Where there is Darkness, the Heart shows the Way.

Where there is darkness means that where there is indecision or conflicting opinions about a person or situation or about yourself or your goal in life, there is darkness; that is, you are unable to act because you cannot see the way. The Heart shows the way means that the Heart is infallible. The Heart is connected to Buddhi, a subtle Light-energy that is a combination of Wisdom (profound understanding) and Love (total compassion). Once that Light-energy is activated in the Heart, it can show you exactly the right way, the right solution.

Normally, when you are in darkness your mind becomes very busy. You can ask a hundred people and receive a hundred different answers and your mind will agonize over the answers—while the darkness remains. But rather than analysing the situation in your mind, simply forget the whole thing and put your attention in the Heart. Allow your mind to become silent and, if you have already learned to feel that subtle energy inside you, the Heart will tell you what course of action to take, not in spoken words or ideas but as a knowing, an inner impulse that tells you which way to go.

In the beginning of this process many people, after descending into the Heart and feeling the right solution, still do exactly what the mind wants because they think the mind is cleverer! Of course, they get the wrong answer and are back where they started, in darkness. It takes courage to obey the impulses of the Heart, especially when the Heart gives you an answer that the mind fights against.

There is an interesting and profound scene in the Chinese warrior movie House of Flying Daggers where the hero and heroine warriors decide for some reason to separate from each other. The hero leaps on his horse and, with hair flowing in the wind, gallops far into the forest. And then he stops. He remains still for a long time, sitting on his horse, while the leaves fall all about him. He is searching his Heart. The decision he previously made was from the mind; he thought that leaving was the best action to take. But being a Spiritual Warrior, he pauses, enters the Heart and without any words he knows the right thing to do: he turns his horse around and goes back in the direction he came.

So part of the lesson of the Spiritual Warrior is to trust your Heart without interference from the mind. This requires preliminary practice whereby you develop the ability to drop your consciousness into the Heart and learn to feel that you are alive in the Heart. You already live in the Heart! Not your physical heart, of course, but the inner regions of the Spiritual Heart, where you quite literally dwell as a Living Soul; where Atman, the Spirit, the Self within you, resides. Once you enter the Heart, be still and feel the Heart, and trust whatever comes from that Life-essence inside you.

Harmony is maintained by being centred in the Heart.

Generally speaking, women are luckier because they are more connected to the Heart than men. Nowadays, of course, because of the education system, girls become as intellectual as boys and never even know that the Heart exists, and nobody learns how to feel from the Heart or how to live from the Heart. It’s what I call the disaster of education—a disaster from the spiritual point of view because it keeps people focused on the material objectives of a material world, as if nothing else existed. If learning about this world were only a part of their education, that would be fine, but there is no mention of the other worlds, the other realities; no one is taught that they are part of a larger structure. So human beings are kept nicely in the material plane, living materialistically, wasting their wonderful human life.

Everything in this society is done through the mind: you fight for this cause or that cause, for this opinion or that opinion, and the other person does exactly the same, so there is endless fighting and disharmony. There is no aspect of human life that is in harmony. Why? Because ideas and opinions conflict with each other and there is no Understanding. If you are a Warrior who lives in the Heart, your inner being is always in a state of harmony, equilibrium and balance. The Spiritual Heart does not experience conflict. The radiation of the Heart is always in harmony because the Buddhic energy of Love- Wisdom is a harmonious energy—it cannot be anything else. It is not possible to imagine a loving energy or an energy full of wisdom that is not in a state of harmony.

When you are Heart-centred, you can remain harmonious in your day-to-day life in all your relationships with people at home and at work. If the other person is working through the mind, you can make a suggestion from the Heart. If the person accepts it, that’s fine; if the person doesn’t accept it, that’s also fine. Why? Because the integrity of the Heart says that you cannot force your ideas on other people. The Light has to work in a person by agreement of that person. It is up to the other person to feel your Heart-energy and the sincerity behind your suggestion. When you explain things from the Heart, even mind oriented people can feel the positive energy emanating from you, and even though their mind may not understand the suggestion, they will likely follow your advice.

Identification with the Spirit Within the Heart is the centre of Stability.

We have talked about the action of the Heart when you are able to sense the energy of the Heart, how it acts in the Way of Wisdom and the Way of Love. But now we go one stage deeper into the mystery: Identification with the Spirit within the Heart is the centre of stability. Here you do not just feel the loving, all-wise energy coming out of the Heart and act from there, but you go deeper to identifying with it. This is what the Indian Yogīs call Yoga, what the Christian, Jewish and Muslim Mystics call Union, that is, ‘at-one-ness’ with the Spirit within the Heart. That energy emanates from Atman, the Higher Self, or the point of Divinity above the Buddhic dimension. It is our Spiritual Being and is also called the God-Self or the God Within.

You reach this stage of identification as a result of two things: 1) regular meditation using techniques such as Surrendering the Ego to the Heart and rhythmic intonation of the Warrior Mantra (see practice at the end of this article) and 2) actually living the life of the Heart. Meditation alone will not take you through any one of the Gates; your whole life has to change. Many people following various religious or spiritual paths meditate every day and still get nowhere because their whole life, their inner consciousness, their inner reality has not transformed. In the Way of the Warrior, you have to have spiritual practices and a fundamentally transformed life. Then, at a certain point, there comes the stage of identification with the Spirit within.

Once you reach that stage, you will look at things from the inside out. Before, you were looking at everything from the outside and taking it in. You may have had a decision to make or a disagreement with someone, so you brought the matter back into the Heart; you were working from the outside in. But now you are looking at all situations and problems in life in a reverse way. That’s why it’s difficult for the average person to understand the actions of a person who is identified with the Spirit within, a person who is looking at things from inside out.

When you are centred within the Heart and identified with the Spirit within, you are looking at the overall flow of the Vital Force as it moves outward into Creation from within. You are with that force and therefore see where it comes from and how it’s going to work out, instantaneously, because you are right at the centre of stability. The Spirit within is always stable, like a solid wall of immovable Light, so you are in that stability all the time and therefore your attitude to life is different, the way you do things is different and your understanding is different, including your understanding of the Warrior Path itself.

PRACTICE

Sensing How Nature Works Within You

This is a Spiritual Warrior meditation technique for tuning into yourself: Sensing How Nature Works Within You.

First, centre your awareness in the Heart and then have the general sensation of harmlessness, tranquillity, peacefulness and lovingness, of just being there, in the state of quietude. Try to feel how Nature, the life-force that sustains your physical body, is working inside you. Then try to go beyond that to how your emotions are working inside you and then how your mind is working. Feel how you are in this moment, not how you were yesterday or will be tomorrow.

Simply experience what is there, without condemnation, criticism or judgement, without mental descriptions, and then as your experience goes deeper and deeper into your body, your emotions, your mind, suddenly drop everything. This is the part that is so difficult, because at that moment you do nothing. You move from activity into non-doing and become Pure Being, just awareness of yourself without a name, without a quality: you are no longer a good person or a bad person, young or old, American or Chinese. Suddenly there is nothing but You. Then you understand the Way of the Spiritual Warrior.

Excerpt from The Planetary Reality (pages 40 – 45)