Why Sadness Can Feel So Beautiful (Simple Spiritual Technology is All Around Us)

 This edited excerpt is from "How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying); Part One, Perspective, Chap. 6, Compassion

If you feel too caught up in the challenges of your life (as we always can) to unlock more open-hearted compassion, there is a guaranteed way that you can find the key to unlock it; and although it doesn’t sound too good, it’s such a deep part of our shared existence that (despite being rather painful) it can often seem almost comforting. The key to finding more compassion in our lives – a key that none of us can avoid finding – is this: Sadness.

Sadness visits us all like a long-lost relative whose company we don’t always look forward to but then become grateful for in a mysteriously profound way. There’s nothing good about it to the outside eye, but inwardly it does make you wonder: Why is this sad feeling so familiar and strangely appealing?

It’s because sadness opens our hearts (whether we wanted them open or not), and in our moments of soul searching it reliably directs us toward a “secret” passage into Heaven – a small side door that insiders already know exists. Sadness is a magical ‘sixth-sensory’ key into the state of compassionate consciousness (an application of Spiritual Technology), because it causes us to resonate with structures of the Universe at a deeper level than we normally encounter here on Earth. All of us can realize that kind of deep, shared reality through sadness, and perhaps for some people only through sadness. No one will completely escape it’s insistent embrace.

Imagine these scenes: The loss of a beloved one to illness or death; the bulldozing of a favorite piece of nature; the sight of an abandoned pet; the feeling that a favorite piece of music gave you way back when, and the feeling it stills gives you when you reminisce; the look in eyes of a homeless person when your eyes meet – the entire story of a different, lost life you might have lived yourself…

Do you feel the sadness in any of those scenes? If you do, then right now – in this eternal moment – you are connected to our shared compassionate consciousness. “You let the pain of the world touch your heart and you turn it into compassion,” I’ve heard it said (by a Tibetan Buddhist), and almost nothing else needs to be said about this mysterious gateway into the realm of the heart. Sadness arises within all of us in those places that reveal a great shared meaning…and we all intuitively know that we must return it’s embrace.

“Sadness is but a wall between two gardens.”

                                    Khalil Gibran

Read about this and much more in: How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), Wisdom From a Near-Death Survivor  from Llewellyn Worldwide available direct on this page, or online. How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond is available the same ways – but ask for it at your local bookstore!