The first stage of our practice concerns WHEN we activate one or more heart virtues. As I began to think about this stage, however, it suddenly seemed that I should be transmitting the heart virtues all the time. I asked myself, “Shouldn’t the divine love in our hearts be flowing from us all the time?” The answer came almost immediately, “Yes, but it needs to be detected, accepted, and passed on for the energy circuit to be completed, otherwise the energy is never put to use.” We may have all the electrical power we need, but if we never turn on the switch, no one receives the benefit of light.
Naturally, this brought up the next question of why I was not always in touch with these heart energetics. I won’t go into the details here, but I will say that generally speaking, my reasons are probably quite similar to your reasons. They have to do with our egos and the defense mechanisms that often set us at odds with those around us. Examining the deeper issues of our ego shortcomings is beyond the scope of this guide, but some of these difficulties will most likely come to the forefront of our awareness as we engage the when-which-how practice.
This, in fact, is the core issue of emotional self-mastery—we should be receiving the energetics of the heart and transmitting them to everyone (including ourselves) all the time, but we don’t for many reasons. We may feel that we are unworthy, that we are sinners, or that we are not meant to. As an agent of the soul, the heart continuously transmits divine love in the form of the six heart virtues, but we are not receiving and transmitting the signals. And if we are, the energetics are too often distorted and/or diluted by our ego-personality filters. This is not something to blame ourselves or others for, but is simply our current situation. We should acknowledge this without blame and work to correct the deficiencies.
The point for now is to realize that the goal of emotional self-mastery is to reach a state of continuous loving outflow. This state of consciousness represents a stage of development and this stage and state are that of the soul. Here are two quotes from “Living from the Heart.”
This is the goal of the when-which-how practice: to draw your soul into the experience of the body-mind, and enable it to lead the expression of your life in the domains of timespace.
It is not an exaggeration to say that if you possess emotional self-mastery, you live as soul upon the earth with minimal distortion from your physical body and mind.
Here, at the beginning of practicing when-which-how, this may seem like an ideal beyond our reach, but I believe we can not only reach it, but that we are meant to reach it—we are in fact, designed to reach it. This is our destiny.
