The Light of the Heart: A Contemplative Essay
by Beezone
At the core of our being, within the quiet space of the chest, lies a subtle and essential center: the heart. Not merely the pump of blood, but a locus of the feeling of awareness. Here, the entire body-mind finds its root — the place where feeling and self-consciousness takes its stand, and where the mystery of our condition silently dwells; The Center.
Your heart, my heart is not just “there”. It is the living doorway to Reality. In the yogic and subtle architecture of the body, the heart corresponds to the formless state of deep sleep — that condition in which identity dissolves and only Being remains. One has to be a yogi it understand this but when this doorway opens and is awakened — not emotionally, but in its deepest sense, beyond identity and separation — the body-mind is suffused with a feeling and potentially with a Light not of this world.
Yet across history, many have looked elsewhere. Mystics and seekers, ancient and modern, have often turned their gaze upward — to the brain, the crown, the subtle lights behind the forehead. The nervous system, rising like a pillar from spine to skull, became a path of ascension. The image of the caduceus — twin serpents winding the staff of the spine — echoed this vertical longing, suggesting that heaven lay in the head.
“I suffered from what you could call vertical schizophrenia. I mean, I even had two names for it: there was Dick Alpert, and there was Ram Dass. And Ram Dass saw everything as love, and everybody as brothers and sisters.” – Ram Dass/Richard Alpert
In these inner heights, refined visions appear: a white brilliance at the top of the hear, surrounded by deep blue, and rounded with golden light, all seen with the ‘middle eye’. Celestial sounds fill the inner ear, ascending from low hums to flute-like tones. These are not illusions — they are real, potent, and powerful reflections within the subtle mechanism of the body-mind. The brain/heart receives them first-instantaneously, being outward and active; the lower body follows, receptive and grounded; centered in the heart (if you are able to feel it so-if not then its all taking place in the brain).
Yet all of this — the light, the sound, the ascent — remains within the realm of experience. It is still a theatre of form. And form and experience, no matter how luminous and pleasurable, is not the Source.
The Tibetan tale of the Light Blazing King captures this poignantly. He dwells in a palace of light, surrounded by ten thousand sons of desire, crowned with jewels, and fanned by magical breezes. All appears as he wishes it. His realm is joy, his body radiance. Yet — a sound rings out. The mirror cracks. The palace collapses. His image disappears. And a figure, Dutara, stands beyond the wreckage and whispers:
“All this was conjured by the mind’s display. You were dreaming a beautiful dream. But it was a dream.”
In that moment, the king bows his head in silence. Not defeated — but finally touched by Truth.
For the Reality or the Divine is not centered in the head. It is not a vision or a sensation or a power. “It” may and does at times come through those channels, but…it is the all-pervading Presence that breathes life into everything that is actually what is occuring. The heart — that still, quiet, radiant space — is the only true gate. When it opens (and YOU dont’ do that!) the self relaxes, the contraction is obviated, and the Radiant Current flows without obstruction. Maybe for an instant, may for a day but in any case you’ve “seen it” and now you “know it”, for a moment.
This is does not occur through belief, technique, or ascent. You can’t take heaven by storm. It is a letting go — a whole bodily release into Radiant Communion. Then, the body-mind is not illuminated by something else; it is itself Transfigured, made transparent in the Light Itself.
Peace may come. Bliss may overflow. Even miracles may occur — healing, vision, transformation. But these are not the goal. The only true Realization is the dissolution of the separate self in the Radiant Life of God. With That comes the understanding that ‘you’ as you knew yourself to be are not ‘The One’.
To live this is not to escape the world, but to be undivided within it — a heart illumined, a body awake, and a life flowing as Love Itself.
And so the journey is not upward, but inward. Not away, but Present. Not into the light above, but into the Light that has always already been — at the root, at the center, in/at/through and by the Heart.
Bibliography
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Adi Da Samraj. The Enlightenment of the Whole Body. Dawn Horse Press.
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Adi Da Samraj. The Knee of Listening. Dawn Horse Press.
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Kapstein, Matthew T. The Tibetan Assimilation of Buddhism: Conversion, Contestation, and Memory. Oxford University Press, 2000.
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Imaeda, Yoshiro. “The Cycle of Birth and Death,” in The Tibetan Assimilation of Buddhism, translated and presented by Matthew T. Kapstein.
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Beezone.com. Selected essays and transcriptions from Adi Da Samraj and related sources. Available at: https://www.beezone.com