What are ‘near enemies to the truth’? Borrowing this phrase from Buddhism, I use it to refer to slightly distorted versions of spiritual teachings—statements that are close to a profound and subtle truth, but are distorted just enough to make a big difference over time. When we’re talking about deep and fundamental truths, getting it a little bit wrong doesn’t matter in the short run, but it does in the long run, just like a tiny adjustment to the rudder of your boat makes little difference at first, but after 1000 miles, it lands you on a different continent.
Now, some people object to the use of the word ‘wrong’ in the previous sentence, subscribing as they do to the idea that the only necessary criterion for truth is it feels true to me. This view is as dangerous in spirituality as it is in politics, because it usually means I want it to be true, so I'm going to believe it, regardless of the facts. If you don't see how dangerous this is, or if you doubt whether there really are facts or universal truths, please read the first blog post in this series.
Understanding the Near Enemies to the Truth, and why they are near enemies and not the truth itself, is hugely important for any spiritual seeker who wants to get past the beginner stages and into the deep (and deeply fulfilling) spiritual work. Having said that, it’s important to note that if a Near Enemy is near enough, it can be a Temporary Ally for a beginner. But as the stakes get higher in spiritual practice, there is no such thing as ‘close enough’ anymore, and your comforting affirmations must be sacrificed on the altar of truth, or else your spiritual progress stalls. With that brief orientation, let’s look at this month’s Near Enemy.
NEAR ENEMY #5: LISTEN TO YOUR HEART
In popular culture today, the mind and the heart are viewed as being in opposition in some fundamental way. The mind is seen as the locus of thought and rationality, and the heart of emotion, passion, desire and longing. Rationality and emotion are often seen as being irreconcilable, at least in some instances, and so one must choose between the promptings of the head and of the heart.
This is sheerest nonsense.
There can, of course, be real opposition between what you want to do and what you’ve been told you should do (or any number of similar internal tensions), but mythologizing this into a struggle between heart and head serves no one.
In ancient Indian culture and philosophy, there aren’t separate words for ‘mind’ and ‘heart’. That is, any word that means ‘mind’ in the Sanskrit language also means ‘heart’, and vice versa. In other words, this culture never imagined that the locus of the thought and the locus of emotion could be different. Both thoughts and emotions were understood as vibrations of citta, or the ‘heart-mind’, located in the center of the chest. In other words, premodern South Asian people didn’t experience thoughts happening in their heads as we do (or think we do), they experienced thoughts and emotions both occurring in the center of the chest. The head was a locus of awareness, but not of thought. We’ll return to this important distinction later; suffice to say that it is mostly cultural conditioning that causes us to experience thoughts and emotions in specific locations. In fact they have no fixed location.
Wherever we locate it, the proposition that there is in fact a single locus of both thought and emotion (we could perhaps call it the psyche in English) has considerable implications. Thought and emotion are entirely inseparable. We can still usefully distinguish them by saying that thoughts are vibrations of the heart-mind with a greater linguistic or rational component, and emotions are vibrations of the heart-mind that are less verbal and have a greater ‘affective charge’—but they exist on a continuum. Therefore subconscious thoughts frequently manifest as emotions, and subconscious emotions as thoughts.
It takes a few minutes (or months) to fully assimilate the implications of this. <SNIP>
TO READ THE REST OF THIS BLOG POST, PLEASE BUY THE SOON-TO-BE-RELEASED BOOK Near Enemies of the Truth, in which it appears in a much-improved form.
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Transcript of a live teaching session on this Near Enemy, with spontaneous Q&A
Hareesh: Heart with a capital ‘H’, the Sacred Heart, spiritual heart, the heart of being is to be distinguished in this teaching from the emotional heart, the heart chakra with all its Bhāvas (mental-emotional state). Most humans tune into their mental-emotional heart and some are compulsively concerned with the heart-mind. In contrast, the Sacred Heart, the absolute core of being, is virtually unnoticed and so we describe it, metaphorically, as like a tiny, tiny point beneath or behind the Heart chakra and this is the Heart Bindu. It is a tiny point, like a singularity that sometimes manifests as the Nila Bindu which is a point of cobalt blue light, or the blue pearl, as it can manifest in multiple ways. It is important to realize that it's not some sort of static entity. Somebody might experience their Heart Bindu swelling and becoming vast, overflowing with the joy of being, or overflowing with gratitude for being. The mind might even interpret this as gratitude for someone else, the being of someone you love but that's usually just the mind giving a certain spin on the feeling because you're not culturally conditioned to realize that this is gratitude for your own being, for all beings even though it might be sparked by someone you love or even your dog or cat. When it swells to this gratitude for existence itself and suddenly tears are rolling down your cheeks and you think ‘what are these tears’? They are not sadness, they're not even exactly happiness, although happiness is part of it, it's an overflowing, a brimming over of sheer gratitude. This is the swelling of the Sacred Heart.
The Heart Bindu is realized as the very root of the Heart Chakra, the point from which the Heart Chakra truly blossoms. They can be experienced as separate insofar as a spiritual practitioner imagines that her emotions and mental-emotional states are unspiritual, are separate in some way, and then they're experienced separately. That separation can dissolve and you can experience that all these mental-emotional states, all these Bhavas, are in fact vibrations of consciousness. They're not good, they're not bad, they're not right, they're not wrong, and they don't need to be gotten rid of and they don't need to be cultivated. They are expressions of this deeper capacity of being, this vibrancy of consciousness so you don't need to take them too seriously and you don't need to dismiss them.
There can be fusion/an alignment of the Heart Bindu (which is just a term that means the absolute centre, the singularity, or the essence point) with the Heart Chakra which is the whole heart-mind phenomenon, all the mental-emotional states. When we listen to the deeper heart, we allow this innate wisdom to arise which is usually not in the form of words. I say ‘allow to arise’ but that's a figure of speech as it's always there, subtly arising like a tiny bubbling spring that can never stop but you don't necessarily bring it into awareness, you don't necessarily notice it until you allow it to come into full view. This innate wisdom, this inner knowing is quiet, it's sure and it might have something to say about anything under the sun, it could be something trivial or profound, or seemingly trivial or seemingly profound and it might have nothing to say about something the mind thinks it should have something to say about! We may think that it is letting us down by not giving an indication about something that seems important and yet, perhaps, there's no indication because there's nothing to do right now, or there's no indication because now is the time of waiting for ripeness, allowing contemplation to ripen. So this inner wisdom, this Pratibha, this voice of the Heart, with a capital ‘H’, which again often doesn't speak in words, will never let you down. When it doesn't have anything to say, even when you get really quiet, still, surrendered, open and ready to hear anything it has to say then it says nothing, this is perfect as it means you abide in stillness and wait for ripeness, it's that simple really. Don't stop listening because it might be that just at the moment when you think inner wisdom, or inner intuition, will have nothing to say about the situation or scenario then it does, so you can't stop listening!
Student: I am not clear about the “spot in the heart chakra” that you talked about before. It doesn’t seem to me that it is in the heart but a much much bigger form of energy that is outside the body. Have I misunderstood?
Hareesh: No, not at all because a Bindu is an essence point. It can be a tiny point, deep within, that needs to be discovered. It can be barely discernible for one person and it can have swelled to encompass the whole of reality for another person. For many spiritual practitioners, it's both, as it contracts down to a difficult to discern point, and it expands out to the whole of reality at any given moment. If it is permanently expanded then that's full awakening, and that's liberation! It's important to note that it's not a fixed entity as nothing's a fixed entity! When we're speaking of subtle body anatomy, we are not speaking of organs, we're speaking of a highly fluid reality even when it comes to chakras. Chakras are highly fluid but they're less fluid than Bindus because Bindus are at a deeper level. In philosophical terminology, multiple bodies are spoken of as the physical body, the subtle body, the causal body, and the supracausal body. The chakras are in the level of the subtle body and the three primary Bindus are in the level of the causal body and then, at an even deeper level than that there is the supracausal body, where there's one essence Bindu that manifests as the three essence Bindus of Head, Heart, and Belly. Muktananda’s Play of Consciousness chart shows this and they're spoken of in other sources as well.
Student: You mentioned that having expanded these points is an aspect of full awakening and liberation. You have also spoken before about the difference between awakening and liberation, where you can be awakened without necessarily being fully liberated and the liberation continues over a period of time. So, with regard to the expansion of the Bindus, does that happen with awakening or once liberation is fully complete if it ever does become fully complete?
Hareesh: There is a challenge with these words. In some contexts, awakening and liberation are used interchangeably. When language is being employed in a more precise manner they're not interchangeable. Liberation refers to integrated awakening but there are many accounts in the Indic tradition where those terms are being used interchangeably as well. Just now, I was using them more or less interchangeably because it's about granularity. If you're zoomed out, these distinctions are not what's relevant. If we're going to get a little more granular, in the awakening process the Heart Bindu learns how to expand and we can experience it in this expanded form but it also can contract back down. It may feel that you have ‘lost it’ but you never can truly lose it but it seems like it. In liberation, the Heart Bindu is fully expanded and it really can't contract down to that tiny point again. This language is partially literal but in another sense it's metaphorical. We're not describing the principles of physics here as much as metaphysics and the language strand that straddles the line between the literal and the metaphorical. Many people experience a literal expansion from this Heart point but it doesn't matter if you don't experience that because the phenomenology of mystical experience has really nothing to do with how awakened you are. It certainly looks good on paper in your spiritual autobiography but it has nothing really to do with how awakened you are. For some people, a mystical experience is a pitfall that they get attached to and become prideful about. For other people, the lack of mystical experience is a pitfall as they imagine they haven't had this dramatic experience and fear they must be really missing out. They are actually missing their own awakeness in a sense and that's a whole topic right there!
Student: What about the other two bindus? Are they also fully expanded in liberation?
Hareesh: Yes! They're not only fully expanded, the three Bindus become one in full liberation. One might say that the three Bindus of Head, Heart and Belly are all in harmony with each other and with the total environment which is really just another way of saying the three have actualized as one at the supracausal level.
Student: Do you have an opinion on the use of psychedelics and those who claim to have an expansive experience under the influence? Is this also a Near Enemy to Truth?
Hareesh: It depends on the person. I've talked about this at some length in various places so I won't go off on it now. Oftentimes, for some people the first use of an effective dose of a psychedelic, that's well-constituted or pure, can be a revelation that unveils the unity of existence or consciousness. However, psychedelics can confer an artificially inflated sense of significance where people feel they have been given, or imagine that they've been given, insights that the ego attaches to or co-ops. But it's also true that for some people, an initial psychedelic experience was their awakening to the spiritual path, their Shaktipat moment so we can't dismiss those experiences. It’s not a path, it's an opening of a door.
Student: I've had an embodied experience of this heart knowing that lasted for three months which seemed to be an awakening experience. But it wasn't fixed and I understand that everything changes yet I find myself pulling on embodying the state once again because of the bliss and peace and connection that I felt.
Hareesh: The most important thing is that there's absolutely no benefit to looking backwards at a wondrous experience. You can enjoy the impression of the beneficial samskara that the experience has left that inspires your practice but trying to recapture it is absolutely pointless. This doesn't mean that your best days are behind you and you may very well have, not only an experience but a paradigm shift that's far more profound than what you previously experienced. You want to have that visceral experience of everything as consciousness. You don’t need to try to have it, to grab at it, just notice that it's literally true that everything is internal to consciousness, and so you gently ease your way to the pre-verbal, pre-mental, precognitive direct experience of it. So there are vectors of approach that are different from how it happened before but forget about how it happened before! Explore the different new vectors of approach.
One vector is to just notice that this very room is in my consciousness. There's nowhere else for it to be. Habitual cultural conditioning dictates my consciousness is in this room but that's simply a mental fabrication to imagine consciousness is in my brain, and my brain is in my body, and my body is in this room. It's just a way of thinking but just stop thinking and notice whatever you're aware of is internal to awareness. If you realize you are awareness and everything is internal to you, there is no ‘out there’, there is only ‘in here’. The sky is in you, everything is in you, there's nowhere else for it to be! It's very simple so you don't need a mystical experience, you don't need a big heart-opening. If that happens, it's great, it's fine, but you don't need it! Just relax out of your habitual sense of self, your habitual sense of separation, and notice this is always, already true. You don't have to make it true, you don't need to accomplish it, or attain it, it's always, already true - everything is what you are, everything is internal to what you are. Others look in your direction and they see a body and then we take this third-person perception to be reality but it's not right in your direct experience. For everyone else, everything is also within consciousness and the body is just a sensation, near the center of consciousness or surrounding the center of consciousness from your point of view. You needn't experience a center but most people do. We imagine ourselves through the eyes of others and thus become tiny limited separate beings, these little fragile bodies. We become that by imagining ourselves through the eyes of others and that's just imagination. What you're perceiving right now, each and every one of you is exactly what I'm perceiving right now because there's only one of us here, only one of us perceiving from all these different angles of perception because the one, in its infinite power and majesty, can refract itself into infinite facets. So, I am the one perceiving from this vantage point and you are the one perceiving from that vantage point. When you look at your direct experience, it encompasses everything and the body is one small, small part of what you are. It is really simple, so just relax into the realization that you don't need bells and whistles. Sometimes they'll be there, sometimes they won't. You can't lose this.
What’s happening when you think you’re lost in the “I got it / I lost it” phenomenon is the mind is manufacturing an experience of having lost it but it's make-believe. It's just like kids playing make-believe and now you're playing make-believe that you’ve lost it! You can't lose it! So you need to be ready to be done with the make-believe. Why not be done right now? Why not just see that the voice you're hearing, right now, is you. It's you, communicating with yourself because you care about waking up. The One wants to awaken to itself in every possible form, so it manifests something like a teacher to give itself that opportunity. If you're thinking about all of this, it's perfectly okay but it's not ‘it’. When you get it, it just lands, you just perceive it. You don't need a thought in your head about it. For anyone who seems to be grappling with the “I got it / I lost it” phenomenon, Adyashanti’s book, ‘The end of your world’, has a chapter about this which I recommend.
If you are struggling with this, I will give you a little tip though which is, when you open your eyes at the end of meditation don't let there be an end of meditation. When you open your eyes, that's consciousness manifesting a visual world of experience for itself that is consciousness expanding in the form of a visual field. It's not an external world confronting you. There is no external world, there never was, it's just consciousness manifesting in the form of a visual field. So if you're ready to click with that, you'll click with it the next time. Don't worry about it because the non-dual experience will become your default state at exactly the right time and when it does, you will know absolutely, that it shouldn't have been sooner. There's no sense in which anything should have been different. You may not know that now but you will know that when non-dual awareness becomes your default state and you'll see ‘oh, it was all perfect’ and the grasping was perfect too, everything, all of it. Remember that you're not a little being grasping after a big experience, you are the whole within which there manifests something that appears to be a little being wanting an experience. That's just part of the whole that's manifesting through you at every moment.
Student: There's a term ‘downloaded’ that drives me a little wonky and crazy when my friends say it. For example “I downloaded so much last night”!
Hareesh: One can never really tell from just the words. It's possible that the person had a burgeoning of insight that comes from a deep place, that's an expression of what we call Prathibha, or innate intuition. Oftentimes, what will happen is that the mind grabs on to it, interprets it, and puts it in language that's more familiar. This might sound like new-agey language, it might sound like the language of this or that spiritual community but we can't assume from that that the insight wasn't legitimate and can really be honoured.
‘Downloaded’ is a modern term that could very well be the same as innate wisdom but it could also be a Near Enemy because their conception of ‘download’ sometimes is like: there's the universe and it has something separate from me and ‘that’ is downloading external wisdom to me. Possibly you know people who have even channelled beings from other galaxies or whatever but often it's just the universe downloading. This is fine but it's a Near Enemy because it's not ultimately beneficial to foster this conception of the universe as something separate from you, which downloads to you. In the Tantric Tradition, we see in the Shiva Sutras and other sources, that the language that's chosen is that of ‘uprising’ or ‘upwelling’ of insight from the innermost depths and again it's not about correcting people's language, it's just about realizing for oneself, in this community, how certain forms of languaging could be a Near Enemy that reinforces a conception that distances the divine from yourself.
Student: How do we interpret narratives such as the heart chakra is blocked? Is this a problematic way of talking about emotional blockage?
Hareesh: When the Heart Chakra is blocked, it can mean it's closed, it's contracted, it's tight, there's no flow happening. The problem is that people imagine this is a bad or undesirable state and thereby they artificially perpetuate the state. There is nothing wrong with having a closed heart! The image of the lotus in the Tantric Tradition, which entered into mainstream Hinduism, is the lotus of the heart, a lotus of light as the image of the heart chakra. In this image, this lotus can be closed or open, just like a lotus that closes at night and opens in the day. It's a Spanda and there's nothing wrong with being closed. But, when the person thinks “oh the heart is closed and shouldn't be” or “the heart chakra is blocked and shouldn't be '' that's the problem. The solution is to be open to your closed heart, to soften around your closed heart. Don't limit yourself to it, don't imagine it should be different or is a problem. It opens when it's ready to be open.
Student: is it more about listening from the Heart Bindu, rather than listening to it?
Hareesh: Both are right. When you are situated in the heart-mind, in the mental-emotional space of being that you identify with, then it's valid to speak of listening to the deeper heart, listening for its wisdom. When you're abiding in that deeper space, then you're listening from that space, so in other words, when identification is with the mental, emotional apparatus you're listening for the deeper wisdom and when identification is in the core, in the heart, then you're listening from that space to everything.
Student: I have been told that I am about being too sensitive, very emotional or very easily moved and that my heart is too open.
Hareesh: There is no such thing as having TOO much of an open heart/ too sensitive! Being very emotional, or very easily moved, has nothing to do with an open heart because it's a mental or emotional construct. There can't be ‘too much’ of anything. When somebody says you're ‘too’, they're just trying to manipulate you into being more or less of what they want for their own comfort. Just like when we say to kids ‘you're too loud!’ we only mean that “I want you to be quieter for my own comfort”. It's not an innocent statement! We are telling kids they're wrong as they are, they need to be less, they need to be smaller, they need to be quieter. If we just told the truth which is, ‘hey, I'm having a hard time right now and I need some quiet’ rather than ‘you're too loud’, it's a world of difference. So no, no heart is ‘too open’, no-one is ‘too sensitive’. In terms of being very emotional, that's partially a mental construct and maybe you might be emotionally expressive compared to most people but what's the point of comparing? Where does that comparison actually get you? What knowledge does it give you? Zero, as far as I can tell! Maybe you want to observe that a lot of people are uncomfortable with strong emotional expression and you want to be sensitive to that. I'm sorry that you've been lied to, I'm sorry that you've been told, in a thousand different ways, that you're not okay as you are - it was never true and it never could be true.
Student: What is the deity at the heart? Vishnu? Shiva? Lakshmi?
Hareesh: No answer is right because you're asking about the nature of reality and you're trying to use mind created categories to ascertain that, so that's not going to work. Since we're dwelling in mind created categories, it depends who you ask and each answer is perfectly correct for that lineage. In the lineage that I work with, there are presiding deities for each Bindu: Ganesh in the belly; the goddess Mahadevi, in the heart; and the formless Niṣkala Shiva in the head. Each lineage that you participate in has specific reasons for its pedagogy, for the way it's presenting things, for the names that it's giving, but none of those can be absolutely right, so that's why I call it a question with no answer. It has answers for specific legitimate pedagogical reasons in those lineages but not on an absolute level.
Student: Could experiences of trauma close your heart or expand it?
Hareesh: Trauma can cause your emotional heart to close, or expand, or shut down, or become raw and open - it's totally unpredictable. Could traumatic experiences influence the connection with your heart? No, if we're talking about the Sacred Heart, the core of being. Traumatic experiences cannot influence the connection with it at all. It is connection.
Student: When I listen to my heart or wait for Pratibha, the answer that usually comes through is “do nothing and be nothing” and then my head or my conditioning struggles with that because in the world, and in our culture, it seems you can't just do nothing! I think that I already know the answer but it's just dealing with that struggle.
Hareesh: There are two things about this: residing in it more and more and realizing that other people's judgments of whatever you do, or not do, are as meaningless as anything could ever be and the nothingness, the radiant no thingness, that you are can manifest in action. Action can feel like doing nothing while doing something. The Taoists call it the Wu Wei - actionless action. So be open to that possibility, not that it needs to happen but it could allow the spontaneous flowing forth of actionless action. When Pratibha says there's nothing you need to do, again it's not in words, usually, but you feel it and then let that nothingness flow forth if it wants to. Sometimes your actionless action will be praiseworthy in the perception of others, sometimes it won't be. They're just expressing their conditioning and that's all they can do.
Student: Surrender seems to be a huge element to this. Are there practical ways to cultivate this unfolding, allowing, and surrendering?
Hareesh: Well, stop looking at surrendering as something you need to do. It's an undoing, it's melting yourself into the natural unfolding of the flowing pattern of the whole. Sometimes you need a different language for it - surrendering is an undoing, it's a letting go. Just like letting a current of a river take you.
Student: I feel the tenderness of the heart, is that not the deepest layer of the heart? Is the deepest layer of spacious emptiness not tender?
Hareesh: You've got to discover for yourself and that depends on what you mean by tenderness. We could say there's always tenderness, there's always softness but there's also spacious, an openness that is free of all needs and requirements. In the tradition, it's called parā viśranti - the Supreme Repose - the coming to rest within yourself in the absolute center. It does feel tender but it also feels strong at the same time. Maybe it feels vast, open, and able to receive everything, able to meet everything, able to allow for all birth and death, all living and dying, in every moment.
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Next up: Negative Energy
* See the fascinating article “Culture and language: looking for the ‘mind’ inside the body” by Sharifian et. al., 2008.
** “Study yoga: you will learn an infinite amount from it, but do not try to apply it, for we Europeans are not so constituted that we apply these methods correctly, just like that.” ~ C.G. Jung
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