How Do You Open the Spiritual Heart?

Survival isn’t physical longevity. Survival is spiritual longevity. If you haven’t survived spiritually it doesn’t matter how long you live here physically, because your physical body is going to die at some point. It’s interesting to think about how we try to protect something that isn’t going to work. If you can really understand what that means, a lot of those things that you now hold “sacred”— your “sacred cows” and those things that you defend through ego— will fall from you. At that moment you’re free. But you don’t have liberation until you recognize and know your own soul.

One of the biggest jobs we have is to run our own self-correction. This is where we fight with ourselves the most. It’s called “to thine own self be true.” If you do something wrong, you have to run the correction so you can be true.

If you want to find a fast way to run self-correction, you have to practice the ability to move into the loving heart, the spiritual heart. You come into it not just through your emotions, but through the emotions plus the loving feeling that sits on the emotions. Then the feelings of loving can be moved by the emotional energy.

When you’re upset and righteous and you’re not going to self-correct, a good thing to practice would be to find something—a horse, a dog, an animal, a baby, a person, a tree, a rock—that you can get in touch with, so that it then gets in touch with you. You stir the feeling of, “God, this is wonderful!” And then you walk away from it. I tell people don’t use food because it has only one sensation associated with it. Get hold of something that arouses most of your senses—hearing, touching, tasting, feeling—and activate it internally as much as you can. Then walk away from it and attempt to move that feeling in the loving spiritual heart, to the point where you go, “Oh yeah, there it is!”

If you can’t, you’re not a failure at this point, you’re just somebody who hasn’t succeeded. You go back to that object, re-look at it and say, “Did I just think that was really something wonderful?” Or you may look at it and say, “Oh you know something? That color reminds me of a house I knew a long time ago.” And you find out that the object doesn’t really do it for you. But something else in there did it for you, and if you can isolate that, and get in touch with it, then maybe you can activate it.

When you walk away from it and think of it, and all this loving comes up inside of you, guess where you now have it? Inside of you. You now have the ability to access and touch that whenever you want to. Here’s the bad news. If you don’t practice that, it will go away. It gets lost in the rest of the ego functions. It’s like an affirmation that you must do over and over again. But affirmations are more in the area of the mind, ego, and feelings, whereas the spiritual heart moves the consciousness to a place where you will lovingly self-correct because that is the right, loving thing to do. The spiritual heart then embraces the ego and the ego feels wonderful to have made the self-correction. It feels proud and it will say, “Look, I did that wrong. Now look how right I do it!” And it feels great when everybody goes, “Yeah, that’s right.” You’re bringing all the diverse levels of your personality into a focus, back inside of you, and you’re grabbing control of it consciously, touching it and activating it.

Often, as you become faster and more adroit at doing this, you will become faster and more adroit at solving ego dilemmas. Ego dilemmas deal with all the things of the world—how you perceive those things in the world, how you want them, and how you’re not getting them. For example, you say, “Let’s go down to the theater and we’ll catch that eight o’clock show. It will be great, it’s the middle of the week and very few people will be there.” But you get there and it’s sold out—not only that showing, but all the other showings that night. The mind then goes into dilemmas. It thinks, “What are all these people doing here? Doesn’t anybody work? Doesn’t anybody stay home? I’ll show them! I’ll burn down the building, I’ll do all these horrible things.” Instead you go into self-correction, touch the heart center and say, “Wow, they’re going to really enjoy this movie and I still have an enjoyment ahead of me. I’ll go see this other show.” And now you’re in the area of choices instead of addictive behaviors. Only out of the spiritual heart can you make these types of profound choices.

I use the term “valuable” interchangeably with “usable.” The value of a thing is its usefulness. Everyone’s reference point for what is valuable is going to be based on the experience of their life and their karma. That is unseen and unknown, so therefore we can’t judge it. We can only perceive how others value something and cooperate with it if we find it matches what we value. When something matches our own value, we have peace, because we’re in harmony. Being in harmony is a wonderful thing, but you have to remember that harmony does not mean non-movement. If its non-usable, then it becomes non-movable and you must stay by it to use it, which means you’re now non-movable and non-usable also.

The only things that we can really pick up and move are those things that are inside of us. Consequently, we’re all busy translating whatever we get from the outside to the inside, to see how we can value and use it. And what we value is sometimes an answer to something in the mind. We may not be able to use it but it answers a dilemma, so now that part of us is quiet, and we say, “That was so valuable to me!” Nobody else can see that use, but just because it is invisible it is not less valuable. It is extremely valuable because it solves a dilemma of disturbance and stops the againstness inside us.

How do I find the way into the spiritual heart? I have a little girl that does it for me. I can think of her for a second and it just opens, and I’m in the spiritual heart—immediately. I promote, allow, and create that. I wouldn’t want it to change because it is very usable to me inside of me. In the midst of a disturbance, she’ll kick in automatically and people just cannot disturb me. I start to see how she would handle the disturbance by pontificating and moving her hands and yelling and screaming, not necessarily in that order. Or she might get up and walk out of the room, and you yell her name and she keeps right on going, thinking that it’s a game. She’ll look back to see if you’re after her and she will run faster and giggle and laugh, and you’re out of the disturbance.

Through this technique I can overcome a lot of things. If I get a headache I go, “Why don’t I go down and see that little girl?” And the headache just goes away. What was the headache from? Internal stress and strife that is below my level of awareness. Maybe there is too much glare from the TV lights. Or it could be the wind blowing a certain way. It could be allergies. It could be perfumes. It could be smells. It could be drinking some water and choking on it and you clear the choking, but you still have to deal with residuals in there. So what could it be? Almost anything and everything.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. It’s knowing the process of your being and how you process life, and how things are processed inside of you, and then working those in such a way that they become functional and usable to you, either by working with them or getting out of them. I would not suggest to anybody to put up with something, because putting up with it is, in a sense, condoning its existence, its behavior, and its actions in and around you.

Something may be causing a level of disturbance inside of you and even though your mind says, “Oh that’s all right,” the uptight stomach says, “No it is not”. If you accept it in the mind and ignore the stomach, you’re disowning the signals of your life. You’re disowning something inside of you that says, “I have a signal for you about something that is out of line.” It may be saying, “Your house is burning down and you don’t want to hear this signal”. All the while you’re saying, “Well I wish I would have heard the signal, I’d have gotten up and saved the house.”

The bad news about not listening to the signals is they don’t necessarily stop, but they seem to stop. Then you come into a group like this or to a person like me and you think, “He hasn’t said anything new in thirty minutes, but he’s said things that I’ve had to hear, because there is a part of me that stopped, disowned, and didn’t listen, and it just woke up and said, ‘Hi!’ And I want you to wake me up and say ‘Hi’ in my life.” I want you to be watchful. I’m going to give you the value that you are. I am going to use you the way that you are to be used. I am going to value you.

The Kingdom of Heaven is much like that. If you start to disown and not value parts of your system of information, you have cut off one of the sources into the kingdom, because who knows where the entrance is? We know it’s a straight and narrow way, and few enter because few choose to go that way. And we all know that at times, we feel as far away from the Kingdom of the Heaven as we can possibly be, just because we are unaware. And as strange as it may seem, in comes somebody we love, the spiritual heart opens, and the Kingdom of Heaven is immediately at hand. So how far away from us is it?

It’s nowhere. All that blocks us is a sense of separation. Not separation. A sense. And we value the sense of separation more than we value the reality that is always present. If we get a feeling that says we’re in separation, we value that feeling so strongly that we will leave our family, quit our job, feel people hate us, or become paranoid, over something that is not real. It’s not usable or functional. So we have to come back once again and say, “Wait a minute! Just because I don’t sense and know the Kingdom of Heaven is active in me, that is not a reason to feel separate and lonely unless I’m choosing to have an exercise in separate/lonely. And if I am, I think I’ll find out what that is at the highest rate of efficiency I can, so I’ll know it no matter what its disguise looks like.”

Everyone has that sense of unworthiness. I don’t know if we will ever get rid of it while we’re on the planet. I’ve got mine encoded as a guardian that keeps me going, so I can never sit in complacency and say, “I’ve got it! This is it! I don’t have to do anything else.” As soon as I do that this thing kicks me right in the backside and says, “Up one more stair.” And I say, “Yeah, but I declared this stair the top!” That’s an ego position that’s going to cause me disturbance, because the top is the top. It will declare itself.

I’ve been talking about this for years: coming back to self, introspecting, finding the places inside, going in, and strengthening those. If we strengthen them and we don’t use them, they start to go weak. Here’s the dilemma of this whole spiritual game: You can’t just come to a place where you get strong and then never have to do that again.

You can lift weights for a while and get in shape. You say, “Wow, I’m in shape!” Then you put the weights away and you don’t lift them again because you’re in shape. A year later you look in the mirror and you go, “Everything went to my stomach.” What happened? You stopped strengthening yourself. “Yeah but you see I was strong. I was in shape.” Well, at that time you were in shape. Now you’re not. Now what? “Well that’s not fair.” Its never been designed for fair, its been designed for a process of doing.

Strengthening ourselves spiritually is much the same. Some people ask, “When do I stop doing spiritual exercises?” I say, “About forty seconds after you die physically.”

When are you going to die? Are you as strong as you want to be spiritually? Then why don’t you keep doing s.e.’s? People respond that they don’t know if the s.e.’s are strengthening them. Then along comes some problem. Kaboom! And you fall down and cry and moan and say, “God doesn’t love me. Nobody loves me. I’m all alone in this world. How am I going to get through this?” Then you go inside where you’ve been doing spiritual exercises and you grab hold of the strength and you think, “Wow! This isn’t as bad as I was dramatizing it to be. I’m doing pretty well here. I wonder how I’m doing pretty well?” It’s because you were strengthening yourself, and you didn’t know how strong you were. Along came the test and now you’re being shown how strong you are. It’s really wonderful. Instead of crying about the event, pat yourself on the back and claim the event.

Will there be harder tests? Yes. But you have a method by which to counter the harder tests— spiritual exercises. You have a way to strengthen yourself so that whatever shows up, if you’ve been doing your spiritual work, you will meet it, go with it, and add it to your repository of resources. My mom used to say, “Son if doesn’t kill you, it will strengthen you.” It hasn’t killed me yet, so it only leaves one alternative. It is strengthening me.

Baruch Bashan.

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