Simple Clues to Knowing When You are in Your Heart
Love, Heart, and an End to Separation and Judgments
How to dissolve the
differences, Because it is impossible to be in the heart and be separate at the same time the simplest clue to knowing when we are in fact in our hearts is to ask ourselves, "Do I feel separate? Am I judging others?" When we judge we separate, and when we separate from one being we separate from all beings, including our own being, because there is only one being. The greatest caring act is to begin to look at how our minds separate being from being. To look at the root cause within us that separates us from the Oneness of Being is the heroes act because most people value, above all else, their individual separate uniqueness. In our minds, we envision a terrifying conflict between individuality and The Oneness of Being. To give up our separateness we must give up our selfishness, that part of us that brings our conflicts, pains and suffering. Giving up our separateness is the giving up of ego consciousness which is small and puny in comparison to who we really are, the Oneness of Being. The terror of our egotism is the fear of losing that special uniqueness that we identify as me. On a being level we never actually loose the uniqueness, only the special-ness and the craving to be important. For most people the above clue is meaningless because separation is all they know. Most human beings have completely forgot the unitive state of consciousness that they where born with. That state of oneness and vulnerable bliss. Most people, if you said to them, "Hey I am feeling a little separate from you" would not know what you are talking about. They would probably think you are crazy and the heart has always been depicted as being a fool. Fools say funny things. Or if you say "Hey I feel judged by you" equally there are many who cannot distinguish what a judgment is or what it does in human relationships. For them it is just the reality of their thoughts and to them all their thoughts have the weight of total reality.
Can You Make Yourself Vulnerable to Being Hurt? Heart Clue #2 The second key or clue to the heart is: can you open yourself to being hurt? Can you communicate in such a manner that it does not matter what others say or do? If we are totally open we can not really be hurt too badly because the heart is the totality of being and that being is very strong and open to whatever the cosmos sends it. When we are totally open in the heart there is little place for the hurt to stick, little mind to dwell and suffer obsessively. The heart can feel and suffer, but for strong hearts these feelings pass. The heart felt person can fall, can feel, can suffer, can be thrown to the ground. But these people pick themselves up, dust off their pants and get about the business of living life. It is our capacity to endure the sufferings of life Even Christ, when on the cross, lost hope for a second when he said, "Father, why have you forsaken me." To think that there was no pain in his great soul at his own crucifixion. He consciously opened himself up to the greatest of great hurts. To think he went to the cross laughing and in great pleasure is ridiculous. But he found the answer to the deepest anguish when he said, "Father forgive them, they know not what they do." This was such a releasing thought, freeing the soul to transcend the hurt, the hurt that comes from being a human being on this planet. Such a great master of consciousness can brave the ultimate of tests. The most tender hearts are actually the toughest, they can take anything. To be totally vulnerable is a form of surrender to whatever might happen. That is the strongest person. It is helpful to remember when dealing with the realities of Christ's consciousness that when he said Father forgive them, he was talking to his own immortal consciousness, his own highest and most pure soul.
Living in Truth Simple Heart Clue # 3 To gain access to the universe of our own hearts we must be willing to live with truth. The truth is that we cannot be happy, in our hearts, if we are not living in truth. In our hearts is the truth of who we are, what we want, and what we need. In our minds is often something else: what we think we are, what we think we want and what we think we need. If we compromise with the truth, we cannot remain at peace in our hearts. In all aspects of life this is true. In our relationships, in business, government and education. When we lie, hold back the truth, when we fail to communicate the full honesty of our feelings in any given situation, we become uneasy in our hearts. The further we drift from the absolute truth in any given situation the further we drift from the absolute center of our hearts. So this is another simple clue: Are we living in truth? Love is the caring about truth. It may seem hard to live in truth. If I tell them what I am thinking in my heart of hearts what will they think? The ego, which is based on the untruth of separation, always finds it difficult to live in truth. To stay one with the truth requires some sort of ruthlessness with oneself. It takes great heart. Facing the truth about ourselves or the situations we have created for ourselves can often bring pain. The truth has a tendency to wound us, it is painful to endure. The truth is as unpopular now as it ever was because the world is still identified with mind consciousness, with separation, judgments and dogma. The truth disturbs those who are not in truth because it exposes their separation and how distant they are from truth. The truth also disturbs us because it means that we have to change. But if we fall in love with truth we can eventually So if something is troubling you share it with the person you need to. Share your truth, don't hide your feelings or you will never be comfortable in your heart. Your feelings are telling you something and not only do we need to listen to them but we need to communicate them with our significant others. Once we open the heart it becomes a very sensitive organ and it tells us when we are in truth or not. Either it feels deeply at peace of something is going on down there in it's mysterious depths. When we feel disturbed it is time to penetrate that disturbance, probe it to it's core, and then act in some new way that will resolve the issue. Our individual resistance to change is one of the most basic characteristics of our human nature and is mirrored by our resistance to open our mouths and say how we really feel. People love the stable, the familiar, the secure. Usually, life has to slap us pretty hard because we resist changes. We play it safe behind our silence. When we don't share or communicate we don't risk and when we don't risk we never face the mirror of life that will lead us toward change.
Willingness to Change Simple Heart Clue #4
The kind of changes that The Marriage of Souls is interested in are changes in our basic capacity for love. Stretching our hearts to love more is the work of a life time but in the Marriage of Souls we get to accelerate the process yet this work is for great lovers of love for it is only they who are sensitive to the poverty of love within their own hearts when life confronts them with a mirror of this poverty. When we expand past the severe limitations of exclusive love and step out into the light of expanded love we are confronted with many mirrors of the quality of our love. We are faced with other peoples reactions and limitations to our own expanded heart and if we truly love then we have to work out, through loving and compassionate communication all the problems that our impure love is creating in the inner world of others. Make no mistake love is a two sided sword! Love is dangerous and not for the timid. Love itself drags us into the refiners fire whose temperatures are controlled by the cosmic consciousness. Because God is love that love never stops flowing as it drags and pushes us until our consciousness is pure. The truly loving soul is sensitive and is pained greatly when life confronts them with any lack inside their own heart. When they see the limits of their love they are motivated to expand past that limit and the pain helps them do it. They are deeply motivated to dig down deep inside themselves and change themselves on a being level. By comparison it is much easier to change the mind than the being because our being moves along a much deeper grove. Our being is the sum total of everything we have ever done, been, and ever thought. it's movements are very slow and deep, and thus, it is very difficult to change. Most "spiritual" people like the idea of change, but also want something else. There are two secrets to change. The first secret is to really want to change. Not only do we need to fall
in love with love. If there is no will, no love to change, how can we change. How many people hang on to spiritual concepts that close them off from all real change. For most the first step in the process of change comes with the openness to realize that our concepts are not reality. Concepts are only mental models of reality. All change on the being level happens beyond the world of concepts. All our concepts are designed to prevent
The second secret to meaningful change and the discovery of our true heart is found in our willingness to look at those things inside of us that we do not want to look at. The essence nature of the ego, besides separation, is self-blindness. Our minds are caught up in an endless chain of rationalizations that continually justify our present existence. Because the heart is the totality of our existence, we deny that totality when we deny any particular aspect of ourselves. We are not interested or capable of looking at those parts There are just certain things that we simply do not want to see about ourselves because it would be to painful. We don't want to suffer, so we do not care to look. Nobody likes to see their own weaknesses. No one likes to be wrong or blind. It is the one thing, that tragic flaw, that is so obvious to the people in our environment, this is what we least like to see. Even when life, or our friends or lovers try to point things out to us we manifest our resistance to change as a lack of listening. The wisest person is the one who listens the deepest. This is one of the most hurtful experiences we have to endure in life. With our loved ones, family, friends, and business associates there are times when we must make a communication, because of tremendously powerful feelings or reactions that we are having, and when we make it, the other refuses to listen. This is the worst experience we have in our personal relationships and it turns to disaster when it happens with our intimate personal partners. So many people are already living with their hearts closed down that they are no longer even sensitive to the issues pertaining to the heart.
Is My Heart into This Simple Clue # 5 The only way
to know the heart This takes the heart's ruthlessness. The heart is always ruthless with itself where as the head tends to be ruthless with others. No matter how hard we try, and how hard we chop, the head always seems to come back. To the mind, the heart is a little stupid. The heart does things that the mind would never do. The conflict between the head and the heart can be boiled down to this: Are you going to risk everything for something unknown (the heart risk) and appear ridiculous to the head, or are you going to go the ego preserving way of the personality? Everything is a risk when you push The heart's ruthlessness always brings more love and integration with the whole. The head always leads us into more divisiveness. The whole problem with the heart's war with the head is that the head always thinks it is going to lose something. Only a group totally committed to the purity of the heart space can lead us down safely into the fire where we will feel safe enough to crucify and purify our self-sense. This takes a tremendous love and a tremendous commitment to being One in the heart despite all the differences in the head. This is what the Marriage of Souls is about. Deep inside of us awaits a love that is so strong that it has the power and the courage to face all the separate evils inside of our own separate self. Everything you
will do will be according to your will This is a great secret because most people think that their will has something to do with their mind, or making some mental decision. We talked about there being two sides to the heart, the soft cuddly compassionate side and the side pertaining to courage, resolution and fortitude. This is the side of the heart where the will resides. In reality anything that we really love to do, anything that springs directly from the heart, we have tremendous will to do. When our heart is in something, time goes by incredibly fast. It is easy to get out of bed at five in the morning if our hearts are beating, anticipating the manifestation of our love, no matter what that love might be. If its to go fishing, or make money to support our family, if our heart is in it, there is no problem. For there to be will there needs to be love and if our heart is not into something then we are playing a loosing game. If we have no will to communicate at any depth of being, all our communications will remain superficial. If we have no will to grow how can we change. If we have no will to look at those things that we don't want to look at we will never refine our consciousness. Whatever we love to do we have all the will for it doesn't matter what it is. But nothing takes deeper will than the will to change who and what we are. We must change all the time or life will
batter us. We are always where our heart is, we cannot be in any other place. Our body might be in one place, our heart in another. In reality it does not matter where your body is, it is where your heart is that matters. You can be anywhere, at the movies, in bed with someone who you don't really love, or at work. If your heart is not there, if your heart is not really into what you are doing, you, the real you, will be somewhere else. Anything we do without our heart is a losing game. Anything done halfheartedly is not worth doing. Half-hearted is really a disguise for no heart at all. So this is another simple clue: Is my heart in this? Do I really want to be doing this? If our heart is not into something, then we should stop and find out what we really want to be doing. This answer is usually right at the tip of our tongue because we feel the conflict directly between our head and our heart. If we are in bed with the wrong person, and our heart is shouting this out to us, have the courage and integrity to say, sorry, I really don't want to be doing this, no matter how good it might feel. It is helpful in life to always keep our bodies close to our hearts. Our integrity and health in life depends on us keeping our bodies where our heart is. Strange to say the obvious but it is not obvious to a great majority of people. How many people work their entire lives with the constant yearning for something else? How many people are really following their dreams? Following their hearts? There is no figuring anything out in the space of the heart. Few people are able to follow all the impulses of the heart. When we were kids, it was much simpler. Few adults trust the heart because the rational mind senses that it will only bring us more trouble. We doubt the heart because it does not sound logical. We are always shutting out the heart and as such are denying ourselves the full experience of love. Ask yourself now, what is my heart really yearning for? What am I longing to do with my life? What is it that will bring me total fulfillment?
Being Still and at Peace Simple Heart Clue # 6 You will penetrate your heart This is another simple clue. Are we at peace with our self? When we are centered in our hearts the conflict with the head disappears. If we could stop the endless merry-go-round of our minds and knock down the battlements and defenses we have erected against our own hearts and the hearts of others, we might begin to hear the deeper voice of our hearts. We might begin to hear our own being speaking through the mists of our fears. Normally our fears are more precious to us than our love of being, and that is why we find it difficult to trust our hearts real message. That is why we doubt our beings and do everything possible to avoid the truth of our own existence. Your own heart has a deep
holistic appreciation
Giving Simple Clue #7 But if we can make the leap, if we can give ourselves back to ourselves, we will find a treasure that is equal or greater than the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. What greater present can we give to ourselves, than a present of our own hearts. What greater present than giving love back to itself! When we follow our heart's design for us we feel that good feeling flowing just like when we fall in love. Then we just want to do things for people. Anything, just anything! We will do anything when we are in love. And our reward is that feeling that wells up inside, that feeling of satisfaction and fulfillment; feeling full, feeling love, feeling at peace with ourselves. It is such a good feeling it is amazing that people avoid it. Love, the real love of the heart. Mankind has been looking for love for an eternity, now The Marriage of Souls puts love within our grasp. Yet another simple clue: Do you feel to give yourself? Our natural hearts just want to give. This is perhaps the simplest of our clues, do we feel the feeling of wanting to give. The heart is like the sun. It radiates out it's light without paying too much attention as to where that light is going to fall. Its 360 degrees of free radiation. Whenever we are in love with a person we just want to give things to them. This is not the calculated giving of the mind but just a rush of well being that says, "is there anything that I can do for you." We just want to stroke them, buy things for them, please them. Once we open our hearts we have a problem because we live in a world that does not always return that love so life here on earth demands that we grow strong in our hearts to weather all disappointments, all the storms that come from living an intense life. If we wait until others love us we might have to wait and waste a lifetime. It is always we that have to give and radiate out love.
Do You Mind? Simple Heart Clue #8
Our true hearts are very spontaneous and tends to speak
out The real heart does this with everyone because it does not discriminate between one person and another. Our real heart is secretly in love and is open to everyone, not just to our best friends. Christ said that there was not much reward just from loving those who are so easy to love. When we can learn to love our enemies, or at least see that they are really our best friends in disguise, because they are giving us our most valuable lessons in life, then we will know that our love is true. The purest person is mindless, they take no thought for what is next to come out of their mouth, or the next thing that they will do. The purest person is not minding anything! So this is our last clue: Do You mind? Are you minding who you are relating to? Are you minding or creating divisions between you and your little circle of friends and others? Are you minding the differences between your guru and others? When we are in our hearts we say, "I don't mind. I don't mind who I will love and be open to, who I will give a gift of warmth and compassion to." In our more personal lives, we don't mind picking up after the ones we love; picking up their socks, doing things for them. But when we are in our minds, we are constantly minding things. We do mind. We get irritated easily and don't want to give. And then all the little things get us angry. The heart tends to be much softer than the irritated head and when we hurt the tenderness of love we ourselves will be shot by loves arrow. We will be cleaved in two by our own separate mind and then we will have to suffer the longing and the missing that comes when we separate from our own and others hearts. It is very difficult to think in the normal sense of the word and be in the heart. If our consciousness is occupied with a mind full of thoughts, our center of gravity is automatically shifted upward to the more superficial vibrations of the mind. The reality of life is that we are constantly minding everything, very busy analyzing and judging, expecting and reacting, identifying and attaching ourselves. One of the tricks to searching out the world of heart is to begin to mind the heart. This is another way of saying pay attention to what is happening in our feeling center. Use the mind to probe the secrets of the heart in meditation and a whole new universe will open. Our heart of hearts wants to respond to the call for more love. How can love not answer love. Our hearts respond to the beings of others and is not looking for imperfections on which to base judgments. I believe from the bottom of my heart that what God wants from us now is more love, much more love. He wants us to open our hearts to a new vision of man, to a fusion of beings, to The Marriage of Souls and The Oneness of Being.
Can You Listen with a Silent Mind Simple HeartHealth Clue # 9 Listening is the ecology of being, Nothing demonstrates the quality of our love better than our listening. The pure heart is a perfect listener. It listens so deep that it actually penetrates into the inner world of the speaker and becomes one with that person. The heart has an ability to listen past the word level to the being level. And there is no quicker way to find and enter ones own heart center than by tuning into and listening to the inner world of another. This is a great spiritual secret and was actually illustrated in the recent Robin Williams movie about Patch Adams, the interned mental patient turned illuminated doctor. His simple but rare illumination happened just on this point. He became aware of what happened when he would tune deeply into another's inner world by listening to the inner world of another and he saw clearly that the trained Psychiatrist did not listen at all. What he discovered was his own heart, the same heart that just loves to give and to help and to love. And the secret is: When we enter and pay attention Listening is the art of paying attention and is in essence love in action. Listening actually creates love. It is love in reality. So learning how to listen is really learning how to love. Listening is the straight and narrow path into the heart center which has enough love to pay attention because it wants to pay attention and has the will to pay attention because it loves to pay attention. This is the key, the heart loves others inner worlds. It is the nature of the heart to care and to love and how else can or do we see peoples inner worlds but by listening. HeartHealth Technique # 6 is called Mirroring and was developed into a fine spiritual art form by Christopher Hills. His method of training his students was through the communication and listening arts. People find this approach to love most difficult because it confronts us directly and quickly with all of our resistance's to something as beautiful as real love. Real communication and listening training is absent across all levels of society and education, and in the vast majority of professional organizations and business simply because, people in general, on the deepest and most gut level, do not want to listen. The general lack of listening in life reflects the general and deep lack of heart and the lack of heart reflects the lack of love. To listen is to suffer because we do not want Love expressed as listening and love expressed as change are the hallmarks of true heart and are the highest and most beautiful expressions of love. It is the very nature of our minds and egos to resist any deep process of communication because our personalities do not like change. Meaningful communication always brings about change in our life. (See Chapter on Change ) Our capacity for love grows automatically as we learn
Are you willing to Communicate and Simple Heart Health Clue # 10 Making yourself vulnerable Since the heart is the vulnerability of being you need to make yourself vulnerable to be in it. So in HeartHealth Technique # 8 we practice with someone we love and trust making ourselves vulnerable. If we cannot be vulnerable with the one we love the most on this planet we can forget the universe of the heart and move onto something else. Our closest and most intimate relationship gives us by far the best mirror of our love or lack of it. And if we cannot be vulnerable with them life is a hell on the heart level. Anything we keep secret from the closest person to us has the tendency of a great weight around our hearts. It is called an infidelity which is really a lie or secret we keep, which later destroys all trust when that secret finally comes out. Infidelities, meaning the lying, not the sexual act, is basically virtual suicide to the heart and its heart to heart relationships with others. We do this in big ways when sexuality is involved, and we do this in many small ways on a daily basis. Anything we are afraid to share we tend to hide and then we tend to close our hearts. And what we might be afraid of is the total inability of our partner to really listen to us. We might be afraid that we will get cut off so fast that our vulnerability will not get the chance to be heard by another heart so we close our heart.
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