A while ago I was talking with my amazing friend Chris, a devote spiritual seeker and finder who, among many of his adventures and explorations, has spent a long time working with a guru in India. We were discussing a recent tension in my life I was experiencing with a spiritual teacher I had taken on and was not in total harmony with and so challenged I asked for Chris' advice, knowing he was an individual who had pursued and experienced the spiritual to high degrees. Chris listened intently to my accounts of discord and then offered a simple yet incredibly profound remark: "All teachers or gurus are essentially pointing their students to one realization: that the true guru is within." I nodded in total appreciation as a luminous smile bloomed on my face. I believe this is one of the most significant wisdoms to hold and work with and after years of trying, often in desperation, to seek guidance externally from teachers, I believe I am now fully coming into the understanding of what the inner-guru is all about and truly getting in touch with my own. This has been a long and arduous realization for me to consider. Often in our culture, so rife with spiritual awakening, we find before us a spiritual supermarket of sorts: workshops, teachings, teachers, retreats, you name it, all dazzling us with the hope of giving us the essential kernel of truth that will satisfy us finally and completely. And yet, for most of us, we find ourselves shimmying from one teaching/teacher to the next, gaining ever-new insights and yet never reaching that satisfaction we so crave. There's many reasons for this and I'll try and tease apart some of the more significant points. For one, our culture is one of constant desire and activity where restlessness is the norm. In Chinese Medicine, we regard it as excessive yang which is the active force in the universe, while yin, signifying stillness, meditation and reflection or the passive force, is scarcely engaged, much to our detriment. To this end, our restlessness is a kind of attention-deficit-disorder caused to some degree because we're bedazzled and even bewitched by so many options in our information-laden era but also, and perhaps harder to acknowledge, we're not very good at actually sitting and working with spiritual teachings because they inevitable are about self-realization and self-transformation, which not only takes dedication to work through but can also be uncomfortable. All too often, at the first sense of challenge, we look instead to another teaching to whisk us away into bliss, while sending distrust to life's adversities which, as Shakespeare asserted, often bring out the sweetest results. To remedy this spiritual malaise, I believe the subject of the inner-guru can be of tremendous aid. You see our culture is also one rife with disempowerment. Historically speaking, we've been an oppressed people for millennia the world over--oppressed primarily by beliefs systems that have limited our potentials and full expression of the human spirit. In our present era, these belief systems have weakened and humanity is experiencing a powerful liberation of thought and belief. Essential to this understanding is the need for the belief of our inner-power and divinity to come through and be embodied in the world. Many of the great spiritual teachers attest that the nature found in every human being is something innately glorious and infinite in power. To that end, the path of self-realization has been championed in the East as the essential path to awaken one's divine nature and inspire a life living from that foundation, doing nothing less than bringing light into the world. This is where the inner-guru takes centre stage. I`d like to turn now to the wisdom of Chinese Medicine to share an interesting anecdote to help illuminate this point. The Heart in Chinese Medicine is said to be the house or temple of the shen which has been translated as spirit, consciousness or awareness. The Heart is also said to be the emperor-empress of us, holding the ability to know truth in any moment spontaneously, meaning not with the linear time of intellectual analysis but as a vibration of knowledge and wisdom that simply arises by itself. This is an INCREDIBLE gift and power that all human beings possess and means that at any given moment, we are aware of truth and have the ability to act and embody that truth. This is why living from the heart is verified by almost all spiritual traditions as the highest way to live. However, to be aware of the heart-mind (as some Buddhists called it) is a process of "discerning the whisper" as Mikki Sankey, founder of Esoteric Acupuncture, tells us. This means that this voice of truth is very subtle and in a culture that has revered the brain or intellect as the superior mind for a long time now, it can be difficult to shift one's self-governance to the heart but wholly essential if one wishes to live in truth and to their highest. Ultimately, it is the Heart that is the inner-guru. The most powerful way to get in touch with the inner-guru or heart-mind is through the act of meditation which is a practice that stills the intellectual mind to connect us with our deeper nature, which through my experience is the consciousness we've been describing in the Heart. Although a popular form of meditation called non-seed emphasizes the need to simply quiet the intellect to total silence, other forms of meditation emphasize slowing and quieting the thoughts to then connect with the Heart and then allow a contemplation of things in our life, spiritual truths and other profound topics we may be curious about or seeking clarity upon, from our deeper nature which is more suffuse with truth. Meditation in this way can be highly profound! Moreover, in my own spiritual practice, making meditation a way of life through movement meditation and awareness of breath (things discussed in great length by Eckart Tolle) can allow us to constantly be in touch with truth consciousness, not only while seated in traditional meditation, making our whole life a wave of truth. The potentials for rectifying not only ourselves but the world then become entirely real as wherever we go we carry a beacon of light to illuminate the darkness of ignorance or quagmires of confusion, helping to bring more coherence and harmony into the world. In Chinese, this is called the Art of Heart (xin shu), a profound topic I will elaborate in my next post. For now, get in touch with the heart through meditation and any activity that helps still the intellect. Know that from the Heart is where we wish to live. Shine your deepest nature out into the world, knowing that within us all is "Ìn the individual the heart is the son of Heaven, the image of Heaven, suggesting to man that he molds himself to Earth, to Heaven, and to Nature.`` (The Heart of Chinese Medicine) CommentsDaniel 08/17/2011 08:41
Yeah, 'discerning the whisper' of the heart is definitely a fine art and is something I've just started dabbling in. Leave a Reply | The Druid
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