The afterlife, so close to us, this time of year — when the veil is thin — is represented by many people many ways — sometimes too harshly, sometimes in a way that is Pollyanna. Sometimes, purgatory is confused for hell and hell for purgatory. (We noticed this with an article the other day.) Let’s focus on what we so often do: Heaven.
There are many mansions. There are hovels and huts and basements and small homes. There are apartments. There are great, grand edifices. We move into our states of mind.
Everyone reading this has a chance to turn his or her state of mind into a mansion in Heaven.
The very last decision even a hardened non-believer can make in a state of earthly free-will is whether he finally accepts the Lord now that he faces eternity.
There is that one last chance – which is why prayers must be said for the dying no matter how hostile they have been to religion.
Think simply. Don’t speak more than you need to. Use that time to pray. Talk simply – and never in the form of gossip. Do not judge. Judgment inhibits your ability to love. Be holy and God will come to you and upon death you will be drawn to Him.
Never be discouraged. God does not expect you to be perfect right now; just improve a little bit every day and you are on the way to perfection.
You are on the upward path. Let God judge other religions. A great danger: spiritual pride. Let the beauty within define you.
These are lessons from the other side.
The farther you go into the eternal, the more you will see who you really are.
You are more beautiful than you imagine — and would see that beauty if you let yourself, if you saw with the eyes of God.
Here on earth, ask the Holy Spirit to illuminate this. He can show you how you would appear before God and how to work toward the best appearance. In Heaven, said one researcher I have quoted, we remember our real identity. Some say we have an eternal name. Some say it is different from here. Some see things as similar.
This we know for sure: knowledge will grow each day.
The answers to every mystery of earth will come as a flash and will pale beyond the new wonders that stretch across realms we didn’t even know existed.
There are no misunderstandings in Heaven.
The coincidences of earth are the tapestry of eternity.
To God, the “small” things on earth may be big things and vice versa.
There are no “big shots” — in the earthly sense — in Heaven.
One musician who reputedly died, in reviewing his life, was asked by his angel during his life review if he had done everything with his music he wanted to, and he answered that he’d always dreamed of being an opening act for someone famous, like Arlo Guthrie at the Woodstock Festival. “The voice saw how I gave Arlo Guthrie a sort of hero image and explained to me that he was no different from the rest of us on earth, and that if you want something bad enough it can be yours — as long as you realize that once you get it, you may find that it was not what you were looking for in the first place.” Learn to cooperate, he was told, not compete. Some of the things we strive the most to get on earth aren’t what we expect once we get them. Everyone who gets to Heaven is a “star.”
Sweet Ripples. “Sparkle shine wishes,” is the way that one woman who experienced death, Linnie Smith, of New Hudson, Michigan, put it, describing the afterlife [see our original story on her].
“I am a very visual person, being an artist, yet there was nothing visual, just the sense of leaving my body and rising,” I was informed by another. “As I was rising I felt the most peaceful, joyful, loving, fatherly Presence, which to this day is impossible for me to describe or explain.”
We go where we think.
We step into the love we created.
With that love, said the Blessed Mother, we will not even feel the transition.
“If you would abandon yourselves to me, you will not even feel the passage from this life to the next life,” was her incredible promise to a locutionist. “You will begin to live the life of Heaven from this earth.”
[resources: The Other Side, and What You Take To Heaven]
