Finding Adi Da > Chris Tong > Part I, Chapter 11

Feeling With the Heart

This is Part I, Chapter 11 of Chris Tong's book, Finding the Divine In Person and Waking Up From the Dream.

The core of the being is the heart, not the head or the navel, but the heart, the function of feeling-attention, the unobstructed emotional connection, or communion with everything through feeling. That function is the principal one, and the realization of Spiritual life depends on that function, on its becoming active. Spiritual practice is about the re-adapting to this feeling function of the heart. However, each of you now has problems, doubts about yourself, and ways of acting from day to day that represent the obstruction of feeling. Therefore, you must re-adapt yourselves to this function of the heart. Avatar Adi Da Samraj

In an earlier section (Feeling Without Limitation), I talked in detail about the importance of feeling in the Way of Adidam. But how exactly does one “feel”? The practitioner of the Way of Adidam regularly makes use of a primary instrument or "muscle": the capability to feel with the heart. (This is one of the reasons why Adidam is also called "The Way of the Heart".)

This capability of heart-feeling is not something that can be merely presumed or taken for granted (or treated as though it were a mere metaphor, or a synonym for "emotion"). It is a capability that is awakened by Grace and cultivated by practice.[1] Here is how it developed in my own case. I had begun formal meditative practices in 1989, sitting before Adi Da's Murti for a period of time each morning and evening.[2] Over a period of months, through this process of meditation on the bodily form of the Master, I began to feel something I had never consciously felt before: my heart. Like all of us, I had felt emotions of various kinds — fear, sorrow, anger, pleasure, love, and so on — and many of us casually associate "the heart" with such emotions when we speak about them ("my heart was filled with sorrow" — that sort of thing), even though that's not necessarily where or how we feel them.

But despite the suggestiveness of such conventional language and imagery about "the heart" (whose linguistic origins are rooted in esoteric discoveries made by spiritually gifted individuals in the distant past), I had never before consciously felt (or felt with) the heart itself — the actual source of the capability to feel anything, including emotions. That capability awakened through the practice of contemplating my Spiritual Master, as I followed His Instructions (the underlining in the quote below is His):

Therefore, by always first . . . "Locating" the feeling-Place in you that already and presently and effortlessly feels Attracted to My Avatarically-Born bodily (human) Divine Form, and My Avatarically Self-Revealed Spiritual . . . Divine Presence, and My Avatarically Self-Revealed . . . State, Yield . . . to the feeling of the Inherent "Bright" Attractiveness of My Avatarically-Born bodily (human) Divine Form, and Yield . . . to the feeling of the Inherent "Bright" Attractiveness of My Avatarically Self-Revealed Spiritual . . . Divine Presence — and, by all of this, responsively, actively, and intentionally Yield . . . your ego-"I" . . . in the "Bright" and Very Space of My . . . State. Avatar Adi Da Samraj, Da Love-Ananda Gita

At first, that heart sensation — that "feeling-Place in me" — was like a tiny, fiery point whose "fire" I would "fan" by feeling from it to my Spiritual Master’s form (as though casting out a "cord" of feeling in His direction). Over time, that flame grew in magnitude to where I could very tangibly feel from my heart, through all the "self" sensations (of body, mind, emotion, and breath), and to my Master’s form, or, for that matter, to anything. By "feeling", I mean not emotions or sensations, but something more like the way "a hand feels into a glove" (a phrase Adi Da uses). It is an actual, tangible ability to reach out with the heart.

What we discover is not that love comes to us from Infinity, as from a super-cosmic Parent. We discover in our Communion with Infinity that we are love. That is the Divine Realization. God-Realization is not a relationship to some great something that loves you. No one is the beloved of God, absolutely no one. God is not the kind of Reality that makes beloveds out of creatures. Creatures owe their love to Infinity. You don't realize God by finding God at the end of a great chain to Infinity, but by being wholly one with Infinity, so that you yourself are love. If you come to Me and keep getting loved, having the blossom projected at you, there will be no change, because you will remain loveless. Divine Communion begins when you love. Then not only are you connected to love, but you are it. The only way by which we commune with God is by being love. Love has great strength. It is Siddhi, the Power of the Divine. It is the fundamental Power, the great Power, when we are it, but not when we worship it or depend on it in our egoic separation and weakness. Avatar Adi Da Samraj

As you will read (in just a little bit), this heart-capability would serve an important purpose when I finally met my Guru face to face.[3]

Chapter 12

FOOTNOTES

[1]		Feeling with the heart is a capability that is characteristic of what Adi Da refers to as the "fourth stage of life", which is characterized by a deep impulse to Communion with the Divine. It is in the context of the fourth stage of life (when one is no longer wedded to the purposes of the first three stages of life) that the true Spiritual process can begin. In the history of the Great Tradition, those involved in the process of the fourth stage of life have characteristically felt the Divine to be a great “Other”, in Whom they aspired to become absorbed, through devotional love and service. However, in the Way of Adidam, the presumption that the Divine is “Other” is transcended from the beginning. In the Way of Adidam, the process of the first three stages of life is lived on the basis of the devotional heart-impulse that is otherwise characteristic of the fourth stage of life. No matter what the age of the individual who comes to Avatar Adi Da, there will generally be signs of failed adaptation to the first three stages of life. But the practice is not a matter of attempting to overcome such failed adaptation through one’s own (inevitably egoic) effort or struggle. Rather, the practice is to turn the faculties (mind, body, feeling, and breath) to Avatar Adi Da in devotional surrender. In that manner, the virtue of the fourth stage of life — the devotional heart-impulse to Commune with the Divine — is specifically animated from the beginning, in living response to Avatar Adi Da. Thus, whatever must be done to brighten the first three stages of life occurs in the devotional context of heart-Communion with Him.
[2]		It is very fortunate for Adi Da's devotees that the same Spiritual Transmission occurs in contemplating the photograph or artistic rendition of Adi Da as occurs in His physical Company — there is nothing in the nature of things that guarantees that this would necessarily be the case! But it is. Just so, when Adi Da reviewed the first video ever made of Him, a broad smile came over His face as He exclaimed, “It transmits!” Fortunately for us, and all future generations of devotees, this is so.
[3]		During the same period when this capability to feel with the heart was developing, a mudra — a spontaneous boldily gesture — also started occurring: my right palm would spontaneously be placed over my heart, and my head would bow. This is not anything I intended. It just would occur spontaneously, and, over the years, has remained a mudra that occurs now and then when I am feeling with the heart.

Chapter 12