Quote from giles117:
Remember, when he was "alive" he siad the kingdom of heaven is AT HAND. After his death, the KINGDOM IS HERE.
Yes exactly. I taught that the Kingdom of Heaven is present, if not presently in your awareness.
Here is how my apostle Thomas remembers me saying just this:
Quote from gospel of Thomas:
"The disciples said to him, "When will the Kingdom come?" He said, "It will not come by watching for it. It will not be said, 'Behold here,' or ' Behold there'. Rather, the Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and people do not see it"
This is understandable only when you understand that the world you see is a collection of images in perception that you've selected to see relative to ideas about yourself...your made-up self-image. Perception is driven by what you think, mainly what you think about yourself.
When you perceive, you always look inward before you see outward. What you see outward reflects your ideas about yourself within... what you prefer to see instead of who you really are. When you "hide your light under a bushel" you are seeing out from a dense layer of obscuring thoughts within. So nothing you see is real. When you do not "hide" your light, you look upon a world with light from within. At that stage, you are seeing with the eyes of Christ. What he sees is not what eyeballs see.
When you look deeper within, past erroneous thoughts about yourself, you look out from the perspective of the Christ within. Such vision sees an entirely different world than eyeballs.
This is the "world" God gave His only begotten Son. It is still a world perceived. But when you are looking at it from the Kingdom within, you see the closest representation of Heaven that perception can offer.
This lasts only a little while, until such vision entices you to take the final step from perception back to knowledge...where you came from. After that, perception is forgotten.
While you perceive a Heaven on earth, you are in your natural state of timelessness...in the world, but not of the world. This is that elusive "state of grace", which is amazing.
Jesus