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The spiritual heart is one of the main chakras. A chakra is a junction of energy pathways in the middle of the chest. The spiritual heart for me is the main entrance gate to my inner world. It is the meeting point of two worlds: the outer world – the world of the body – and the inner world – the world of the soul. I meditate, like all of Sri Chinmoy’s students, on this center and try to “dwell” in it during the day so that my self-awareness does not live in my head but in my heart. In the beginning I found it quite useless and silly to imagine, say, a flower in my heart and to spend my precious time as a reasonable adult on playing with this flower or expanding myself in the heart. But this was my assignment and I carried it out, simply because I was curious where all this would lead me. By today, my meditation assignment has increased in scope. Not only do I concentrate on my heart during my silent meditations, I try all day to let my heart and not my head guide my life.

I would call this a meditative attitude. The more I control the thought world, the easier it is for me to sit in my heart. Conversely, the more time I spend in my heart, the better I am able to control my mind. If you are given the ability to live in the heart, work in the heart and to use the heart as the main center, you are bound to first take control of thoughts and later of the whole mind itself.    When we start to meditate, we will slowly come to feel our spiritual heart. As a novice, I perceived it as a tiny nest in the middle of my chest, sort of like a “magnetic field”. This magnetic field was initially the size of a nest, and then gradually expanded.

The concept of size is somewhat awkward here because the spiritual heart is not confined by walls. This is interesting in that I feel it grow until I realize that it is without end. It can’t be fenced in, as it is limitless. This is why everything has room there, can be sorted out, be transformed and finally rest in peace. Its limitlessness makes our spiritual heart more valuable than our mind. If we have to solve a great many problems with our mind, the mind’s limited capacity leads to an energy block that may for example manifest as mental fatigue, stress, headache, or similar conditions.

Trying to solve problems in the mind actually multiplies them. We worry ourselves sick. But by spending most of the day in the heart, the problems melt into the heart and dissolve on their own, without superfluous cerebration. Mental fatigue and the resulting headache then simply no longer exist. In my early career as a dentist, I would be thoroughly exhausted each Friday evening after work and my head was humming. It was filled with noise. Then I went home from work and was very irritable. The kids banging the door or making noise was enough to make me mad. After a whole week slaving away to sustain my family, I expected to deserve some quiet at home. My wife tried to help me and shushed the kids, saying “Poor Daddy works so much!” After the third or fourth beer, the noise subsided and peace was setting in.

This used to be my approach to gain peace of mind. After some years of meditation, on a Friday evening, I was driving home from my office with my wife. While driving, I noticed that the humming and noise in my head were gone, but were still around. Somehow, the noise hovered next to me, above my shoulder, but no longer in me, and so it got home together with me, like in the old days, but it no longer bothered me. This I told to my wife, who, then like today, warned me against talking about these experiences in public. She was convinced that any audience would readily diagnose me with lunacy. The same experiences reoccurred to a lesser extent on the following two weekends, and then no more. Mental fatigue and the related headaches left me for good.

The spiritual heart also enables us to memorize things. As I am not a spiritual master yet, unfortunately, I do not know how the spiritual heart functions in its entirety. Still, based on my experience so far, I claim that a time will come when the spiritual heart will surpass and even assume all of the mind’s capacities. At the outset of my spiritual life, I wanted to take control of my mind, all at once and by hook or crook. This was not the right approach, but that’s what I did. I stopped almost all inflow of new information into my mind, as from newspapers or TV. Also, I put advanced vocational training on hold for a few years. After that period, I tried to attend dentists’ conventions again, but I felt out of place and escaped home in the first intermission. But at some point my conscience made itself heard, insisting that I owed it to my patients, who confided in me, to be up to date in terms of dental science. For this reason, I decided to attend conventions and sit through it, although all I was actually going to do there was meditate. So, my day at the convention passed like this: I was “sitting” in my heart all the time, looking from this vista into the world and listening to the speaker dispassionately, without commenting thoughts. I could really relax and left the convention rested, without having taken any notes.

The next day, I was amazed to notice that I remembered everything that had been discussed, especially the information concerning my job. During work, for instance, it occurred to me that I should not do this or that because Dr. so-and-so at the congress had talked about this particular subject. So from then on, I enjoyed conventions and attended them on a regular basis. It was wonderful to just sit there and take in the lecture as well as the lecturer. Everything, including each person at such an event, can be stored in one’s memory as long as you are not distracted by thoughts. It’s like being a sponge that absorbs everything.

Actually, children also use this method for learning. The mind of small children is not yet sophisticated, it only starts functioning powerfully from the ages of 12 to 14. Before that, children live in their hearts. This is why they know no prejudice, they accept everything and are friendly to everyone. And this also explains why they identify with their parents and view them as perfect. Schoolchildren do not have a well-organized mind. They do not store information in their short-term memory but directly in their long-term memory with the help of the heart. This way of studying cannot be considered mental work; rather, it is a game, a game of identification with the subjects taught and with the teacher. Children don’t know what they know or what they don’t know. I still remember exactly the entrance exam for the fifth grade. At home, my parents asked me if I was well prepared in the various subjects, but I couldn’t say. In this situation I was simply unable to produce the things I knew, or rather, from a mental point of view, I didn’t know that I knew the right answers. During the exam, the teacher asked me various questions, and as she was kind and smiled at me, I always gave the right answers.

In later years I would ask myself why I knew nothing when I was afraid, whereas I knew everything when the teachers were nice to me. The answer is simple: Fear closes the heart, and the child falls silent. Friendliness and love open the heart, and the child becomes communicative. If someone succeeds in opening the spiritual heart, they claim many abilities they had as a child, like the carefree, self-forgotten play. That wouldn’t be a bad thing, would it? As a part of the inner world, the spiritual heart is not bound by time. This is why the heart’s guidance is far closer to perfection than that of the mind, which is very limited as far as time is concerned. The mind knows not the future, it only sees the present and the recent past. The mind guides us with thoughts that, due to the future’s uncertainty, drown in the swamp of doubts. We are not capable of assessing the consequences our decision will have in ten years, one year or sometimes even the next day.

But if we have learned to live in our hearts, we are guided by feelings. This kind of guidance reminds of a little of the “wisdom” of animals. Neither animals nor humans need the mind to get this guidance. Of course, there is a big difference between the two – in humans, the intuitive mind is meant to gain the upper hand over the physical mind. And orders given by the mind are not executed blindly, but are first examined intellectually and are then, approved or dismissed by the free human will. Anyway, the feelings of the spiritual heart are the language of the inner wisdom, the emergence of the so-called “inner voice”. Rats leave town by the score – without knowing why –, and the next day an earthquake hits the town. A human thinks he is not so stupid as to sleep in the woods, so he stays at home. That’s why a brick falls on his head. Let’s take for example the wonderful family of bees, where each individual knows what to do. Strictly speaking, the bees don’t know their duties but they do it because they feel what needs to be done. This could work for us, too; we could feel what we have to do.

This comparison may not live up to today’s scientific standards, because animals possess other known and unknown sensual faculties. But couldn’t there come a time when our inner perceptions become also measurable, that is, open to scrutiny? Our mind is not yet able to understand this, but still we can learn to use the heart to feel which consequences would arise from our present actions in a few years’ time. If one of my actions produced a negative result, I would feel it before taking this action. So, by listening to and obeying our feelings we can avoid decisions that entail negative consequences. In the beginning, we are not able to receive the messages of our feelings clearly, or if we do, we don’t allow our mind to deviate from its logic goal.

The mind calculates and knows everything, and then it dictates what specifically has to be done. Since childhood, we have been trained to assert our will at any cost. We find it exceedingly difficult to replace that will, which relies on logic, with a feeling. It is all the more difficult, as we do not trust feelings, which are unknown territory to us. There is no experience, no proof that feelings are safer than familiar logic. Feelings are not controllable by logic, so they require blind faith. It is a kind of obedience. A child does not know why it has to be obedient, but it is obedient because it trusts its parents. The same holds true for the spiritual life: I am obedient because I trust the capacity of my inner guide. This makes the spiritual life that is led by the heart a kind of inner obedience.

Listening to the feelings of our spiritual heart makes sense. Two years after I started meditating, I sold the house that had always played an important role in my dream of achieving world fame. I did it because at work I had an intuition to sell it. Interestingly, I had no apparent reason to part with the house, but back then – out of the blue – I felt the unswerving inner urge to sell it. On imagining the sale of the house I felt happy and free. I put down my conditions for the sale. Only one buyer showed up, and the conditions he had for the transaction were the same as mine. Then my wife and I rented an apartment and planned on building a house in a village where we owned a garden. I bought a pre-fabricated house, everything was set, and all I needed to do was sign a contract. After work, I got into my car and was driving to the real estate agent to put my signature on the contract. I had no idea what was happening to me, but I simply wasn’t able to go there. At each crossing, I made a wrong turn, without knowing why, and I felt queasy whenever I drove in the right direction. Something was pulling my hand from the steering wheel and a very bad feeling came over me. I have never again experienced such strong, even forceful, guidance.

This interference was completely new to me, and I didn’t know what to make of it. I made an appointment for the next day, and this time I took the subway to make sure I would get to the appointed place to sign the contract. Three or four weeks had passed when a realtor called me up, saying he had found a unique house for me. I declined as I already owned one, but he implored me to at least have a look, free of any charges and obligations. When I was indeed driving to this proposed house, I immediately felt that this was our house. By the way, we have lived there for ten years now. The location, the price, everything was just perfect. I had no choice but to cancel the contract for the pre-fabricated house, losing 150,000 schillings.

This experience taught me to take feelings seriously, though I continued making mistakes, learning the hard way. It often happens that our mind or desires tell us that something is the right thing to do, while the heart remains silent. At that point, it is important – and difficult – to wait for the feeling to come, because the mind and even more so the vital are very impatient: “Do it now, do it now, unless you do it now, you miss out on this opportunity, life is fleeting.” We have to learn to wait until we are guided by feelings. This is the only way to avoid actions that cause future frustration. “If the heart feels more quickly than the mind thinks, there is peace and happiness,” says my master. And consequently, if my heart is not quick enough, my mind has to wait. We all know that ruminating and brooding over past mistakes is the main factor in destroying our peace.

How often have we thought, “What would have been if it hadn’t come this way; if that idea had occurred to me sooner, my life would have taken a different course”, etc. We know all that. This can break us. But if we, following the precepts of our heart, no longer make any mistakes, our future will be filled with both success and peace. Then we remain happy, even though it may seem as if we have missed out on something, because we are protected and safely guided by our heart. The mind no longer questions or ruminates the heart’s decisions. This is the advantage of inner obedience.

There is a thing called outer knowledge and another called inner wisdom. Outer knowledge is book or intellectual knowledge and is based in the mind. Inner wisdom dwells in our inner being and is also called intuition, which is a notch above the physical mind. In our case, the spiritual heart is the gate to intuition. The inner wisdom is simply there, emerging out of nowhere. It cannot be invoked or controlled by thoughts or a special technique. On the contrary – outer knowledge obstructs the path to inner wisdom. Thinking uses the methods of analysis and synthesis, and thus closes the door to inner wisdom. Inner wisdom, however, hides behind the mind. Otherwise stated, the inner wisdom can only come to the fore in the silence of the mind. The opening and the expansion of the spiritual heart does not make the mind narrower – not at all.

The spiritual heart assumes certain tasks within our being without violating the mind’s supremacy. Quite the other way round, what happens is an expansion of the mind. You can think of it that way: At first, you feel a tiny part of your heart, which starts communicating with the mind through your regular meditation and aspiration. So the mind is indeed able to perceive the heart. In my case, it’s like there is a path between my head and my heart. Over time, this connection intensifies and broadens, and becomes like a highway. Just as two neighboring cities engaging in trade are growing together, so do the spiritual heart and the mind. In the process, the mind expands, transforms and not even loses its previous abilities but is enriched with numerous new qualities. So, this is not a matter of narrowing the mind, but of expanding the heart to flood and embrace the mind.

Once a girl was diligently taking notes during one of my lectures in order to write an article on meditation. After the lecture she told me that all her questions had been answered and that she agreed on everything. She said that basically she was an optimist, but sometimes – as I myself had just noted – her optimism was unexpectedly depressed by negative feelings. That is why she saw eye to eye with me on my premise that the mind functions predominantly in a negative way. But if that was so, she asked, why then is there something like optimism and if so, what is it like? I couldn’t make sense of the question, looked at the girl, closed my eyes and started smiling. I felt that it wasn’t my smile, but completely my master’s. Then I heard the girl start laughing and say, “I think that neither do you …” Now I recognized that I was starting to talk, speaking very slowly, “Optimism is a temporary victory of the heart over our mind.” On saying the first word, I was empty; I had no idea which words would follow next. The girl liked this formulation very much. She found it wonderful and immediately wrote it down. I’ve got to write down this sentence too, I thought to myself, and that’s what I did when she was leaving. Only then did I realize that the sentence was actually true. Optimism is the heart’s victory over the mind, and pessimism is the mind’s victory over the heart.

However, if the heart achieves a final victory over the mind, there will be neither optimism nor pessimism. Then there will only be safety and happiness. Then there will only be the cheerful acceptance of life. Another girl once asked me a question. I can clearly remember what the question was about, and I was very sure of the appropriate, logical answer. The girl, nevertheless, didn’t want to accept the answer. She would have preferred a different answer and furnished a lot of arguments for the solution she thought was the right one. I conceded that her reflections had some merit, but I reaffirmed my point of view, since she had asked me. The girl now looked for a loophole and asked me whether I might be mistaken, or if I was never mistaken at all. I was surprised by hearing myself tell her the following: “As far as other people’s problems are concerned, I am never mistaken; I am only wrong in my own affairs.” This answer came from deep within; I had no time to think it up. The girl accepted this answer and I thought about why this was so. Then I understood.

As far as other people’s problems are concerned, I can remain completely detached, I am not involved. My mind does not spring to action and produces no counter-arguments. My mind sleeps somewhere in a corner, making way for my intuition. If, however, I am concerned, then indifference and detachment are gone and the mind kicks in. The mind then lets the inner knowledge only some room to maneuver, or with an ulterior motive it tries to corrupt the inner knowledge. And the mind is often successful, as it receives support from our vital instincts and desires, which are also actors in this play. This means that we could live a perfect life unless we identified ourselves with our own problems, or in other words, if we steered our lives from a distance, with utmost composure. This, however, would require us to be completely dispassionate, or separated from our ego.     By the way, these mechanisms also explain why we always want to solve others’ problems – we are able to see them much more clearly than our own. Then again, this leads us to believe that we can change the world by changing and perfecting others. But all we achieve is undermining our peace and the peace of our fellow human beings.

The Spiritual Heart and the Feeling of Oneness

Our spiritual heart not only has the capacity to perceive the messages of our inner wisdom, it is also able to feel oneness. Everyone, by means of identification, has the potential to feel oneness with others. If we are able to feel the vast being inside ourselves during meditation, we can feel it in other people and living beings too. By looking into somebody’s eyes, I feel in her the existence of the same being that I feel inside myself, and this being unites us. The deepest sense of “I”, the inner world of my brothers and sisters, centers on the being that is identical to mine.

As a consequence, I don’t just perceive the world outside myself, but also within myself. When I perceive the world only outside myself, problems for me keep cropping up because then I want to possess the world or change it to my liking. According to this frame of mind, I do not possess whatever lies outside of me, as it is not a part of me. In such moments I see how little I am and that I am separated from others. In my heart, however, I feel that everything is inside me, that everything belongs to me and that I actually am everything provided I embrace the world inwardly. If I can remain in this consciousness, I no longer feel the need to benefit from something myself. The smile of God no longer has to be addressed to me personally. Everything happens inside of me, meaning that I automatically take part in everything, identifying, for instance, with someone who is being smiled at. I feel his joy and I am happy for whatever he receives. I do not need to realize something myself, because the person who also exists within me experiences his joy within me.

The inner world is just a synonym for inseparable oneness. If I feel the inseparable oneness, the outer world no longer seems to be separated from me as if by a fence. My fellow human beings are with me and in me, along with all their virtues and faults, so their qualities are mine too. Their faults don’t bother me; I just accept them like my own faults. Of course, I am still able to get angry at inanities. But even if I express my anger, the surface of my heart’s ocean stays calm, smooth and absolutely untrembling. Inwardly, I just can’t be angry, despite all the anger I may express at imperfections. As all these imperfections are mine, I accept them and make up with them. Though I like to speak my mind, I never get angry inwardly as anger has lost its sway over me.

While opening the spiritual heart, we may get a subjective sense of oneness – which alone is able to change us –, but also physical sensations. I had my first experience of the physical kind in Switzerland, in a meeting with Sri Chinmoy’s students. It happened in an intermission after a meditation: We were standing in a hallway, talking. Just as I was about to walk down the stairs, I casually looked back. My eyes fell on one of Sri Chinmoy’s longtime students, who was among the first in Europe. I stopped dead when I felt that my body was shifting shape. I had become him. My facial expression had changed to a point that I had his face. The size of my body also changed, and I was now as tall as him. As it appeared, he had duplicated himself through me. Then I went to the staircase and found it amusing that, as this student was standing upstairs, I, his “double” was walking downstairs.

This was an interesting, pleasant and easy-going experience. My mind for a long time did not come round and understand how it could be that this student had doubled and where I had remained in the process. In these days I believed that he too, the object of my identification, had to feel this identification. Meanwhile I have come to know, however, that this is not the case. Others do not feel what you feel, as with all physical sensations. Another experience of this kind came over me with my family. My family, consisting of my wife and two children, would often have just started dinner when I arrived. Then, when I sat down, I would sometimes feel that I was my wife or one of my sons. It got all the more interesting when I felt the three family members at a time, or when I “zapped” from one person to the other. At that point I would start looking for the fourth person at the table. There was always a fourth person that I couldn’t find and who was none other than me. I felt like I had lost him. I missed him.

Identification once offered me a horrible experience. It took place during my first years of meditation, in my office. A patient suffering from a tooth-ache came to see me, accompanied by two people. I demanded these two uninvited men to leave the room. One of them acquiesced and went back to the waiting room, while the other refused to budge from the side of the patient. While I was arguing with him, the patient turned around and stared at the man who accompanied him. I didn’t observe this happening, I only sensed the patient’s presence in my back, and I turned to face him. When I looked into his eyes – I didn’t know what was going on, but I started screaming and flew into a rage. I clearly felt that I was being overpowered by a terrible force. My facial muscles distorted, dancing like mad, and my whole body stiffened because of that aggressive force. My muscles contracted to such an incredible degree that they formed knots above my bones. Such a destructive force entered me as if I had swallowed a bomb.

Harshly, I chased all of the three men from my office, and they readily took off. I struck fear into everyone around me; I could see it. In this moment, I would have certainly been able to kill, and I could barely breathe for this inhuman tension in me. So I rushed to the window, opened it and leaned out. Something small, something that was left of me began crying for help. But only a rattle escaped my throat. Inwardly, I was imploring Guru intensely. This went on for some time until I also heard my mouth repeating these words, “Guru, help me, Guru help me, Guru save me… .“ I was calling my master, upon which this fit suddenly vanished. After I was all right again, I asked who this patient was. My assistant replied that this man was a prisoner, a murderer sentenced for life, escorted by guards. She added that she had given this appointment with my own consent. It seemed I had forgotten about it. The murderer and his chaperones were still sitting in the waiting room, hopeful that I would treat him after all. I apologized and agreed to treat him, and went about pulling a tooth. My assistant told me later that day that, despite her being an atheist who believes neither in God nor in the devil, she had seen Satan in me; my face was knotty, had a dark green color, and just thinking of my eyes gave her the creeps.

Then I entered a period in which I was able to identify with everyone except for my master. Him I considered too perfect and unreachable. This annoyed me because I preferred being him to being anyone else. The students of Sri Chinmoy meditate on his “transcendental picture”. This photograph for us does not represent a human, not a God, but a state of consciousness we strive to attain. Once I was in a house where a lot of these students lived and where transcendental pictures could be found on almost all walls. With an empty mind I was passing by those pictures and I wondered to myself why they had put up my picture everywhere. Of course, I soon realized my mistake and had to smile at myself, but ever since I have always felt that this transcendental picture was a picture of me.

In my lectures on Yoga it happened time and again that people from the audience believed that the man in the transcendental picture was I. One lady told me after a lecture that she loved everything I had talked about, but the only thing she couldn’t understand was why I had placed my picture on the table. On another occasion, two women asked me to reveal the name of the artist who had taken this wonderful picture of me. I would reply that, to my regret, I wasn’t the person in the picture. Not yet, or still not yet, I hastened to add. I am convinced that each of Guru’s sincere students will inwardly realize this picture, this state of consciousness. And this is how I go about it: When I meditate very intensely, very well, then my mind and the “mind” hiding behind the picture are uniting. This unification, figuratively speaking, does not result in an opening between two rooms but creates one single room. In this state, nothing can disturb my meditation any more. Everything can disappear through the opening into the vastness behind the picture. The reason, according to me, is that the transcendental picture is a formal expression of the universal consciousness, which provides enormous room for all of us who are aspiring to the infinite consciousness.

These days I don’t care about identification, and I don’t go after it any longer. Very rarely do I identify with other people, which may spontaneously occur now and then with my fellow students or with some of my patients that I treat in my practice. But identification is now most of the time with Guru. When I sit down to meditate, it is irrelevant to me whether Guru is present or not, as I am always able to inwardly take on his posture and his facial expression. In these moments I feel that I am he. This sensation is actually not limited to meditation sessions. I can achieve this while am doing something, talking or simply laughing. Then I feel his smile on my face, I feel the poise of his mouth and his moves. My gaze no longer belongs to me alone. I feel that it is he looking at somebody or something. In the beginning, this would happen quite spontaneously, and in such moments I didn’t doubt that I was saying and doing the right thing.”
Gunagriha

Excerpts from the book: Third Wish

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