The goal of life is to make our heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match our nature with Nature.
~ Joseph CampbellÂ
As children, we may have experienced being in harmony with Nature, our innate creative rhythm, and with the heartbeat of those around us. In this state, we are joyful, playful, creative, and an inspiration to others. We are free and happy because we know our parents are taking care of us and we are protected from harm. But life tends to get in the way of our joy and our experiences teach us that not all is safe in the world. We grow up with the voices of admonition from our parents, teachers, and later friends who have become parrots in a world that values what we produce more than what we create; what we think more than what we feel. As a consequence, we think it is normal to ‘grow out of’ our childish connection to Nature, where we ran carefree. Instead, we adopt the ‘normal’ thinking tendency of judging and criticizing ourselves based on self-imposed standards. We lose our connection to trust and feel vulnerable to all that can go wrong. We adopt those behavioral patterns that appear to be the path of least resistance in terms of how others view us and accept us, which also contributes to the pattern of our sense of self-worth.Â
Our behavioral patterns are the personality masks we wear in an effort to fit in. We put on different masks to fit any occasion. In doing so, we can lose sight of our authentic personality; the personality that is us when we take off all our masks. This can turn into a Russian nesting doll exercise as we peel off endless personalities, one after another. Eventually, we reach a layer of personalities that we keep hidden, sometimes even from ourselves. This becomes problematic because we can’t remove masks from personalities that are buried so deep in our subconscious that we aren’t aware they exist.
The church father Origen said we have more personalities within us than herds of cattle, herds of sheep and goats.(1) Jung echoed this sentiment when he said our “psyche is far from being a homogeneous unit—on the contrary, it is a boiling cauldron of contradictory impulses, inhibitions, and affects.â€(2) This is why, as G. I. Gurdjieff explained, we have so much trouble sticking to a diet. One of our personality masks thinks it is a good idea to lose some weight, but by the next day we have already gone off our diet. The reason, he says, is clear: we didn’t have a consensus of going on a diet from the other 999 personalities within us. This example shows that who we are is not necessarily a homogeneous and self-directing unit.
Gurdjieff attempted to reconcile our inner contradictions with the view that who we are consists of two parts: essence and personality.(3) Essence represents our authentic Self: who we are at the level of unified Self when we have reached the bottom of the Russian nesting dolls. Our personality is what Gurdjieff describes as not really belonging to us because it has been acquired from ancestral memories, the environment, and through parental and societal conditioning. As a result, our essence becomes negatively polarized into personality consciousness and crystallizes into a self-made construct of personal identity; one that is separate from others, from Nature, the planet, the Universe, and beyond. This ‘ideal’ self-image is the personality we post about on Facebook and await anxiously for our virtual friends to give us thumbs ups and acknowledging comments. We forget that everyone else on Facebook is also hungry for acknowledgment. We are so busy trying to please everyone that we become a walking contradiction. This is a state of great distortion where our actions may infringe upon the free will of others or be without regard for the health of the planet. Consequently, we may lose a sense of our authentic self and may suffer from a lack of direction and purpose as we fall into the delusion that everyone else’s life is better, happier, and more valuable than our own.
The good news is that a sense of disconnection from meaning and purpose can be a catalyst for putting us on a journey towards re-connecting to our true Self (essence). The impetuous for change is often an external motivation, something that creates enough pain and discomfort that we are compelled to step out of our comfort zone: our place of habituated behavioral patterns.
Jung felt that these external motivators were connected to the collective unconscious; a matrix of higher mind or an extended mind. We can call this Universal Intelligence or heart-consciousness, since the heart beats in synch with the rhythm of the Universe. Therefore, the heart must know (feel) what Universe knows.
The connection between heart and Universe is better understood when we consider that our heart beats 72 times per minute on average or 4,320 times per hour. It beats 8,640 times in two hours, which is a factor of the 86,400 seconds in a day. Right away, we get the feeling that the heart is connected to time. The heart is also connected to an even larger scale of time. Every 72 years, from our perspective, the fixed stars move by one-degree in a parade of the constellations known as the Precession of the Equinoxes. It takes 25,920 years for the constellations to complete a full circle (72 x 360) also referred to as the Great Year. When we multiply the Great Year (25,920 years) by a factor of the heart (7.2) we arrive at the speed of light (99.82%).(4) The speed of light squared is the fundamental definition of energy according to Einstein. The heart, therefore, is rhythmically connected to both time and space or ‘spacetime.’(5) This gives us a better sense of how the heart knows what spacetime knows. The heart’s connection to spacetime and beyond is one way to explain how people know a friend is about to call before the phone rings.
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The heart’s knowing has come under scientific scrutiny. Experiments by Dean Radin, for example, demonstrate the heart’s ability to ‘know’ and cause physiological changes ‘before’ a significant event occurs.(6) This is similar to animals taking protective measures ‘before’ an earthquake or a tsunami arrives.
If the heart knows an important event is about to happen before it actually happens then our concept of time and space must be reconsidered. It suggests that we live in a holographic universe as physicist David Bohm suggested. It also puts the heart at the center of ‘knowing’ and being connected to an intelligence that lies outside our brain, perhaps in the field of essence.
The realization of our true essence happens when our personality becomes passive and essence becomes active. It requires a loosening of our grip on what we believe about ourselves: our ego-identity that is tangled up with other’s expectations. Untangling our essence from our personality requires conscious awareness of our conditioned behavior. This is not a simple task as most of our conditioned responses are both habituated and subconscious. Since heart-consciousness is connected to our essence, it can help bring our subconscious patterns to light, thereby helping us integrate and transform them.
Mostly, our latent personalities want to be heard and understood. They are largely the personalities that arise in response to events where an emotion is not fully acknowledged or contradictory impulses are not fully integrated within our conscious and unconscious minds. Unfortunately, because of the unconscious aspect of our personalities, reintegration does not occur by thinking about it logically. It requires a process over time. It is a process that is more like a journey, where the unconscious aspects of ourselves work behind the scenes to create external events that shake our foundation enough to make us question ourselves and our behavior. Â
The motivators of change work together in a mysterious yet intelligent archetypal fashion. It is as if that part of us that seeks change elicits an energetic pattern that works dynamically in a triangular pattern. The first manifestation of this triad is the “Issue†or the ‘thing’ that is causing us upset or discomfort. The part of us that is experiencing the “Issue†is the personality aspect that was targeted to undergo transformation. The second component is the “Obstacle,†which allows the contradictory personalities that were stirred up in the Issue to interact. The third aspect is the “Action†necessary to bring about transformation (change and growth).
(The Triad Dynamism of Archetypes)
The mediator between the three dynamics is the heart. If we tap into heart-consciousness we can allow our innate knowing to guide us through the labyrinth of our mind’s contradictory impulses. The heart is available to help us identify cognitively the limiting belief or negative behavior pattern we have habituated. The heart can also guide us to the right action and the new behavioral pattern we need to adopt in order to bring about the change we desire.
How to ask the heart for guidance is easier than we may think. The process of Scalar Heart Connection utilizes synchronicity and consequently is similar in that aspect to the I-Ching. The difference is in how Scalar Heart Connection utilizes number as a matrix of informative statements that identify the specifics of the triad dynamisms. This is accomplished when we tap into trusting our heart and asking our heart to show us a number related to the information we need related to the Issue at hand. The heart will guide us through the Obstacle as well as the Action we need to take to modify the resonance pattern into one that is entirely integrated and connected with what our heart truly desires.
When we connect to heart-consciousness we tap into the wellspring of love. When the spirit of love flows through us unimpeded by repressed emotions and negative thinking, we become a channel for spirit to manifest in the world. As a channel for the spirit of love, what we create and who we are becomes a monument to spirit, standing as a metaphor to what is true and whole within our authentic Self (essence).
Article by Stephen Linsteadt
First published by ExpandedConsciousness.com