Heart Chakra and Mirroring

Ok, I’m going to start on this topic, but I don’t know where I’m going to wind up because it’s such a large and important area—I may just keep writing until I run out of steam or then again I may make a bunch of general statements and observations and we can pursue them over a period of time. There is a direct link here between what you do as a medium and what you have and will experience in terms of ‘higher awareness’ or whatever you want to call it.

First, about the heart chakra. When your heart chakra is open (or perhaps too open, depending on your point of view) you will experience other people’s thoughts, emotions, and sometimes physical sensations as your own—you will not be able to differentiate you from them—not know whose thoughts they are, whose emotions, whose physical sensations. When I get ‘strange’ thoughts or emotions I always have to check myself to make sure that I’m not mirroring someone—that person doesn’t have to be physically present—and one way I do it is to see what my face feels like—I check to see whose face I’m wearing. When I’m relaxed and, for example, lying in bed, if I think about someone I know and am fairly close to, I can feel my face change into their face, and I get the accompanying thoughts, emotions, etc. For example, I have a friend who’s married to an RCMP officer—she and I are quite close so she’s easy to reach—but when I get in touch with her and feel my face change, what I get is what I’ve come to call the ‘police radio’—I hear all of these police conversations, law enforcement phrases, etc—because she so strongly mirrors her RCMP husband. Here’s another example: some time ago, six years or so, I was in a relationship with a woman where I got stuck in the ‘mirror’ thing—on one occasion I lay down on my bed and closed my eyes, and immediately started thinking about her—where she was (she was out with some friends), how she was, etc. I lay there for a while, then decided I had to take a leak, so I got up and immediately began staggering around the room with my head spinning, bumped into the wall on the way into the bathroom and fell down. I lay there on the floor trying to figure out what was wrong with me and the best I could come up with was that I felt like I was piss drunk. As soon as I thought that, and then realized that I hadn’t been drinking, the whole sensation went away and I was back to normal. The next day I found out that my lady friend had got herself totally pissed the night before, so much so that she was staggering, falling down drunk. (I’m just glad I didn’t have the dry heaves the next morning.) This woman also had a depressive streak and on several occasions I got stuck mirroring her depression, to the extent that I was in tears, feeling suicidal, etc—and had to call a good friend of mine who fortunately also knew this particular woman, who told me that I sounded exactly like this woman—my voice over the phone, my choice of words, my phrasing—it took me great effort to regain my own ‘mind’, and for some time after our relationship was over I had to be careful about my dreams—if I dreamt about her in any way I would have to check my face when I awoke to make sure it was mine.

This sort of mirroring, in fact all mirroring, takes place at the heart level. Imagine what can happen if you’re in an intimate relationship, or imagine what can happen when you’re a newborn baby and you pick up on your parents’ vibes just like a sponge soaking up water—you don’t even know you’re doing it, you mirror them completely, and you’re doing it because of your relationship at the heart level with them—out of love. The expression ‘you become what you love’ is exactly true at that level. This is how we become enmeshed in the world—we love the world and so become the world —and then try to straighten ourselves out by trying to fix the world. We lose ourselves in the world and forget ourselves because of love. This is why it’s so important to ‘remember yourself’, to be able to find yourself—how many times have I said that—because it’s not just a matter of ‘enlightenment’, but of spiritual survival. Most spiritual traditions try to renounce the world, some try to embrace it, but they are all attempts to ‘solve’ the world-—you can’t do that until you know ‘you’ first. You said that “I, or ordinary consciousness, was very AWAKE and looking on… I was a huge spaciousness..” —you have to follow THAT one, that ‘I’ which is both ordinary and spacious. You also said you felt “totally whole… no “male, no “female” just whole…” (that’s why I like to quote back what you’ve written—so I don’t have to type it :) )—that’s because you were viewing things from beyond that sort of duality. The resolution and integration of dualities takes place at the heart level when you are moving upwards in the kundalini flow; the creation and generation of all dualities takes place as you move downward in the kundalini flow. The resolution and integration gives rise to the experience of bliss—nirvana; the creation and generation are samsara—both arise from the heart area—when you hear the expression that everything arises out of bliss and subsides into bliss, this is what it means. The integration of the heart area is the goal of classical yoga. Look at how you described your experience—there was both the experience of yourself as a “huge spaciousness” and also as “ordinary consciousness”. You find the term ‘spaciousness’ coming up again and again in Vajrayana and Nyingma writings (I’m thinking here especially of Longchenpa). But notice that ordinary consciousness stayed around. Both the spacious consciousness and the ordinary consciousness arise in the heart. (Now, go read Ramana—not what someone else says he said, but his own words.)

If you look at drawings of chakras, etc, the heart area is always shown as containing two superimposed triangles like a star of David. These triangles represent the union of Shiva and Shakti, the divine marriage, the alchemical marriage—the upward pointing triangle moves up from below, the downward pointing one moves down from above—Yin and Yang. The most important mandala/yantra in Hinduism is called the Sri Yantra, and is a series of stars of David, if you will, receding into infinity one inside the other, and at the center of the yantra, at the point where all the stars would meet is a tiny blue point, a bindu. The yantra represents, among other things, how the world is made—out of the continuous divine union of Shiva and Shakti. The Hindus say that the first thing to be manifest in the process of creation is sound, and the first sound is “OM” which causes vibrations to be set up which give rise to all things. (If you remember back in the ‘resume’ thing I said something about at one point breathing into the blue points and they started to vibrate—at that point I could ‘hear’ the vibration as an ‘om’) Anyhow, certain schools of yoga have made a science of studying the sounds that arise after the ‘om’ (and as a result of the ‘om’) and have classified them and graded them (you hear this sound when you’ve reached this stage etc). You don’t begin to hear these sounds until your heart chakra begins to open—in fact they say that the sounds arise from the heart —there are sounds like bells, flutes, wind, thunder, and so on, and they change as you move towards to ‘om’. Another thing that happens with that kind of focus on the heart chakra is that you may experience physical symptoms such as heart palpitations or small pains over your physical heart, usually on the left side of your chest. You may also experience heat, either locally or all over your body. Sometimes the heat is so strong that people near you will notice it—I’ve read accounts of people actually scorching table tops from it. You’ll also find that if you have sex with someone your body may heat up so much that you feel you’re about ready to ignite—your partner will definitely notice it. Some schools of Tibetan yoga encourage the propagation of this heat, called Dumo in Tibetan, and use the strength of it as a gauge to measure spiritual progress. It arises as a byproduct of the ‘re-union’ of Shiva and Shakti (the physical act of sex mirrors the spiritual act of ‘re-union’, the physical act is a sort of ‘acting-out’ of the ‘re-union’—this is the foundation for tantric practices—so the heat is generated in the physical act, but after a while you don’t need the physical act for the ‘re-union’, or the heat, to take place)

I’ve just realized that I’m sort of jumping around to different areas, writing things as I think of them. So, here’s another jump—you mentioned that you had found yourself at someone’s feet, but that you couldn’t see whose they were—if you had merged with that someone and seen through ‘his/her’ eyes, you’d have seen the ocean of blue stars that I talked about in the first thing I sent you, the ‘resume’ thing—the blue stars are the same as the blue bindus at the center of the Sri Yantras—each one of the infinite multitude of them is a yantra.

Now, back to the progression through the heart space. At the outer layer you will do the ‘my face is your face’ thing with people in the world, or near the world, you will mirror them—channel them—in effect I was channeling my friend and her depression when I was talking on the phone and the other person recognized the change in voice, etc. You can do this at any level—channel non-physical entities, etc. On a broader level we mirror the world, we channel the world and become it and if we don’t know ourselves, we get lost in it. So, the first step is to find our own mind—our ‘original face’. If you go deeper you begin to experience yourself as dualities—male/female, life/death, the desire for life/the desire for death, light/dark, good/evil, and so on. If you don’t get lost in these you wind up at the spaciousness. Once you can maintain the spaciousness (ie, are comfortable) you can begin to experience the things I talked about in the ‘resume’—the ocean of blue stars, the large figure looking in all directions with the ocean pouring out of his/her mouth, etc., and you can begin to experience them as further progression of ‘forms’, for want of a better word, that give rise to still more forms, all of which you give life to (including the one at whose feet you found yourself).

So now there’re the forms and there’s the spaciousness—is that one or two, is that another duality? Go find out. Follow yourself back and see….

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