Today we ask that you know that your home happens to be wherever you are this moment.

There is a strong theme of “exile” that runs through your reality.  You are told the tale of the Garden of Eden, from which you were exiled forever.  Many such myths exist.  One feels a deep yearning for a home that is somewhere else.  This home is usually idealized as a paradise.

Some yearn to return to an idealized past — like the descendants of aboriginal peoples, who yearn to return to the perfection of their ancient tribal ways.  Some yearn for a physical piece of land — as the Tibetans yearn for the return of Tibet, or the Lakota Sioux yearn for the return of the Black Hills, or fundamentalist Jewish settlers in disputed parts of the Middle East yearn for the return of their Biblical homeland, while displaced Palestinians in the same region yearn for their own return.  Some yearn for “the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth” — the world to come after the Christian Apocalypse, an idealized heaven on earth.

These yearnings are, alas, fantasies.  They are like the fantasies of children who yearn for a world without homework.

There is nothing wrong with the desire to create and dwell within a kinder, saner world.

But you do not require a special piece of land or a time machine or the Apocalypse to make this happen.

In fact, these desires actively block you from creating a kinder, saner world right now — for they imply that it is impossible to create a kinder, saner world until some special condition is met.

These beliefs imply that until the lost land is restored, or the Apocalypse comes to pass, your special heaven on earth cannot exist.  Therefore you can give into cruelty and insanity so long as it is a means to the end of creating your special heaven on earth.

Hitler believed the same thing.  He was so obsessed with creating his vision of heaven on earth that it gave him the license to engage in war and genocide as part of the clean-up effort.

And so you see how the desire for utopia leads directly to the creation of Hell on Earth.  Hitler thought he was creating Heaven.  What the rest of us know is that he created Hell.

If you yearn for a kinder, saner reality, that begins right here and right now, wherever you are.  It does not begin after some injustice is corrected or your ancient lands are restored or Christ brings down the Kingdom.

It begins right here.  Right now.

If you yearn for paradise, begin living as you imagine an inhabitant of paradise might live.  Right now.

There is no idyllic home somewhere else.  You are not here in this body in this location by accident.  It is no mistake that you are you, in this body, in this time and place.  You are placed here to work with what is right in front of you in this lifetime.  There is no other place you are supposed to be but where you are right now.

Paradise starts at home.  Here.  Now.  It cannot be found in the past or the future.  That is a fantasy.

Home is wherever your feet are planted at this moment.  The Garden of Eden lies there, and nowhere else.  Work with what you have been given.