Threads of Heart, Energy and Will

 

by Joseph Naft -

We weave the tapestry of our path with threads of heart, energy and will. The way starts and ends with heart.

The first stirrings of the spirit guide our heart toward the path. Without this call we would never begin. Along the way, the closer we approach the Source of all, the more our heart opens.

Our commitment and determination to practice grow, coupled with new found reservoirs of kindness, compassion and love. But our heart's range extends from the most banal and self-centered desires to the most sublime and hidden depths.

Whenever we wish to assess our progress on the path, we need look no further than the state of our heart.

The inner substance of the path, the field of our practice consists of energies. 

Energies drive our inner life and form the various levels of our soul, yet we typically remain unaware of them.

An astonishingly wide range of inner and spiritual energies nourish and condition our life and our practice, from the automatic energy that enables us to function in a pre-programmed way with minimal awareness, all the way up to the transcendent energy of the Divine.

One of the great adventures of the spiritual path consists of gradually discovering the profound subtleties of the energies within us.

Any endeavor first requires contact with the necessary materials. A major challenge of the energies, the substances that form our inner world, lies in their disparate natures and our inability to see or recognize them.

We work most effectively with those energies that we can actually perceive. Step-by-step, the path refines our perceptions, so that we can recognize more of the energies and learn to use them.

As our contact with energies grows, we notice variations in the amount of particular energies present.

We start to see that some of our inner and outer activities waste our energies. In response, we pursue efforts to plug the holes in our bucket, to conserve our energies for more important uses, such as deepening our awareness or building our soul.

Unnecessary muscular tensions, for example, needlessly waste our energy. Relaxation of those tensions conserves the energy.

Awareness of an energy and actions to conserve it show us that more energy enables more inner work, enriching our inner life. Understanding this, we fervently seek to increase the quantity of energy available and to concentrate it within ourselves.

We learn and practice methods like energy breathing to draw in energy directly from outside ourselves, augmenting the energy our bodies ordinarily produce.

The extra energy, however, disperses from us just as readily. To assimilate those energies into our growing soul, we practice methods to allow the energies to settle in us, to merge with our own substance.

One such method of energy absorption is deep relaxation. The new energies assimilated gradually accumulate in the reservoir of our being.

A pool of a particular energy provides a base which helps us attract the next higher quality of energy.

Our work with the lower energy prepares our perceptions for the further refinements required for contact with the higher energy.

Our endeavor to deepen the quality of energy that we can perceive starts another cycle of energy work, but at a new level.

These cycles of practice bring a variety of energies to our being. Certain interactions among the different levels of energies produce new energies in a process of transformation. Most meditation practices lead to such energy transformations.

But this emphasis on energies raises a whole series of questions: what holds these energies together, what draws them in, what brings them to assimilation, what enables their transformation, what contains them, and what tools work in the medium of energies?

The one answer to all these questions is will, the core of who we really are. The timeless realms of energy and will closely interact at all the levels.

The whole work on energies hinges on will, on choice, intention and attention. But will, in turn needs energies to make its acts effective.

Will can operate with any of the energies, but works quite differently depending on the level of energy available to it. The direct understanding of will as that central factor in us which intends, chooses, decides, attends, and acts, proves crucial to our inner work.[1]

Will is essential to spiritual transformation. 

Like energies, 'will' belongs to a realm outside of time and space. So our limited perceptions condition the process of working with will. However, with will the problem deepens even further. 

Energies can be perceived, whereas will can never be seen or perceived. Will is always the one who sees, the one who perceives, the one who does. This most subjective element in us cannot readily turn back to perceive itself. In a profound sense, we are our will.

Despite its absolute subjectivity, we can experience will as who we are. We can be our will. Thus, contact with will comes through being it, whether an affirming will, as in directed attention, or an open, accepting will as in non-directed meditation.

We can be will in action in the choices we make, in everything we do.

Will participates in all our experiences as the one in us who is having the experience, who is making our choices or non-choices.

All spiritual practices from every tradition concern will as their key but sometimes hidden factor. The more we intentionally work with aspects of will, the more our recognition and contact with it grows.

Early on we notice the fragmented state of our will. A multitude of conflicting urges, desires, dreams, fears, and habits coexist uneasily in us.

We rarely act from the whole of ourselves. Our inner life suffers from chaotic disarray. This state of affairs results from the fact that our activities run in a pre-programmed mode with the automatic energy.

We operate on autopilot, reacting in a conditioned manner to the situations and events of our life. Our inner automatism, our conditioning and programming dominate us. All this constrains our will into working almost exclusively through the automatic energy with its inherent fragmentation.

Through our spiritual practice, we initiate a process of defragmenting our will. 

As we gain access to higher levels of energies, the isolated pieces of our will start coalescing into greater wholeness, less fragmentation. We become more fully ourselves, more unique.

Despite this reconstruction, we soon discover that nearly all that drives us arises solely from our self-centered agendas and attachments.

We call this false center of the universe ego, the great usurper. Our growing dismay with this thief in our midst starts a process of deconstruction and purification.

With the help of the higher energies, we gradually release the multifarious grip of self-centeredness. 

We become more open to the magnificent world of which we individually form a small but significant part – a significance precisely due to our special potential for will to act consciously through us

As the purification of our will, intentions and motivations proceeds on the periphery, the egoistic core at our center stands immune, slipping through unscathed. The day comes, however, when the only way forward is for us, for our ego to give way, to surrender, to empty ourselves utterly. 

Through the stages of this surrender, the Divine Will finds a home in us, as our will rejoins It, opening the door for Love.

In this process of liberating our will, we seek a strong, affirming will in ourselves and a tenderhearted will open toward the Divine.

Our strong, affirming will in this lower realm then transforms into a substantial instrument for the higher. Liberation, whether partial or full, enables the person to serve more deeply, more effectively.

Every spiritual tradition, every spiritual practice and every person on a spiritual path plays a role in the universal processes of the transformation of energies and the liberation of will.

In contemplating the context of our life journey, we may catch a glimpse of the awe-inspiring evolution and spiritualization of life on the Earth.

The challenge of participating in that evolution manifests in our own inner work as the disordering influence of much of life, making spiritual practice like swimming upstream against the currents of time that draw us into our lower potentials, our pre-programmed, reactive modes of living. 

Our nascent soul constitutes the inner frontier in which the upstream and downstream forces interact.

Pursuing the path to liberate our will and open to the Divine, we participate on our own small scale in the prodigious process whereby the Divine Will extends into the material universe, including our human community. 

All this touches our hearts intimately because the greatest force for spiritualization is Love.

[1] Bennett, J.G., The Dramatic Universe Vol. 2 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1961), 74-76

See Also: Modes of Will

innerfrontier.org

The Manifestation of Presence

by Joseph Naft - 

Presence… the very word evokes a depth and potency of character, a gravitas, a charisma based on inner substantiality rather than outward flash, a simple and quiet dignity. All of that, however, only describes the outward signs of presence. Our path addresses its inner manifestation.

True living absolutely requires presence

Without presence, life passes us by: we neither participate in nor fully experience our life. Presence means being at home in ourselves, being here, not only in contact with our sensory experience, but also doing what we are doing. 

Presence means inhabiting our body, heart, and mind, inhabiting our space, inhabiting our actions and inhabiting our life, not just passively letting it all happen.

Consciousness, the distinctive quality of presence, is a timeless energy of wholeness and peace. However, our sensory perceptual experiences, including physical sensations, thoughts and emotions, cover and obscure consciousness, keeping it dispersed, submerged and mixed with the energies of sensation.

For that reason we practice sensitive awareness in our whole body, in our emotions and in our mind. This intentional sensitive awareness organizes our sensitive energies and creates a workable and effective foundation for consciousness to emerge from sensation.

The foreground of life, the perceptual picture on the screen of consciousness, captivates our attention and we remain unaware of the screen itself. But we cannot find consciousness by focusing on its contents, on the ever-changing play of sensations.

Consciousness possesses entirely different qualities: spacious, timeless, cognizant, and unchanging. However, our contact with consciousness does change.

Presence is always available but by habit, clouded perception and lack of choice, we are not always available to it.

Perhaps you have seen the drawing of a black vase on a white background. You shift your focus to the background and suddenly see two faces, the vase having merged into the background.

This foreground-background perceptual shift presages exactly what we need with respect to consciousness: to bring consciousness to the foreground, as the basic container of our experience.

We can approach presence from the front or from behind. 

From the front, the side of sensory perceptions, we approach through quiet relaxation and meditation, letting thoughts, emotions, and sensations settle down, until we become aware in the gaps between them, and then aware of the consciousness, the pure awareness filling those gaps.

As our energies settle, consciousness may coalesce like beads of water joining to form a pool. We rest in the still pool of consciousness, not entangled with its contents, not lost in sensations. Then the foundation for presence grows strong.

Approaching presence from behind, we search deep within ourselves for that vibrant space beneath all our sensations, thoughts, and emotions. As we step behind our ordinary perceptions, the vast continuum of consciousness gradually unfolds in a new mode of perception.

Consciousness alone is not enough

We need the will to be present, the will to be. If we do not intentionally choose to be present, presence will be rare and fleeting. 

That is our role in the work of presence, to make that choice again and again, to take every moment of awakening and decide to be. Just as God continuously creates the universe, our act of will in being present continuously creates us.

In the act of presence we create ourselves, we become real, we inhabit this life. If there is no one home in us, it matters little how much awareness we may have of bodily sensations or anything else. 

The degree of someone being there, someone (will) who actually does the seeing and moving and thinking, determines the degree of presence, the quality of our life. Thus, our will-to-be is the central component of presence.

It does happen that presence arises spontaneously and effortlessly but without effort, that presence soon evaporates. The effort required is a relaxed effort, but an effort nonetheless.

For example, after a meditation session, we may find ourselves effortless present, due mainly to the settling of the conscious energy in us. But if our will does not enter the scene, that effortless presence, earned through meditation, gradually and subtly goes flat.

The will-to-be can pervade our entire body, heart and mind, our entire being. Acting through our attention and intention, our will entrains some of the higher energy of creative light, carrying it into our body, into our energy of sensation, where the higher energy blends with the lower to create more consciousness, the middle of the three energies and the primary energy of presence.

The in-the-moment effort to establish and maintain full-body sensation gives our will a ready and useful target. Our will plugging into the sensitive energy in our body creates a field of presence.

The key to this begins with being present in our energy of sensation, which resides in our body, not just being present in our body.

The difference is subtle but significant. Established in our body sensation, we extend our will-to-be into the sensitive energy of emotion and thought, in our heart and mind. This completes us on the level of the sensitive energy.

This simple will-to-be supports our presence, giving us life. Our will-to-be suffuses our presence with a force, the force of will, like a wind filling our sails.

When we accept to become our will-to-be, we raise ourselves out of the thrall of associative thoughts and other automatic and reactive processes, and we abide in presence.

We experience this will-to-be as I, as I am, as I am here. As one writer put it: “It is not cogito, ergo sum, as Descartes thought, but opto, ergo sum: I choose, therefore I am.”[1]

Yet this “I” is not separate from others, but rather an element of the Whole. This will-to-be, this wind filling our sails, does not begin in us. Its source lies in the higher worlds.

The challenge is to open ourselves sufficiently, so as not to block or divert that wind flowing through us from Above. God may see through our eyes and act through our hands, but only to the extent that we are present, that we engage in this moment, in being here, and in opening to the higher will.

Our will-to-be thus takes on a two-fold character. 

First, we are active toward the outside, toward full sensation in the body, toward full contact with sensory experience, toward activity in the world.

Second, we are open to the innermost, the higher, allowing it to warm our very being with love and infuse us with proximity to the Ultimate.

Between them, in consciousness, the two act in harmony as simple, relaxed presence. Thus not merely a personal matter, the effort to be present itself fulfills a sacred duty incumbent on all human beings, to serve as a bridge between heaven and earth.

Presence sets the stage for love, good works, and the transformation of energies.

Presence has several measures: frequency, duration, intensity and depth.[2] 

Frequency connotes how often we return to ourselves, how often we remember to be within ourselves and make the effort to be present. We aim to decrease the lapsed time between falling out of presence and coming back to it. 

Every activity in life transforms into an opportunity for practice. Former sources of frustration, such as waiting in line, become openings into which we pour our spiritual effort. 

Whenever we notice that we have fallen out of presence, out of consciousness, we immediately rouse ourselves back to the moment.

Duration reveals the stability of our presence. It indicates the length of any given period of presence, how long we are able to stay within our awareness before we fall back into sensation or down into autopilot.

We may effectively gauge our day by estimating the percentage of our waking hours during which we were present. Our goal is 100% unbroken presence all day, every day. But as with every other aspect of the spiritual path, we start where we are: somewhere less than 2% on a good day.

Being honest with ourselves clarifies our situation. If we remain under the illusion that we are present all the time, we shall never come to the necessary effort and determination.

Intensity of presence depends on two factors: the quantity of energy and the strength of our will-to-be. 

The more energy brought together in our being, the more intensely present we can be. The more steadfast our will-to-be, the more intensely present we are. Intensity of presence should not be confused with tension of any kind. 

Presence comes with an inner relaxation. An intense will-to-be does not imply an experience of tension, but rather a strong, vivid, and current intention to live in presence, which enables us to actually be here at home in this body, in this place, in this very moment.

Lastly, depth results from the combination of the degree of stillness and the clarity of will in our presence: the quality of energy and will available.

Is our presence underscored by the deep silence underlying everything, conferring a conscious, unifying wholeness to presence? Am I actually here in this silence? Is the whole of my attention and intention engaged in being in this moment?

Our external will-to-be opens inwardly to an alignment with and devotion to the higher world. We open the very core of our being to the higher. In the center, between the open will toward the inner/higher and the active will toward the outer/lower, we stay relaxed in being conscious.

There is yet a deeper level of presence: opening to the higher to such an extent that the higher affirms itself in us, as us. 

We invite that affirmation from beyond consciousness. In this case our true I is subsumed into the greater, sacred I of the Whole. We experience ourselves as ourselves, with no loss of freedom or independence, yet now aligned and connected with the sacred.

Typically there is a great influx of higher, sacred energy into our being in those moments, but the essential action is the purification of who we are: we become ourselves and the higher sacred, both and without contradiction. 

Rather than aggrandizing us, this action results in humility, in knowing that we are all the same in our connection with and as the sacred. In that moment, we are whole and complete and fully here; the universe is whole and complete and fully here.

Presence builds on awareness, encompassing physical sensations, emotions and thoughts. Strong contact with sensation throughout the whole of the body serves as an excellent foundation for consciousness to arise.

Contact in turn, with the pure, underlying screen of consciousness serves as the foundation of presence, a vehicle to carry presence, an invitation to presence to reside in us. Into this basic consciousness, we, our true will, can enter. To really live, means to live in presence. 

Without presence, our time passes, lost like yesterday's sunset. With presence, we bring the timeless to time, transforming it, as well as ourselves and our lives.

See Also: Stages of Presence and the Path to Presence 

[1]   Goswami, Amit The Self-Aware Universe (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1993) p. 107[2]   Tracol, Henri, The Real Question Remains (Sandpoint: Morning Light Press, 2009)

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Owning and Transforming Emotions

by Joseph Naft -

Only the rare high saints achieve a level of being untouched by anger and other destructive emotions. The rest of us must deal with distasteful, even ugly emotional states in ourselves. 

For a meaningful and satisfying life and particularly for our spiritual path, our emotional nature matters dearly, serving alternately as an essential help and a severe hindrance. 

We need the inner skills to manage our troublesome emotions. 

The bouts of anger and rage, fear, anxiety and timidity, greed, lust and gluttony, envy and jealousy, arrogance, coldness and rigidity, squeamishness and laziness, worry, hurry, and depression all take a toll. 

They make us pay by destroying the precious energy of our inner life in a wasteful, self-referential cycle. These self-reinforcing emotional descents interpose themselves between us and the people around us. They distract us from working toward our goals.

But emotions are not our enemy: they are us. Or at least through the process of identification, we believe them to be us. 

Emotions propel us through life. 

Our destructive emotions call us to respond to ourselves with kindness, acceptance, and patience. We can learn to neither abandon ourselves to their indulgence, nor to blame ourselves for their arising. 

Indulging in destructive emotions makes us petty and self-centered, and can even lead to emotional instability requiring professional psychotherapy. 

The other extreme of unwillingness to face destructive emotions or of condemning them as spiritually impure, leads us to repress them, to refuse and cut off part of ourselves, part of our energy. And ultimately, the repressed energy finds a way to surface, perhaps even more destructively.

With destructive emotions, the most effective spiritual practice, assuming one’s readiness to bear it, is to be openly and unflinchingly present to these emotions, to be here within myself in the midst of my inner turmoil, to simply see and not to run away into repression or indulgence and to not identify with or collapse into them. 

Such forthright presence brings a subtle but crucial new element to bear in our emotional life. 

Persisting, eventually our presence grows stable enough, large enough and strong enough to embrace the whole unexpected catastrophe of our destructive emotions. 

By choosing to participate in an undefended awareness of what we find most objectionable in ourselves, we set the stage for a gradual transformation of our emotional life. 

By respecting even what we consider lowest in ourselves, we learn to respect others as well. We clear a path for the higher emotions such as love, kindness, generosity, joy, and compassion.

While presence to and awareness of our destructive emotions forms the first requirement, the second crucial element for working with these states is the willingness to let go of the emotion, to let go of nurturing and dwelling on the cause to which we ascribe the emotion. 

If, in our mind, we keep ruminating over the unpleasant event or situation, then we feed the wrong side in ourselves, giving energy to our downward emotional slide. 

Let It All Go

We need to be willing to let the whole thing go, so that we can live in a higher part of ourselves instead of lingering in our emotional dungeon of identification, which drains the life-blood out of our spiritual work.

Transformation of our emotional life remains one of the greatest challenges confronting us on the spiritual path. 

We so easily fall into our emotional mud. Another step and we sink up to our necks. Our head then enters the fray as a supporting actor, busily thinking and imagining in ways that only worsen our position. 

Our breathing may grow rapid or shallow, our heart may pound, our shoulders may slump, and our face may flush or tighten. Our entire bodily demeanor reflects and abets the emotional siren. Our consciousness flees, not wanting to face the disaster. And so, we abandon ourselves to the chaotic whims of the torrent. 

By this time, there is little we can do but ride out the storm, attempting not to inflict any lasting damage. But even in the thick of it, if we can but open one eye, ever so slightly and see with a modicum of clarity and perhaps even a hint of compassion for ourselves, we set the stage for the next round not to be quite so dark. 

Perhaps the next time we open an eye a bit earlier in the process and a bit warmer. Eventually we may see with kindness at the tempest’s beginning, at the first flap of the butterfly wings, the triggering event. 

Then, before the emotional storm clouds gather, we can choose to let it all be, and let it all go. 

Out of respect for ourselves and for others, we might choose not to allow this wasteful pain to overtake us again. This forms part of the long-term blue-collar work of the path, wherein our hands get dirty and our heart gets cleansed. We become able to be more present, more compassionate, and more joyful.

In practice, we must find a way to “own” our destructive emotions. 

Take the example of anger. As long as I inwardly blame another person for “making” me angry, I am feeding my anger. 

As soon as I see that the anger is mine, that it has arisen in me, that the other person's actions do not directly arouse my anger but rather find a ready response in me, that someone else might respond without anger, that I am responsible for the anger, then I may decouple my anger from the outward apparent cause. 

When I am able to see this clearly, the anger subsides rapidly. Then I am free to take or not take appropriate action in response to the outward situation. But my inner life has been spared the cost of allowing the destructive action of anger to continue within me. 

Notice that owning my anger does not mean pushing it away, repressing it or disowning it. 

It means accepting the anger as mine and seeing into its roots within me. A similar process applies to all our destructive emotions: not blaming the outer situation, owning the emotion and, finally, letting it go.

Some emotional storms are short-lived, even less than a minute. Others can last for days. Recurrent or chronic destructive emotions that consistently derail us from living a full life, from loving relationships and from our spiritual practice may require the help of a good psychotherapist. If that describes our situation, then the sooner we seek therapy, the sooner we can move on. 

We need to be responsible for what we make of our lives, because our precious time is limited.

So if you see the anger or other destructive emotion, understand its causes, see it as baseless and unnecessary, and yet despite all that it still has you, then what? 

Depending on how thoroughly involved you are, you may be able to turn your attention away in that moment, toward something else. One potentially powerful place, if you have a prayer practice, is to turn to prayer, as deeply, strongly and genuinely as you can. At that time, rather than ask for relief, we offer our love for the higher. 

Transforming Difficulty

Opening toward the Divine, with intention and heart, can transform your state of difficulty into a state of grace. As a byproduct, prayer releases the energy of the destructive emotion to feed your soul instead of sapping it. Another excellent place to persistently direction your attention is toward the work of sensation and presence.

Another source of help in an emotional storm can come from remembering the purpose of our life, remembering our spiritual path. 

Destructive emotions are so called precisely because they destroy, at least temporarily, our spiritual possibilities. These emotional upheavals burn our energy and entice us into attitudes and actions that increase our egoism, our sense of separateness. 

Remembering that all this flows in the opposite of our intended direction can help us do damage control, conserve our rapidly ebbing energies, and shift our sights toward the path of purification. Every time we fall into some dark state that causes our inner work to vanish, we get up and start again, sooner rather than later.

And what if even that does not help? You are left bereft. Seeing and inwardly admitting to your enslavement, your powerlessness in the face of your emotional state, can empty you, can breach a hole in the darkness of your ego. 

Your heart and soul lie in ruins. Such emptiness cleanses your heart. Indeed, this emotional emptiness can lead us toward true spiritual emptiness, toward the inner need and openness that relates us to the Ultimate Source of All. The higher can only enter our emptiness, not our fullness. 

If our need is strong and if we can orient that need toward the Sacred, the Response will surely come.

The challenge of emotions is not one of taming or controlling them. 

Within the Wholeness

We need our emotional engine to be strong and vibrant. Our problem arises from our fractured nature. Our emotions, our mind, our body and our spirit all push or pull us in different directions. The spiritual challenge calls us to integrate our heart into our whole being. Within that wholeness, all our parts find transformation. 

Then our true consciousness emerges, not identifying with our painful emotions, letting them pass through without singeing us or our neighbors. Clear seeing of our emotional dramas and traumas in action extricates our sense of self from our narrowly-defined, self-centered emotional pseudo-life and brings us to a wider consciousness. 

By integrating our emotions into our wholeness, by not identifying or collapsing our sense of self into our emotions, we can rest in the freedom of consciousness and toward the higher emotions, toward the source of love. 

Furthermore, the whole of our inner work, all rightly conducted spiritual practice contributes toward freeing us, which, in part, means loosening the grip of our destructive emotions. 

So by working at meditation, prayer, presence, kindness and the rest, we naturally lighten our emotional burden.

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Non-Dual Awareness

by Joseph Naft -

In certain remarkable spiritual teachings the entire path revolves around entering our inherent pure awareness, pure consciousness, pure being and residing there.

Seer and seen merge into a global awareness which excludes nothing, has no center and no separation between observer and observed. The ego, at least temporarily, evaporates. 

Unfiltered, unfettered consciousness replaces ego as the organizing structure of the person. Seeing reveals the pseudo-self of ego as an empty and illusory construction, instantly dismantled by the unifying wholeness of consciousness in which nothing can be truly separate.

Instead of our awareness collapsing in egocentric identification with some distraction or problem, we remain in the authentic fullness of consciousness.

At first, this realization of the non-dual might only be intellectual. When the true seeing opens, however, it is both a magnificent surprise and patently obvious.

Problems dissolve, joy, wonder, and compassion arise naturally.

The extremely rare saint may, on the occasion of this first taste of non-dual awareness, spontaneously enter a stable, lasting and completely effortless abiding in pure awareness, in clear seeing.

Such people inspire us with their teaching that enlightenment is at hand, is our true nature, that we need only let go and be fully in the moment.

The great majority of us, though, are not so spiritually gifted that we attain enlightenment on our first contact with pure awareness. We sink back to autopilot. We cannot learn to ride the bike of non-dual awareness without training wheels.

If non-dual awareness is our only practice, we either find it rough sledding, fragmentary and momentary or we delude ourselves into thinking we have been conscious when we have not.

We need an inner structure to enable us to balance between falling out of the present moment, back into the self-centered view on the one hand and falling off into a semi-conscious absent-mindedness on the other.

We need to contact, build and organize our sensitive energies into a vehicle capable of supporting pure consciousness in a stable manner. So we focus on practices that involve the gradual cultivation of attention, contacting and organizing energies, body awareness, radical acceptance of ourselves and our situation, seeing the processes of attachment and identification operating within us, prayer, and the rest.

Non-dual awareness is not difficult to experience. 

We need only simplify into the moment, coming to rest in pure awareness itself by backtracking within our ordinary awareness to its natural, wide-open clarity. We go behind sensory experience, behind emotion, behind thought, behind our very self, into the now.

We allow the clouds of thought and emotion and pain to float by without obscuring our presence, and we become that vast sky of unadorned awareness. Pure awareness precedes all; it forms the substrate that receives experience.

This clear consciousness appears both wonderful and seductive because the relative ease of momentarily entering the utter satisfaction of non-dual awareness is matched by the ease of falling out of it.

Non-dual awareness draws us to seek it directly. But to establish ourselves in awareness, we need a balanced path of cultivating our soul, our wholeness.

This conundrum has been widely debated in spiritual circles for millennia. In early Chinese Zen, for example, the discussion took the form of gradual cultivation versus sudden awakening.

The wise, like the twelfth-century Korean Zen master Chinul, taught the necessity and complimentarity of both. Sudden awakening into non-dual awareness bestows a first release from the egocentric grasping and rejection of experience.

With this weight lifted, we can breathe freely the air of the Present. 

When we return to our usual state, our understanding has changed. From then on, the recognition of clear awareness as our own essence informs our pursuit of practices in the gradual cultivation of our being. Doubts dispelled, our faith and confidence in the spiritual pursuit grow unshakeable.

Awakening recurs more frequently and for longer periods and we discover the satisfaction of living in Presence. No longer divided inside, no longer focused on the division between our self and the rest of the world, we arrive at rest in the non-dual wholeness of awareness.

Yet non-dual awareness, pure consciousness is not the ultimate goal. 

We are here to serve a great Purpose. Living in awareness accords with and supports that Purpose in important and subtle ways but our obligations do not end there.

Respecting both the traditions of the East with their focus on being and those of the West with their focus on doing, we see that being is not enough. Purity of being, awareness, promotes the purification of our will, the letting go of attachments and egoism.

Gradually opening our will to the Divine Will and our heart to the Great Compassionate Heart of the World enables us to discover and create our destiny through our own unique service to the All.


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Dealing with Jealousy

by Joseph Naft -

Jealousy exposes the limits of our love. 

Combining elements of egoism, greed, sex, instinct and fear, jealousy forms a potent and poisonous cocktail that drains our energy, enslaves our inner world, harms our relationship, causes suspicion and mistrust, and is sometimes based on a misinterpretation.

Egoism's grasping and possessive attitude projects itself onto our mate, endeavoring to turn this other human being into "my" property, not to be shared.

Powerful instincts jump into the fray by seeking to protect our prospects for transmitting genes. Furthermore, we fear our mate's infidelity could lead to the loss of the relationship, the abyss of loneliness, and the destruction of trust, loyalty, commitment and our own self-worth.

Given that suspicion reinterprets events and almost inevitably finds or creates hints that justify it, jealousy, like the rapid onset disease that it is, overtakes our heart and mind all too quickly, sometimes even burning out of control with disastrous consequences.

Yet jealousy directed at our "loved" one bears the seed of its own destruction, for jealousy kills love.

Indeed, jealousy is a negative love in which we become completely identified with our own needs, desires and demands. In the grip of jealousy, we entirely forget that the true nature of love is to give and not to demand, to consider the loved one before ourselves, to be united with our loved one and to share in our loved one's joy, even when that joy involves a third person.

This last, unconditional joy in the loved one's joy is a true and hard measure of love. 

We can readily envision or even experience such love for a child but in the context of two lovers it is rare. Yet we can hold in our imagination this potential of unconditional joy in our loved one's joy and consider it as a sign of the perfection of love. Jealousy, by contrast then, shows us how far we have to go.

To work with jealousy we need, as always with the destructive emotions, to recognize it for what it is, as it occurs. Then we see its various manifestations in body, heart, and thought.

This presents us with the opportunity to not identify with it, to not believe the thought "I am jealous," but rather just to see it as a process in our body-heart-mind.

We can make efforts to turn the energy pouring into jealousy toward more constructive channels by taking the impulse of jealousy as a reminder to change our focus in that moment toward work at sensation and presence.

We can also perform reality checks to see if the events that sparked the jealousy are truly grounds for alarm or are they simply exuberant friendliness, for example.

And, finally, what if the reality checks turn out as we feared and our "loved" one actually is moving toward another. Do we fall into depression and anger, desperation and shock?

Perhaps we try to remedy any problems in our relationship. And what if that fails? This unwelcome event presents a difficult opportunity.

We may open to the inner sacrifice of our self-interest, letting go of the jealousy and seeking our heart of unconditional love. Perhaps you think this is only for the saint but what is the goal of the spiritual path if not to become that? The relationship may die and we will mourn it. But in the process our being can grow.

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Thoughts and Thinking

by Joseph Naft -

We collectively glorify our ability to think as the distinguishing characteristic of humanity; we personally and mistakenly glorify our thoughts as the distinguishing pattern of who we are.

From the inner voice of thought-as-words to the wordless images within our minds, thoughts create and limit our personal world. Through thinking we abstract and define reality, reason about it, react to it, recall past events and plan for the future. Yet thinking remains both woefully underdeveloped in most of us, as well as grossly overvalued.

We can best gain some perspective on thinking in terms of energies.

Automatic Thinking: 

 Automatic thinking draws us away from the present. We wistfully allow our thoughts to meander where they will, carrying our passive attention along with them. Like water running down a mountain stream, thoughts running on autopilot careen through the spaces of perception, randomly triggering associative links within our vast storehouse of memory.

By itself, such associative thought is harmless. However, our tendency to believe in, act upon and drift away with such undirected thought keeps us operating in an automatic mode. Lulled into an inner passivity by our daydreams and thought streams, we lose contact with the world of actual perceptions, of real life. In the automatic mode of thinking, I am completely identified with my thoughts, believing my thoughts are me, believing that I am my thoughts.

Another mode of automatic thinking consists of repetitious and habitual patterns of thought. These thought tapes and our running commentary on life, unexamined by the light of awareness, keep us enthralled, defining who we are and perpetuating all our limiting assumptions about what is possible for us.

Driving and driven by our emotions, these ruts of thought create our false persona, the mask that keeps us disconnected from others and from our own authentic self. More than any other single factor, automatic thinking hinders our contact with presence, limits our being, and blocks our path. The autopilot of thought constantly calls us away from the here and now, and keeps us fixed on the most superficial levels of our being.

Sometimes we even notice strange, unwanted thoughts that we consider horrible or shameful. We might be upset or shaken that we would think such thoughts, but those reactions only serve to sustain the problematic thoughts by feeding them energy.

Furthermore, that self-disgust is based on the false assumption that we are our thoughts, that even unintentional thoughts, arising from our conditioned minds, are us. They are not us and we need not act upon or react to them. They are just thoughts with no inherent power and no real message about who we are. We can just relax and let them go — or not. Troubling thoughts that recur over a long period and hinder our inner work may require us to examine and heal their roots in our conditioning, perhaps with the help of a psychotherapist.

Sensitive Thinking: 

Sensitive thinking puts us in touch with the meaning of our thoughts and enables us to think logically, solve problems, make plans and carry on a substantive conversation. A good education develops our ability to think clearly and intentionally with the sensitive energy. With that energy level in our thinking brain, no longer totally submerged in the thought stream, we can move about in it, choosing among and directing our thoughts based on their meaning.

Conscious Thinking: 

 Conscious thinking means stepping out of the thought stream altogether, surveying it from the shore. The thoughts themselves may even evaporate, leaving behind a temporarily empty stream bed. Consciousness reveals the banality and emptiness of ordinary thinking. Consciousness also permits us to think more powerfully, holding several ideas, their meanings and ramifications in our minds at once.

When the creative energy enters into thought, truly new ideas spring up. Creative thinking can happen after a struggle, after exhausting all known avenues of relevant ideas and giving up, shaping and emptying the stage so the creative spark may enter. The quiet, relaxed mind also leaves room for the creative thought, a clear channel for creativity.

Creative and insightful thoughts come to all of us in regard to the situations we face in life. The trick is to be aware enough to catch them, to notice their significance, and if they withstand the light of sober and unbiased evaluation, to act on them.

Limitations of Thought: 

In the spiritual path, we work to recognize the limitations of thought, to recognize its power over us, and especially to move beyond it. Along with Descartes, we live in the realm of “thoughts ‘r us.” But thoughts are just thoughts. They are not us. They are not who we are.

While thought processes, such as planning and foresight, give us power in the domain of time, thoughts also mask the timeless, chaining our inner world to time. No thought can enter the spiritual realms. Rather, the material world defines the boundaries of thought, despite its power to conceive lofty abstractions.

We cannot think our way into the spiritual reality. 

On the contrary, identification with thinking prevents us from entering the depths. As long as we remain mesmerized by thoughts or believe that refined thinking represents our highest capacity, we shackle ourselves exclusively to this world. All our thoughts, all our books, all our ideas wither before the immensity of the higher realms.

A richly developed body of spiritual practices engages thought: from repetitive prayer and mantras, to contemplation of an idea, to visualizations of deities.

In a most instructive and invaluable exercise, we learn to see beyond thought by embracing the gaps, the spaces between thoughts. After sitting quietly and relaxing for some time, we turn our attention toward the thought stream within us. We notice thoughts come and go of their own accord, without prodding or pushing from us.

Timeless Consciousness: 

If we can abide in this relaxed watching of thought, without falling into the stream and flowing away with it, the thought stream begins to slow, the thoughts fragment. 

Less enthralled by our thoughts, we begin to see that we are not our thoughts. Less controlled by and at the mercy of, our thoughts, we begin to be aware of the gaps between thought particles. 

These gaps open to consciousness, underlying all thought. Settling into these gaps, we enter and become the silent, timeless consciousness beneath thought. Instead of being in our thoughts our thoughts are in us.

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Purification of Heart and Actions

by Joseph Naft -

Every major religion and path addresses the requirement of purity of heart, purity of action. Impurities literally bar our entry to the higher realms. But what are these impurities? If they are in my heart and in my will, are they not a part of me?

How can I become purified in heart and will? 

A whole gallery of nasty thoughts and petty emotional reactions course through my mind and heart. Do I need to somehow stop all that? Is that even possible? If I am impure, how can I purify myself? Won’t there always be some taint? Isn’t impurity inherent in dealing with this imperfect world? Isn’t life full of tradeoffs, so that nothing is totally pure?

If we truly aspire to open to the depths, these and other questions about purification cannot be ignored. Yet confronting them presents such difficulties that we take every opportunity to avoid them.

The first thing to remember is that it is not all up to us to do the purifying. 

The Christian model says that through grace we are forgiven our sins. In Buddhism, final enlightenment comes as the ultimate letting go of attachment, and all the remaining fetters drop at once, revealing the spotless purity of being.

In both representations, a willingness to be purified, repentance and equanimity, enable the purification to come. The general principle is that, for each level, the higher purifies the lower.

This willingness to be purified grows gradually in us as a result of all our spiritual efforts. 

We become wary of succumbing to the temptations offered after we make an effort: temptations to rest on our laurels, to enjoy the self-aggrandizement of increased energy, to strut and brag about our practice, to compete with our fellow seekers and be jealous of their progress, to follow a fast with overindulgence, to fall into extremes and disregard the middle road of moderation in all things, to look only outward or only inward instead of both.

We stand ready to be purified — except for our own unique set of special attachments, such as certain resentments and grudges, a propensity to angry outbursts, self-pity, self-glorification or self-loathing, laziness or avarice, worry and hurry, a surfeit of doubting or a naïve readiness to believe, strongly held opinions or weak-kneed vacillation, arrogance or timidity, stubbornness or refusal of commitments and whatever else lurks in our personal psychological menagerie.

True willingness to be purified means the willingness to not be attached to any of our personality traits, the willingness to let them go, to not be ruled by them, to stop looking to our thoughts, emotions and the momentum of our life experience as who we are, to come from a deeper place instead, to see the stream of thoughts, emotions, assumptions and reactions without floating away in it.

Perhaps you have known someone who struck you as a simple person, simple in the sense of guileless with nothing to hide, harmless with no one to hate, content with nothing to grasp, happy with nowhere to go and childlike with maturity earned.

The spiritual path leads to simplicity:

The simplicity of presence here and now, of action directed by the intuitive and immediate wisdom of conscience, of a loving and joyful heart untroubled by the chains of time, ruminating thought or emotional reaction. Simplicity is purity.

Several stages delineate the path of purification. 

Early on, we may need to actively engage against our destructive habits of body, mind, and heart. As our contact with consciousness grows, clearly seeing our patterns of attachment weakens their sting, their sway over us. Drop by drop, the murky waters of our psychology are distilled and cleansed. The mud sinks and settles to where the winds and currents rarely disturb it.

As we open to higher energies, our mind, heart and will gradually grow transparent to motivations in accord with kindness and wisdom, supplanting the detritus of egoism and guiding us through the thickets of life's many dramas and dilemmas.

Laughter and tears still accompany the ebb and flow of life but leave fewer traces, as the tar of identification gives way to the air of freedom.

We may pray for purification and we struggle to see wasteful and disruptive patterns.

In the end we must choose whether to keep ourselves living in a narrow-hearted way or give ourselves over to enter our place in the Great Heart of the World.

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Timeless True Joy

by Joseph Naft -

 Joy transcends all boundaries. 

Clouds cannot hide the sun forever; joy eventually breaks through. We discover joy in our friendships, in nature, in loving our family, in spontaneous humor, in delicious food, in meaningful and interesting work. In coming to know joy, we find the important distinction between pleasure and joy by examining their relationship with time.

Pleasures always remain time-bound and fleeting, whereas joy transcends all boundaries. 

Pleasure often contains its opposite, as we dread losing the moment or the object of pleasure or we desire more -- a grasping laden with suffering. Standing as its own timeless quality, joy has no opposite.

In the spiritual path, we may enter true joy that can suffuse our entire life, creating a continuing background of natural and buoyant happiness. Such joy develops gradually over the years of inner work, although we may experience intense flashes of it.

As our contact with the eternal source of joy grows, we relinquish our fears of the inevitable end of every time-bound moment of pleasure, appreciating pleasures as they come, eschewing the endless quest for pleasure and transforming pleasure into joy.

The source of joy works both through and beyond our material pleasures. Even in the midst of pain, joy remains itself.

The simplest, most ordinary moments can reveal the spirited glow of a joyous world unbound. As our presence deepens, the veils of our perception grow translucent even before they dissolve altogether in our maturing soul.

The consuming fire of total-hearted prayer and the hidden worlds of meditation bear unimaginable joy, surpassing all material pleasures. 

From those points of entry, joy works its way into the fabric of our life.

Though sometimes considered a joyless enterprise, the spiritual path affords true joy where there was little or none. A few moments ecstasy in a lifetime of labor do not approach the ever-growing joy nurtured through persistent spiritual practice.

Even a small portion of transformation, a slight loosening of the bonds of egoism, widens our context of spontaneous joy in life, in work, in family, in friends, in nature and in the Source of all joy.

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Healing the Emptiness

by Joseph Naft -

Several forms of emptiness can face us: the more common, lower forms that we can work to heal and the higher emptiness that heals us. At times the lower emptiness assails us, perhaps as a world weariness or ennui.

We fall into the grip of boredom or the feeling of wasting time, of having nothing or too much to do, of being tired of the routines and frustrations of life, of dissatisfaction with our job, our entertainments, or the people around us.

We usually confront this lower emptiness by filling it with busyness, new entertainments, shopping, overeating, substance abuse or other distractions from our quotidian existence.

Yet there it is: that dissatisfaction with life.

A more seriously debilitating form of emptiness arises through dissatisfaction with ourselves. 

Self-criticism and self-doubt can draw us into despondency, despair and even self-loathing. Difficult childhood experiences can create long-lasting wounds that condition us for gnawing dissatisfaction with ourselves. The loss of a significant relationship, a job or some other major undoing may trigger the descent.

The first antidote to both these types of emptiness is acceptance: accepting our life as it is and accepting ourselves as we are. 

This does not preclude working to improve our outer or inner situation but we do so from a base of love and acceptance. Generally this is not so easy, to turn a lifetime of dissatisfaction into acceptance. But it is necessary.

We notice the negative attitudes, thoughts and emotions. While not rejecting them either, we let that awareness prompt us to adopt a stance of acceptance, to let go of our demands and just let ourselves be.

As a further and complementary approach to healing the lower emptiness we turn to spiritual practice, creative work and right action in service to others. 

Each of these broadens our ordinary life, opening us to the greater world and connecting us with real meaning. 

When we find ourselves in the throes of dissatisfaction, we can practice sensing right then and there, knowing that by doing so we strengthen our soul through an effort of lasting significance.

Sustaining the practice of presence puts us into a very different relationship with life. 

Similarly, by entering some creative endeavor or engaging in acts of kindness and service, we touch a region of timeless value.

A different, higher, sacred and unquenchable emptiness lies at our core and forms the doorway to the Divine. 

This emptiness increases our hunger while leading us toward the Source of spiritual nourishment. Along the way, this higher emptiness guides us into the utter peace of pure consciousness, where no thing encumbers us.

Stepping further into our empty core, beyond consciousness and peace, all questions vanish or rather they merge into the singleness of purpose of joining in the Divine purpose.

Toward this higher emptiness, our job is to accept, deepen and surrender to it, while asking, praying for its fulfillment from Above.

These upper reaches of emptiness complete the healing of the lower ones, bringing true and lasting satisfaction, contentment and purpose.

To work at healing the emptiness, distinguish among the forms of emptiness confronting you, notice how you normally respond, and consider how you wish to respond.

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Empathy and Compassion

by Joseph Naft -

Standing in our shared sameness and accepting people as they are carries us to the threshold of empathy and compassion, wherein we allow others' joys and sufferings as well as the basic fact of their being to touch us directly. We willingly enter the experience of other people, celebrating their successes and suffering their setbacks.

This is the place of heartfelt prayer and charitable acts for others' welfare. The walls of separation grow thin and ready to evaporate.

The path toward being able to love is a process of diminishing our self-centeredness to make room in our soul. As long as our inner world remains totally preoccupied by personal concerns, no one and nothing else can enter.

Loosening the shackles of egoism creates space within our heart. Into that space we allow other people, we allow our concern for them and we allow their joys and sufferings to touch us as our own.

And what then? Is it enough to feel someone's pain? 

Our conscience informs us that it is not enough. In response to suffering we can act. If we can take some outward action to alleviate the suffering, for example through charitable or other acts of kindness and responsibility, then perhaps our conscience will prompt us to do so.

Sometimes, especially with those close to us, the tone and quality of our interaction can show our concern, enabling the sufferer to feel less alone, allowing us to bear part of their pain, to share its burden with them. Sometimes, simply listening with full attention and open heart can diminish the other person's suffering.

Sometimes our presence can silently present the vast field of presence to the other person and reduce their suffering thereby. This depends on the quality and depth of our presence and on their openness. But suffering itself can and does open people. So we can offer an effective gift of presence.

Sometimes our prayers can help. These depend on the quality of our being, the purity of our will and our beliefs and style. We may engage in petitionary prayer. We may chant a prayer of healing.

In all of this, we approach the other's suffering with the same concern as if it were our own. In our shared sameness, it is our own.

Can it be too much to feel others' pain? It can be.

A typical day's news brings so many tales of sadness and suffering. To take it all in would overwhelm us, were it not for the inner strength born of regular spiritual practice, of presence, meditation and prayer. The stronger and more refined our soul, the greater our capacity to bear suffering, both our own and others'.

Deeper into Love

Empathy and compassion are not restricted to cases of suffering. We can empathize with anyone, regardless of their state. 

This goes a step beyond opening to our shared sameness. Here we open to what it is to be that person, to the experience that person has of him - or herself.

We enter the unique beingness of the other and stand in their shoes. This brings us to a truer understanding of and compassion for that individual. It brings us another step deeper into love.

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