Sunday Contemplation # 45 The Listening Heart

Our Doorway To The One

Image by Sydney Michalski. Sydney writes the Nature Moments newsletter here on Substack. Her work is stunning…I hope you will take a moment to also check out her website.

• This Week’s Quote

• A G’day

• This Sunday’s Contemplation

• A Guided Meditation

• Grateful For

• This Week’s Community Chat

• Upcoming Activities

This Week’s Quote

The heart is the seat of Jnana (true knowledge). It is the Heart that shines as the Self, free from thought. The Heart is not physical; it is spiritual.

Ramana Maharshi. Hindu Mystic and Advaita Vedanta Teacher (1879-1950)

A G’day

Hello Everyone:

I hope that you are doing well. I wish you peace and the inner capacity for the resilience we all need to live life on planet earth.

This week’s contemplation is one that touches on the inner world. Like all of us I think, I need to go within to regain my bearings. Sometimes for a moment, sometimes for days.

Life does not always offer us days, but there are always moments.

There are challenges a plenty in living with other humans on planet earth, and my experience is that without touching what is most essential within us, we are not in good shape, or in possession of a perspective, to make the best choices. Life is full of moment to moment choices and we need to navigate them well.

I offer the following Sunday Contemplation for your consideration and I wish you peace.

Cheers,

This Sunday’s Contemplation

The Listening Heart. Our Doorway To The One.

We all arise from The One. The one consciousness, the one awareness. Therefore we cannot be separate from The One, or each other.

The experience of the recognition that we are not separate, is called love.

To “explain” this Ramana Maharshi, who I quoted above, would most often just sit in silence. For him, anything other than silence was a compromise of what is most true.

For those of you who may have read my stuff before, you know that I have a “Dave Rule”. That rule says that if I can’t explain these things in simple and real language that my digger and bulldozer driver colleague Dave thinks is reasonable, I am falling short. Dave, who was an incredibly intelligent and kind man, would respond to my first paragraph above with…”speak English and don’t BS me”.

So.

The most important lesson of our lives, in my view, is to understand and experience who we really are.

We are sacred beings. Sacred because we each arise from the One Consciousness, some call God.

We are not material beings hunting for insight about who we are in the time and space soup of life on earth. Rather we are Consciousness being expressed in this world. Our purpose and nature is rooted in consciousness, not matter.

The truth or otherwise of this is determined not in logic, but in subjective experience.

Science is moving inexorably towards a proof that time and space are not primary to existence. The most likely contender for this primary position is consciousness. (Read Donald Hoffman’s work and others in this regard).

The door opener in this process to discover what is most important for our life, is not logic and science, but experience. Science may well prove mathematically that consciousness is primary to existence. It is our experience of consciousness that will take us to the realm of meaning and the nature of that Consciousness beyond the science.

Enter the listening heart.

Our experience in time and space is made up of the sensations of our body, and the perceptions of our thoughts. Most people in our modern world rely on these sensations and perceptions to discover meaning.

But there is a much more fundamental doorway to that discovery. It is the “knower”. We are not the sum of our sensations and perceptions. Rather we are most fundamentally the knower of these sensations and perceptions. We are the awareness.

The activities of our mind and body take place within the field of our knowing. Not the other way around. Our awareness is not a neurological function, but a consciousness function.

Our heart is the seat of meaning, and the “listening” centre of our life.

When we sit and watch a sunset, there is an experience, beyond words and logic. Our heart is awakened, and we experience something that we struggle to put in words. We call it beauty.

When we experience the essential nature of another person, our heart is awakened. Love is the arising experience.

Our heart is where our life touches eternity. It is here that we “hear” the sacred whispers of Awareness.

Therefore our best practice may not be mindfulness, but heartfulness.

What does this look like in day to day life?

The first steps here are in stillness.

• Be still and recognise that you are the knower. The one who is aware.

• Settle you attention towards that knowing beneath the sensations and perceptions.

• Calm your thinking…let your heart show itself to you.

• Listen to what your heart is attending to.

This is a practice. It takes practice. The destination of this practice is to consciously abide in your heart, whilst also acting in the world of sensations and perceptions. (Stay tuned to future posts and upcoming short retreats to practice this with me if you would like to).

The next steps are in movement. How to bring the experiences of your listening heart into day to day life.

This is rarely easy in our current materialistic world culture, but it is critical to our survival as a species. The existential problems facing humanity have to do with the breakdown of meaning and our relationships with each other and Nature. These are not external and material issues. They are profoundly internal issues. They are matters of the heart.

I do not want to be simplistic here. Our world is complex and the networks and institutions built on the foundation of materialism are intricate.

We who experience the primacy of Awareness and Consciousness in our lives must not retreat from the world, but act where we can on the discoveries of our hearts. We may not be able to transform our workplaces and institutions by talking about love and beauty. But we most certainly can seek to be agents for trust, sacred respect for others and Mother Nature, in every part of our lives.

I speak often to people who feel completely overwhelmed and in some cases hopeless in the face of the breakdown we see all around us. Our choice is simple, to give up, or to endure and respond. In my experience bringing our listening heart to the centre of our lives is critical to sustaining hope, resilience and perspective.

A day will come when we can speak openly and without fear about the intuitions of our heart that have guided us to act as we do. When we can, we should speak openly and support others in the journey of their hearts. Hopefully many of us have communities where we can do this. Where it is no so easy to speak like that, we can do our best to foster the values of trust, respect, reliability and authenticity in the networks we live and work in.

I urge you to spend time with your listening heart. Let it listen, let it speak to you.

There is a peace there that you can bring into your life, not just sometimes, but at all times.

Thank you for reading this. See you next week I hope.

I wish you peace.

A Guided Meditation

I have received quite a bit of feedback that a guided meditation connected to the topic of these contemplations has been appreciated. When appropriate I will provide one each week. This week’s guided meditation is called The Listening Heart. I will publish that recorded meditation in a couple of days.

Grateful For

I include this section because I found that when I read or hear about what others are grateful for, I tend to think more about what I am grateful for. Feel free to share what you are grateful for in the comments. I think it is a beautiful service to others.

We had friends from the USA stay at our place this weekend. It was a joy. Particularly it was a joy to speak from the heart and listen with our hearts and feel safe to do so.

That is a precious gift for which I am deeply grateful.

This Week’s Community Chat

The theme in the chat this week is:

For me the most accessible doorway to Awareness is my listening heart. What works best for you?

Thank you.

Upcoming Activities

Please stay tuned.

Should you want to message me directly, please feel free to do so.