Heart

The logics that have served our five-sensory exploration of physical reality cannot comprehend evolution without time or the influence of the present upon the past. They cannot meaningfully represent the existence of the soul or a dynamic of energy balancing that generates and links many lifetimes. They reflect no experiential points of reference beyond those of the five-sensory personality. Therefore, the time has come for a higher order of logic and understanding.
The logics and understandings of the five-sensory personality originate in the mind. They are products of the intellect. The higher order of logic and understanding that is capable of meaningfully reflecting the soul comes from the heart. The creation of this higher order of logic and understanding, therefore, requires close attention to feelings.
The central position of the heart in the higher order of logic and understanding of the multisensory human, and the sensitivity to emotional currents that is characteristic of multisensory humans, appear as extraneous to the five sensory personality because they do not serve the accumulation of external power. As we have come to seek and wield external power consciously, we have come to view feelings as unnecessary appendages, like tonsils-useless, but capable of creating pain and dysfunction. Thus, the pursuit of external power has led to a repression of emotion. This is true of us as individuals and as a species.
The irrelevancy that we attribute to feelings pervades our thinking and our values. We admire the "hard-nosed" businessman who fires employees for the sake of external power. We reward the military officer who sends himself or others to pain and death for the sake of external power. We honor the statesman who is not swayed by compassion.
When we close the door to our feelings, we close the door to the vital currents that energize and activate our thoughts and actions. We cannot begin the process of understanding the effects of our emotions upon us, our environment, and other people, or the effects of the emotions of other people upon themselves, their environment, and us. Without an awareness of our emotions, we cannot associate the effects of anger, sadness, grief, and joy-within ourselves or others-with their causes. We cannot distinguish between that part of us which is personality and that part of us which is soul. Without an awareness of our feelings we cannot experience compassion. How can we share the sufferings and the joys of others if we cannot experience our own?
If we are not intimate with our emotions, we cannot perceive the dynamics that lie behind emotions, the way that these dynamics work, and the ends that they serve. Emotions are currents of energy that pass through us. Awareness of these currents is the first step in learning how our experiences come into being and why.
Emotions reflect intentions. Therefore, awareness of emotions leads to awareness of intentions. Every discrepancy between a conscious intention and the emotions that accompany it points directly to a splintered aspect of these. lf that requires healing. If, for example, your intention to marry causes pain instead of joy, following the pain will lead you to unconscious intentions. If your intention to advance in your work causes sorrow instead of satisfaction, following the sorrow will lead you to unconscious intentions.
Without an awareness of your emotions you are not able to experience reverence. Reverence is not an emotion. It is a way of being, but the path to reverence is through your heart, and only an awareness of your feelings can open your heart.
The higher order of logic and understanding of the multisensory personality reveals connections where no connections are apparent to the five-sensory personality, and meaning where no meaning is apparent to the five-sensory personality. A five-sensory personality is not able to process fully the data of its senses. Its perception of reality is segmented. Its experience of the Universe is partitioned.
The five-sensory personality can learn that internal dynamics affect perception, and formulate this as folklore or cliché, such as, "Smile and the world smiles with you." It can discover regularities within physical reality, and formulate them as laws, such as, "A body in uniform motion will remain in uniform motion until it is acted upon by a force." Yet, the five-sensory personality is not able to experience the relationships between these domains, and, therefore, is not able to learn about one from the other. It is not able to experience the same richness through each.
Science, for example, reflects the Divine impulse to become conscious of relationships that connect apparently separate aspects of experience. It is the pinnacle achievement of the five-sensory personality, yet when the fruits of science are grasped only with the logic and understanding of the five-sensory human, internal dynamics-feelings and intentions-appear to be unrelated to the world of matter. Neither supernovas nor subatomic decay rates nor anything in between appear to be affected by what human beings feel or think.
When the discoveries of science are comprehended with the logic and understanding of the multisensory human, intimate relationships appear between internal dynamics and regularities that govern physical phenomena. To the multisensory human, for example, "A body in uniform motion will remain in uniform motion until it is acted upon by a force," reflects not only a dynamic at work within the realm of time and space and matter, but also a deeper dynamic that works within nonphysical reality as well.


How is this?
One of my friends in infantry officer candidate school was a tall, affable and pleasant-looking young man from Kentucky named Hank. Hank and I liked each other early on. Several times he lent me his physical strength when my load became too heavy, and I helped him through intellectual obstacles, such as calculating artillery trajectories. We shared adventures, and our friendship grew.
Upon graduation, we were assigned to different organizations. I lost track of Hank until I ran into him in Saigon. He had been wounded, and due to the befriending of an Army General, had been assigned to a unit that I came frequently to visit. While serving in Saigon he met a popular female radio announcer, and they became engaged. It seemed a perfect match-a tall, handsome captain and a beautiful and admired public figure.
I again lost track of Hank until I had left the army. He called me to say that his wife was coming to make an appearance at a resort near me, and he asked me to meet him there. When I met Hank, now a civilian also, he looked troubled, and his easygoing manner was dampened. He had changed his name to Hal, he told me, and apologized that his wife was unable to join us. We spoke for a while, and when I asked him what he was doing with himself, he told me, "Looking for my place in the sun."
The next news that I heard of Hank/Hal was that he had killed himself. When I was later able to meet his widow, she told me a painful story of marital difficulties, of Hank's despondency, and of his suicide. In the years immediately following the Vietnam War, the rate of suicides among Vietnam veterans was significantly higher than the rate of suicides among non-veterans. Therefore, it is likely that Hank, also, was affected adversely by his experiences in Vietnam. Yet there was also a more common dynamic at work in my friend.
Hank was not the kind of person to ask himself deeper questions about his life. He did not inquire into the deeper meaning of his existence upon the Earth, because that would have caused him to change his life, and he did not want to do that. He lived his life without much reflection, and one day he awoke to overwhelming emptiness and powerlessness.
How does my friend's life relate to the first law of motion, "A body in uniform motion will remain in uniform motion until it is acted upon by a force"? What does "uniform motion" mean in terms of a human Life, and what is the "force" that alters that motion?
The outward events of Hank's life were not uniform. He grew up on a farm in Kentucky, became a military officer, traveled thousands of miles from his home, married a celebrity and brought his own life to an end. It was the unconscious quality of the flow of Hank's life that was uniform in its motion. Neither the experiences of his childhood nor his military service nor his marriage caused Hank to consider seriously the deeper meaning of his existence. The pains and the joys that flowed through him did not affect his awareness of who he was, or what he might become.
Hank did not allow himself to follow the experiences of his life to their roots. On the contrary, he feared such a pursuit. As a result, his life flowed uniformly unaware, uniformly unconscious, from its incarnation to its release. He experienced the situations that were necessary to the balancing of the energy of his soul, he responded to them in accordance with the conditioning that he had acquired through the karma of his soul and the environment into which he was born, and he created more karma unconsciously with each response.
The compassion that Hank brought into the world nurtured many people around him, including me, but he did not allow it to become his center of gravity. Hank made no effort to move toward his soul. He spent his life attempting to fulfill the wants of his personality, and he became too attached to those wants to attempt to change them. Thus, Hank's life was a "body in uniform motion" that never encountered a "force."
What is the "force" that Hank's life did not encounter?
Gregory was a white, middle-class, and college-educated man from the Northeast. His childhood was emotionally difficult, and he grew up angry, manipulative, and bitter. He was incapable of forming relationships, and his violent temper and argumentative nature kept people at a distance. This further increased Gregory's disdain for Life and for other people, but he did not stop to ask what role he played in his experiences.
When, at last, his temper and his disagreeable disposition caused the woman that he was living with to leave, Gregory fell into a deep anguish not only because of his loss, but also because he recognized in this latest event the repetition of a long-standing pattern in which he found himself, in each instance, suffering from rejection. He determined to confront both his pain and his pattern. He made arrangements to live in solitude while he searched within himself for the deepest causes of his painful life.
When he emerged, weeks later, both his perceptions and his values had changed. He began to soften, and, slowly, his old mannerisms dropped away. Over the following years he developed a more sensitive way of being with people. His cynicism gave way to an emerging joy, his anger melted, and other people became central to his life. He is a productive person now, and he draws his strength from the contributions that he makes to his fellows.
These changes did not come easily to Gregory. His transition from an angry, manipulative, disdainful person to a more caring and considerate person was a journey through pain that required much courage. Yet, by committing himself to that journey, he changed his life. From the point of view of Gregory's consciousness, the uniform flow of Gregory's life was altered significantly by his determination to confront his pain, and was altered further by his determination to cultivate his new perceptions. The "force" that altered the "uniform motion" of Gregory's life was his decision to enter into his life consciously. Without this decision, Gregory's life would have continued, as did Hank's, on the unconscious course that his karma, and his responses to the situations that it generated, would have created for him.
Is it appropriate to interpret the first law of motion which depicts the idealized movement of a physical object -in this way? Is the first law of motion, when it is interpreted in this way, merely a metaphor that conveniently serves to describe a nonphysical dynamic? It is more than that. It is the reflection in physical reality-in the world of physical objects and phenomena-of a larger nonphysical dynamic at work in nonphysical domains. This is the physics of the soul. When science and its discoveries are understood with the higher order of logic and understanding of the multisensory human, they reveal the same richness that Life, itself, displays everywhere and endlessly.
The perception of the multisensory personality is not segmented. The multisensory human, for example, sees that the paradigms which form the history of science also reveal a history of the way that our species has seen itself in relation to the Universe: Ptolemaic astronomy reflects a species that sees itself as the center of the Universe; Copernican astronomy reflects a more sophisticated and interdependent perspective of a species that recognizes itself as part of the motion of the Universe; Newtonian physics reflects a species that is confident in its ability to grasp the dynamics of the physical world through the intellect; relativity reflects a species that understands the limiting relationship between the absolute and personalized perceptions of it; and quantum physics reflects a species that is becoming aware of the relationship of its consciousness to the physical world.
In other words, from the point of view of the multisensory human, the discoveries of science illuminate both inner and outer experiences, physical and nonphysical dynamics. A foundational discovery of optics, for example, is that white and black are not colors, like blue, green and red. White is a combination of all the colors of the visible spectrum of light, and black is the absence of that spec with purity, insight, and Divine inspiration. As we shall see, this type of Light is not merely poetical. It is real.
A soul can find it difficult to walk the way of Light through the course of an incarnation. It can find that learning to live in Light is a difficult sojourn. Through the choices that it makes while it is incarnate upon the Earth -the choice of anger instead of forgiveness, for example, or condemnation instead of understanding-a soul accumulates negative karma. As it leaves its body, it remains enveloped with the quality of Light that it acquired through the choices that it made while it was upon the Earth. When that soul has to create another personality, it will have to create a personality that is drawn from this well. Therefore, it will create a personality of more limitations.
A personality with limitations of consciousness will find what we call evil more attractive than will one with a more expanded awareness. The temptation to walk that way will be strong for such a personality. All souls are tempted, but an individual with limitations of consciousness will find it more attractive to walk into the magnetic field of fear because it would not recognize fear for what it is. It would accept it as something else, as something that is normal to Life.
How we understand evil, therefore, is very significant. Evil needs to be understood for what it is: the dynamic of the absence of Light. It is not something that one should prepare to battle, to run from or to outlaw. Understanding evil as the absence of Light automatically requires that we reach for this thing called Light.
Conscious Light is equal to Divinity, to Divine Intelligence. Where there is an absence of Divine Intelligence, that darkness itself maneuvers. It is simply that there is darkness, and we stumble in the darkness. The existence in darkness is not permanent. Every soul will eventually be fully enlightened. A soul with no Light will always come to know Light because there is so much assistance provided to each soul at all times. There is much Light, as we shall see, that is continually surrounding such a soul even though it may not be able to directly penetrate it, and there is much assistance for souls that insist upon living in darkness. The encouragement to take even one thought into Light is always available. Eventually, they always do.
Understanding that evil is the absence of Light does not mean that it is inappropriate to respond to evil.
What is the appropriate response to evil?
The remedy for an absence is a presence. Evil is an absence and, therefore, it cannot be healed with an absence. By hating evil, or one who is engaged in evil, you contribute to the absence of Light and not to its presence. Hatred of evil does not diminish evil, it increases it.
The absence of Light causes the personality to suffer. There is pain. When you hate, you bring that suffering upon yourself. Hatred of evil affects the one who hates. It makes him or her a hateful person, a person who also has absented himself or herself from Light.
Understanding evil as the absence of Light does not require you to become passive, or to disregard evil actions or evil behavior. If you see a child being abused, or a people being oppressed, for example, it is appropriate that you do what you can to protect the child, or to aid the people, but if there is not compassion in your heart also for those who abuse and oppress-for those who have no compassion-do you not become like them? Compassion is being moved to and by acts of the heart, to and by the energy of love. If you strike without compassion against the darkness, you yourself enter the darkness.
Understanding that evil is the absence of Light challenges the perception of power as external. Can an absence be defeated? An evil person can be arrested, but can evil be arrested? An evil group can be imprisoned, but can evil be imprisoned? A compassionate heart is more effective against evil than an army. An army can engage another army, but it cannot engage evil. A compassionate heart can engage evil directly-it can bring Light where there was no Light.
Understanding evil as the absence of Light requires you to examine the choices that you make each moment in terms of whether they move you toward Light or away from it. It allows you to look with compassion upon those who engage in evil activities, even as you challenge their activities, and thus protects you from the creation of negative karma. It permits you to see that the place to begin the task of eliminating evil is within yourself. This is the appropriate response to evil.
The higher order of logic and understanding that characterizes the multisensory human permits it to learn more quickly than the five-sensory human is able to learn from what its senses alone tell it, and what its intellect makes of that. We have evolved as far as the intellect will take us. We have explored the scope and depth of five-sensory reality, and we have discovered the limitations of external power.
The next phase of our evolution will take us into the experiences of the multisensory human and the nature of authentic power.
This requires the heart.