The Spiritual Heart

My heart longs to be dissolved In wings of air And fly in the unhorizoned sky. I long to open up All my heart-doors In the delight of my liberation-life. May my life begin With the breath of a new hope.

Before we enter into the spiritual life, we feel that the mind is superior to everything. According to our understanding, the person who has a brilliant mind is a superior being. But once we become aware of the limitations and imperfections of the mind, we will try to illumine and perfect the mind. We have to feel during our intense meditation that we have nothing, and we are nothing but the heart and soul.

A beginner has to feel that he is a child, no matter how old he is in earthly age. A child's mind is not developed. When he is twelve or thirteen his mind starts functioning on an intellectual level, but before that he is all heart. Whatever he sees he feels is his own. He identifies spontaneously. This is what the heart does. When you feel that you are a child, immediately feel that you are standing in a flower garden. This flower garden is your heart. A child can play in a garden for hours. He will go from this flower to that flower, but he will not leave the garden, because he will get joy from the beauty and fragrance of each flower. Inside you is the garden, and you can stay within it for as long as you want. In this way you can meditate on the heart.

It is better to meditate in the heart than in the mind. The mind is like Times Square on New Year's Eve; the heart is like a lonely cave in the Himalayas. If you meditate in the mind, you will be able to meditate for perhaps five minutes; and out of that five minutes, for one minute you may meditate powerfully. After that you will feel your whole head getting tense. First you get joy and satisfaction; then you may feel a barren desert. But if you meditate in the heart, you acquire the capacity to identify yourself with the joy and satisfaction that you get, and then it becomes permanently yours.

The heart is strikingly significant because inside it is the living presence of the soul. True, the consciousness of the soul permeates the entire body, but the actual location of the soul is inside the heart. The soul has everything: Peace, Light and Bliss in infinite measure. We get these divine qualities inside the heart directly from the soul.

The way to achieve inner peace is to meditate on the heart, where there is constant joy and constant love. At that time you will not cry for appreciation from others. You will all the time depend on your inner source, which can offer you infinite Joy, infinite Love, infinite Peace. The best thing is to meditate on the heart; this way is most effective.

When you see a flower with your mind, you appreciate and admire it. But when you see it with your heart, immediately you feel that your heart is inside the flower or that the flower is inside your heart. So, when you have an experience, if you are one with the experience itself, then you will know it is from the heart. But if you feel that the experience is something that you are achieving outside yourself, then it is from the mind.

To reach the spiritual heart you have to feel that you do not have a mind, you do not have arms, you do not have legs, you have only the heart. Then you have to feel that you do not have the heart, but that you are the heart. When you feel that you are the heart and nothing else, then easily you will be able to reach your spiritual heart during your meditation.

All excerpts by Sri Chinmoy

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