ALBANY COUNTY — For 30 years, Robert LaCosta has helped people hear again.

“I have a big heart for seniors,” said LaCosta who is himself 61. “We put a person in a soundproof booth to find deficiencies.”

It occurred to him that people could be spiritually deaf, too, and he has written a book to help with that.

“The Lord showed me we can become deaf to God in spirit. You can correct that by being aware of God, listening to the cues and clues,” he said.

His book, self-published through Amazon, has the same name as a blog he writes on sonrisen.com: “Portals To Heaven.”

“It started because I’d see things through to something else. It’s a great metaphor for God showing me the way,” LaCosta said, citing two examples.

“I was behind the fence by my pool, just about swearing at the filter, trying to get it right,” he recalled. “Then I looked through a crack in the fence and I saw the blue water and I imagined my grandchildren jumping in and having joy.”

His other example was about a vacation he took to Bend, Oregon where he stopped at a Holiday Inn, which was rundown and depressing. “It looked like a lower-end apartment complex with an outside stairway. I looked through the stairway and saw a breathtaking view of a golf course.”

LaCosta went on, “I literally started to see through things, to get a glimpse of something beyond.”

His 365-page book is arranged with a description of a portal each weekday for Monday through Friday with weekend days and pages reserved for readers to write about their experiences with their own portals.

“The idea is to discipline the mind and the senses,” said LaCosta.

“I grew up in the Roman Catholic Church,” he said, and he now attends the Bethlehem Community Church, which is non-denominational.

“I do speaking engagements on natural hearing or spiritual hearing. I’ve spoken to 700 or 800 groups on natural hearing,” said LaCosta who lives in Coeymans.

His business, the Heart Ear Boutique is located in the Glenmont Plaza.  LaCosta notes that the word “heart” also contains the words “ear” and “art.”

The hardest part of writing his book, he said, was the editing. Each “metaphor du jour,” as he puts it, was lengthy, and he had been blogging about the devotionals for seven years before he started condensing them into book form. LaCosta had to pare each to about 250 words.

“You’re down to a five-and-a-half by eight-and-a-half piece of paper,” he said. “I can crank out 650 words in no time. It’s far more time-consuming to edit back to 250.”