The heart is the center

My vision is human enlightenment. It has formed out of my feeling that the concept of God as nothingness or emptiness and us being one with this formlessness doesn’t really work and even creates a disruption in the flow of light. I believe that to be a realized human means to stand exactly in the middle between humanity and divinity; between something and nothing; between person and no-self.

I believe that simplified statements like “be here and now” or “there is nothing to do, nowhere to go” are like trying to push us upward to the upper realms while disconnecting from the lower realms of our being. This freezes us and creates a very awkward type of humanity – a humanity in a sort of self-denial.

A human being is exactly as the title suggests, half human half being, and there can be no split within divinity between form and formless. The two must be a continuation of one another, complementary halves. As long as we consider ourselves as only formless, we lose touch with the meaning of life, since then being a human is more like a divine error that needs to be corrected by spiritual liberation.

Much of our current culture of alternative spirituality, however, emphasizes only the formless part.  Its enlightenment teachings put their emphasis on the liberation from the limitations of the separate self. The ideal is the breaking away from the identification with the small ego and the realization that we ourselves are the all-encompassing universal spirit. However, this type of revelation only answers another fundamental question: “Who am I?”  The answer to the question “Who am I?”, achieved through Satsang, meditation and self-inquiry, comes from the highest spheres of our being. But the answer to the question of the meaning of life comes from the core of our being, from its center – the heart. Awakening this awe-inspiring answer within our heart is thus the complementary other half of our spiritual unfolding.

My principle is that as a human buddha or enlightened human or a fully realized human we stand just in the middle, between form and formless, divinity and humanity, spirit and matter, and that this middle point has a very clear location: the heart. To be a divine human means to be located in the heart, as the place where divinity and humanity merge into one another and become one and the same. The heart is not a foreign location for humans. It is actually very intuitive, since we are first and foremost activated and driven by our emotional center. Even our attraction to intellectual concepts has emotional origins. This is the central way by which we connect to the world around us as humans. And so, the heart is the key to the vision of human enlightenment.

As long as we are not located in the heart, something very fundamental is missing in our spirituality, something so essential that it is quite astonishing that we have gotten used to being deprived of it: The very meaning of our existence – and our enlightenment, too. The heart makes us the most human and the most Godly at the same time; the most limited and the most unlimited imaginable. It is the tension and friction between these two poles of our existence that are the meaning and purpose of our existence as human beings rather than as mere free spirits. We must remember that we are here for a reason: to be humans who experience themselves as spirits and spirits who experience themselves as humans. Only such a combined awakening of both our true identity and our true purpose can make our enlightenment complete.

It’s important to understand that our role as the bridgers between divinity and humanity and humanity and divinity is not a passive one. It is actually very active and responsible. We are like a bridge that can allow the light to come down, all the way to the material plane, and that can allow humanity to come up all, the way to the formless. With every spiritual practice and every human gesture we are building this bridge.