Everyday Enlightenment, page 26
Having practiced shifting attention to the heart a few times, you are ready for the following mystical practices that serve to awaken your heart.
Speaking from Your Heart
When you place two guitars (or other stringed instruments) next to one another, and you pluck, for example, the “D” string on one guitar, the “D” string on the nearby guitar will also begin to vibrate. This is known as sympathetic or harmonic resonance. This harmonic resonance also applies to the human voice, in the following way: When you speak from your mind (with your attention on your thoughts) you resonate the minds of others. When you speak from your heart (with your attention on the heart) you resonate the hearts of others. This conscious and deliberate act of remembrance—placing your attention on (or in) your heart as you speak, or visualize, or see, or touch, or listen—spiritualizes your senses. This act of feeling-attention is a key practice of everyday enlightenment.
There is nothing wrong with speaking from the mind. If someone asks you for information, for example, you may think about it (put your attention in your mind) and speak from your mind as you answer.
However, when you speak from your heart, you create a bridge of love and understanding between you and another person, connecting your higher self with theirs. This act of speaking from your heart is not merely sentimental or personal, but rather transpersonal. You don't need to use any special tone of voice; you can speak in a matter-of-fact way. The quality of your feeling-attention makes the difference. This practice is extremely simple, but new for many of us, so I summarize the key points here:
• Put your attention in your heart—feel your heart.
• Speak normally as you remain aware of your heart.
• In other words, you connect your voice to your heart as you speak, letting your voice carry feeling-attention.
When I first learned this method of speaking from my heart, I did it as a practice or a technique, in order to awaken my heart, as I recommend to you. Today I can't help but speak from my heart; it has become natural, as my attention abides in the heart more and more. When I speak to groups of people, I may relate material that I have written about; yet it has a special impact because of where I'm speaking from—a heart-to-heart transmission takes place that transcends the information conveyed.
You can incorporate this mystical practice into your everyday life and work, whether speaking with your children, friends, clients, neighbors, or clerks at the store. While you are apparently shopping, selling products or services, or engaged in meetings, your voice can become part of a secret, underground spiritual moment, touching others' hearts as it awakens your own, bringing more love into the world. With this practice you are never again only teaching or selling or coaching or managing or building or consulting; rather, your work and life become a source of love and light for others.
Inner Speech: Visualizing from Your Heart
once you are aware of your heart, you are not limited by speech at all. You can also connect your heart to your thoughts and send inner speech, such as healing wishes or blessings, to others. When using inner speech, you are not limited by time or space. You can send messages of love and goodwill to someone nearby (in the same room or lying asleep next to you), or you can send an internal message of love to someone a thousand miles away, to someone in a coma, even to someone who has passed away.
The method is the same as with auditory verbal speech:
• Put your attention in your heart. Feel it.
• Visualize that person or those persons surrounded by light.
• Internally think/say words such as “I love you, I support you, God bless you.” The specific words you use aren't critical—the key is remembering and feeling your heart as you send your wishes.
Do I know for certain that your words will reach someone who has passed away? No. But I am more certain, from experience and from reports of many others who have applied this simple practice of love, that whether people are near to you or on the other side of the world, they will get the message. They may not know it consciously, but I have gotten too many telephone calls out of the blue, and seen too many adversarial relationships suddenly healed, to doubt its efficacy. Ultimately you need to test it in your own experience.
Seeing from Your Heart
In my book Sacred Journey of the Peaceful Warrior, the Hawaiian kahuna named Mama Chia used the phrase “seeing with the eyes of the heart.” I took it as a poetic metaphor until I learned how to do it
• Put your attention in your heart. Feel it.
• Look at the world with eyes of wonder and love.
You can do this now, by becoming aware of your heart and gazing from the eyes of the heart at anything you see. You can look upon a tree, another person, or a piece of crumpled paper on the floor. You may view an automobile or a building, and consider the human effort, creativity, and labor required by people from many walks of life to create such wonders out of raw materials, drawn from the earth. Consider the spirit and dedication required. If you see something from the natural world—a stone, a tree, a cloud—consider how these were created and by whose hand.
There is another way to connect your eyes to your heart that enables you to connect spiritually with another human being. Consider first how little time we spend actually looking into the eyes of others. We may steal a glance, then quickly avert our gaze—or we look, but we do not feel. This is strange, because the eyes are indeed the windows of the soul. To learn to see in a new way, try the following practice and experience the results:
• Make eye contact with someone. It doesn't have to be for a long time, nor does it need to be some kind of self-conscious stare or involve any special facial expression. Just relax, open, and connect your heart to your eyes.
• As your eyes meet, let that person see your heart through your eyes. You make no attempt to project love or anything else out of your eyes. This is a receptive exercise, where you feel your heart and open your eyes, letting another see the love and compassion you have for that person as another human being. Again, this is a transpersonal practice, not a personal flirtation. It matters not whether the person with whom you connect is the same or opposite gender. Seeing from the heart—letting others see your heart through your eyes—creates a bridge between two souls and reflects our common humanity.
Touching from Your Heart
It is no accident that when something stimulates your heart, you may say you were touched. Our tactile sense—our need to touch and be touched—is essential to our psychological and even our physical survival. Numerous studies have shown that baby monkeys deprived of touch languish or die; the same can happen with human infants
You spiritualize your sense of touch by doing the following:
• Put your attention in your heart. Feel it.
• As you touch someone, maintain awareness of your heart.
Does it really make a difference whether you are aware of your heart when you shake hands with someone or touch in some other way? That question can be answered only in your own experience. I suggest that you will feel the difference in your own heart, in the quality of your attention and connection. And that the other person will feel it as well.
Listening from Your Heart
Many Buddhists believe that by listening deeply—by listening alone—we alleviate suffering. The practice of listening from your heart may be for many of us the most important practice of all. For many of us, listening is nothing more than a chance to think of what we are going to say next while the other person is speaking. Before some people become hard of hearing, they become hard of listening. We forget people's names because we hardly heard them in the first place, since our attention was elsewhere. The following practice can strengthen, mend, or even save relationships
• Put your attention in your heart. Feel it.
• Consciously connect your heart with your ears by this act of attention.
• Placing feeling-attention on your ears (rather than on your thoughts), just listen.
Although others don't always acknowledge it, a part of them knows whether or not you are truly listening. A quality of heartful attention—treating what they say as the most important thing in the world in that moment—is one of the greatest gifts you can give to another. It values and validates them and encourages them to open up and express their truth.
When you listen from your heart, you listen without judgments, expectations, or opinions. You enter their world without demanding that they enter yours. And without knowing why, they are likely to find you one of the most charming conversationalists they have ever known.
The Healing Heart
These simple, pleasurable practices of connecting your heart to your voice, thought, sight, touch, and hearing are forms of spiritual practice that produces emotional healing in relationships. When your attention rests in your heart, it has risen above fear, sorrow, and anger. These heartfelt practices enable your attention to rise above emotional weather into the infinite space of love. Whether or not you experience their impact on others, you will soon know their impact on your awakening heart
Love cures people, the ones who receive love and the ones who give it, too.
—Dr. Karl Menninger
Hearts, Flowers, and Global Shifts
As your heart awakens, and your sense of separation and isolation begins to fade, you will experience a variety of perceptual and behavioral shifts
From Differences to Common Humanity
Those you previously viewed as strangers, you will come to see as members of your human family. Even as you appreciate and value our rich global heritage of religious, cultural, racial, and collective diversity—humanity's treasure house of wisdom—you will see beyond these differences to connect with people at the deeper levels of our common humanity
Even as we speak different languages and practice different customs, religions, and rituals, we have infinitely more in common than we have differences. As your perception shifts, you will come to see every human as a brother or a sister, all in this adventure together, seeking meaning, purpose, happiness, love—sharing the same Mother Earth, seeing the same sun rise in the morning and set at night, feeling the same rhythms of nature and human life, loving our children, sitting under the same moon and stars at night, and wondering, and dreaming, and weaving our stories.
From Competition to Cooperation
As your heart awakens to our essential unity, you will begin to lose your taste not for excellence or achievement, but for the competitive mind. Instead you will find a growing commitment to cooperate with others toward common goals. The shift will come from within (rather than be imposed by an outside authority)—not from philosophical or political abstractions, but from a realistic understanding of how to survive and thrive together in the new millennium. The natural urge to join together as strong, unique individuals in cooperative communities will lead to new sports and games, institutions, and ways of being and doing that will reflect your evolving awareness, values, perceptions, and behavior
From Personal to Transpersonal Love
So many songs and books about romantic love focus on satisfying the separate self. The promise of the eleventh gateway—transpersonal love—means recognizing the same consciousness alive in others as in yourself. We continue to love our mate, our children, our relatives and friends, but love our extended human family no less. Love becomes a way of life, no longer something we dole out only to a special few. Transpersonal love is the recognition that every soul is
• looking to find happiness
• seeking to avoid suffering
• fighting our own battles with fear, insecurity, self-doubt
• searching for greater meaning, purpose, and connection
• climbing our own mountains
• awakening to the truth that we are, each and all, fellow schoolmates on planet Earth.
Such a series of recognitions wakes the heart from its slumber. Love breaks through the walls of divisiveness and separation. Fragmentation gives way to unity. A transcendent worldview emerges, based on the connection of all creation, so that you finally see all people, all life, as the same Consciousness, the Light of God, manifesting as billions of beings, shining through each and all of us. You finally realize that you are that Light.
Even after this awakening, the everyday world and all its challenges reappear. But with the eleventh arrow of enlightenment in your quiver, you are ready to give back to the world. For the heart, awakened by love, turns naturally to service.
Love and do what you will.
—St. Augustine
THE TWELFTH GATEWAY:
Serve Your World
Service is an attitude founded on the recognition that the world has supported you, fed you, taught you, tested you, whether or not you earned it.
Understanding this simple truth can move you to do what you can to repay a boundless debt of gratitude.
Service is both a means and an end, for in giving to others, you open yourself to love, abundance, and inner peace.
You cannot serve others without uplifting yourself.
Completing the Circle of Life
The purpose of life is not to be happy—but to matter, to be productive, to be useful, to have it make some difference that you lived at all.
—Leo Rosten
Road Map: Enlightenment in Action
We come to the final gateway, the final step up the stairway to the soul, the completion of a journey preparing you for the ultimate practice of everyday enlightenment
I first glimpsed the power of service as a collegiate gymnast. At first, most of my attention was dedicated to myself—my progress, my body, my problems—until I realized that I enjoyed helping others learn new elements even more than learning those elements myself. When I learned a skill, one person benefited; when I taught that skill, many could benefit. I didn't know it then, but once I stumbled upon the satisfaction of helping others, my life as a teacher had begun.
Years later, after a lengthy search for personal enlightenment, my exclusive self-focus again shifted to learning not only for my sake, but for the sake of others. Coincident with this shift, extraordinary teachers began to appear in my life, and doors opened within me and in the world.
Submitting ourselves to the needs of others makes heroes of us all. There are countless ways to make a difference—like stopping to assist someone in need, reaching down to pick up a piece of litter on the street, sharing your talents and energy with others in practical ways—this is what it means to be a part of the human family. Making our every interaction with people at the grocery store, the print shop, the bank, the hairdresser, a chance to leave someone feeling a little better is serving our world, enlightenment in action.
Again I repeat: You are not here to contact your higher self; you are here to become it. And there is no surer or greater path to embodying the courage and love of your higher self than self-sacrificing service. Serving those around you in the spirit of love becomes everyday enlightenment.
As you discover the joy of service, your life may or may not experience dramatic shifts or monetary abundance. But you won't care about that any more than Mother Teresa cared if she was having a bad hair day when she tended the sick or blind or lame. You'll be too busy making a positive difference in this world, connecting to the circle of life.
We begin Serve Your World by resolving the apparent contradiction between working on oneself and serving others, followed by a reflection on the gift of life; finding your calling; putting your money where your heart is; and how small, everyday acts can make a big difference in the world. Throughout this gateway you will find stories about the kindness of strangers, as a reminder to create and share stories of your own.
The Heart of Service
Let's start with the words of Lynne Twist, a founder of the Hunger Project, on “The Heart of Service”
People think service is a kind of charity—strong people giving to weak people, healthy people giving to sick people, rich people giving to poor people, together people giving to people who aren't so together.
To me, true service is an experience of wholeness, fulfillment, fullness, self-reliance, and self-sufficiency for all parties—an experience of the magnificence and infinite capacity of human beings. When I'm really in service, I disappear. My identity is no longer present. I am one with he or she or that which I am serving. It is actually an experience of God, of unity and wholeness. There is nobody giving and nobody receiving. None of that is happening. There is only an experience of unity. We begin to see that we are the expression of one soul.
An act of service is an act of love and of trust. It's also an act of responsibility and of courage…a stand for the integrity of human life.
Service Is an Attitude: Questions to Ponder
Until your attention, energy, and heart are free, service appears as either a guilty omission or a social obligation. Or you may not appreciate the service you already provide in the world, in everyday ways at home or work. Consider these questions to reflect upon your relationship to service
• When you hear or read the phrase “serve your world,” what are the first five words that come to mind? ( Say them quickly, now.)
• Do you do any volunteer work? Why? Why not?
• Beyond services you normally provide at work or at home, name three forms of service, large or small, you've provided in the past twenty-four hours.
• If you were independently wealthy, how would you spend your time?
• How would you spend your money?
• Do you help others when it is convenient?
• Do you help others when it is inconvenient?
