Week 1. Spiritual Principle
Heaven on Earth
_edited.png)
And what is heaven exactly? It is love made real.
“Love in your mind produces love in your life. This is the meaning of Heaven. Fear in your mind produces fear in your life. This is the meaning of hell.”
— Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
This means heaven is always a choice.
“This world was created by your choice and a new world can be created by a new choice. But you must realize that this is all there is. Love or lack of love. Love is all that is real. A choice for love is a choice for heaven. Neither are a place."
— Mari Perron, A Course of Love
“Heaven on Earth is a choice you must make, not a place you must find.”
— Wayne Dyer
Songwriters and spiritual teachers echo this wisdom.
“They say in heaven love comes first, we’ll make heaven a place on earth.”
— Belinda Carlisle
“Cause you and I know what love is worth, we’re gonna build a Heaven on Earth.”
— Eddie Money
“Rather than finding heaven on earth, we are asked to release heaven by living on earth.”
— Mark Nepo
In earlier times, visions of heaven were always beyond death. But today, many recognize that we do not have to wait.
“In the past, heaven or nirvana was thought to happen after death. The new thought is that we do not have to die to get there.”
— Barbara Marx Hubbard
Our participation in the OCA Movement—and our collective choice for love—can accelerate this next stage of evolution.
“The earth is not a lair, neither is it a prison. The earth is a Paradise, the only one we’ll ever know. We will realize it the moment we open our eyes. We don’t have to make it a Paradise—it is one. We have only to make ourselves fit to inhabit it.”
— Henry Miller
But too often, humanity still turns away from this possibility.
“You who have come close to truth only to turn your back and refuse to see it, turn around and look once again. You have traveled your path and the end of the journey is in sight. You stand at the precipice with a view of the new world glittering with all the beauty of Heaven set off at just a little distance in a golden light. When you could have seen this sight you turned your back and sighed, looking back on a world familiar to you, and choosing it instead. You do not see that this choice, even made with every good intention of going back and making a difference, is still a choice for hell when you could instead have chosen heaven. Yet you know that choosing heaven is the only true way to change the world.”
— Mari Perron, A Course of Love
“Eden is that old-fashioned house we dwell in every day, without suspecting our abode until we drive away.”
— Emily Dickinson
“Nirvana is where you are, provided you don’t object to it.”
— Alan Watts
The great teachers remind us heaven is always near, yet so often unseen.
“The heavens call to you… and your eye gazes only to earth.”
— Dante Alighieri
“The kingdom of heaven is closer than the brow above the eye, but mankind does not see it.”
— Buddha
“Our real reality is beyond the five senses.”
— Deepak Chopra
“Heaven means to be one with God.”
— Confucius
“I have found heaven on earth, since heaven is God, and God is in my soul.”
— Elizabeth of the Trinity
“The kingdom of God is within you.”
— Jesus Christ
“The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.”
— John Lennon
And today, a new sense of hope is stirring.
“Outside Heaven’s gate, healing is shaping our desires… Despite pain and conflict, the hope of Heaven is rising.”
— Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
“The gate of heaven is everywhere.”
— Thomas Merton
“The outcome of the world, the gates of the future, the entry into the super-human—these are not thrown open to a few of the privileged nor to one chosen people to the exclusion of all others. They will open only to an advance of all together, in a direction in which all together can join and find completion in a spiritual renovation of the earth.”
— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
“We are poised at Heaven’s gate. In our mind, we left there millions of years ago. Today we are returning home. We are the Prodigal Son generation.”
— Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
To fully participate in the OCA movement, the most important spiritual principle to understand is that Heaven is not a place, but a state of consciousness.
Earth, on the other hand, is the world perceived through our five senses—seeing, hearing, feeling, touching, and tasting—created by the mind’s projection of thought.
Earth can also be described as a world of form, matter, or darkness—even as hell. Yet all are the same: an extremely limited, perceived existence born from our thinking minds and most often experienced as ego-based fear.
Heaven, however, is everything else—an infinite existence unknowable to our limited minds. It is primarily known as consciousness, but also as spirit, oneness, wholeness, energy, light, the unknown, absolute truth, or even God. And Heaven is primarily experienced as the feeling and resonance of love.
Our only purpose as incarnated, self-aware, sentient beings is to choose to bring forth higher, unmanifested consciousness—love—into our manifested, earthly existence. This is what it means to create Heaven on Earth. That’s it.
And, inevitably, as the Lord’s Prayer says, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.”
This is the choice we have the free will to make in every moment.
I believe that moment is now. And now, we have a movement, a plan, and willing participants—you—sitting at Heaven’s gate, ready and destined to make it happen.
This means heaven is not something we wait for; it is a reality we create through choice.
“You can live in heaven right now… Heaven or hell is here and now.”
— Don Miguel Ruiz
The first Spiritual Principle of the OCA Movement is simple yet profound: Heaven is a place on Earth.
We have long been told heaven is far away, a reward after death. But the deeper truth, known across wisdom traditions, is that heaven is a state of consciousness available here and now. Earth is its reflection.
“Heaven is not a location but the inner realm of consciousness. Earth is its outer reflection.”
— Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth