If you fail to achieve freedom in this life, when do you expect to achieve it? While still alive, you should be tireless in practicing contemplation. The practice consists of abandonments. “The abandonment of what?†you may ask. You should abandon all the workings of your relative consciousness, which you have been cherishing since eternity; retire within your inner being and see the reason of it. As your self-reflection grows deeper and deeper, the moment will surely come upon you when the spiritual flower will suddenly burst into bloom, illuminating the entire universe.
It’s an open ended question tentative - leaving room for interpretation. Of course, you are welcome to ignore the entire thread if it doesn’t work for you.
tentative, I would imagine that the ‘heart’ LA refers to is the same as the ‘inner being’ or ‘spiritual flower’ to which Wu-hsin refers. But the question of ‘what is the heart’ remains open, for we have merely used a different word to describe the same mysterious thing.
I would like to know what is meant by relative consciousness. I imagine that relative consciousness is our experience of ourselves as an abstract entity, a name which relates to other names. For example, in my relational consciousness I am the name “Paul”, and Paul is six feet tall, is friends with Nina, needs to go for a run, etc. Whenever I experience these truths, I am treated as an abstraction whose internal structure is either nonexistent or irrelevant to the experience. This is reminiscent of “the Tao that can be named is not the Tao” – the conscious experience which can be named is relative consciousness, not retiring within the inner being.
The abandonment of relative consciousness, then, would be a sort of forgetting or detachment from such experiences for the sake of retiring into the inner being, to ‘see the reason of it’. And the spiritual flower bursting into bloom? I can only guess. It does not seem to me that there is any inner being at all separate from relative consciousness, that there would be any core left once it were stripped away. We cannot experience what we cannot name.
But could that be the point? If one were slips away from relative consciousness by contemplation, one would ‘experience’ the nothingness there, an endless void, a vast blank slate upon which the writing of relative consciousness is chalked. The ‘nothingness’ that cannot be named but which is the origin of all names.
Then, I wonder, what would the flowering and the illumination be like?
What is “freedom� Liberty, autonomy, a lack of restrictions, self-determination, independence, choice, free will or sovereignty?
I think that freedom is achieved when fear is overcome and I am able to lead my life in an inspired manner, but in a world full of individuals, it is also necessary to be able to compromise and allow the freedom of the other person too. In the moment that my “freedom†infringes upon the freedom of others or I encroach upon the security of my fellow man, I am no longer free. Rather, I am under the spell of what I feel I need to possess.
Contemplation or meditation upon abandonment or the leaving behind of all such desires has been a subject of spirituality for a long time. Introspection shows us our weaknesses, and hopefully helps us to see through them, because if we understand how we fail, we can work at overcoming them. When the “spiritual flower†starts to bloom, it is a wonderful experience for all who witness it. It is a shame that too few achieve it.
The heart, or the core of humanity is the soul, which is where true health and well-being is maintained.
I guess it is the use of the word heart that seems sort of out of place. “retire within your inner being” is to become the watcher, where one releases (abandons) emotive and cognitive activity. Both emotion and thought remain, but not attended to. It is letting go of duality, and in doing so, one transcends such concepts as mind and heart.
Trying to explain meditation is like trying to wrap water in a paper bundle. Experiencing with out naming is indeed possible. And one sees both presence and absence as one. I’ve heard it call a sense of nothingness, but I always sense an ‘allness’ Obviously, the words are completely inadequate, but we’re talking about not-words… What’s a mother to do?
In an effort to show both the paradox and the potential of the OP quote, another quote, from R.D. Laing:
[i]a finger points to the moon
Put the expression
a finger points to the moon, in brackets’
(a finger points to the moon)
The statement:
‘Afinger points to the moon is in brackets’
is an attempt to say that all that is in the bracket
( )
is, as to that which in not in the bracket,
what a finger is to the moon
Put all possible expressions in brackets
Put all possible forms in brackets
and put the brackets in brackets
Every expression, and every form,
is to what is expressionless and formless
what a finger is to the moon
all expressions and all forms
point to the expressionless and formless.
the proposition
‘All forms point to the formless’
is itself a formal proposition[/i]
Personally, I think the heart is what is called the True Nature. Maybe it would be known as the Christ nature or the Buddha nature, never mind, I’m not too concerned with the words, I’m more concerned really with the essence. Some people refer to the heart as the place where love (emotional love) comes from, and although I’m certain (almost) that love comes out of the heart, I think that for most people it is heresay, meaning they have heard that love comes from the heart - but how many people know that that love comes from the heart, I mean how many people have actually experienced this?
Meditators call the heart the fourth centre or chakra, there are three centres below and three centres above the heart. The heart, is directly in the middle. It is therefore the centre of the being. If anyone has ever meditated on the chakras, they would know that when they reach the heart, something tremendous happens. There is an overflowing of love. We all experience this on some level when we ‘fall in love’, our heart chakra opens and we experience love. So love is experienced literally in the heart and human beings when they fall in love with each other appear to tune into this love space. But, we can also fall out of love with people for whatever psychological reasons…so, people, the people that we love, are simply catalysts for ourselves to experience this love that seems to exist in the heart. Proving to some extent the connection between human beings, the oneness between us. It is my feeling that love between people therefore has a profound purpose, to experience the love that already exists within the heart.
“As above, so below”. This energetic heart that we all experience when we love, seems to have it’s roots in a deeper source. Yet, it’s lessons are tough. The love that we experience for example when we love another person is so powerful that we seem to hanker after it (all our lives). Yet this seems to be the teaching. The great paradox. Can we love and still detach from this human love? Can we love in a spiritual way - if love or the heart is our centre, then it must be the centre of all of humanity? Surely this is what is meant by “illuminating the entire universe”.
The heart is just another part of the body. I prefer the liver. It is the being that this system creates that I am interested in, the innate “self” that we are so aware of, what is bound to this viscera.
Does the heart seek freedom? It can’t if it is genuine. Searching is simply an extension of the illusions of duality. The OP quote talks of abandonment, of letting go of, does it not? This is the paradox one must see through. You are free, thirst. We all are. But we create not-free and having sensed not-free,we counter with ‘searching’, which takes us away from, not toward our original state. Searching is entering the hall of mirros with its infinite reflections that keep us from ourselves. People speak of meditative practices and all of the methodologies. You too can meditate if you do this or that. Can you see that the methodologies are but another illusion of mind? More paradox. It is as if one has to accept that there is no way to get there from here. Continue searching and that statement is truth. Only when you let go of here and there can you discover freedom.
Some months ago I was roundly criticised for saying that I seek nothing, that I have no where to go, nothing to do, no way to be. It was a statement of freedom, but seen as a “giving up” by a number of people who reified their “search”. Well, they were right to say that I had given up, but it was a giving up of the illusions, and that they did not see. And so they continue their journey into the myriad reflections, always searching, always looking for the THE. They are standing in the middle of it, but refuse to see.
So what is it we call heart? I would choose other words, but let it be heart for this discussion. I don’t have heart. I AM heart, and so are you, and so is everyone else the minute they stop searching for themselves.
And there you have more tentative gobblygook, but it is because we have to use words, and words can never be me, any more than words are you.
Some here seem to taking the idea of “Heart” literally. I’ve never heard anyone say “from the Heartâ€, or “he has a lot of Heartâ€, or “a good Heart†and actually meant the organ that pumps blood. This whole Asian philosophy thing seems extremely shallow to me, everything is about the body as if that is what we are, just a body.
When someone speaks of the Heart in this manor they are obviously talking about the emotional center, this is part of the Soul. Now what is far more interesting is when you begin defining the Soul and try and understand its relation to the body and Spirit.
