Flowering of Heart Centre ( Dissolution of Identity )

Flowering of Heart Centre

( Dissolution of Identity )

-Anant Sri

There are techniques and experiments to facilitate the flowering of the heart center & dissolve identity. You can try the following experiment-

You imagine that you have no head over your body. Whatever you may be doing but continue to imagine this headless feeling. Or else you can paste a picture of you without your head and look at it several times to get that headless feel.

You may initially think that what is the point in imagining; when you know your head is properly secured over your body? But imaginations are powerful tools to give you the feel of your imagination and that can do wonders. So, continue this experiment and see how it works.

Head is the seat of your identity. You identify with your face, and you give so much time and money for its polish and shine that the entire beauty and cosmetic industry runs on this obsession of yours. Then you identify with your thoughts also treating them to be yours. You create an identity for yourself and likewise you create identities for others.

This identification cuts you off from the whole world. It cuts you from one another. When you see someone, you form a picture in your mind about him and then when you meet him next, you see him through the glasses of your picture. You never see him in realty, in the present. You only interact with pseudo identities, and you never get to meet the person.

These identifications with the body mind and things around give rise to an individual, a unit, a pseudo self. This self is limiting in nature and is the root cause for all duality and multiplicity giving rise to division, comparisons, contradictions, conflicts, fights, wars and eventually destruction.

When the head is missing then your identity goes. With the dissolution of identity, you become like any other and this gives you a freedom, a feeling of expansion. You feel one with all and that is the opening up of the heart centre.

Then Bhagwan Buddha and Mahavir advised the middle path. Mahaveer approached the issue from a different angle and gave five directives of negation-

-First is ahinsa, non-violence

-Second is aparigrah, non-accumulation

-Third is achaurya, non-theft

-Fourth is akaam, non-desiring

and

-Fifth is apramaad, non-unawareness, i.e. awareness

Now we need to understand the meanings of these negations.

Ahinsa, nonviolence is to refrain from any type of violence. It is not only physical violence but to interfere with anyone’s freedom is also violence. We also indulge in subtle violence. Even to think that anything or anyone should be in anyway other than what it is, comes into the category of violence even though its form is subtle, and may not appear to be violence in the general sense. One must refrain from all such activity.

Aparigrah is non-accumulation. We have a tendency to accumulate things. By saying things, it does not include material things alone, we wish to accumulate people, relations, thoughts, honor everything possible irrespective of the fact that whether we need them or not. And these accumulations create a constant pressure on our being. We fail to have trust in existence that whatever is needed will be provided for and so we want to accumulate things. And this again has its strings connected to the first directive ahinsa, for only those will go for violence that have a tendency of accumulation.

Achaurya or non-theft is not only not stealing material things or money from people. Theft is again a tendency we have to abstain from. Theft has a broader meaning, even theft of thought, profits, good will, achievements, name and styles are theft only. In the subtler sense possession itself, is theft. You cannot claim things as yours. They are in the nature, you may use them, you can be with them but you cannot possess them. You cannot claim anything to be yours, not even your thoughts, not even your people, not even your child.  This again has its connections in the previous dictate aparigrah for only one who accumulates will go into stealing.

Akaam- is desirelessness. People normally take kaam for sexual desire. Here kaam is used in its broader sense, not only sexual but desire in any form is to be done away with. Desires arise out of lacking, out of insufficiency. We feel this lacking and desire is just an effort to bridge this feeling. To get fulfilment and pleasure from another is in the root of all desires. The feeling of lack comes from limitation because we don’t know that we don’t lack, as we have not experienced our limitless nature.

We can see the line of interconnectedness in all these directives.  This ignorance of our true infinite nature causes this limitation, this inadequacy that becomes the main cause of desires that leads us to theft and accumulations which subsequently becomes the root cause of all violence.  As a solution to this ignorance, the fifth directive of awareness has been suggested.

Apramaad means non-unawareness, i.e. awareness. We tend to be sleepy all the time. Even when we are supposedly awake, we tend to do things in a sleepy way. We are not watchful, we do things unaware and therefore we don’t see the actual thing.

When one is aware and awake you gradually come to see your limitations and merely by observing that, you turn to the observer and you glide into limitlessness where the observer and the observed both dissolve into one vast existence.