transform. So the big question is: how do we help our hearts to grow?” Yes, how DO we help our hearts to
grow? We’ll get there shortly I promise. Thicht Naht Hanh is right: if there is a
doorway to compassion it is the opening of our spiritual (non-physical) hearts. It’s only because our hearts are closed that we so rarely experience compassion. Instead of compassion towards others, our more frequent experience is one of judgement. Judgement comes because of the mind-dominant state that the world has been living in for so long, and when our minds are dominant, our hearts are closed. According to Ed Rubenstein, Ph.D, author of The Way of the Spiritual Heart, “Mind-dominant states are
characterised by emotionally reactive patterns, limiting thoughts and self- defeating beliefs that are present when the mind is in charge. Examples are un-forgiveness toward self or others, resentments, arrogance, anger, pride, vanity, greed, jealousy and self centredness.” The great paradox is that when we
begin to open our hearts, our minds are actually more open too because our minds are influenced by our hearts. An open mind actually perceives reality quite differently from a mind that is
KNOW THYSELF AS SOUL
closed. This is the greatest secret: we cannot know compassion while our mind is dominant, because we are experiencing a dramatically different reality. While our closed minds tell us that
it’s normal to experience emotional reactions as described above, in actual fact, this shows us the depth of our amnesia because we haven’t just ‘forgotten’ the heart; we have forgotten who we ARE. Emotional states are not who we truly are, and yet we often describe people as being ‘an angry (anxious, worried, arrogant, etc.) person’. We cannot be an emotional person, any more than we can ‘be’ the clothes we are wearing. When we are within those mind-dominant states, though, we enter a soap-opera of our own creation and our identity shifts. This is where the spiritual terminology
of ‘being asleep’ or ‘unconscious’ come from. A spiritual awakening is the process of opening our heart.
When our heart opens, it’s like we perceive reality for the first time… although it may only be a glimpse to begin with because our mind is strong and the habits are millennia old.
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When our hearts are open, compassion flows from our heart as naturally as a flower opens to the sun. Does the flower think how to open, does it do anything at all? No… a flower opens to the sun because it was designed that way. Do we make our breathing happen, or the beating of our heart or the movement of blood around our body? No they all happen naturally because that’s the way we were designed. When I suggested to Elizabeth
[LivingNow editor] that I might write something on compassion, she said: Sounds OK, except what’s in it for the people who have not got the compassion? How can you engage them? How can you help them? Typically thinking about her readers’ needs, I thought. What a good challenge. The only point to writing an article like this is to convey that Everyone has a heart and this is the time on Earth that we should be opening them. There is one very simple and important key to the opening of our heart… perhaps the ultimate in paradox. A koan like no other. We cannot open our hearts. I know. It makes no sense on the
surface. So let’s think about that flower and the sun metaphor again. It’s natural… it’s spontaneous. It’s the very purpose of the flower’s existence
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