The Kingdom of Heaven is Within You

I did a video on the Kingdom of Heaven being found within us as Jesus states, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you”.  Luke 21:31 Jesus also said: If those who lead you say to you: See, the kingdom is in heaven, then the birds of the heaven will go before you; if they say to you: It is in the sea, then the fish will go before you. But the kingdom is within you, and it is outside of you. Gospel of Thomas, saying 3. A listener commented saying the Kingdom of heaven is not inside us and that Jesus meant he was the Kingdom of Heaven and he was in the midst of the crowd. Here is my response:

Here is the verse in context,  “Now when He was asked by the Pharisees when the Kingdom of God would come, He answered them and said, “The kingdom of God does not come with observation;   nor will they say, ‘See here!’ or ‘See there!’ For indeed, the kingdom of God is [g]within you.” Luke 17:20-21. First of all Jesus talking to the Pharisees said the kingdom cannot be seen and no one can say here it is or there it is over there. If Jesus was the Kingdom as you suggest it is obvious that they could see Jesus and show his location. 

Can I ask you a question about the Kingdom of heaven, also called the kingdom of God, which Jesus said was within us? Where do your thoughts, beliefs, and emotions reside? Do they live inside your body which the bible calls the Temple of the Holy Spirit or floating around somewhere outside you? When you go to sleep at night you are shut off from all external stimuli but still you can have dreams so vivid that you may wake up in a cold sweat or laughing. Where is the world you created unconsciously in your dreams? Is it inside you or outside you?  Isn't it inside  you in what the bible calls your body or the temple of the Holy Spirit? If you are searching for the Holy Spirit don’t you think you would look for God where God dwells which is in the temple, aka our bodies?  Where is the only place on earth that hate, greed, lust, bitterness etc can exist? They do not exist outside of a human body or temple but only inside us. Where is your brain with its trillions of neurons that gather information from our five senses and assemble it into our reality? Is it not in your body temple? 

I once believed that the Kingdom of heaven was pearly gates and streets of gold in the sky that could only be experienced after we die. I was looking for God outside myself as separate from me instead of looking inside myself and becoming aware of my thoughts and emotions. But the deeper I went into my inner world the more the inner kingdom became a reality. Jesus spoke of the kingdom of heaven , or God, eighty eight times in the gospels. It was a major theme in his ministry. He told us to pray “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done ON EARTH, as it is in heaven. If we don’t find it inside us we won’t find it outside us but when we find it within we see it outside too and Jesus’ message is that we are to bring it here to earth.