Click here to go to the next issue
Highlights Home Page | Receive the Nondual Highlights each day
#2027 -
Deepak Chopra
Finding Balance Within: Purifying the Heart
There is a center in the body where love and spirit are joined,
and that center is the heart. It is your heart that aches or
swells with love, that feels compassion and trust, that seems
empty or full. Within the heart is a subtler center that
experiences spirit, but spirit is not felt as an emotion or
physical sensation. How, then, can you contact it? According to
the masters, spirit is experienced first as the absence of what
is not spirit.
In
Spirit is not caused; it is not bound by time and space; it is
not a sensation that can be seen, touched, heard, tasted, or
smelled. This may seem like a baffling way to define something,
but imagine that you had never seen the color white, that the
whole world consisted of red, green, blue, and all the other
hues. Then one day a master came to you and said, “if you
wash this enough times, you will see that it is white.” If
you ask to see white before you wash the shirt, what you ask is
impossible. Black is the sum of all colors, and only if you wash
them all away will light appear. In the same way your present
life is one of sensations, not just colors but all of the
stimulus that comes through the senses. Some of these sensations
may be very pleasurable, but none of them is adequate to tell you
what spirit is. Spirit lies beneath the layers of sensations. To
experience it you must go to the heart and meditate upon it until
everything that obscures spirit is cleansed.
The purpose of the following exercise is to give you the
experience of making your heart pure enough to witness spirit.
Pure here doesn’t mean good and virtuous; it means free from
impurity, with no value judgment intended. In the words of
William Blake, we are cleansing the doors of perception.
Meditating on the Heart
Sit comfortably in a quiet room by yourself, choosing a time when
you feel settled and unhurried. Early morning is best, since your
mind will be alert and fresh; try to avoid late evening, when
your awareness is preparing for sleep. Close your eyes and focus
your attention on the middle of your chest, where your heart is.
Be aware of your heart as a space. Don’t try to hear your
heartbeat or any other sound you think a heart makes as it pumps
blood. The heart center you want to find is a point of awareness
where feelings enter. In its pure form it is empty, pervaded by
weightlessness, absence of care, peace, and a subtle light. This
light may appear as white, gold, pale pink, or blue. But again,
don’t strain to find light of any kind. You are not trying
to sense the purity of the heart center right now; all you need
to feel is whatever is there right now.
Letting your attention rest easily there, breathe gently and
sense your breath going into your heart center. Here you may want
to visualize a soft pastel light or a coolness pervading the
chest. Let the breath go in and out, and as it does, ask your
heart to speak to you. Don’t phrase this as an order; just
have the faint intention that you want your heart to express
itself. For the next five or ten minutes, sit and listen. Your
heart will begin to release emotions, memories, wishes, fears,
and dreams long stored there, and as it does you may immediately
get a strong flash of emotion, positive or negative, or your
breathing may change. You might gasp or sigh. Let the experience
be what it will be. If you daydream or drift off into sleep, don’t
worry. Just bring your attention back to your heart center.
Whether it speaks to you in sadness or in fear, delight or
pleasure, its message is equally beneficial.
Paying attention to your heart is the object of this meditation.
You will notice as you continue this exercise that three
components of inner balance naturally come together: meditation,
purification, and attention. You are learning to be with your
heart in order to heed its spiritual meaning—this is
meditation. You are letting repressed material come up to be
released—this is purification. You are listening to your
heart without judgment or manipulation—this is attention.
Because this process is like washing a shirt to reveal its
whiteness, be patient as you explore the inner spaces of your
heart and seek balance in each moment.
Twice each year, at Seduction of Spirit, I teach the heart sutras
-- advanced meditation techniques to help you re-connect with
your deepest emotions and begin a healing process. Once you learn
these sutras, reaching into your heart to balance yourself can
become a part of your daily ritual. Each day, as you open your
heart, you will feel its light, love, and guidance.
Love,
Deepak
If you'd like to learn more about purifying your heart through
meditation, or wish to explore the heart sutras at Seduction
of Spirit, email info@chopra.com or
call (760) 494-1639.
from http://www.greaterkashmir.com/Full_Story.asp?ItemID=2467&Cat=11
The problem with high tech is that it tends to impede spiritual
growth. No doubt, superhighways facilitate speed. But speed is
basically injurious to the spirit. We need time to pray, to
meditate. And a mad rush is not likely to yield any spiritual
benefit.
Probably the most serious shortcoming of the Net is its divorce
from nature, as it means a divorce from the body, which is our
primary anchor to reality as also to spiritual energies.
Certainly, many people go to the Net to escape, to abandon
themselves to a make-believe world, even a world of Technicolor
dreams. The result is that those who are constrained to spend
much time in cyberspace will learn to cherish the natural world.
After spending hours on end staring at a computer monitor, there
is nothing like the scent of a flower or the push of the wind
against your face.
People often try out multiple selves in some of the activities
and games available on the Net. They deliberately indulge in a
sort of consensual hallucination. This allows them to explore
their shadow selves, as it were. The projected “me”
need not be the real “me”. One thing people do on the
Internet is to project their shadow selves into cyberspace and
create online characters for role-playing.
Traditionally we posit two kinds of space: the material world in
which our bodies exist, and a spiritual world where our souls
dwell. We can think of cyberspace as existing somewhere in
between: a world that shares some of the qualities of the
material world, such as space and time; and some of the qualities
of the spiritual world, such as interacting with thousands of
souls at thousands of locations at once.
This takes us to the social, as well as to the spiritual,
implications of the Internet: The Net offers us an opportunity
for a new community life, and it can create in us a new interest
in religious pursuits or even open before us hitherto unexplored
areas of spiritual awakening. This is the positive aspect of it.
The downside is that the Net can also tempt us to further and
further social isolation. As I engage in more and more online
activities, I can avoid face-to-face human interaction, except
for the select few with whom I really want to be. This leads to a
new elitism. But we can never substitute Internet interaction for
flesh- and-blood contact because we are corporeal beings, because
cyber life will never be the same as looking into one another’s
eyes as we share our joys and concerns.
THE CHURCH is not made up of spiritual giants; only broken men
can lead others to the Cross.
--David J. Bosch, A Spirituality of the Road
THERE'S SOMETHING wholesome, healthy, and very human about
going to church and pooling your needs and your ignorance
with that of other people who are willing to get out of bed
and put on good clothes and come out to this totally
gratuitous event. Nobody's forcing them to do it, the
rewards are elusive, yet the fact that we do it in a group
is somehow part of the point.
--John Updike in an interview by Philip Yancey in Image
ACCORDING TO the prayer of Jesus as presented by the author
of the Fourth Gospel, the mission of the church and its
fruitfulness in the world depend not so much on what we say
to the world as on our sticking together, our coherence in
the Way (John 17:23).
--Paul M. Van Buren, Discerning the Way