Devotee: “Should I meditate on the right chest in order to meditate on the Heart?”
Bhagavan: “The Heart is not physical. Meditation should not be on the right or the left. It should be on the Self. Everyone knows “I am”. It is neight within nor without, neither on the right nor the left: “I am” – that is all”.
S.S. Cohen – Reflections on Talks with Ramana Maharshi
The first night we came together here I quoted that (that verse from) particular verse from the Bagavad Gita, in which it says the life force should be resolved in the sahasrar and the mind resolved in the Heart. The epitome of the conscious activity, the ultimate event of the conscious activity is the resolution of the consciousness in the Heart, prior to thought, prior to the reflections in the mind, prior to experience, the very Self. This is the source or reality of consciousness. But the force, the manifest force, the Shakti of this Siva is generated above. So the form of reality, the form of realization is this Amrita Nadi that is generated between the true Heart, not just the heart chakra, but the living Heart of the very Self and its perfect place above, its perfect extension, above, which purely for convenience, in order to relate the whole affair to ordinary perception, we say is in the head, or we relate it to our sense of the head. But actually it has nothing to do with one’s physical head, other than the fact that there is certain phenomena associated with this process that go on relative to one’s physical head, but the upper terminal of Amrita Nadi is nowhere in time or space, anymore than its lower terminal, the very Heart, is in time or space.
When enquiry has settled in the heart, awareness develops as what Ramana, Ramana Maharshi, calls the ‘Amrita Nadi . I call it the ‘Form of Reality.’ It is the circuit of current from the heart to the head. As a child I knew it as the ‘bright’. In the unqualified state all identification, differentiation and desire have ended. There is only unqualified relationship realized in enquiry to be already the case. This realization is simply consciousness as the Amrita Nadi, the form of Reality, and it is experienced as the ‘bright’, the unconditional bliss of presence, of perfect knowledge, whose source is the heart, reality itself. Therefore, the bright is the form of that reality which is consciousness. It is a true and real, the birthright of all existence.
Amrita Nadi is eternal.
Amrita Nadi the Heart, the absolute Formless existence, is of course the quality of Amrita Nadi. But so is also its Infinite, perfect generation.
So there is an eternal God world that transcends the appearance and disappearance of the Cosmos, of the conditional worlds. The God world does not come and go. The God world does not appear and then collapse for a period of time and then reappear.
The form of God is eternal. Amrita Nadi is perfect. Amrita Nadi is the form of consciousness. Amrita Nadi is the perfect realization.
The Form of Reality is not a a special creation or condition but the native form Itself. In other words, Amrita Nadi is not just something temporary while the world exists and then it disappears.
The Heart is then the true foundation, the exclusive Heart is the true foundation of both manifestation and no manifestation.
The Amrita Nadi is never collapsed. Amrita Nadi is always perfect.
One’s own inner functions are subtle functions relative to the intuition of Amrita Nadi, the intuition of the Form of God through Amrita Nadi. These functions may manifest differently in time, their qualities may change. And any function that arises in consciousness as a quality of mind or as a quality of experience, any such things may in themselves come and go. So in no sense is this life as Amrita Nadi some form of holding on to phenomena.
The Heart is the Guru. The Amrita Nadi is his Form. The bliss of unqualified enjoyment is his teaching. The Knowledge of all this is liberation and freedom. The enjoyment of all this is Reality. The existence of all this is Truth. The activity of all this Is understanding. And understanding is real life.
The highest Form of this life. The highest form of Sadhana, the life of a devotee, In whom Amrita Nadi is the constant intuition, the constant enjoyment. But for such a one the human Guru is also Amrita Nadi, alive and literally. So he lives in relationship to the Guru as a perfect devotee, while the perfection of his own conscious enjoyment in more internal ways is also perfected.
The Inner Guru, which is the very Heart and the Form of Reality, Amrita Nadi, is the same as the human Guru. The human Guru is that alive and functioning relative to you. That’s why the life of sadhana relative to the Siddha Guru is the highest form of spiritual activity, because all of the virtues of the Truth are already present. They are already present in the activity that is understanding because it is the understanding of the heart, and of real consciousness, but they are also present in the condition of sadhana itself, in the condition of Satsang, in the very condition with which you begin your sadhana, you exist in relationship to this fullness in the Form of the Guru. So the perfect devotee of the Guru experiences the perfect communication of the quality of the Guru.
But as in every other case where something arises and enquiry is generated in the midst of it, such a one in this case, may find himself falling into the Heart, the root of the mind. And then he will know only Amrita Nadi, which here is described as the spire of Sound and Light that stands forever in the Heart. But Sound and Light capitalized, meant in perfect terms, not sound and light as simply the lesser phenomena that you can turn on by yogic concentration but the perfect Sound and perfect root of Sound, and the perfect Light and perfect root of all Lights.
S-curve of the Amrita Nadi, the open channel of light between the Heart and the point at the top of the head at which the Divine Light is intuited.
The conventional Way of Sages is the Way of exclusive descent into the Heart, or ego death through descent in Amrita Nadi (the secret pathway between the sahasrar and the heart region). The Way of Divine Ignorance, or Radical Understanding, is the Way of non-strategic dissolution of the ego-soul in the Heart and simultaneous regeneration, or expansion and ascent, in, as, and through Amrita Nadi, whose upper terminal is not truly the sahasrar (subtle crown of the gross body) but the Unspeakable Condition and Radiance of the Highest, wherein all worlds arise and fall. (The Expansion of the Heart is without qualification, Radiant in all directions to Infinity, losing its center by including all objects, and losing its boundaries by penetration of all contraction. The Fullness of this Process is also experientially communicated in the upper, or subtle, and lower, or gross, dimensions of the whole body – first to the subtlest, and descending simultaneously to the lowest.)
What I’ve called Amrita Nadi is realized only in the form of understanding, in the most radically intense, intuitive life. Then the true nature of what I’m describing begins to become obvious, and how it is really deathless, beginningless, endless and perfect begins to become obvious Amrita Nadi, in the sense that it is somehow related to one’s own subtlest function between the Heart and the sahasrar, in that sense is limited. In that sense Amrita Nadi is a form, the subtlest form of our own existence, our individual existence and through it we intuit the Very Form or God Form. This Amrita Nadi then, is the duplicate or likeness of God described in the Old Testament. And it looks like this. The Amrita Nadi is the perfect reflection of the Perfect Form.
The Knee of Listening and Study Chapters – Table of Contents