Heart Studies with Dr. Richard Moss

Reprinted with permission

There is no question that the more we consider Psyche, the greater the complexity of patterns, forces and levels of consciousness that underlie and orchestrate our personal experience. In my last calendar, I outlined four key areas that I address in my work: Meditation, Symbolic Reality, (including dreams and spontaneous imagery) body Consciousness (including yoga, dance, singing, breath work, energy awareness and so on) and Faith which really embraces the notions of consecration and grace that is so central to my teaching. In my teaching and in my life these four areas converge in what we can call enlightenment or awakening. But these terms tend to make abstract that which as a process is really an affair of the heart. What do I mean by heart? There are noble sentiments such as love and compassion that are typically associated with the heart. But at the risk of over simplifying and perhaps unintentionally demeaning such profound emotions, I would say that they are derivative of the larger experience of the heart. Heart, or specifically an open heart, is a state of radiant embodiment of Consciousness, what the Buddhists call Rigpa or the View. This is no mere conditions of mental stillness, no tranced out or dissociated state. It is a View that is itself an inexhaustible presence, a sense of being energized from a depth that is at once within the body and beyond it. In this state, love and compassion flourish organically. Considering the heart at this level, love is unattached and impersonal or rather, unconditional; the beloved is everywhere. Hence, there arises frequent confusion about what this means at the level of personal loving. Without an open heart, our capacity to another becomes narcissistic and controlling. Paradoxically, when realized through the open heart, the love for a particular person (which we fear as being too small a vehicle for the larger energy) is the fulfillment of unconditional love in the personal (human) sphere.

I know that as one becomes focused of this heart, she is presented moment by moment with choice. However, to say choice can be misleading. It is not an egoistic choosing, but a deep recognition of two fundamentally states of being: an open or closed heart. An open heart is an immediate, sensual, bodily “Yes” to life without self protection. Here love is not predicated on the need for security or reciprocity; there are no conditions on one’s loving. When two people each choose in themselves an open heart, they become for each other the living counterpart of a deeper, transcendental love and simultaneously poles between which circulates the basic energy of life. It is this inexhaustible energy that then incarnates in them, forging their true relationship and planting seeds out of which the subsequent moments of union and sharing are born. Yet with the slightest shift away from the View, we enter a stance of self-protection. The heart is closed; there is distrust, fear, calculation, and endless negotiation for the conditions deemed necessary for love to happen. An open heart is the hard won fruit of spiritual maturation. This potential presumes that one is deeply rooted in one’s body and can sense the subtle flow or contraction of energy as one begins to defend against or relax into life. Similarly, an open heart presumes a deep meditative awareness, a radical intuition of that which precedes thought. For otherwise we are constantly at the mercy of our thoughts, happy when they are positive and miserable when they are negative. Likewise an open heart presumes a deep reverence for the symbolic language of Psyche so that we can listen and be appropriately encouraged or humbled by that which speaks to us from beyond the narrow parameters of our ordinary consciousness. Finally, how can one relax so deeply into the uncertainty of the moment without the most profound faith? Faith is often considered the first step necessary on the path, but it is also, as well the last step. In faith, we know that we Belong and can stand undefended in our hearts. In faith we know that we can never be separated from the inexhaustible well spring of life energy.