• Heart

    December 28, 2018

    Perhaps you think that to have a heart means to experience emotion and to sympathize with others…to be an emotional person. Can you consider another view?

    In this work, heart is a faculty, not a metaphor and not a temporary emotional state. Heart is a mirror-like organ of perception able to reflect the finest qualities…of humility, honour, beauty, glorification and truth to name a few…which exist continuously in the realm that is proper to them. Heart makes these qualities directly available to us in their essential formlessness unlike thoughts which stand for and represent something or sensations which vibrate the nervous system in response to a stimulus. Feeling is the nature of the thing itself.

    Sensation, thought and feeling…body, mind and heart…interacting together, make a real human being. Thought and sensation are freely given to each of us but feeling…what some call higher emotion…is not so easily accessed because the heart required for it must be uncovered.

    What covers the heart? The counterfeit of feeling….sentiment. Sentiment, literally sensing-mind, is, like all ordinary emotion, a combination of thinking and sensing. Both are valuable but they cannot substitute for the perceptions of the heart. The thought of love is not love. The sensation of sadness is not deep sorrow. The sentiment of friendship is not the mutual reflection of two open hearts.

    We have learned to indulge in the easy satisfactions of ordinary emotion, seduced by its habit-forming cycle of charging and discharging our biological organism. The undesirable must be relinquished before the desirable can be attained.

    The heart is traditionally thought to be in the center of the chest and is often experienced as if it is located there. But higher emotions are not produced in the body. Feelings are frequencies outside body and mind, although they may be describable in words and gestures which can be used objectively to invoke them if the heart is open. Sometimes the heart reflects the cold clear light of truth, sometimes the exquisite fire of love. For the heart, there is no right or wrong.

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  • Measure

    December 8, 2017

    A ruler is a measure for the physical world. Logic is a measure for the mind world. Are these the only worlds you live in?

    Where is the world which contains love and beauty? Where is truth to be found? Are these qualities simply a manifestation of the physical and mental worlds?

    Each of these qualities has a physical and a mental expression. Love is attraction in the physical. Perhaps beauty for you is perfect symmetry in the mental realm. Truth is a repeatable observation in the material realm, an axiom of geometry in the mind. But the essence of these qualities is not found in these spheres alone.

    Each of these qualities is whole and complete, more than an expression. Each feeling is itself a phenomenon of another kind, which exists in a third realm of existence. This third realm is different from the other two. A ruler is a measure of dimension but it is not dimension itself. Thought is the content of the mind but it is not the mind itself. Feeling is itself the third realm; it is its own measure and its content is itself. Thus it has an immediacy which announces itself as…itself.

    The feeling of truth cannot be separated from falsehood because they were never intertwined; they exist in different and separate universes. Falsehood is in the physical and mental realms where the expressions of truth can be contradicted, where opposites exist. In the realm of feeling, truth always rings the same note. And feelings are like notes, each with its own vibration or frequency but in a continuum of varieties…hundreds of types of roses but all roses just the same…such as love, sympathy, compassion, fidelity, admiration, glorification, honour…

    It is remarkable that we have so many different words, each with subtle shadings of meaning, for qualities that have no factual existence. It is disturbing to see so many of these words disappear from common use.

    How is feeling perceived? Who enters this third realm of existence? The organ of perception is the heart. It is the heart that enters. If you cannot see in the physical world, you are blind. If you cannot follow the laws of logic, you are unintelligent. If you cannot feel then your heart is asleep.

    We have talked about the awakening of the heart. We can do so again. But first, let us be clear. The yardstick of one world is not suitable for another. Do not take a ruler to measure the mind. Do not use logic to measure feeling. Inquire of the heart.

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  • Service (2)

    November 8, 2016

    You have said that remembering yourself as a being, rather than as a personality, is the first step towards real service.

    Yes, real service must come from who you are, not your conditioning, your ideas or the concepts you have picked up from religion or politics.

    Is there a further step?

    Yes. A work group is able to invoke special states and qualities which are in some way needed and may not otherwise be available. You could say it is a larger remembering.

    Qualities such as love and compassion?

    Those are the popular ones. There are others, such as glorification, objective sorrow, loyalty, joy, steadfastness, protectiveness, understanding, truth, retribution. There are also qualities that have no name in English. Each is a manifestation of our origin and a means by which it comes to know itself and its possibilities through us and the world.

    A genuine work group is a repository for the possibilities that exist in human beings and humans are an expression of the possibilities that exist in the universe.

    I use the word repository intentionally, to indicate that these qualities can find a place in us, probably a temporary one, but they do not come from us and they are not developed by us. Just as we have being, the universe has being. From a certain point of view, there is only one being.

    This is not work that can be done by us individually?

    Not in my experience, although individual practice also has value. Each of us is too limited. We need more than one. We need to acknowledge otherness to create a large enough space for higher qualities to descend. Matthew 18:20 says: “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” The participants cannot be of the same type. There must be a proper place for them to perform their service, a place which has been prepared in advance. Names are also important.

    The prophets were invocants and they used their work circles to call down something that was needed. They unfolded our possibilities as beings. In a small way, their work can be continued. They left instructions on how to repeat what they did. They tell us to call upon higher powers in order to establish a communication. It says in the Koran: “Remember Me and I will remember you.”

    Religions have work ideas embedded in them but these ideas must be separated from the many foolish notions added by meddling humans.

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