Why "Unobstructed Heart?"

Question 9:  Several weeks ago, you titled your two of your questions of the week, the unobstructed heart. Why? I didn't see anything that particularly dealt with an unobstructed heart.

Mataji/John's response:  I agree. Today I'll try to make the connection. Those two questions attempted to explain the scope of freedom we normally have to change our reality dramatically. I described the structure within which we individuate, six streams or bundles of probabilities. These six streams float on and within vast multi-life conglomerations of organized feelings called feeling tones. These feeling tones constitute the karma of what makes us ourselves. This feeling tone karma conditions us and makes us unique in our manifestation, in our humanity. It both connects us and limits us.

Feeling tone karma connects us by making us human. It places us in a society of other humans with the potential for spontaneous interaction. It limits us because, given our emotional/structural selves and our resources at any particular moment, we have a broad but not unlimited range of possible interactions with society and our environment. It is for both the opportunities and the limitations that we incarnate. The purpose of the opportunities might be obvious, but perhaps not the purpose of the limitations. The limitations allow us to discover who we are and what are the implications of our beliefs. Feeling tone karma creates a personality within physicality which can try out and explore the concrete world of cause and effect.

We explore who we are by pursuing desire and avoiding pain. Our distinct desires are cultivated and explored in the first three chakras. They are explored by choosing one thing over another. By making choices, we come to know our boundaries. As we come to know our boundaries, a sense of a separate self, an ego emerges. One purpose of the ego is to develop a separate and distinct point of view, separate from all other people. Paradoxically and ironically, it is impossible to form an ego without exploring our boundaries, abilities and limitations with others. We individuate by exploring our boundaries, abilities and limitations in collaboration with other humans who are, themselves, trying to individuate and who, themselves, must explore their boundaries, abilities, and limitations. So, the ego must voluntarily embrace its limitations and venture to know itself in society.

This embrace is made within the heart. It is there that the connection can be made between our limited selves and other limited selves. Freud introduced the idea of an unconscious to our society. For him, the unconscious was personal. It can be useful to think of other people and our environment as our extended unconscious, as a super-personal unconscious. They manifest and express what is beyond our current sense of ourselves. Of course they have their own free will, so they are themselves creative. Together we co-create a spontaneous experience growing out of our feeling tones and theirs. And in doing so, our lives and theirs expand. Something new in all of consciousness is created.

The Buddha's great enlightenment was that all experience is ultimately limited and transitory, that within the wheel of pleasure and pain, there must be pains at times. One of Jane Robert's Seth's core messages was, I believe, that desire is wonderful in that it carries us into the dance of life and the creation of things that never were before in all of consciousness.

But with desire, there must also come pain. Seth often used to say that there are no limits to the self. Many of us took that to mean that we could create a world in which each and every desire was automatically given, a world in which we were invulnerable, a world in which there would never be any surprises. We didn't state it like that of course, but that was the implication of our arrogance. It is within the heart that the illusion of invincibility can be overcome. It is within the heart that we can embrace our limitations, explore them in our interactions with others, and thereby move beyond the sole criteria of pleasure and pain to what emerges when we embrace the dance of life.

What emerges is an unobstructed heart, what emerges is joy. So, the only skillful way to engage the process of individuation, to engage the first three chakras, and to engage the six streams or bundles of probabilities is through saying yes to life and to its intrinsic limitations. When we say yes, we move into the unobstructed heart and we move into the very nature and joy of life.

c 2001 by John Friedlander
www.PsychicDevelopment.cc

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