Last time in The Caress, we dove into the mysticism and spiritual wisdom of Verse 10 of the Shiva Sutras from the Vigyan Bhairav Tantra, “While being caressed, sweet princess, enter the caressing as everlasting life.” And today, upon the suns of my time in the beautiful South of France, let us explore the worlds of Verse 16,
Blessed one, as senses are absorbed in the heart, reach the center of the lotus.
This path of yoga, and the deepening of union, is for those who are heart centered or more heart oriented people. It’s a way for those with the more developed heart, as this is about love – love is a doorway of entering God.
The developed heart is those who are more loving, open, soft skinned and warm hearts; those who are more sensitively attuned and feeling people. Such as yoga method of entering the heart of the lotus is only meant for those people who are heart centered; and so, to understand this path of union we need to first understand more deeply how the heart oriented person is.
When one is heart oriented, everything leads to heart, everything. When you love him, his heart feels it, not his head nor mind. When he loves you, his heart loves you and his heart has your heart within his heart.
There, you are one within his heart. For the heart centered person intimacy is a sacred thing, a union, true merging because all boundaries dissolve and we become one within the church of our heart. There are no longer divisions based on mental concepts or ideas or judgments.
The feeling ones live without much reasoning, nor rationalizing love. If one is asked “Why do you love?”, and they give you the why, the reason, then they are head oriented, mind oriented, not heart oriented.
Someone is beautiful and that’s why you love them; that’s a head oriented reason. The heart oriented person sees you as beautiful because they love you. So this is why for the heart oriented person everything can become beautiful, because they have the eye behind the eye – the eyes of the heart; and all becomes an expression of beauty because they love. For the heart oriented person the heart comes first, always. This becomes a union within them – a sacred marriage.
Love is to know and be known, to see and be seen, not of flesh, but through the flesh. Their eyes are the heart of the heart, and this is their meaning, their moonpull, their fuel of life, their solar fire.
In every moment of your life many things happen and move; move around you, move through you, move in you, move of you. Witness yourself. Where do these touch you? How do they touch you? You pass a tiny animal in the wild, a squirrel perhaps, where do they touch you? Where are you touched by the homeless person on the side of road? Do you think of economic conditions and the unfairness of the socialist societies and system? Should you now start a fight for social justice or for some future of utopia?
These are head oriented. Your heart is not touched at that moment; your mind is. It’s not a bad thing, it’s not about right or wrong, it’s just about what first is touched within you. Because if you are a head oriented person, this particular method from the 112 Shiva Sutras may not be the most appropriate for you currently on your unique spiritual path; perhaps meditation are a start would be better, because meditation is more mind oriented.
For the heart oriented person, in that very moment, their mind isn’t pre-occupied with a future nor even past; right now, in that very moment, is where the feeling is, the movement within you is. Because the heart is touched, not the head first.
The head calculates, plans, rationalizes, judges. The heart opens. It feels. It does also, through actions, but it is entered in a very deep way, profound way, and in that space it is opened and warm. The warm heart feels everything without judgment, without fear, and just holds it all, while still being open and soft in hands also, and in kindness of rhythm.
So the first thing to know about yourself is knowing where you are touched first; because many people may think they are heart oriented but they are actually head oriented. Again, this is not about right or wrong, but if you don’t know yourself, you can’t know your path of union and which doorway is the one for you to reach that inner temple of God.
Many people self deceive; they have their identities, images of themselves, beliefs and ideas, but if they truly were all heart centered as they often say they are, then the world wouldn’t be in the place it is.
The only truly genuinely spiritual people that I’ve met are those with the warm hearts. They had and have big hearts, loving hearts, generous hearts, all inclusive hearts. They feel everything deeply, yet they are not swayed by emotional imbalances and judgments.
A lot of our world today has a very twisted understanding of some spiritual concepts, such as the one about detachment. Sometimes people say things like “Oh, I am detached, nothing affects me.” But if that’s how they truly feel – that nothing affects them – then it is more likely a psychological issue than some emotional sophistication or spiritual illumination.
Sure they preach about detachment and maya to others, but if something goes wrong in their life and hurts them, is it maya? Is it maya if suddenly you lose all your money in the bank? Is it maya if someone hurts you or when someone you love is hurt? Is it maya when you suffer and your very body feels the pain? It’s only maya when it’s happening to others, but when it happens to them they are not so “detached” after all.
There is a difference between detaching from your own lower urges and compulsions, and detaching from your heart, your humanity and your compassion for other people’s emotions and situations.
If you can’t feel, it is certainly not transcendence. All spiritual masters felt everything – they cried for others, they felt mercy for them while being generous and holding out their hands. And while they felt everything, their emotions weren’t radical nor out of control – they weren’t emotionally dumping onto others, they weren’t throwing their emotions onto others and making it the others’ problem; they had self control, emotional management and awareness. They had profound sensitivity attunement and feeling control and responsibility. That’s the distinction.
A lot of people go to ashrams and temples, and leave donations in the temple, money and beautiful things to the statues; but then they walk outside the temple, and completely walk past the homeless woman with her child, without even looking at her. So where is the god? Is it in the statue and structures? How are we spiritual if we treat one another with ignorance? God speaks and moves through us and our hands and our being; God is in the eyes of another; God is not found up there in the sky, nor is he to be worshipped as a statue, it is an alive movement of love that inspires us to be better people, more loving, more kind, and do what we can when we can, to support one another, raise each other, lift one another up.
Most of our religions are actually heart centered, and are for the heart oriented. Prayer is heart oriented. Meditation is more mind oriented. The older the religion the more heart oriented teachings we see in its essence. Christian mysticism, and I mean the older church and essence of the faith, was very heart oriented and heart focused. This is why Christ points to the heart. This is why he said “Love is God.” It’s not God is love necessarily, we can’t put God in a word, nor name, but love is the doorway.
The Vedas were also heart oriented when written originally, and this what was the path, because people were more heart oriented. But nowadays people are more mind oriented, so naturally, even something like prayer may feel difficult to fully deepen into, because our mind still often wonders around.
So what is the path of the Verse 16?
As the senses are absorbed in the heart, reach the center of the lotus.
Touch someone. If your touch goes immediately to your heart, you are heart oriented, and you will feel it. You will feel the warmth. Compassion will soften you. Love will soften you. Humbleness will soften you.
Close your eyes and touch anything. What touches you when you touch it. What within you is touched. There is now a language, an intuitive feeling language, that while may not be spoken with human made words, it is understood and communicated. It is felt.
Deepen into the music, the sound, a song. Don’t think it, feel it. Feel the sensations arising within you, follow the rivers, the waters, the ebbs and flows. Listen to music with your heart, and witness how this deepening dissolves boundaries within you.
Each one of our senses is a doorway to dissolving boundaries and deepening into the center of our heart, which in this phrase is the lotus. Just as within us there is a temple of God, we must first dissolve the boundaries, the walls, the structures of our mind and ideas and pre-judgments and limitations, and then enter it – the home of our heart – and there, the inner flame.
The closer we are to God the quieter it becomes. Because we are in the center of the dome now. We listen. And when we listen we hear; and we hear we become the sound itself.
When we become fully absorbed in the heart, because we’ve realized the spiritual purpose of our senses and entered them too completely, we fall into the lotus – the center within us.
Love is a door. When we fall entirely, wholebodily and wholeheartedly, it doesn’t matter who or why. And then this love becomes a prayer itself; a prayer with open eyes. A deep presence with someone, a deep presence within you. A deep gratitude for this presence and paying attention to one another, and all becomes a prayer, an intentional and conscious way of living life. A sacredness for each moment and a humility to see the sacredness within the eyes of another person and within all of life and wildlife.
The beloved is a seed of God. A love that enters us and then we see the divine in them. Love is a seed of God. Within us it is given to us, for us to nurture and nourish within our own gardens and inner landscapes. And if we learn how, we may nourish such beautiful gardens of only one little seed, that we may then invite all into our gardens.
With an awakened heart of love, the true eyes see how everything becomes an expression of love and God. The heart of the lotus is the space of self awareness within us – it is the realization of the harmony and inner peace. There may be wind, there may be snow or ice or a hot sun outside; there may be changing seasons and temperatures moving us and through us, and things may touch our skin, but if you are within the center of the lotus – deep within the strength of your spiritual core, grounded, rooted – this is where the awakened heart is, where the wisdom of the heart is, and where the truth is.
Clarity becomes you, purity becomes you, and anything else just simply moves through you. Being rooted in our inner truth, and remaining devoted to introspection and self awareness are the paths towards the center of the lotus flower.
The heart is the lotus, and through our senses the petals open until we become the lotus opened. Let senses absorb you – but not through the head, let it be entered through your heart or towards your heart through feeling. Become not just a hearing of a song, or a thinking of a song, become the song, the sound; just as the dancer becomes the dance itself, and the poet the poem, and the one being kissed or kissing becomes the kiss itself.
I often speak of how love is like prayer, because both are sacred. Both are ways of mysticism, because in both love and prayer we open ourselves, our bodies, our palms and our minds to trust something beyond us. In prayer we fall into deep trust, into the arms of someone whose face we may never see; we trust and surrender to something greater than us and greater than our mind’s borders or limitations of our understanding.
And in love too. We trust in something greater than us, because something greater than us takes us in its hands, and we feel almost weightless. There is surrender in love, trust in love, a willingness to trust moving beyond the boundaries of the known, beyond the mind.
When you are able to love someone without your head, reasons, thinking or rationalizing, your love is bound to become prayer. And when your love becomes prayer, your beloved becomes the door. Such love will make you centered in the heart; and once you’re centered in the heart, you enter the temple of God.
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Cover photograph by me in the South of France.
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