne, founded PPMD to change the course of Duchenne and, ultimately, to find a cure.

Today, she continues to lead the organization and is considered one of the foremost authorities on Duchenne in the world.

Here is a video that tells a little more about her and her story:

http://youtu.be/9U28QPHIA34

The Theater of Duchenne

This is us. 

We are confronted with a “to do” list that extends to the moon and back, 

appropriate for the size of the gene responsible for the word Duchenne,

 which has recently broken down the door of home and heart.

 We have to learn how to say the word DUCHENNE out loud without letting on that our heart is breaking in a million pieces. 

We have to say it to the world we live in, 

our spouse, 

our children,

 our extended family,

 the school, 

and our community. 

We have to search for our own version of optimal care,

 a team of physicians we feel confident have sufficient expertise and experience to care for our sons. We search the internet and connect with the Duchenne Community.

-Pat Furlong

I’m writing all about Pat Furlong today because back in 2012, I had the opportunity to attend a Duchenne Support Group Meeting and she was there.

We were only 4 months into Jackson’s diagnosis.

So, I went to this support group……and I didn’t know what to expect.

I didn’t know if I could keep my emotions in check, but i went anyway.

and i brought my “Keep calm and carry on” tissues.

Pat Furlong Post for Joy in Jacksons Journey

The meeting was going great and we had to go around the room and do our little introductions.

I talked about our recent diagnosis and they asked me all the steps we’ve taken thus far and I discussed all the places we’ve been and all the clinics we’ve traveled to and what decisions we’ve made for Jackson’s care.

The person leading the support group was Pat Furlong, the lady I wrote all about up above.

See, I was so new to the Duchenne Community that I didn’t know who she was.

All i knew from the night before the meeting was her story about her 2 sons because I had read about it in a book and I was sobbing the night before when I read her story.

During my into I also told her how much it meant to me to be able to meet her and share our stories and how I just crumbled upon reading hers.

and of course that is when i lost it and couldn’t keep the tears away.

Because she then told her story and it was so tender and so heartbreaking at the same time.

No one else was really emotional, but don’t worry,

because I was plenty emotional for everyone else.

I was SO nervous before the meeting.

My stomach was in knots and I didn’t eat anything for fear that it would come back up.

After my intro I felt much better and remained calm throughout the entire thing.

No more crying for me,

and let me tell you why.

There was another couple there and their son is 5 years old and has Duchenne and they haven’t really taken the course that a lot of us other families have with their son.

In fact, they haven’t really done anything.

So as I’m going on and on about what we’re doing, they were getting more and more confused and upset.

So then the conversation turns to me because they looked at me and started questioning me and the reasons I’m doing those things.

They disagree with my decisions and feel it is not the best choice.

It was such a weird feeling to be in for me because

this was all SO new to me and as I sat there

I realized that this was the first time {in regards to DMD} that I had to stand up and back the choices that I was making.

I had to inform these parents of why it is the best choice and what the research shows,

and why we’re traveling all around instead of staying local for treatment.

I didn’t know I had it in me so early on to have such an intense discussion, but I have to say that I feel like I did a great job presenting my reasoning and I only hope that they will use the information to find some help for their son.

and I had no hard feelings towards them, even though that would have been quite easy to have, because i understood that it was coming from a place of defensiveness.

Defensiveness because they felt guilty that their son has had a diagnosis for a 1year+ and we were a few weeks into diagnosis and they had done nothing.

So I educated them and I hope they apply my favorite quote to their lives.

“When you know better, you do better”.

-Maya Angelou

The meeting ran WAY over, but it was great.

and i’m really glad that i went.

and i got END DUCHENNE t-shirts for our family,

and i got to meet Pat Furlong and learn from her,

and now I’m ready for the second meeting which is in a few weeks.

 

Pat Furlong Post for Joy in Jacksons Journey

 

To view Jackson’s Personal Donation Page through Parent Project MD click HERE.


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