This excerpt from How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying) comes from Chapter 8:
Finding Presence Now: It's Always Been Now, and Will Always Be
Maintaining presence allows us to respond appropriately to life's personal challenges. Our ego always wants to be in control by labeling, judging, comparing, and making demands, while being truly present lets us recognize our harsher ego demands and reject them, allowing our deeper, intuitive intelligence to arise within that eternal moment. If we let our ego-mind – our feeling offended, our sense of injustice, our need to be right – spontaneously dictate our actions, we tend to be reacting, or often over-reacting to simple circumstances. We can blow situations out of proportion, losing the perspective that kindness, humility, honesty, forgiveness, and compassion can give us. In fact, we can make proper choices only when we're fully present to do so, because not only does presence give us the priceless gift of constraint – the ability to take that extra moment to let sanity and reason arise – but it also puts us in touch with an existent intelligence that is greater than our own. Just stopping and intently focusing on one breath can instantly allow us to check in with Heaven, so to speak.
In Heaven nobody gets caught overreacting in senseless or destructive ways. Everyone relishes taking that eternal moment to adjust to every situation. In fact, in Heaven everyone is quite calm and thoughtful, as you may have already imagined.
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