But that’s not what happens inside most of us. Instead, it’s more like you’re driving down the street, here come the trees, here come the cars, and it’s all passing right through you with no trouble. Then, inevitably, something comes in that doesn’t make it through. There was this one car, a light blue Ford Mustang, that looked like your girlfriend’s car. But as it passed by, you noticed two people hugging in the front seat. At least it looked like they were hugging, and it sure looked like your girlfriend’s car. But it was a car just like all the other cars, wasn’t it? No. It wasn’t just like all the other cars to you.
Let’s look carefully at what happened. Surely for the camera of the eyes there’s no difference between that car and the others. There’s light bouncing off of objects, passing through your retina, and making a visual impression on your mind. So at the physical level, nothing different is going on. But at the mental level, the impression didn’t make it through. When the next moment comes, you no longer notice the rest of the trees. You’re not seeing the rest of the cars. Your heart and mind are fixated on that one car, even though it’s gone. You’ve got yourself a problem here. There’s a blockage, an event that got stuck. All the subsequent experiences are trying to pass through you, but something has happened inside that has left this past experience unfinished.
What happens to that experience that didn’t make it through? Specifically, what happens to the image of the girlfriend’s car if it doesn’t just fade away into deep memory like everything else? At some point, you’ll have to stop focusing on it in order to deal with something else—like the next stoplight. What you don’t realize is that your entire experience of life is about to change because of what didn’t make it through you. Life must now compete with this blocked event for your attention, and the impression does not just sit in there quietly. You will see that your tendency is to think about it constantly. This is all in an attempt to find a way to process it through your mind. You didn’t need to process the trees, but you need to process this. Because you resisted, it got stuck, and now you have a problem. You see the thoughts start up: “Well, maybe it wasn’t her. Of course it wasn’t her. How could that possibly have been?” Thought after thought goes on inside. It drives you crazy in there. All that inner noise is just your attempt to process the blocked energy and get it out of the way.
Long term, the energy patterns that cannot make it through you are pushed out of the forefront of the mind and held until you are prepared to release them. These energy patterns, which hold tremendous detail about the events associated with them, are real. They don’t just disappear. When you are unable to allow life’s events to pass through you, they stay inside and become a problem. These patterns may be held within you for a very long time.
It is not easy to keep energy together in one place for long. As you willfully struggle to keep these events from passing through your consciousness, the energy first tries to release by manifesting through the mind. This is why the mind becomes so active. When the energy can’t make it through the mind because of conflicts with other thoughts and mental concepts, it then tries to release through the heart. That is what creates all the emotional activity. When you resist even that release, the energy gets packed up and forced into deep storage within the heart. In the yogic tradition, that unfinished energy pattern is called a Samskara. This is a Sanskrit word meaning “impression,” and in the yogic teachings it is considered one of the most important influences affecting your life. A Samskara is a blockage, an impression from the past. It’s an unfinished energy pattern that ends up running your life.
In order to understand this, let’s first take an in-depth look at the physics behind these blocked energy patterns. Just like energy waves, the energy that comes into you must keep moving. But that doesn’t mean it can’t get blocked within you. There is a way that the energy can both keep moving and stay in one place—and that is to circle around itself. We see this in atoms and in planetary orbits. Everything is energy, and energy will just expand outward if it is not contained. For there to be manifest creation, energy must get in the dynamic of cycling around itself to create a stable unit. That’s why energy manifesting as an atom forms the basic building block of this entire physical universe. Energy cycles around itself, and as we’ve discovered, atoms have enough harnessed energy to blow up the world when that energy is released. But unless forced otherwise, the energy will stay harnessed because of its equilibrium state.
This process of cycling energy is exactly what happens with a Samskara. A Samskara is a cycle of stored past energy patterns in a state of relative equilibrium. It is your resistance to experiencing these patterns that causes the energy to keep cycling around itself. There is no other place for it to go. You won’t let it. This is how most people process their issues. This packet of cycling energy is literally stored in your energetic heart center. All the Samskaras you have collected over your life are stored there.
To fully appreciate what this means, let’s go back to the example of the light blue Mustang that looked like your girlfriend’s car. Once the disturbed energy patterns are packaged and stored in the heart, they are basically inactive. It may look to you like you have handled the situation and that you have no more issues with that experience. You may not even mention the event to your girlfriend because it would look like you were jealous. You didn’t know what to do, so you resisted the energy, and it got stored in the heart where it could fall into the background and not be bothersome. While it may seem like it’s done, like it is all over and gone, it really isn’t.
Every one of the Samskaras that you’ve stored is still there. Everything that did not make it through you, from the time you were a baby all the way to this moment, is still inside of you. It is these impressions, these Samskaras, that encrust the valve of the spiritual heart. That encrustation builds up and restricts the energy flow.
Now that we understand where the blockages within the heart come from, we have answered the structural question of how the heart gets blocked. You can certainly see the potential for impressions to build up to the point where very little energy can make it through. If they build up sufficiently, you will find yourself in a state of depression. In that state, all becomes dark. This is because very little energy is coming into your heart or mind. Eventually, everything appears negative because the world of the senses must pass through this depressed energy before it gets to your consciousness.
But even if you aren’t prone to depression, your heart still gets blocked over time. It just builds up. It doesn’t always stay blocked, however. Depending upon life’s experiences, it can open and close quite frequently. This leads us to our next question: What is the cause of these frequent changes in the state of the heart? If you watch carefully, you will see it is related to the same stored past impressions that caused the blockages.
The stored energy patterns are real. A Samskara is actually programmed with the specific details of the event that could not pass through. If you experience jealousy because you thought you saw your girlfriend hugging someone in a car, very detailed data about that event is stored in the Samskara. It has that event’s vibration, it has that event’s nature, and it even retains your level of sensitivity about the event.
To see this, let’s watch what happens in the future. It’s five years later and you’re no longer with your old girlfriend. You’ve married someone else and you’re much more mature. One day you’re out driving along with the family having a wonderful time. The trees are going by, the cars are going by, and then a light blue Mustang drives by with two people hugging in the front seat. Immediately, something changes in your heart. Your heart actually skips a beat. Then it starts beating faster. You start getting moody, irritated, and agitated. You aren’t having such a nice day anymore. All of these inner changes occur because your heart got disturbed when you saw one particular car. It is truly amazing to step back and look at this process. Five years ago, for just a few moments, an event took place. You never discussed it wit
h anybody, and now five years later, a light blue Mustang drives by and it changes the energy flow through your heart and mind.
As unbelievable as this seems, it is true. And it’s not only true about light blue Mustangs; it’s true about everything that didn’t make it through you. No wonder we’re so overwhelmed. No wonder the heart keeps opening and closing. The energy that’s stored there is real, and it interacts with the flow of current thoughts and events. The dynamics of this interaction cause the vibrations that are stored as Samskaras to get activated, sometimes years later. This is what happened with the light blue Mustang. Understand, however, that it didn’t even have to be the identical car to activate the stored energy. It could have been a black Mustang or any car with people hugging. Anything in the neighborhood has the potential to stimulate a Samskara.
The point is that past impressions do get stimulated, even old ones, and they affect your life. Sensory inputs from today’s events dig through all the stuff you have stored through the years, and they restore the exact past patterns associated with the incoming events. When a Samskara is stimulated, it opens like a flower and begins to release the stored energy. Suddenly, flashes of what you experienced when the original event took place rush into your consciousness—the thoughts, the feelings, sometimes even the smells and other sensory input. The Samskara can store a complete snapshot of the event. It is way beyond any computer storage system created by human beings. It can archive everything you were feeling, everything you were thinking, and everything that was happening surrounding the event. All this information is stored into a tiny energy bubble within your heart. Years later it gets stimulated, and instantly you are experiencing the feelings you felt in the past. You can actually feel the fears and the insecurity of a five-year-old when you’re sixty. What is happening is that unfinished mental and emotional energy patterns are getting stored and reactivated.
But it is just as important to realize that most of what you take in does not get blocked; it makes it right through you. Imagine how many things you see all day. They’re not all stored like that. Of all these impressions, the only ones that get blocked are those that cause either problems or some extraordinary sense of enjoyment. Yes, you store positive impressions too. When a wonderful experience happens to you, it doesn’t make it through because you cling to it. Clinging means “I don’t want this one to go away. He told me he loved me and I felt so loved and protected. I want to keep reliving that moment. Play it back for me over and over again…” Clinging creates positive Samskaras, and when these are stimulated, they release positive energy. Hence two kinds of experiences can occur that block the heart. You are either trying to push energies away because they bother you, or you are trying to keep energies close because you like them. In both cases, you are not letting them pass, and you are wasting precious energy by blocking the flow through resisting and clinging.
The alternative is to enjoy life instead of clinging to it or pushing it away. If you can live like that, each moment will change you. If you are willing to experience the gift of life instead of fighting with it, you will be moved to the depth of your being. When you reach this state, you will begin to see the secrets of the heart. The heart is the place through which energy flows to sustain you. This energy inspires you and raises you. It is the strength that carries you through life. It is the beautiful experience of love that pours through your whole being. This is meant to be going on inside you at all times. The highest state you have ever experienced is simply the result of how open you were. If you don’t close, it can be like that all the time. Don’t sell yourself short. This can go on all the time—unending inspiration, unending love, and unending openness. That is the natural state of a healthy heart.
To achieve this state, simply allow the experiences of life to come in and pass through your being. If old energies come back up because you were unable to process them before, let go of them now. It’s that easy. When that light blue Mustang drives by and you feel fear or jealousy, just smile. Be happy that this Samskara, which has been stored down there for all this time, has the opportunity to make it through you. Just open, relax your heart, forgive, laugh, or do anything you want. Just don’t push it back down. Of course it hurts when it comes up. It was stored with pain; it’s going to release with pain. You have to decide if you want to continue to walk around with stored pain blocking your heart and limiting your life. The alternative is to be willing to let it go when it gets stimulated. It only hurts for a minute and then it’s over.
So, you have a choice: Do you want to try to change the world so it doesn’t disturb your Samskaras, or are you willing to go through this process of purification? Don’t make decisions based on stimulated blockages. Learn to be centered enough to just watch this stuff come up. Once you sit deeply enough inside to stop fighting the stored energy patterns, they’ll come up constantly and pass right through you. They’ll come up during the day and they’ll even come up in your dreams. Your heart will become accustomed to the process of releasing and cleansing. Just let it all happen. Get it over with. Don’t process them one by one; that’s too slow. Stay centered behind them and let go. Just like the physical body purges bacteria and other foreign matter, the natural flow of your energy will purge the stored patterns from your heart.
Your reward is a permanently open heart. There is no more valve. You live in love, and it feeds you and strengthens you. That is an open heart. That is the instrument of the heart as it was meant to be. Allow yourself to experience every note the heart can play. If you relax and release, this purification of your heart is a wonderful thing. Set your eyes on the highest state you can imagine and don’t take them off. If you slip, just get back up. It doesn’t matter. The very fact that you even want to go through this process of freeing the energy flow means you are great. You will get there. Just keep letting go.
7
transcending the tendency to close
The foundations of spiritual growth and personal awakening are very much strengthened by the findings of Western science. Science has shown us how an underlying energy field forms into atoms, which then bind together into molecules, and ultimately manifest into the entire physical universe. The same is true inside of us. All that goes on inside also has its foundation in an underlying energy field. It is the movements in this field that create our mental and emotional patterns as well as our inner drives, urges, and instinctual reactions. Regardless of what you call this inner force field—Chi, Shakti, or Spirit—it is an underlying energy that flows in particular patterns through your inner being.
When looking at these patterns within yourself, as well as in other living species, it is not difficult to see that the most primal energy flow is the survival instinct. During eons of evolution, from the simplest of living forms to the most complex, there has always been the day-to-day struggle to protect oneself. In our highly evolved cooperative social structures, this survival instinct has gone through evolutionary changes. Many of us no longer lack food, water, clothing, or shelter; nor do we regularly face life-threatening physical danger. As a result, the protective energies have adapted toward defending the individual psychologically, rather than physiologically. We now experience the daily need to defend our self-concepts rather than our bodies. Our major struggles end up being with our own inner fears, insecurities, and destructive behavior patterns, and not with outside forces.
Nonetheless, the same impulses that make a deer run away urge you to run away. Suppose somebody raises their voice at you or talks about an uncomfortable subject. These are not physically threatening circumstances, yet your heart starts pumping a little faster. That’s exactly what happens to deer whenever they hear a sudden sound. Their hearts start pumping faster, and they either freeze or run away. In your case, however, it’s not usually the kind of fear that causes you to physically run away. It’s just a deep, personal fear demanding protection.
Since it’s not socially acceptable to run into the woods and hide like a deer, you hide inside.
You withdraw, close down, and pull back behind your protective shield. What you are actually doing is closing down your energy centers. Even if you don’t know you have energy centers, you’ve been closing them since kindergarten. You know exactly how to close your heart and put up a psychological protective shield. You know exactly how to close down the centers to avoid being too receptive and sensitive to the different energies coming in and causing fear.
When you close down and protect yourself, you are pulling a shell around the part of you that is weak. This is the part that feels it needs protection even though no physical attack is taking place. You are protecting your ego, your self-concept. Although a situation may present no physical danger, it may cause you to experience disturbance, fear, insecurity, and other emotional problems. So you feel the need to protect yourself.
The problem is that the part of you that gets disturbed is way out of balance. It’s so sensitive that the slightest little thing causes it to overreact. You are living on a planet spinning around the middle of outer space, and you’re either worrying about your blemishes, the scratch on your new car, or the fact that you burped in public. It’s not healthy. If your physical body were that sensitive, you would say you were sick. But our society considers psychological sensitivities normal. Because most of us don’t have to worry about food, clothing, or shelter, we have the luxury of worrying about a spot on our pants, or laughing too loud, or saying something wrong. Because we’ve developed this hypersensitive psyche, we constantly use our energies to close around it and protect ourselves. But this process only hides the problems; it doesn’t fix them. You’re locking your illness inside yourself, and it will only get worse.
The Untethered Soul Page 6
