Grace Light Meditation: Opening Up The Heartland

My post this week is a short chronicle from the road, deep from the heart of the Grace Light tour. Several weeks ago, I posted an article titled Amazing Grace, which explored the role of grace and divine intervention in awakening humanity to new levels of enlightened existence. Many of you responded, either in the blog comments or to me personally, and even more of you have approached me at subsequent Grace Light events.

Our planet, and all of humanity, is currently undergoing a major evolutionary transformation. This is impacting our environment, our social structures, and our individual and collective consciousness. In order to make a positive evolutionary leap, we must cultivate expanded capacities for compassion, peace and service, all of which emerge with the opening of the heart.

Great masters and mystics have long taught the necessity of awakening the heart. One such master, Dattatreya Siva Baba, an enlightened saint from the Tamil Siddha tradition of southern India has recently revealed a sacred process handed down within his lineage for awakening various centers in the subtle body, including the heart center. This process is essential, he says, to infuse the body with greater light and to activate the divine intelligence latent within us.

"Ours is a unique time in human history. A doorway is opening for each and every person to absorb profound divine energies and to be conduits for the greater awakening of the heart of humanity. This is an opportunity to be part of a global shift in human consciousness."

To help steward this transformation, he has created a series of public blessings called Igniting the Heart of Humanity which include a "Grace Light" meditation for opening the heart center. The first gathering, held just one month ago in the historic Grace Cathedral of San Francisco, involved over 700 people giving and receiving grace light with one another. Simultaneously that evening, events were held in ten cities around the world (New York, Toronto, Montreal, London, Stockholm, Frankfurt, Singapore, Chennai, etc.), with over 100,000 people participating in the Grace Light meditation globally.

Almost immediately YouTube caught wind of the program and featured the Grace Light meditation video on their homepage. Over 250,000 people watched the Grace Light meditation within 8 hours, followed by several million hits on www.thegracelight.com in just a few weeks. The message seemed to resonate.

"Our only real hope is to look deeper for the essential divinity within us," says Dattatreya Siva Baba. "Awakening compassion, love and divine intelligence on a collective scale is the only way to find permanent solutions to our problems."

As co-producer of the Grace Light tour, I've had the privilege to travel with Dattatreya Siva Baba and witness the impact first-hand. According to those who have received it (and speaking from personal experience), the Grace Light blessing is a profound healing experience. It involves opening channels in the energetic body through a process Dattatreya calls the "9-Gate process", which enables each person to become a carrier of the grace light and to emanate peace and joy into the world.

This last week the Grace Light tour rolled through the Midwest states, the heartland of America, with events in Chicago, Ann Arbor and St. Louis before heading back to Chicago and San Diego over the weekend for full-day workshops. It seemed somehow appropriate to be lighting up the heartland...not only of our country, but also of each participant.

"I have incarnated innumerable times in service to the Grace Light, as a saint or sage of nearly every religion," says Dattatreya. Even so, I am only one conduit to receive and spread the light. Who is going to transmit it? Every one of you. In this way, the light will quickly spread to all who need it. Let us all join together and embody the light and carry it to our fellow men and women."

If you are interested in attending an upcoming Grace Light event in Albuquerque, New York, Boston, Raleigh, or Washington DC, or to learn more, visit www.thegracelight.com.

Tune Into a New Channel

My previous post explored a short aphorism from the Siva Sutras - "Knowledge is Bondage" - which warned that grasping for knowledge obscures true wisdom.

Some of you expressed concern that I was condoning ignorance or apathy - quite the contrary! If you reflect more deeply on the sutra, you will see that it suggests a path toward supreme intelligence. Given the profundity of this message, I thought it worthwhile to explore further...

To start, we should make a subtle distinction between "knowledge" and "wisdom". Gaining knowledge is a process of structuring reality in a particular, defined configuration using the apparatus of the rational mind. "Rationality" comes from the root "ratio" or "ration" which means to portion, meter out, or restrict. Our rational mind uses a short-hand method for metering out reality so we can manage it. While this may seem a useful too for navigating a complex world, if we are not exceptionally careful and highly alert (which most of us are not), our rationing obscures deeper truth.

Wisdom, on the other hand, is a state non-linear intelligence free from rationalization or restriction. This intelligence is infinite. Omniscient. Indeed, enlightenment has been described as the direct apprehension of reality without the intervening gauze of preconception. The enlightened individual is free to use logic, or not, as the situation requires, since his or her experience of reality is free from conceptual restriction.

The rational mind and the omniscient mind work differently. It's something like this: Channel 2, 4, 5, 7 and hundreds of other channels are broadcasting simultaneously, yet the logical mind can only tune into one channel. Depending on our mental capacity, cultural conditioning and various other predispositions, we tune into the channel that matches our current frequency, or level of "knowledge". We resonate with people tuned into the same frequency and squabble with those on different frequencies, continually defending what we "know" to be true.

The Omniscient mind can apprehend all channels at once without any distortion or conflict. There is no separation in time or space. No distinction between cause and effect, or subject and object. There is no duality. Said another way, if you move your consciousness out of the logical mind, you can actually "tune in" to the simultaneous content of all channels. For an advanced yogi, this means direct apprehension of the fullness of reality without the intercession of any mental constructs.
In Patanjali's Yoga Sutra's, he says, "Yoga citta vrtti nirodha." Yoga is stopping the fluctuation of the mind. In his parlance, rational knowledge belongs to "citta" which is the mind. This is counterposed to "Cit" which is the wisdom or superconsciousness belonging to the heart. We are in a balanced state of union (or yoga) only when the mind ceases to fluctuate and comes into alignment with the higher intelligence of the heart.

"Hrdaye citta samghatad, drshe swapa darshanam," declares the Siva Sutras, and similarly Patanjali adds, "Hrdaye citta samvit." The essence of both of these aphorisms can be translated as "when the mind merges with the heart, supreme intelligence or pure consciousness is attained."

The goal is to release the mind from limiting constructs which obscure wisdom, so that you might become liberated in pure consciousness. In this enlightened state, you can wield logic as necessary but not rely upon it as your only tool.

If you choose, instead, to foolishly cling to your tiny bit of knowledge, it will become your bondage.

I'm certainly not proposing replacing knowledge with greater ignorance (in fact, sages and rishis would say we're in a pretty ignorant state already). I would, however, propose replacing knowledge with supreme intelligence...omniscience...the great wisdom of the heart.

Any takers?