Is Your Heart Pure Enought To Witness Spirit?

You are not going to follow a path that doesn’t feel natural for very long, nor will it bring the growth you need, however well intentioned you are. 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 spiritual masters, spirit is experienced first as the absence of what is not spirit. In India this is described as Netti, netti, which means, “Not this, not that.” 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 with a black shirt 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 white appear.

In the same way your present life is one of sensations, not just colors but all 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.

Adapted from The Path to Love, by Deepak Chopra (Three Rivers Press, 1997).

Long Time...

Its been some time since i have posted here. Been mainly on my new creative blog so check me out there. Will be here from time to time agian though :-) XX

Shadow Energies

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The intensity of shadow energies is a way of getting noticed: Hiding something is not the same as killing it. Shadow energies remain alive. Even though you refuse to look at them, they aren’t extinguished–in fact, their desire for life becomes all the more desperate.

To catch your attention as a parent, a child who is overlooked will become more and more extreme in its behavior: first a call for attention, then a cry, then a tantrum. Shadow energies follow much the same pattern.

It seems only reasonable to see panic attacks, for example, as a hidden fear throwing a tantrum. That same fear first called out to be noticed in a normal way, but when the person refused to notice it, a call turned into a cry and finally ended up as a full-blown attack.

Fear and anger are especially adept at increasing the voltage to the point where we feel that they are alien, evil, demonic forces acting without our will. They are actually just aspects of consciousness forced into inhuman intensity by repression. Repression says, “If I don’t look at you, you will leave me alone.” To which the shadow answers, “I can do things that will make you look at me.”

Bringing consciousness to any energy diffuses it: This follows naturally from the last statement. If an energy demands your attention, then paying attention will begin to satisfy it. An overlooked child isn’t placated by only one glance. It takes time to change any behavior for good or ill and, like children, our shadow energies get stuck in patterns and habits.

But this doesn’t alter the general truth that if you bring light into the shadow, its distortions start to lessen and eventually are healed. Is there time enough and patience to do the whole job thoroughly? There’s no fixed answer to that.

Adapted from The Book of Secrets, by Deepak Chopra (Harmony Books, 2004).