Anita Moorjani – What If This Is Heaven?
An Interview with Anita Moorjani – What If This Is Heaven?
How Our Cultural Myths Prevent Us from Experiencing Heaven on Earth
Anita Moorjani knows well the truths that exist beyond common knowledge and acceptance. The clarity she has gained has led her to further understand who she was born to be.
Following Anita Moorjani near-death experience as shared in the New York Times bestseller Dying to Be Me, she found that part of that truth has involved contemplating the cultural myths infused into our everyday lives, and that are passed down from generation to generation, these myths are pervasive and influential. From the belief we reap what we sow to the idea we must always be positive, cultural myths are often accepted as truths without questioning.Anita Moorjani asserts it is now time for start questioning those beliefs to help us reach our fully informed, authentic selves.
Anita Moorjani explores these common myths in their real-world existence while presenting examples from her own life that reveal the falsehoods beneath the surface. By freeing ourselves from these ubiquitous expectations, we can break open an honest pathway to life as it was meant to be lived.
Interview of Anita Moorjani for OMTimes by Dirk Terpstra
Dirk Terpstra: What made you decide to start writing the second book and how did you experience this process?
Anita Moorjani: My second book, What if this is Heaven, is more like a journal of the journey after Dying to be Me was launched. My hope with my first book was to heal people’s hearts by sharing with them what is possible.
After the launch of Dying to be Me, many people started writing me and I received so much positive feedback which is what really kept me going. During this process, I also received many questions like: “Yes, I understand that I have to love myself but I have no idea of how to love myself” or they would say things like:” But how do I deal with pain? How do I deal with the fear? How do I deal with loss and suffering?”
During my new journey, I began to realize that we live in a very painful world, even though I thought “This is it. This is my story”, I also began to realize that people wanted more. While I was answering their questions by email and through Q&A on stage, these same questions were coming up over and over again, and so I needed to write them down. That was the start of my second book.
Dirk Terpstra: How did you experience writing What if this is Heaven, compared to writing Dying to be Me?
Anita Moorjani: Writing this book was probably a little harder than the first one. Dying to Be Me was like a release. It was really therapeutic. I was writing about something that I felt I needed to sort out and clear in my own head.
The second book is more like a journal, and I have been writing it about this journey in the second part of my life after my near death experience. I am writing while living it at the same time. I have integrated what I have learned, and I go deeper into the teachings of it.
Dirk Terpstra: You write at the beginning of your book that you learned upon death that all that matters in life is to love, laugh, and shine our light brightly!
We both know that at the most fundamental level, we are all deeply connected with one another. How do you think we can manage to keep loving, laughing and shining our lights, while we feel the suffering of millions of our brothers and sisters simultaneously?
Anita Moorjani: That is really the biggest challenge – If we feel guilty because they are suffering while our life is good, we won’t be bringing healing into the world.
I like to explain it as follows – If you imagine that you are a light bulb, the brighter you shine, the more you illuminate the room, including the people who are lost and who are in darkness. The only way that you can bring light into the world is by shining your light brighter, not by dimming your own light. You don’t even have to do anything. Your very presence is all that matters.
So if I just bring my presence into the world, it needs to be a presence full of love, full of joy and full of upliftment, because the person you take out into the world, is the person you are inside. But if you feel stressed because of all the fear, poverty, terrorism and so on, if you feel anger and fear, that is the person you are taking out into the world. You will then only be adding to the energy that is already out there while trying to change it. To take revenge with what you don’t like, you have to become what you are taking revenge against.
The only way to actually change things is to be the change like Gandhi said. Darkness is the absence of light. This is also true for fear. Fear is not a substance in itself. Fear is the absence of love. So the only way to fill the world with love is by filling yourself with love first.
The reason why we have starving people in one part of the world and a lot of wealth in another part of the world is all driven by fear. If we get sucked into the fear and we start fighting it with more fear, we will never get rid of the problem. The only way we can eliminate it is to be reaching deeper for more love.
Dirk Terpstra: The belief that we are separate from everyone else is a primary cause of injustice, of crime and even wars throughout the world, are due to this. You write: “How have we as a society—with our prejudices and roadblocks, our heavy expectations and assumptions—helped create these criminals?” How can we choose a different approach towards others who do us harm?
Anita Moorjani: The problem is that as a society, we believe that we need to put away the criminals behind bars. We believe that as long as they’re being put away, we’re safe. What we don’t realize is that the more criminals there are behind bars and the more jails we have to build, that there is something fundamentally wrong with our society and within our culture. There is cancer on the whole. It’s not an individual problem, it’s an issue in the whole. How are we letting those people down? Why have they chosen that life? Nobody becomes born into this world and will decide to become a criminal and end up in jail. They didn’t choose that. How have we as a society not supported them? Not given them the opportunities that we have. Not given them our support and love. They have been driven to make choices that have caused them to live this life.
We have to look at the patterns, and it is no coincidence that most of the people behind bars are male, and most of them are black African Americans. This is not a coincidence. At one point, these people were the slaves in America. What has the society as a whole done to fail them? We have to look at it as a bigger problem instead of individual problems. If you imagine a lifetime of being discriminated against, and people are suspicious of you, even when you are doing good, it makes you very resentful, angry and fearful. It makes you wonder why people are looking at you a certain way.
I would love to see people In prison be offered an opportunity to reform and to learn more about themselves so that they would have a chance to reintegrate back into normal life again.
When a country is willing to spend trillions of dollars on the military and is not willing to offer people the proper type of education and nurturing that they need to make them good and helpful citizens of the country, we know that we, as a country, have our priorities all screwed up.
This is also why my new book contains all these myths. I don’t like to give people step-by-step instructions. I don’t like to write a self-help book or offer the audience steps to… – whatever that may be. I think that you don’t need help. You are perfect as you are. You don’t need me to tell you how to do things. Who am I to give you instructions?
The book is more an invitation to consider ‘what if heaven is a state and not a place’? During my near death experience, I realized that heaven is not a physical place. It’s a state. It’s a different reality of things that we have access to, right here, right now. It’s a reality where every choice is made from a place of love instead of fear. It’s a reality where we spread love instead of fear. It’s a reality where we recognize that the more love we have, the less fear we will have. It’s a whole different reality, yet it’s not a separate place. We create this by realizing that we are perfect and that we are love. The more love we feel, the more our very presence brings love to the people around us.
