Opening The Heart

 

 

Just what heart is to be opened? Are you trying to expand the doorway to one’s own heart, the place of remembering pains and pleasure of the past or are you trying to open the one true heart, the place in which boundless love resides? When it comes to love there is only one heart, one source of true unselfish un-self centered love. All other expressions are through the filter of self, ego, self memory, self expectation and most importantly bound by fear for self.

 

Every reaction that caused a closing down, a protection, a decision, is created not by the expanding force of love, but by the boundary creating force of fear. Love comes from the divine and fear comes from the self. It is about self preservation whether it be fighting a wild animal or fighting the perception of incursions and possibility of harm by others. Fear is contraction, love is expansion.

 

If you wishe to, you can identify with expansion and not contraction. This is the goal of love. It is not about how you react to one person or another. It is about how you respond to the call of the Divine as is manifest in the many forms around you.

 

Fear is love distorted by the desire for safety. There is no safety. There is no protection that can save you from your own fears. The man or woman that lives in the fortified fortress in their own heart cannot stop the suffering of fear. Fear builds the fortress and fear keeps one locked within.  Realized yogis, saints and avatars live in love, and a few of them chose to remain in bodies for the assistance and guidance of others. But once the state is reached, the body is no longer necessary.

 

Most of us have no memory of unfettered unbounded love. It lies in the experience of unbounded consciousness, a state realized through deep meditation. Our memories of love are memories of events and feelings that had definition, they were bounded by bookends of times when love was not. If you have had the experience of true unbounded love you could not remember it for it is beyond the mind. Only in the experience is the knowing. It does not lie in the memory. If you want to know love, true love, you must go in to the source of all love. Love is beyond the boundaries of the mind, you cannot define it.

 

The practical approach that can be applied now and at all times is to strive to see all created beings simply as manifestations of divinity given definition and form by the work to be done to fully engage love. No person is loved greater or less by the Creator. He and She created us only to move forward on the journey of realizing and uniting with the force of love within this very life time. We can flow with that river or fight against it.

 

But instead of fighting against the forces that would open us to love let us fight against the forces that constrict the connection to love within ourselves. Wherever you feel fear or the need for self protection, that is the place of your next battle. You need not battle with each other, or battle with yourself. You only need to struggle to bring light into all of the dark places within the soul.

 

Marc Nevas

Acarya Madhusudan