HAY HOUSE Living Heaven on Earth WORLD SUMMIT in a Fear-Based Culture 2017
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#61 HAY HOUSE Living Heaven on Earth WORLD SUMMIT in a Fear-Based Culture 2017 ANITA MOORJANI IN CONVERSATION WITH GREG SHERWOOD [Intro music] SHERWOOD: Hello, and welcome to another session of the 2017 Hay House World Summit. We are delighted to have you taking part in this life-changing annual series. I’m your host, Greg Sherwood. And today we’re gonna get a chance to spend some time with author and teacher Anita Moorjani. Now, my guess is, you may have first encountered Anita’s work like I did through her appearance on one of Dr. Wayne Dyer’s PBS specials. Wayne was celebrating her life-changing insights born of her near-death experience on that program, and I was so blown away by it, I immediately went out and read her New York Times best-selling book, Dying to Be Me. Now in this book—in that original book, Anita describes how her doctors had given her mere hours to live on the morning of February 2, 2006. Unable to move and in deep coma caused by the cancer that ravaged her body for nearly four years, Anita entered another realm where she experienced great clarity and understanding about her life and purpose here on Earth. In that realm, she was given a choice of whether to return to life or continue on to death. Anita chose to return to life when she realized that heaven is a state, not a place, and because of this awareness, she made a remarkable and complete recovery within weeks of coming out of the coma. Now completely cancer free, Anita travels the globe, giving talks and workshops as well as speaking at conferences and special events. Now here’s the really cool thing: Anita has written a second book that in many ways is just as profound as the first. That’s because in it, Anita gives us the simple keys to making our lives indeed heaven on Earth, regardless of our life situation. And the good news—we don’t necessarily have to have a near-death experience to understand her message. Now the book is called, What If This Is Heaven? How Our Cultural Myths Keep Us from Experiencing Heaven on Earth. Key insight in the book, of course, is that heaven is a state of being, and I quote Anita here: “Your only work is to love yourself, value yourself, and embody this truth of self-worth and self-love so that you can be love in action. That is true service to yourself and to those who surround you.” Well, if that is not a great notion to start a conversation with, I don’t know what is. Anita Moorjani, welcome to this year’s Hay House World Summit. MOORJANI: Wow. [Laughs] Thank you so much for that beautiful, beautiful introduction, Greg. Thank you. SHERWOOD: Well, I’m very jazzed, because I just completed the first book. And I read the first book, and now I just read the second book, and it really is amazing how you’ve taken that experience—and then you were connected with Wayne Dyer, and you became sort of this phenomenon that’s given so many thousands of people, literally around the world, insights about something that most of us just fantasized or feared. And one of the things that I love about your story—and maybe we’ll just start here, is that really, as human beings, as you’ve understood it and gone on to explain even in your second book, we don’t have anything to fear. MOORJANI: Absolutely. We don’t have anything to fear, and the problem is, we’ve been brought up in a fear- based culture. And I won’t say a fear-based world, because the world is not fear based, but we’ve made it so 1 ©2017 Hay House, Inc. ©2017 Anita Moorjani HAY HOUSE WORLD SUMMIT 2017 by the way we teach people. And so we even teach people to fear death. Not just the dying process but what happens after death. We teach people to fear judgment and retribution and so on. But I realize that death, in and of itself, is actually a beautiful state, and there’s nothing to fear. SHERWOOD: Well, this is just one of the many ideas, literally the dozens of ideas that you have in the new book. And as your first book was obviously inspired by your near-death experience, this one goes on to explore some of the philosophical and practical revelations you had in the course both of having that experience but then living in the real world with the rest of us after the fact. You had to then come back to us and live in this world, and that’s not as easy as it sounds. MOORJANI: No. It’s not easy at all, because—so, you know, when I was in the other realm, I realized that everything that I believed was the opposite of what I—of what is truth. Everything that I had been taught to believe was the opposite of actual truth, of what I needed to know in order to make my life work. And when I say everything, I mean everything. You know, we operate from a place of fear. So, one thing is that I had always felt like an outsider. I’d always felt separate from everyone else. In that realm, I realized we’re all connected. We’re all one. We’re not separated. I’d always lived from a place of fear. I realized there’s nothing to fear. I’d always thought we were victims of what happened to us. I realized we’re not. The universe actually watches out for us. The universe or God or whatever we want to call it, or our higher self, has our back, and everything that happens to us, even though it seems difficult at that time to accept it, actually happens for our benefit, to take us to the next level. And so every single thing I learned in that realm, like even the way I perceived illness, was completely wrong. I realized our bodies are actually wise beyond what we give them credit for. And even illness comes in—we think it’s an illness that we have to kill and destroy and battle, but actually, an illness, what we label as an illness, is our body’s way of communicating with us, and it’s our body’s way of trying to heal. But then we battle with this body’s way of trying to heal, and we turn it into this full-blown illness. So there were all these things where I just realized, oh my God, I’ve been living my life completely wrong. SHERWOOD: I know, and that’s what I love, and that gets to the point, I think, of the subhead in our new book titled, What If This Is Heaven? And the subtitle is, How Our Cultural Myths Keep Us from Experiencing Heaven on Earth. MOORJANI: Yes. SHERWOOD: And indeed, it’s these myths. What you were just describing as these untruths. These things that we all grow up with and just assume are, you know, just the reality. It’s the water we swim in. Your perspective, born of that extraordinary experience you had, really turned the world upside down. And it’s really fascinating. MOORJANI: Yes. SHERWOOD: Was this a conclusion you came to in the moment of that experience, of the near-death experience? Or was it as you reflected upon it later as you recovered and got on in the world? 2 ©2017 Hay House, Inc. ©2017 Anita Moorjani Anita Moorjani in conversation with Greg Sherwood MOORJANI: The actual realization that I had been living life all wrong happened within that realm. And I’ll tell you what it feels like. If you imagine that you’ve been blind your entire life—and if you’ve been blind your whole life, you know, the way you perceive the world is completely different from the way it actually is, because you have no perception of color, for example. Like, even if someone describes color to you, how do you even perceive it? How do you even imagine colors if you’ve never seen them? And you have no perception of things like depth of field and distance. You have to walk the distance. You can’t look at a building or a wall, and you don’t have the sight to do that, to gauge, oh, that’s 40 feet away, or 60 feet away. You have to actually pace it, and then you realize how far it is. And you won’t understand when people say, “The sky is blue, and there’s a bird flying in the sky.” You won’t even understand what it means to get into an elevator and come out on a different floor. It’s like, I got into this room, and I came out, and I entered another dimension. So now, imagine if you die and you have a completely different perspective, which is the equivalent of one day, you have sight. You were this blinded person, and one day, you have sight. And in that being sighted, even if it’s for 24 hours, 36 hours, suddenly everything makes sense. It’s like, “Oh my God, that’s what it means to get in an elevator. That’s what a building is.” And I thought I was going into a different dimension, into another reality, and oh, my gosh.