Discovering and Creating Heaven on Earth, with Martin Rutte
In this conversation, Andrew Cohn talks a second time with Martin Rutte, one of the pioneers in the field of spirituality in business, and more recently the author of the book, Project Heaven on Earth. Martin begins the conversation by sharing the three key questions that each of us can consider in order to begin to create heaven on earth—as each of us defines it. He also reflects back Andrew‘s answers to these questions and what that might mean for him. Martin describes his book as a blueprint of discovering what heaven on earth means for us, and the steps each of us can take to begin to bring it to life. He describes the seven gateways to heaven on earth, and shares stories that bring these powerful themes and ideas to life. He challenges us to consider where we might be “out“ of heaven and earth with ourselves. Martin talks about his belief that humanity is at a fork in the road, and it is by tapping into these bigger personal questions that we can navigate in the right direction.
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Discovering and Creating Heaven on Earth, with Martin Rutte
In this episode of the podcast, I speak with my colleague, and I'd like to say friend, Martin Rutte. As you may recall from the first time I spoke with Martin a few months ago, I met him originally back in 1996 or so when he hosted a conference on business and spirituality here in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He has since gone on to create other such conferences and really build communities about this topic. In this conversation, our second conversation, we really focus on his latest project, which is his book called Project Heaven on Earth: The 3 simple questions that will help you change the world... easily. He talks me through the three questions that each of us can consider in order to begin to create Heaven on Earth, as we may define that individually.
He talks about the questions as intended to shift the conversation from a conceptual idea to some specific actionable tasks we can perform in order to help create Heaven on Earth, again, as we define it. I answer those three questions myself. This interview is a little bit more personal than many. He invites each of us to answer these questions and use the book as a blueprint to discover what Heaven on Earth means for us and the steps each of us can take to try to begin to create it. He talks about the seven gateways or arenas, like seven categories or buckets to Heaven on Earth, that his interviews have distilled and shares a number of beautiful stories about how different people have brought this to life, made it real for themselves, and begun to project Heaven on Earth in their own lives.
He talks about his intention to make this really a normal part of conversation. As he says, giving us permission to have our soul speak. It's a beautiful life's work. I don't want to make it sound like this is the last significant thing Martin does, but it's beautiful evidence of life’s work and really making a mark and some lasting, deep conversations. He talks us through this book, and I hope you enjoy the conversation.
Welcome back to the Spirituality and Leadership podcast. We have with us again Martin Rutte, close on Zoom, far in mileage, but always close in spirit. So, thank you for being with us again, Martin.
Thank you.
Author of Project Heaven on Earth: The 3 simple questions that will help you change the world... easily, and earlier in his career, really one of the pioneers of the connection between spirituality and business, convening conferences, and one of the first people I knew in this space. So, thank you again for all of your contributions. It would take a library's worth of podcasts to capture, but what I'd love to do after what we discussed last time is really talk more about the work you're doing, as opposed to some of the more foundational first-generation spirituality and leadership work, if we could call it that. Let's talk more about your latest project, your latest book, which I have in front of me, and what this all means and where the conversation is going. Is that a fair way to describe how we might use this time?'
Heaven On Earth
Let me just begin for those who didn’t see the first episode. I’m a management consultant. I’ve worked with large corporations, Sony Pictures, Southern California Edison. I’ve spoken four times at the Harvard Business School on the topic of vision. I did a lot of work on spirituality and work, a lot of work. I was going to do a keynote address at a conference on spirituality and work in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I was in the green room, getting ready, meditating. In my mind, I asked this question, “If every business in the world is spiritual, is that what you want?” I said no. “If we could transform business through spirituality, and because business is the temporal power in the world, we could transform the world.” Andrew, this thought popped into my mind, “You mean Heaven on Earth.” I can remember my first thought, “You can’t say that,” and then I thought, “Why not?” I can talk about hells on Earth, can’t I?
You're talking about that all the time.
All the time. The political scene, the economy, the refugee situation, the environment, COVID, pandemics, and so on. We can talk about that. We’re sometimes overwhelmed by those conversations. Why can’t we talk about the vision we have for our life, our work, our relationships, our nation, and our world? If we had a magic wand, wouldn’t that, in essence, be Heaven on Earth? I began to be intrigued by the notion. “What am I talking about?” I don’t even know what Heaven on Earth is. I began this inquiry, like I did, as you recall, with spirituality and work. I began this inquiry into “What’s Heaven on Earth?” I had no idea. I knew when I heard the phrase Heaven on Earth that it was going to be the next phase of my life, which it has been and continues to be.
I started going around asking people, “What’s Heaven on Earth?” I wanted to get the lay of the land of what it was that had come to be Heaven on Earth, hundreds and hundreds of people. As I began to do that more and more, these three distilled questions kept coming up that would help me get the person to discover what Heaven on Earth is for them. We didn’t talk about this before this interview, but I think you’re gutsy enough. Can I ask the three questions of you?
Yeah, absolutely. One thing I’d like to ask you about, either now or later in this conversation, is where did you first hear the expression Heaven on Earth, or did it come from within you?
Within me. I heard it here. It came into my head. Obviously, I’d heard it before, many, many times. It never registered in the way that it did this time. I knew this was the next phase of my life, clear as a bell.
Three Key Questions
Beautiful. Great experience to have. Good for you. If you have questions for me, fire away, or else please share more about the evolution of this inquiry for you. I’ll follow your lead here.
It’s important that the questions be asked and answered because then you’ll understand the evolution in a much deeper context. For those of you watching and listening, just pause, if you would, after I ask each question and answer the question for yourself. It’ll make it much more powerful.
I will pause as well to give the listener an opportunity to do that.
Question number one, recall a time when you experienced heaven on earth. What was that?
First thing that comes up for me is, I'm recalling when I assisted in the presentation and facilitation of a personal growth seminar with Insight Seminars in Omsk, Siberia, Russia. The feeling of connectedness to people there, with whom I couldn't speak, mostly, some of them spoke a little bit of English, especially the younger people. The fact that we were doing this work about authentic expression, about heartfelt connection, communication, and about our values, it was so universal. In one sense, I was a complete fish out of water there.
This was back in the early ’90s when it was still, we need to worry about these people. I can’t hug one of these guys, they’ll be picking up a gun. This is what I was indoctrinated with to some degree. But the feeling of closeness, universality, and connection in that experience, that’s the first thing that comes up for me.
Very clear. I'm just making notes so we can come back to that. Next question, imagine you have a magic wand. With this wand, you can have Heaven on Earth. What's Heaven on Earth?
It's funny, I think about this podcast. Heaven on Earth is a world where people are seamlessly integrating their professional skills and talents, their professional abilities, what they're doing in the world, business, making money, transactions, commerce, economy, among other things, living in community, and the deeper personal and spiritual dimensions. Who am I? What am I here to do? How am I expressing myself authentically, lovingly, caringly, purposefully? The word that comes to mind for me mostly is integration. That's Heaven on Earth.
Very clear. The third question, what simple, easy, concrete step or steps will you take in the next 24 hours to have more of that?
Two things come to mind clearly. The first one that popped into my head was to have this conversation, and another conversation like it, within the next 24 hours. In other words, speaking with people about “How can we integrate?” or “What do you do to integrate?” or just teeing up this conversation, not in a controlled, heavily structured way, but just teeing it up in a hopefully gentle, flexible way. The other way, which is slipping my mind at the moment, is to take a few minutes to reflect on this. It's not necessarily about going out and doing something in the world, like having a conversation to influence or make something happen, but rather a visioning, a sense of feeling this, letting myself metabolize this sensation of what this is. It's a little bit of what Dr. Rick Hansen calls turning states to traits.
I hadn’t heard that. That’s good language. Let’s go through the questions, and I want to explain why I ask the three questions and why in this order. Question one, recall a time when you experienced Heaven on Earth. What you said, Andrew, is “When I assisted in a personal growth course called Insight in Russia.” What's interesting is, I didn’t define Heaven on Earth. You did not ask me what I meant by Heaven on Earth. Yet, you answered the question, which struck me as fascinating initially. It’s because I assert that there’s an already knowing within you, that when I asked the question, “Recall a time when you experienced Heaven on Earth,” you scan, and you go, “Remember that time in Russia with Insight? Bang, that was Heaven on Earth.”
That’s at least one experience that you’ve had of Heaven on Earth. Second question, here’s a magic wand. With it, you can have Heaven on Earth. What’s Heaven on Earth? The purpose of the magic wand is to remove the necessity of having to know how you’re going to do it. If you don’t have to know how, you can just go purely into the what. If I don’t have to know how, then let me just tell you what it is. “It is a world where people integrate and feel their professional skills and talents, they’re living in community, it’s deeply personal, they’re spiritual, they’re authentic, they’re loving.” For you, when you boiled all of that down, the one word is integration.
In your case, when the global value of integration occurs globally, that is Heaven on Earth. I’ll come back to that in a moment. The third question, I don’t want to just leave it at, “You know what Heaven on Earth is.” I want you to actually, if you choose, begin to take a tiny little concrete step that you know you’re going to be successful at and actually have it begin to be made real. That, you said, is two things, “I’m going to have this conversation on integration with somebody in the next 24 hours, and I’m going to reflect on this.” What was the word you said? Not melting, I can’t remember.
Turning states to traits. In other words, helping to pave some of those neurons of temporary feeling sensations into something that’s more habituated, a regular feeling and awareness.
Those are the three questions. You’ll see what they do is they show that you have had an experience of Heaven on Earth without me defining it. Secondly, you know what Heaven on Earth is. Third, you can create the agency through a simple step in the next 24 hours to begin moving that into reality. That’s the purpose of the three questions. It takes Heaven on Earth from some impossible doodah idea into “I have had an experience, I do know what it is, and I can actually make it real in our world.” Let me just stop there, because I want to then go to another point.
The purpose of the three questions is to take heaven on earth from something impossible to reality in our world.
Thank you for sharing this. I’ve heard you share this before, and I love when it’s personal like this. I’ll just claim that my own personal selfish reality of the experience I’m having right now, thank you. I love the simplicity. There’s a part of me that’s thinking, “Is everybody willing to have this conversation with you readily like this?” My guess is probably more people than I might give credit for.
There’s been a progression over this, it has been 30, 35 years. At the beginning, people, you could see their eyes cloud over. But because of the issues that we talked about earlier, environment, pandemic, threat of nuclear war, artificial intelligence threat if it takes off in the wrong direction, there is much more willingness to discuss ideas like Heaven on Earth, utopia, paradise. I can track that by going to Google and looking at the phrase Heaven on Earth in 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, it’s just taking off. Underneath the surface turmoil of culture, there is something new arising. One way that I measure this is not only the projects that people are doing, which we’ll talk about, but also those simple numbers on Google, they’re mind-boggling.
Wonderful. Terrific. Tell me more.
Seven Gateways
We've got these questions. I've asked thousands and thousands of people these questions. What begins to happen is the lay of the land starts to unfold. There are what I call seven gateways. These are things that people talk about, arenas, gateways, about how they would enter Heaven on Earth and make it real, that consistently kept coming up. My book, do we talk about the title of the book?
We haven't talked about the project dimension of it yet, but we will. I noticed that that copy is autographed. Good for you. Mine isn't. We'll have to talk about that. We'll need to get you back here in person, but please go on.
The title is Project Heaven on Earth: The 3 simple questions that will help you change the world... easily, the noun, but also the verb project Heaven on Earth, a state of being, a state of doing. What are the seven arenas? People have 1 or 2 of them that are really more important. The first one is internal. There are those people who say the way you create Heaven on Earth is internal. “I go to seminars. I meditate. I go for walks in nature. I go to therapy to clean up the not-having parts of me.” The premise being, the more Heaven on Earth within here, the more it will show up in the world. There are people who talk about what I call global values, harmony, love, peace, in your case, integration. You are in the gateway, or that is in the gateway, of a global value. The premise being that once this global value is lived globally, that is Heaven on Earth for you. Correct?
Yes.
Project Heaven on Earth: The 3 simple questions that will help you change the world ... easily
It's that powerful. The third gateway is relationships, with myself, with another, with the divine. Where are you out of Heaven on Earth with yourself? I'm noticing, for example, when I eat sugar, not Heaven on Earth. Relationships with another. There are people you have hell-on-earth relationships with. How do you clean those up so they become Heaven on Earth? How do you nourish the ones that are Heaven on Earth already for you? And your relationship with the divine, however you define that. That's the third. We move into the external world. There are those who say the way you create Heaven on Earth is by ending a particular suffering, hunger, war, poverty, slavery.
Environmental degradation. Things like that.
Correct. They talk about it really interestingly because it's like an arch bridge that has a keystone. That keystone is the suffering. By the removal of that keystone, by the removal of that suffering from the world, all the other sufferings go. The end of war, for some people, that's it. There are projects, because I've been tracking these, which are saying, the end of slavery, not lessening slavery, which is great, but the end of slavery. The end of homelessness. The end of war. That talk, for me, is very clearly Heaven-on-Earth talk. That suffering no longer exists. They are a commitment to that. We talk about people for whom the gateway is institutions.
What is the purpose of law, government, religion, commerce, science, medicine, entertainment, media? What if the purpose of one of those institutions was to help co-create Heaven on Earth? What would it do? What would it not do? We move farther afield to nation. There are people who've said, “My nation is a Heaven-on-Earth nation.” Canada, the United States. Who else do I have? Hungary, Croatia, Denmark. People who've taken Austria, a phenomenal woman in Austria. I learned from her, we were talking, What's Heaven on Earth for you? She said, “Austria is a Heaven-on-Earth nation.” I went, “That's kind of big, isn't it?” She said, “No, it's simple.”
We're looking for what the simple is for you, not by my definition, but by your definition. The final gateway, and these are not in order, is, “This here, now, is Heaven on Earth,” but our belief that it's not, our belief that we're kicked, quote, out of the garden and can never go back to Heaven, is what prevents us from just stopping and going, “We are in Heaven, and our job is to create more heavens.” Those are the seven. People will usually pick 1, 2, maybe 3, and that will be their focus. They'll do a project that then comes out of that. I'll talk about the projects next, but let me just stop there and see if the gateway conversation makes sense.
We are in heaven and our job is to create more heaven.
It makes perfect sense. Did you think about these seven different types or categories of heavens, if you will, or did they come after you started to hear people and recognize, “I'm starting to see how these are falling into different buckets?”
People’s Heavens
The latter. At first, I didn't know. I was just listening, and then I started to hear, “Wait a minute. Somebody else said that. There's something here.”
Beautiful. By the way, I think your listening component is another dimension of Heaven on Earth. It's Heaven on Earth when people listen to one another. Good for you for practicing that. The way I hear you describing these seven things, it's more inside out. The first one is more inside, further out, farther and farther out, and then the last one really encompasses them all as I interpret it.
That's the way I've written it, but I'll give you a perfect example. I was doing this 300-person event. This woman stands up and says, “It's about love. If you have love in the world, that's Heaven on Earth.” The guy after her stands up and says, “What are you talking about? What about hunger? If you end hunger in the world, that's Heaven on Earth.” They started to get into it. I went, “Wait, stop. This is not about the one way to do this. Our job is to support her to get more love in the world. Our job is to support him to get the end of hunger.”
That made really a lot of sense to people. This is the way, because you'll notice that what I'm not doing here is proselytizing or imposing a definition or a way into a gateway for you into Heaven on Earth. It's much more powerful, in my way of looking at it, to evoke the natural, organic way that you have, that you want to create Heaven on Earth. When people discover what that way is for them, they're off and running.
I agree with you, it's more powerful, and it's more respectful, and it's more practical. Especially from people come at things from different sides. Is there a conflict between bringing more love into the world and eliminating hunger? I don't think so, but we come at it from different ways. I appreciate the way you're saying it's not for me to impose a definition, any more than it was 30 years ago. Was it for you to impose a definition of what spirituality or what strategy in the workplace is? We talked about that last time.
Very good. Those are very strong values for me, ways of operating. So, let's look then, unless you have another question, let's look at some examples, because I want the listener or viewer to get that this is much more than a good idea. There are people all around the world who have answered these questions, who have bought my book, who have gone through it. The book, let me just do a little thing on the book, the book is not a book to read in the sense that you sit down and read it. The book really is a blueprint to help you discover what your Heaven on Earth project is. Do the three questions. We go into depth in each of the seven gateways, and it took me a long time, Andrew, to write the book because I had to discover the entry point and the way that each gateway worked.
So that when you look at the gateway, you’ll be like, "I get it. This makes sense to me, and if it's your gateway, fine. If it's not, fine." We end with a particular vow at the end that, if you want to, you choose to say, in essence, "I'm an agent of Heaven on Earth. That's what we're here to do." I was writing about this, we are at a fork in the road for humanity. I believe we have existential, human-wide threats, the environment, pandemics, the threat of AI, environmental collapse, nuclear weapons. Any one of those could knock us all out. We have to come together, which is what I'm saying this work is. This Heaven on Earth is the new story of what it means to be a human and what it means to be humanity. Let me say that again, Heaven on Earth is the new story of what it means to be a human and what it means to be humanity, both the individual and the collective, if you choose. Let's move into examples.
By the way, if I could just chime in here, one of the things I love about the book is that it is really a guidebook. I think it's about discovering that Heaven on Earth, or perhaps naming it, not creating it any more than, like, when I have done leadership workshops about purpose or coaching around individual purpose, "What's your purpose? Why are you here?" That's not something to create, it's something to discover. It is there already. In my experience, is that what you find with Heaven on Earth? It's not about "We need to do some work on this." It's more like, no, maybe you don't know the exact word, but it's in there.
I know that because of how easy it is for people to say, "This is a time I experienced Heaven on Earth" question one, and question two, "Here's the magic wand. What's Heaven on Earth?" When we do either an online workshop or an in-person event, several hundred people begin to share their answers, especially question two, "What's Heaven on Earth for you?" You can feel the whole room opening. This is really realistic, women especially crying, just bursting into tears. I was shocked the first time. “Why are they crying? We're not doing anything emotional.” I think it's because women have no Heaven on Earth and have suppressed it for all the cultural reasons that we don't need to go into. When someone says, "You know the world that you long for? We can talk about it, and you can be in making that happen." That is like, “Oh my God.” Bang. They're off and running.
You're tapping into something very deep and very powerful and very authentic, something that you really can't disagree with. It's real.
It is real.
Promoting Global Family
I just wanted to highlight one of the other things I love about this book is you've got some wonderful quotations in here, some of which I've seen before because I've been in this related space for a long time, and some were quite new. One of them, when you talked about a choice point, we're at somewhat of a choice point as a society. I remember this quotation from the Dalai Lama that's in your book, "We are at the dawn of an age in which extreme political concepts and dogmas may cease to dominate human affairs. We must use this historic opportunity to replace them with universal human and spiritual values and ensure that these values become the fiber of the global family which is emerging." I think your work is you're helping to promote global family gatherings, if you will, the family dinner table.
We are the family. I remember, I'm a member of The Hunger Project for 30 or 40 years. One of the things they said was, "Think of somebody starving in Ethiopia, Sudan, somewhere in Africa. If that person was directly a member of your family, would you allow a member of your family to starve?" Of course, you would do anything. Anything. “Guess what? They're a member of your family.” I never forgot that. It was like, “You're right.” When you see a woman crying in Indonesia because there's been a tsunami and her livelihood, the farm she's been on with her family, is gone. She's alone, it's flooded, and she's crying. You've never been to Indonesia. You don't speak Indonesian. You get it.
It's the human experience, on the sadness part, but also on the joy part. Let's look at some examples. In this work, what I'm asking people to do, if they choose, is to discover what their own Heaven, what your own Heaven on Earth project is. I was in Hawaii doing a workshop, and a woman who grows little microgreens, it takes ten days to grow them, she teaches you how to grow them. It was an Alema fryer, and she said that. "I don't know." I said, "What do you do?" She said, "I teach people how to grow microgreens." I said, "Why do you do that, and how does that tie into Heaven on Earth?" Her eyes lit up, and she said, in essence, "It's to return to the garden."
Now, she puts that embedded at the end of each email, that we're about returning to the garden. A woman in Mexico City smiles at two people a day. Why two? Because, in the book, you'll see I did a chart. If you speak to two people and ask each of them the three Heaven on Earth questions, and then you ask those two people to ask each two the next day, and so on and so on, all you have to do is talk to two people. Ask two people the three questions, people who have never been asked before. Let's say everybody agrees and does it. How long does it take to cover all 8 billion people in the world? Do you know the answer to this?
Thirty-five days or something alarmingly short like that.
Thirty-two.
Amazing.
I remember when that came to my mind. I must have done the calculation 3 or 4 times because I didn't believe it. It's 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, and so on, and in 32 days, 8 billion, it just zooms. Other examples, a police officer in Texas has written a sixteen-page manual called Heaven on Earth for Law Enforcement. Because I asked him one day, this question came up in his speaking, and I said, "What's Heaven on Earth for policing?" He said, "That's simple, the end of crime and people helping each other." I went, "Justin, you do something with that." A sixteen-page manual. A woman outside of Halifax, Nova Scotia, we were doing a webinar, and we were talking about sufferings in the world, and I said, "Is there a suffering that bothers you, Susan?" She said."Yes, violence against women," She was so mad. "I've been to the police, I've been to the government, nothing. What would you do?"
I said, "I don't know your financial situation. You could donate $5,000, you could donate a penny." She said, "What difference would a penny make?" One of the other women on the phone called Annie said, "What if everybody in your county donated a penny a day to help end violence against women?" She went for it. They started a program in which they handed out a little, pretend this is a mason jar, with a picture of a woman, half her face bruised and beaten, the other half bright, alive, with the light shining out. The program's called Making Change. They asked people to donate a penny a day or more. But a penny a day for a year, you could not put in a check for $3.65 and say, "That's the year." No. Penny, penny, penny, penny.
They did it in two counties. They raised $2,500 in a year. They took it to a group in the government, the federal government of Canada, called Status of Women, who gave them $100,000 for each of the subsequent three years. She reports that wherever she goes, the first question is, "How can I help?" What difference would a penny make? What difference would a smile make? What difference would embedding your definition of Heaven on Earth at the end of an email make? Nothing, unless you say it does. Let's just keep going up. This woman in Austria, Elizabeth Ziegler, she was the one who said, "I'm going to make Austria a Heaven on Earth nation." I went, "Why?" She said, "Because it's simple."
She taught me that. I don't know what your simple is, but you do. Something that's simple, easy, concrete, that you know you're going to be successful at. She's taken on Austria. She took a copy of my book to the office of the President of the country. On a Halloween night in Austria, she went to a monastery and enrolled them in doing an event called Heaven on Earth, where people went with little magic wands, all in German, from station to station. They had to answer the three questions. She got the priest to deliver a homily in which he talked about Heaven on Earth. This woman is incredible. We move up to the next level, a man named Charles Torry from Africa. I was doing a seminar, and he just lit up. He said, "This is what I've been waiting for." His project is Africa is a Heaven on Earth Continent. It’s a Facebook page, Africa, a Heaven on Earth Continent. Staggering.
I have no idea how people's creativity will show up. I think that's one of the things that makes it so fascinating to me. The idea. Here in Prince Edward Island, where I'm speaking to you from, in Prince Edward Island, Canada, where I have a summer cottage, a group of us decided, 10 to 15 years ago, to declare Prince Edward Island as Canada's first Heaven on Earth province. We’ve had a seminar given by the Prince Edward Island Business Women's Association. I was going to talk on vision, and she said, "What else are you doing?" I went "I'm doing Heaven on Earth." She went, "No, that's Heaven on Earth, Heaven on Earth." I went to each of the four political party leaders here and asked them the three Heaven on Earth questions plus the question, "Here's a magic wand, what's Heaven on Earth for Prince Edward Island?" We turned that into a video with each of the four.
As far as I know, it's the first time all political party leaders in a jurisdiction spoke about Heaven on Earth. What else have we done? I can’t remember all the other things we’ve done here, but on and on and on. A coffee shop has a Heaven on Earth Coffee. A tea producer has created a Heaven on Earth Tea. It just goes on and on. The idea is to make it a normal part of conversation. The image I have is, I get on a plane. There's an empty seat beside me. You sit down. We’ve never met before. You know, "My name is Martin. My name is Andrew. What do you do? What's your contribution to Heaven on Earth?" That it would be a normal question, and you would know the answer. You would ask me the same question, and I would tell you my answer. That's what's going to happen.
Beautiful. I love the idea of the four political parties. Perhaps this is coming from my lens of integration, which I talked about earlier, but I wonder if those four political parties, with those leaders, went into a room together and shared their vision of Heaven on Earth, how different would those four visions actually be?
You know what we can do? I'll send you the link for the video, and you could post it below the video so people can see for themselves.
Great. I want to hear more about the woman in Austria because I have a colleague in Austria who wants to know about her. She doesn't know that yet, but she wants to know about her. So cool.
Andrew, this woman is a pistol. She's amazing to me. Amazing.
The New Story Of Humanity
What I'm interpreting is that your personal impact on this, or what you're setting in motion, is you're helping people kindle or rekindle their vision of Heaven on Earth. Is that what Heaven on Earth means to you?
Yeah, that's a lovely question. I believe we know, and you know, minus the people who have evil intent, which is really a tiny portion of the world, right? The vast majority of the world wants one of these gateways. I want the new story of what it means to be a human and what it means to be humanity to be clear, we are co-creating and experiencing more and more of Heaven on Earth. It's time, Andrew. It's simply time.
It is simply time we co-create and experience more and more of Heaven on Earth.
Amen to that, my friend. I feel as though there's a part of me that just wants to be quiet and let that settle into the soil. Where can people find out more about your book, the website, these stories?
The website is ProjectHeavenOnEarth.com. The book is Project Heaven on Earth: The 3 simple questions that will help you change the world... easily by Martin Rutte. It's available on Amazon, and I'm asking people to buy three copies, one for you, one for somebody who you know would love it, and who is that person? Think of that person, and one for somebody who's going to come into your life, and you'll have it ready for them.
The program is called The Case for Heaven on Earth. The other opportunity I want to offer is, if you buy twenty, send me a note, Martin@projectheavenonearth.com, with the Amazon receipt. I will do a one-hour consult with you or a one-hour talk for your group that you put together. I want to get this out into the world, and I'm asking you to support me if this vibe resonates with you. Let's get this out into the world, Project Heaven on Earth: The 3 simple questions that will help you change the world... easily on Amazon.
I'm already thinking about some ideas of where I'd love to introduce you, to certain groups, some groups that I'm already working with, etc., business groups, because that's the place where I work, but not necessarily limited to that.
There's another question we ask, depending on, let's say it's a business group. Using the same magic wand, what's Heaven on Earth for your business? And people know.
What a valuable thing to be able to hear the answers to that question from the people on my team, or from the people at the lowest entry level, whatever it might be, part-time cashiers in my business to senior, whoever it is. To hear the different visions, the answers to the question that people have for our shared endeavor. Very powerful.
We have a friend, or I have a friend, Ray Blanchard, who is a trainer. He so loved this, he took it to his board of directors and asked the three Heaven on Earth questions. Plus, using the same magic wand, what is Heaven on Earth? They were sharing on his board. He said they were crying, they were so deeply moved. I've had a consultant do it with a healthcare executive. It gives you permission to have your soul speak. I never said that before. That's it.
Sometimes the work that we need to do is get out of the way. Thank you, Martin, for this conversation. Thank you for the book. Thank you for this movement. I'm really curious. I want to go to the website and poke around and look at some of these examples. I love how people are taking this and running with it in their own ways, which is so powerful. There's no Heaven on Earth rulebook. It's more like a Heaven on Earth invitation, and then, through the power of shared media, to be able to share these stories, which helps kindle some of these flames in different areas. I would imagine it's kindling me.
Thank you.
Lovely. Martin@martinrutte.com.
ProjectHeavenOnEarth.com and Martin@martinrutte.com is my consulting side. When you buy a case, twenty or more, send it to Martin@projectheavenonearth.com.
Got it. Beautiful. Thank you. Let's wrap this up for now. My sense is that we'll be speaking again, and perhaps it'll be on this podcast. I know it will be elsewhere.
Thank you, Andrew, very much.
Thank you.