Beezone adaptation (in italics) of an original talk by Adi Da Samraj
Read original talk – Heart Awakening
This Heart-Opening
Originally published in
Vol 4. No. 9 & 10, September/October 1985
“I cannot “cause” your Awakening—I Am your Awakening. You must devotionally recognize Me—and, in that recognition-response, surrendered to Me, an opening occurs such that My All-Pervading Transcendental Spiritual Self-Transmission can be your Circumstance, your Context of life, Which you perpetuate by right devotional surrender to Me.” – Adi Da Samraj – Friday, March 21, 2008
Heart-Opening
MASTER DA: The heart-opening is the basis of the Way itself. Without it, the Way cannot begin. This heart-opening is, of course, associated with natural and ordinary conditions of life. But you must remember its purpose and the intuition associated with such an opening. Otherwise, you will become involved in emotional manipulation of yourself. Your life will be limited to the Second Commandment*, to trying to be emotional with your neighbor, which, in principle and from an idealistic point of view, is good. However, it is secondary to the significance and purpose of this heart-opening.
*Idol Worship
Your entire experience in My Company is a process that should provoke this heart-opening, this heart-response, so that you can truly enter into relationship with Me and begin the spiritual process. Of course, if you do that, then in the world of relations your capacity to love will improve. That improvement is not the point, however. It is simply a natural but secondary aspect of the demonstration of the Way, similar to the effects of the dietary and exercise disciplines.
I have pointed out to you that you do not have a sexual problem. You have an emotional problem. Thus, if this heart-response is being evoked in you through hearing* and seeing, your capacity to love in the domain of your intimate relationships will definitely improve. The relationships themselves will become happier and simpler. For the same reason, you will also practice the disciplines quite naturally, even motivelessly. In other words, you will practice them not to achieve a goal, but simply because they are lawful and natural to one who is no longer disturbed.
*”A sign of Hearing is the Heart Opens into Feeling of non-separateness. When Hearing is stable by the practices of self-responsibility and Equanimity – Full Capability is Awakened.” – Adi Da Samraj
The point is this heart-response itself. Either it is occurring for you or it is not. You may be having many experiences in My Company and in the community, and you may be very busily engaged in various activities, and you may call all of that practice, even though the heart-response is not really active in you. If the heart is not open, you can be very busy serving and appearing to live all the disciplines on some days, but on other days you can be promiscuous or mediocre or living a wide range of possibilities.
Single or Double Mind
So-called devotees who are not alive in this heart-response try very hard to practice and to live on the basis of these practical disciplines. They try to make their marriages work out, to deal with one another, to deal with their own tendencies, and so on. If the heart-response is true in you, fundamentally you do not have to deal with tendencies. If you practice the dietary discipline, for instance, you are not working against a strong motivation to do otherwise. If you are practicing the yoga of marriage, you are not working against a strong inclination to do something else – to practice the yoga with someone else or to not practice it at all. As long as you are still heart-hardened, however, suffering the self-contraction, the spiritual disease of egoity, to fulfill the disciplines associated with our Way of life is a great struggle. If the heart is closed, you do not have that heart-response to resort to. Instead you resort to your calculations, your knowledge, your observations, and so on. You become self-manipulative.
When the heart-response is active, there is a natural, or inherent, singleness in your disposition. You no longer struggle against an alternative. The opened heart has no alternative. It has the singleness of spiritual consciousness. Even though it may yet be immature, the consciousness is nonetheless spiritually awake, free of the duplicity of the self-contraction.
“As you have an emotional problem, a problem about love, you cannot fulfill the disciplines associated with our Way, just as you cannot fulfill the Way itself. You will inevitably return to mediocrity, a divided mind, dramatization, tendencies, and all the rest.”
Your best intentions are not sufficient and will not win. Your best intentions are always countering your alternative or worst intentions, or at least bad intentions. The self-contracted personality, the heart-hardened personality, has two minds, is self-divided, is stuck with alternatives. Depending on the circumstance, the contracted personality will choose one or the other direction. There are always two alternatives.
The individual who is fundamentally free of the self-contraction, Awakened at the heart, sensitive to the reality of existence, is inherently single, and therefore is not struggling in a situation of alternatives. Willfulness is unnecessary. The self-based, willful character is replaced by an attractive, self-transcending character, a character distracted and drawn by a Power that is greater than the separate self. Such an individual lives in the Domain of Love and is not merely idealistically disposed toward the idea of love. As long as you have an emotional problem, a problem about love, you cannot fulfill the disciplines associated with our Way, just as you cannot fulfill the Way itself. You will inevitably return to mediocrity, a divided mind, dramatization, tendencies, and all the rest.
Therefore, all our discussions are ultimately about an emotional and spiritual matter. Not only our discussions but all the theatre of our life together will not be fruitful until this heart-response becomes true of you, until you have really heard and seen to the point of such a response. When a real heart-response is made, what becomes obvious is your spiritual life, your life in God, your relationship with Me, the inherent process of spiritual consciousness. Secondary to that, but nonetheless coincident with it, is that which belongs to the sphere of relations, to the sphere of practice in terms of disciplines.
Some people have been significantly moved to this response. They are not necessarily about to enter the seventh stage of life, but their response is true and shows evidence of the capacity for what I call practice. The response of others is not yet truly active. What is lacking in those individuals? It is this heart-response – the singularity, the simplicity, the ordinariness of the disposition of the devotee. The heart-response is only an ideal for those who are still bound by the self-contraction at the emotional level. Such individuals can try to do something physically, can think something differently, but the heart-response is absent.
Some individuals presume that to exhibit certain signs is an emotional change. They presume that in order to give evidence of an emotional change they must act very emotional. You can sometimes feel such an individual acting emotional, as if he or she were on the stage. Whereas, the evidence of this emotional awakening, this heart-opening, is not any particularly dramatic emotional state. Sometimes there may be some tears or trembling of the voice and so forth, but basically there are no dramatic signs. In fact, just the opposite is true. An emotionally awakened individual is not emotionless, but he or she does not need to dramatize excessive feeling to prove the heart-response. You need not prove it. If the heart response is active, evidence of your participation in the fulfillment of the practice appears in mind, body, and relations in a very natural way. That evidence, rather than any emotional display, is a sign of this awakening.
People who are maturing are not necessarily being emotional. What is the evidence that suggests they have heard and seen Me and are happy and responsible in their marriages? They are obviously living at ease with one another, polarized to one another, with energy and attention for one another. They are happy in one another’s company. Everything associated with the functional discipline of our Way becomes a simple matter. What is the evidence we might see? It is not the capacity to communicate verbally with a trembling or eloquent voice. Rather, we can observe the simplicity of their fulfillment of the practice. The mood of such practitioners is free of stress, whereas those who are still having trouble in one way or another frequently feel the need to exhibit emotional signs.
“The natural content of every moment while you are physically and mentally alive should be emotion”
Emotion is as natural as breathing. But because you are emotionally retarded, you do not think you are being emotional unless you are involved in a strong, reactive emotional state. In other words, what you consider to be emotional is emotionalism, a reactive emotional state, whereas true emotion is as natural as the next breath, coincident with every moment of living, without signs of a special exhibit of emotionalism or reactivity.
The natural content of every moment while you are physically and mentally alive should be emotion. True emotion informs the moment with Life-Force, balancing and giving it depth and allowing every moment to be coincident with the Divine. But true emotion has no sign in itself. It is simply a component of the complex personality, as natural as the circulation of blood or the opening of the eyes.
This feeling dimension of life is not natural to you, however, since you live the life of Narcissus-one of the incarnations of Narcissus. The feeling component is missing. Therefore, all your separate parts and all the relations your existence involves are patterned, machinelike, exaggerated, conventional, out of control, full of division and alternatives, complicated, and un-Happy. As soon as the essential component, the heart-opening, returns-as soon as the release of the self-contraction occurs-then every aspect of the body-mind that stands above and below this heart point conforms to the single Force of inherent Being. Your life changes, simply because of this heart-opening.
You are all trying to live a spiritual life, a religious life, a life of Divine orientation, and yet you exhibit the signs of a consciousness separated from God, not quite certain whether God exists. For centuries now, since ancient times in fact, certain people in every society have taken it upon themselves to prove to everyone that God exists. Some have done this through analytical philosophy. Others simply based their proposal on authority. The Christian religion, for example, functions this way. Others wanted everyone to become converted to the Divine by witnessing extraordinary demonstrations, such as powers over Nature, siddhis of one kind or another, mystical or visionary states. Some even made it possible for others to experience visionary or mystical states.
None of this has converted mankind. In fact, none of it ever converted anyone. Any one of these demonstrations may make some people a little more hopeful, but none of it really works.
What does convert anyone? And what can ultimately convert everyone? Only the Wisdom and the confrontation that opens the heart. As soon as the self-contraction releases, even if the individual is not informed by theological concepts, witnessing, visions, powers over Nature, or belief systems, the entire body-mind instantly confesses the Mystery of Being. A long time may pass before that individual can begin to speak about God with any clarity. Even then, very often he or she may speak with authority, make analytical proofs, exhibit powers, or tell about visions, as if those things were the means of their conversion. But they are not. Only the heart- opening itself makes possible the acknowledgment of That Which is called God, That Which is Happiness, That Which makes life different from what the ego proposes, different from what most of mankind now proposes.
If the heart opens, you are love. But love is not quite what you are up to yet. It is not what you have been up to all your life. If you examine your emotional state, you will notice an inclination to be taken care of. You want someone to take care of you. If there is God, if there is a Master, or if there is Truth, if this is the Divine Domain in one of its forms, it must first prove itself to you as a kind of parent.
Continue reading original talk – Heart Awakening
“The
perfect among the sages is identical with Me. There is
absolutely no difference between us”
Tripura
Rahasya,
Chap
XX, 128-133