The Deep Hearts Core – Spiritual Direction for Difficult Times

Question: How to be in the world?

Many of us, when we were growing up, were asked the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Maybe we didn’t really know what we wanted to do. We might have said we wanted to be a fireman or a ballerina.

Note that the question is asking, “What are you going to do?” The reply is returned as “I am going to be.” The reply is not “I am going to do.” This is not simply an issue about the correct use of grammar. It is a fundamental way of understanding why you are here in the world of time, space and form.

Most of us are focused and are encouraged to focus on the do-do of our life. We are focused on the dance of the do-do, which is taking us as a collective called humanity, toward the experience of the Dodo – a flightless bird that became extinct. When we focus purely on the do-do of our lives then we are not only flightless, we never get to soar.

The do-do of our lives creates the culture of more and more doing. We follow the focus of affluence, which turns into affluenza and meltdown. At the heart of such focus is the dynamic of fear. We fear that if we don’t get on the treadmill of the do-do bird we will lose out.

What is the primary source of value that exists in this world today? It is the holy measure called GDP – Gross Domestic Product. It has one primary direction. It has to go up. When it falls there is what is called recession. The result is panic.

This GDP is driven by ROCE – Return on Capital Employed. It is really ROCE that is our focus of worship. It is what drives the world stock exchanges. It is what drives multinational corporations. It is what drives our need for early retirement. Profit is not the primary measure of the success of a business. ROCE is. It, in turn, determines whether the share prices go up or down.

The success of a CEO (Chief Executive Officer) of a multinational company, or any company, is determined by the value of the shares based on ROCE. The bigger percentage ROCE, the better. If this means you pull down a rain forest in order to earn a higher percentage rate of return on capital employed, you do it. If you, as CEO don’t do it, then your share value will fall and you are likely out of job. What drives this dynamic is that fear of losing out.

In order to get a return on capital employed you have to have capital. The primary capital in this world of time and space and form is a piece of capital called the Earth. Accountants will tell you (and I have worked as an accountant most of my adult life) that no business can develop when it erodes its capital base.

This erosion of the capital base is fundamentally undermining the very value system worshipped by the capitalist system. It is no longer working. It goes against the law of nature. Communism did not work because it also goes against the law of nature.

What is aligned with the law of nature is being. When you move action from a state of being the capital base is not depleted but expanded. It expands forever because it is created to expand forever. Individual life forms evolve but they are not designed to expand forever. Form arises out of being and the greatest action arises out of non-action, which does not mean doing nothing but means doing arising out from nothing.

Creation created you to be an experience of joy in being creative. This is its intention. It is more than capable of ensuring this happens in your life. You have to allow it.

At this point of time only a few people have ever learned to live in this way. The present global crisis offers more of us the opportunity to ask fundamental questions. Is it going to be more of the same only with a little more controls in place that those with the power will manipulate for their own interest. No one can do this for you. You have, as Mahatma Gandhi said, to become the change you want to see.

The capital of your life is your connection to being. You have forgotten this connection. It requires that you connect to your heart song, your heart story and your heart blessing. This is not the story of your nation, your tribe, or your family. It is the living experience of your connection to the source of creative life. You do not earn this by the sweat of your brow. You melt into it by trusting in its power to celebrate its life through you.

For the most part we are a faithless lot. I include myself in this. We think that if we don’t do it, it won’t get done. Many of us spend our whole lives working to an end that ends. We work and we work. We follow the sound of the drummer playing the collective and psychotic rhythm of ever increased GDP and ever-increased ROCE. The higher the ROCE, the bigger the bonuses. If the system were subjected to an analysis it would be certified as a mental illness. As the mystic Eckhart Tolle says in The Power of Now, “This is exactly what it is.”

You can’t learn how to be. You have to undo the learning of distance from being. To that extent this storyteller has written the eCourse Ready to Radiate.

Are you ready to radiate the being you are? Are you ready to be one who says enough of this collective insanity that is taking this dance of the sound of God (humans and other species) to the experience of the Dodo via the do-do?

If you say you do not have time, you will not have time. The time only ever comes now. It is the now from which awareness of being arises. Without this awareness much of what you will achieve called success is simply more do-do.

Right now gift yourself some sanity not only for your own sake but for the sake of others and in service to the one creative life that serves all life and which you are not apart from, the one infinite being.

© Tony Cuckson 2009

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” Never confuse intellectual understanding for insight.”

 - Michael Langford, The Most Direct and Rapid Means to Eternal Bliss, Vol. 1

This Irish storyteller refers to insight as knowing.  Knowing is not the same as intellectual knowing. Intellectual knowledge is always ‘about’ something. It is dualistic. There is the knower and that which is known.

Insight is transformational.  It changes your worldview.  You see from a higher plane.  You get a larger, wider and more expansive understanding.  There is, however, a paradox with insight.  It will make you humble.  If it does not humble you, you have claimed it as your own and not as the gift of and from Love.

There is a difficulty here.  You must have a contrast in order to avoid confusion.  You have to have had the experience of insight to be able to distinguish it from intellectual understanding.  Most of us have had the experience of intellectual understanding.  Too few of us know and become the experience of the ‘insider.’

“Love is an inside job,” says Paul Ferrini.  Insight, as the word implies, is also an inside job. It is not seeing with the physical eye but is the experience of becoming a Seer.  A seer sees in a way that we ordinarily do not.   A seer experiences life without being an ‘I’ to experience.  This they know is the way to be in the world, the dying before you die, and the dying to a sense of separateness that keeps you anchored to death.

‘Your experience’ as you experience it is filtered.  This filter you call ‘me’ and ‘mine.’  You call it ‘your experience.’  You have it within the boundary called time and space.  When you have a particular experience you say now ‘you know.’

The now your know may be intellectual understanding.  It may change your life’s situation but it will not change the way you see the world.  Insight changes the way you see the world.  You become a seer beyond time.

What if you never experienced insight?  What if you have not seen for yourself with the eye of the Seer?

First, you need an intense desire to become the knowing of who you are or have the intense desire to put an end to suffering.  In the beginning, this desire can be for yourself alone.

The root of suffering is in your sense of separateness.  Insight allows you to recognise that this sense of separateness is created by your sense of attachment to the ‘I’ you call ‘little me.’  To have insight inoto this separateness of self means you feel  the connection to Oneness.  This gives you the ability to distinguish between knowledge and knowing.  More intellectual knowledge may assist you in creating a more comfortable lifestyle.  Insight will lead you to a feeling relationship beyond belief and beyond limitation called ‘my life.’  Instead of satisfaction one experiences joy.

Insight turns rags to riches and lead into gold.  Fairy tales invite insight.  They invite you to kiss the Sleeping Beauty within you locked away in the ivory tower of intellectual knowledge.

In the Hans Christian Anderson’s story The Ugly Duckling the farmyard can still be improved through intellectual and scientific progress. There is nothing wrong with this unless you get stuck in the upgraded farmyard.  You will still be the Ugly Duckling who has not had the insight that he is given when he goes to the lake and sees his true reflection and insight into the true Self.

The work of getting insight is something you do but do not ‘do.’  Insight is a grace.  When you receive it you will know that this is so.  You will know that you could never in a million lifetimes earn this.  You cannot buy it with effort but you need to make the effort. Consider yourself a gardener of insight.  All you do is plant the seed and tend it.  It is, as the word implies, already within you.  It requires practice and patience.

What is given to you through insight you will want to give away.  Only you will be disturbed.  Now you are the knowing of that no thing that is everything and this is the beginning of an endless becoming! You are now an outsider although you have also been  an insider. Now you have to choose which master you are going to serve. Insight?  Or separateness?

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Whatever’s written in your heart

That’s all that matters

You’ll find a way to say

It all some day

 

Gerry Rafferty

 

Here are lines from a song written by a soul friend.  They are point you toward a place you will find what matters.

Every song can be an invitation to the Great Song, the song that you alone have come here to sing.  This is a metaphor.  You are not required to be a singer, although you might be that.  You are, however, required to be a singer although in the sense that you are required to carry the tune of the Infinite as it plays through your heart. 

The heart is not just a physical pump; wonderful as this instrument is that pumps our life’s blood around the body.  The heart is a dimension that spans the time and the timeless.  Without a direct experience of this connection you can have all the things you want but it does not matter that much.  The heart is the bridge between the human and the Divine.

Heart work focuses on what matters.  What really matters to the heart is beyond person, the mask.  What really matters to the heart is the Universal, the timeless qualities of beauty and grace.

These are qualities that you cannot buy but that you realise.  You don’t make them. They come through what Eckhart Tolle refers to as ‘portals.’  These are place of threshold where the heart engages with its Lover and Creator.

You and I are writers.  We write our life’s expression in each thought we think.  What we think about we become but what we think about is not necessarily what we are intended to become.  This writer was intended to become a teacher of yoga long before this word was the household word it is today.  Instead, this writer trained and became engaged in the work of an accountant.

All through this writer’s life people would say, ” Tony, you’re not, you cannot be an accountant!”  But I was and that I remained despite their vocal scepticism.  However, I found a way to do the work of an accountant with the values that wanted to create a yoga teacher.  This did not make me wealthy but it kept me sane.

The heart loves one thing more than any other.  It loves to expand.  Expansion means breaking boundaries.  It means being willing to let go and move into the new.  The ego tends to dislike this.  It dislikes this because with the heart the ego gets dissolved and becomes at one with the boundless.

We each write a script for the heart. We do this everyday.  The script we write has two broad directions.  One leads us down a narrow road and the other onto the highway.  Each signpost that takes us there looks the same.  They have the same words written large on them.

The signpost reads, “This way to heart matters.”  Most people follow the road to the highway.  When asked why they choose that route they often deny that it was because that was the way most people seemed to be headed.  This Irish storyteller headed for the highway of accountancy because, to be honest, he had not the heart strength to go another way.

Actually, what happens is that you will find a way to say it all some day.  This ezine, this website, is the way this storyteller’s heart learns to say it all, not someday, but everyday.

The heart does not just say what it wants to say on one day.  It is saying what it wants to say in every moment.  Fear and doubt get in the way.  What really gets in the way is you – your sense of separateness from Love.  What gets in the way is that sense of unworthiness.

What matters to the heart is not what matters to you but what matters to Love.  You think you are separate from Love but Love is not separate from you.  Your heart knows this.  Your heart longs to remember this.  This is the meaning of yoga – to join together, to re-member.

Whatever is written in your heart will make you sing.  You might sing a song of sorrow but still – it is your song of sorrow.  It is not to be grudged.  It is to be expanded. Your sorrow can be the invitation to deep compassion or bitterness.  Usually bitterness is the calcification, the hardening over past hurts that are being said but not being owned.

The writer and creation spirituality teacher Matthew Fox says in Radical Prayer (available from www.soundstrue.com) that ultimately there is no protection for the heart. There are boundaries but no protection.  The greatest protection is a paradox.  It is to trust the process and allow love to write and play the universal song through you.

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