
http://www.care2.com/greenliving/is-your-heart-pure-enough-to-witness-spirit-2.html
Is Your Heart Pure Enough 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).
More from Deepak Chopra (528 articles available)


Robyn
Melissa
Deepak
Eric
Dave
Dr. Brent
Isha
Susan
Delia
Michelle
Wendy
Megan
Hilary
Ann
Judi
Ronnie
Kelly
Lily
Terri
Betsy
Cait
Andrew
Jana
Annie B.
Veronica
27 comments
add your comment »see www.wordsofpeace.net
send green star
why is this inappropriate?
I say this from the heart --- sky tv channel 186 ( i think!) - "open access" mon-fri 10am and weekends 10am and 6pm, take a good look at wordsofpeace.net
from the heart to the heart....
send green star
why is this inappropriate?
Uma, I think I understood your explanation to be, yes, more than just the natural. More like the sympathetic resonance of piano strings when the sustain pedal is held down. Yes, I felt this too and it quite often focus my mind on the voice of 'Kadosh'. Although it can be very hard to differentiate God as opposed to the self voice, I can ususally tell by
a) The fact that its something I dont really want to do, ie my flesh would rather be self serving. 'Carry it two miles'.
b) Its an action that involves sacrifice/giving without expecting anything in return. 'Give without expecting to receive'
c) Brings an unexpected incredible blessing and testifies that it really was God!
d) Exercises love, faith and compassion.
Yeah, I love quantum although it can send you sideways; like the relative scale comparisons of atomic size; ie the scale relationship of electron/proton in a hydrogen atom is 1sec>30,000,000 years...there is a lot of space going on. 'He stretched out the heavens'!
Blessing, peace.
M.
send green star
why is this inappropriate?
Mark thank you for your kind remarks. By empathy I don't mean natural kindness and putting oneself in another's shoes but the actual feeling what they do ,and if untrained whether you like it or not.I think that originally it was part of our consciousness but when we resolved as a species to concentrate on individuation it and the other"psychic" gifts were sublimated in favor of the dominant focus.The apex of that focus was found in "western" cultural mind set where the christianity chosen by the group soul of that part of humanity was of the type that discourages any idea of human contact with God calling heretical anything but the doctrines chosen at Nicea,with the church always between God and people,similarly empathy and psychic skills were derided as being childish and primitive thinking , predominant in women and savages, and well below the standard of male rational linear thought exemplified in western science and math. How wonderfully,ironically, perfect that Quantum physics the child of western linear thinking should bring everything round again explaining the mystic and the psychic revelations in the light of it's new perceptions of reality. I love the way you express your comments.
send green star
why is this inappropriate?
Hi Everyone
Julia, I thinks its important to divorce ourselves from the autocratic Constantinian concepts of hell and do a little study on death before we get to the 'hell' bit. Its never been about God giving up on His children; its always been about us walking away from our Father. Same thing with world catastrophes etc. We keep saying; 'Keep out of our lives, we dont want anything to do with you'. He is a gentleman and so He does exactly as we ask. The thing is that the substance of the universe is held together by Him and so the default state of being, minus God, is absolutely destruction. Which brings us to the beautiful gift of 'the conscience' of which yours seems to be remarkably unscathed by the searing of our culture. I encourage you both, your love and compassion is evident and is EXACTLY what the God of the universe seeks in all His children; love and compassion. Thats exactly the core of Jesus' commandments; love God (for God is love) and love one another. BTW Uma, I think everyone has the gift of empathy, its just that selfishness is the antithesis of empathy and so this tells me that you both must be very selfless:-) Lets face it, our culture nurtures selfishness.
Blessings and peace
Mark
send green star
why is this inappropriate?
Julia empathy is an inborn psychic gift,perhaps genetically passed since my mother and her mother were very strong with it. Your empathy will allow you to sense anyone else's latent gifts, what ever they are and if it is in you to be helpful it will just work out that way, it's not something you can or should try for with someone else. I find myself most enjoying the company of others who have different psy factors. Allot of people don't like to be around them fearing lack off privacy but I love the extra intimacy and feeling that they can really know and hear me.One of my closest is clairvoyant which as you probably know works around sight. I love being with him because then I see things I normally wouldn't and I find that over the years in his company his talents have worked on my psyche without plan or effort (he has shown me how to "see" on different occasions but it doesn't stick with me and I get too busy with other things to practice what he shows me) I now SEE more than I used to,meaning I get more visual sense than before and certainly more than before I knew him.When I realize what the world looks like to him I can't imagine how he can even walk down the block not to mention driving a car.He feels more when he is with me(his nature is more cool and dry, intellect predominant) and says the same, that he can't imagine survival feeling all that I do. Another good friend is latent telepath many times I think about saying something and she turns around yelling "what?".
send green star
why is this inappropriate?
Uma, did I read that correctly? You think those with empathy can possibly develop the ability to help others have more empathy, or feel the feelings of others. I've always longed to do this but I don't know how. And of course I have compassion for younger souls. It hurts me that othrs do not, but I have compassion for them also. And yes, all hearts are pure, as in we all have a good core that we should listen to. I don't think everyone's good core is quite as loud and nagging (not in a bad way) as mine. I don't know if that's because I was born that way. or if I had some epiphany in my teens that elevated my conciousness. Either is likely, I figure.
send green star
why is this inappropriate?
Julia All hearts are pure, it's usually inconvenient in the present to listen to them, The Egyptians believed that upon death there is a weighing of scales: on one side the heart and on the other the single feather of Maat, symbolizing truth. If the heart wasn't as light as that feather it would cry out against us saying "why have you oppressed me?" and the ravenous beast of the underworld, the monster crocodile would gobble us up, the perfect symbol of bitter remorse.In life the distractions of the flesh can block the heart's voice, it takes courage and commitment to follow it . At the end of mortal time they no longer exist; there is no buffer between consciousness and truth. It seems that we only learn compassion through suffering. Younger souls are arrogant and prideful. In my own case I'm sure that I went through plenty of gobbling before learning better. Have compassion for the younger spirits around you:empathy is one of the psychic gifts and receiving it presents the challenge to master it. There are different types and levels of it;for instance, receiving and projecting. Receptive makes you sensitive to ALL feeling: you're challenged to choose what and when to hear,failure drives people to self medicate to shut out the feeling; experience and practice allow response to the pain by prayer, shining the light for Spirit to notice and come help, the gift is being able to share the bliss at the heart of all life . Projectors are charismatic;mastery demands wise choice.
send green star
why is this inappropriate?
I don't say this to brag or anything but I'm one of those who actually is pure of heart. I define that in my own case as being completely incapable of sustainably wishing ill on others. If a thought of that sort enters my mind, it's literally like my heart pounces on it, rips it to shreds, then chastises me severely for entertaining it in the first place. No one in my family understand why I'm like this - especially my parents. I truly believe that everyone is, if not good at heart, at least redeemable - no punishment ever seems just to me, because of the suffering it brings to others, such as if a criminal is locked up, I feel for his family who will miss him, and therefore be innocent of crime, yet made to suffer. I've met no one else who is like this, which came as rather a shock to me when I realized it. How ironic that my universal empathy sometimes alienates me from others? I lost a good friend when I realized that there could be no hell, because no loving God could ever give up on his children (what parent would?). I believed all souls could be redeemed and found a way to see good in everyone, so how on earth could God be less forgiving than me? I told her that I thought all religions were valid, just another way to experience God. She said that just means you'll all go to hell together, and she stopped talking to me shortly after. Any more pure-hearted people here?
send green star
why is this inappropriate?
Hey I heard someone once say (through a translator); 'Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.'!
send green star
why is this inappropriate?
Facebook account: