Paradise

This might be that you are feeling in harmony with yourself. It could also suggest you have been practising some form of meditation, and you have felt the timeless state within yourself. The experience of being in the womb is often felt to be paradise.

Experience of being in the womb; feeling in harmony with self. See: heaven.

Sometimes it indicates that you have found a way – even temporary – to deal with you problems and anxieties.

The casting out from the Garden of Eden, from the Paradise of the womb is one of the first and greatest possible shocks the infant faces as it moves into growth. Such immense psychic events are not simply things that happen only once. They are archetypal patterns that express in many ways at many levels. So although the discharge from the womb at birth is the first level of expulsion from Paradise, this enormous sense of loss can also be encountered in the loss of a parent or carer through separation or death. It can be met through the loss of the fundamental state of consciousness that exists prior to the arrival of self-awareness as language is learned and the concept of self develops. Self-awareness usually brings with it the loss of innocence – loss of the guiltless, concept-free condition. These may be experienced as separate shocks or shifts.

When the mind becomes exhausted and collapses through shock, loss or meditation, then what has always existed underneath the noise of thoughts and emotions becomes known. In this state we become a being empty of the massive structure of concepts and thoughts built over a lifetime. We suddenly find that the world we created out of our learned responses and ideas melts away, and we are in the Garden.

The story of the Garden of Eden is a wonderful description of this fundamental state of awareness. In the fundamental state there is little or no sense of self; there is a certainty that this blissful awareness is eternal, and that this is the real self. Along with this there is usually a direct experience of some kind that all creatures, all history, all beings, are part of your existence in the eternal now. Sometimes a jump beyond paradox occurs in a conviction that what you experience in this oneness is the source of all existence (God), and you and it are one and the same. Along with this is the sense that the blissful self-existent consciousness is the fundamental stuff of what we know through our senses as the physical universe. See Programmed

 Example: I was in a very expansive place and . . . everyone was there-thousands of entities like myself who belonged there and were also in spirit . . . we were all one, yet each of us was separate. We were in a paradise of complete warmth, happiness, and comfort. I was shown that the physical is actually almost like what we consider the dream state. I also realised how time-oriented, primitive, encumbered, and tiny the Earth is compared to the place from which I was observing it. There was no time-past, present, or future. It just is. Even though I experienced this, I can’t explain it in words. … Looking at the Earth and the physical realm from there made it seem insignificant. I could not imagine why I had worried and was so concerned about what went on down on Earth. From out there the Earth seemed but a speck of sand. I realised that the concept of time went hand in hand with the physical dimension, one reason being that there has to be a time limit on our Earth lives for the assignments we are trying to fulfil. It is hard to explain the insignificance of an Earth life from this other perspective. While I felt detached from the Earth, I was also still strongly me while on Earth. The most amazing thing, however, was the realisation that I had gotten the whole thing reversed and that the dream is actually the physical.  Quoted from Our Dreaming Mind by Castle. Dreams of Jeanette Fusco

Idioms: Fools paradise; a stranger in paradise.

Useful Questions and Hints:

Did I have an experience of paradise in my dream?

What do I feel paradise is like?

Have I searched for it?

See Enlightenment; ASC – Prison – The power of Habits – Questions