Returning to Center: Intro to Heart Light/Clear Light Practice;Returning to Center During Transition;Intro to Clear Light/Heart Light Practice;A Brief Intro to Earth Transition

January 21, 1998 Wednesday Evening with Aaron

Returning to Center: Intro to Heart Light/Clear Light Practice;Returning to Center During Transition;Intro to Clear Light/Heart Light Practice;A Brief Intro to Earth Transition

Aaron: Good evening and my love to you all. I am Aaron. In the past 4 days this instrument has been tossing and turning in her bed with a high fever, often experiencing fever-induced dreams and nightmares, the various visions of a half-drugged state from medication and so forth. There were a number of occasions when she heard me say to her, “Be still. Come back to center.” And at first her response to me was, “I’ve lost center, Aaron.”

All of you through your lives have times when you seem to lose center, lose touch with that place of light and radiance within, that place of clarity. Sometimes it occurs through physical illness, sometimes in times of emotional turmoil. For this instrument, although she said, “I have lost center”, fortunately through her practice she has learned the landmarks that can return her to center. You are like navigators sailing on a vast open sea. The stars are always there to guide you. But you must know the placement of the stars or they cannot help you navigate. As long as you know the placement of the stars, you cannot get lost. There must be something you can turn to which you cannot lose, and which, in your practice, becomes so strongly reinforced a turning point that you turn to it intuitively, whatever pain, turmoil, or negative thought or emotion arise.

I am occasionally asked about the process of death. In reviewing our notes of many years, I do see that this is an area that I have not spoken of deeply. So I want to take advantage of our time tonight to draw two things together: the process of death itself, and why it is essential in your practice to orient yourself to that star by which you can navigate. Not a star our there, a star in here, in your heart.

If that star is radiant, if you know where and how to look for it, you can never get lost no matter how dense the darkness. Most of you have heard me describe the basics of the dying process. Essentially you’re not going anywhere, you’re merely moving from one stage of being to another. We can think of it as a doorway. The exit from one room is the entrance to another room. You fear because you cannot see into the next room, but it is peopled only by the products of your mind.

In this incarnative experience, everything you experience on the material plane is strongly influenced by the filters through which you see it. It is not “what it is” but “what you think it is”. Several weeks ago, this instrument and her son and dogs were walking through the woods, and one of the dogs began to sniff at something on the ground. As this instrument approached, it looked liked nothing more than a regurgitated pile of food, a pile of vomit. The dog started to poke his nose into it. She said, “No” and pulled the dog away, and felt a deep sense of nausea in herself, began to gag. Her son said, “Why are you gagging?” She said, “Because he’s eating vomit.” Her son pointed to a can lying on the ground a few feet away: Spam. He’s eating spam. Not good for him, don’t let him eat it. But not vomit. The gagging stopped immediately. It’s all in your mind.

When you leave this material plane and move into the astral plane, the creations of your mind go with you. They are not any the less dense-seeming after the transition than they were before. If anything, because there is no stability of the material plane on which to ground your experience, the mind can be more erratic in every direction. Finding more angels, more sunrises, finding more demons and horror. Whatever you believe, you create the energy of it in your mind and it is to that energy that you relate. It has absolutely nothing to do with any “real” experience. Was there really vomit on the ground? But what she saw had the power to make this instrument gag, almost to vomit herself. There was nothing there. A can of Spam, half eaten. What kinds of demons or other hideous things do you imagine you might find on the other side of this transition experience? They may be enough to make you want to flee, to scream, to cower. They are not even based on the relative reality of a can of Spam. There’s nothing there but your mind.

That does not mean that there is never anything else there. You will encounter spirit. You may meet me!. You may encounter what seems to be past loved ones. Certainly there are what we would term realities that have some substance, as opposed to the substanceless myths. Is this loved one you meet, dressed in the clothing of its lifetime, really presented that way? There is an energy, but you cloth it.

Will you be able to tell apart the mind creation from anything of substance. Will you be able to find truth? ? Mind can do all kinds of tricks. Negativity does not act in strong ways but is often very subtle. It greets you with an beckoning finger, (whispered) “Come here! Come here! Shhhh! I have a secret just for you! Just for you! You can’t trust anybody here, just you and me here. I want to tell you about your power, but don’t tell anybody.” Are you going to believe it? What do you use as a filter to bring you back to the place of center, back to the place of truth?

I am not suggesting, my dear ones, that when you cross this transition you’re going to be surrounded by wave after wave of negativity. Please be assured that there may be positive and loving support, support that in your heart you know you can trust, that is truth. But of course there will also be whatever negativity you have carried with you.

I see several reasons for meditation practice. Vipassana practice helps you learn to be present and that is an essential beginning for everything else. In vipassana practice you learn to see the impermanence in all things and to know their deep interconnectedness. You learn through those insights and understandings to find this thread we call center, this heart of unconditioned, or naked awareness, and more firmly to rest there. Vipassana practice does not speak of itself as preparation for the transition into non-material form, but in fact it is such preparation. No matter what appears, you have learned how to be more spacious with it, more present.

Some teaching takes us on a different approach. For some Tibetan practitioners, practice is less about purifying the energy in this incarnation simply for the sake of acting in more loving and skillful ways in the incarnation, than it is about preparing oneself for the transition beyond one’s incarnation.

There is a very essential practice within this tradition which I have been teaching to this instrument for about a year. We have worked with it intensively this week in this drugged sleep in which she tossed and turned. It is an ideal practice to strengthen yourselves precisely for that time when you say, “I can’t find center. I don’t know what to do.” It is a practice which so deeply orients you to the radiance of the brilliant star that you cannot lose it.

I would like to begin to teach you this practice, then. It’s not something we will complete in one night and we will not do it over consecutive weeks in this assembly but will do it once or twice a month for perhaps 6 meetings. This is called the practice of clear light or heart light. A few of you have already worked a bit with me with this practice and I ask those people’s pardon for any repetition I offer here as we teach this to the rest of the group.

I would ask you now to sit up. Posture is important here for a free flow of energy through your bodies.

(pause while everyone adjusts)

I would like you to begin by bringing your hands up and touching with a light but steady pressure on the heart center. This is not to create discomfort, just to focus your attention on the heart center. You are of course all familiar with the 7 chakras. I’m not going to go into details now of the energy channels of the body. Perhaps I will detail that at another night’s session. Perhaps we’ll not get involved with it at all. All you really need to know is that you have the ability to draw energy into the heart center, literally.

Sitting as you are, I ask you to experience any energy coming in through the crown chakra and dropping down into the heart; energy coming from the base from the earth, up into the heart. It does not actually come up and down the central energy meridian whereon the chakras lie, but moves up and down the 2 side channels. At the heart there is a junction, a place where the energy may be brought into the center. Many of you have had the experience of drawing energy into the solar plexus center area at a time when you wanted to be strong. It’s something you do almost naturally. What you are going to do now is very parallel to that but you will draw energy into the heart center. I cannot tell you how to do it. There will be as many different techniques as there are people in the room. But you can do it.

Begin by offering the intention to allow yourself to experience the heart filled with clear radiant light. The intention to be a channel for the energy of the universe, allowing the heart to radiate that light which is nothing other than the divine light itself.

Breathing in… drawing the light and energy down from the crown and up from the base… breathing out… allowing it to fill the heart… Breathing in more energy, more light… breathing out… feeling the heart becoming full, radiant, open…

Breathing in… energy, brilliance… breathing out… not releasing that radiance but entering its home within the heart… Feel the heart expanded, shining… full…

With each inhale, feel it expand even further until it is a shining sun within you…

You’re not trying to do anything with it. You’re not trying to create it, only to allow the experience of that which is already there. Most of you have worked with me on the expanding outward, the practices of releasing boundaries . This is another such, but you’re expanding inward, falling into the radiant sun, the clear light of the heart…

That’s all I want you to do for this first step. Let’s sit for 2 or 3 minutes in silence. Breathing in, feeling that radiance and allowing your whole being to fall into it. To be lost in it. To dissolve into it… Radiant… Brilliant…

pause

It is the fullness of everything, nothing lacking…

pause

For those of you for whom this feels manufactured, as if you were making up a fairy tale, I first want to reassure you that this is there, has always been there, you’re not making anything up. If you feel that you cannot really experience it, that it’s conceptual, just go with the concept. Let imagination be your ally here. Visualize a sun burning in your heart. How would that feel?

pause

If there is a tension which does not want to accommodate such a radiance within, then please just observe the tension and soften a bit. Not trying to chase it away but knowing that resistance does not change what is.

pause

(Bell sounds three times)

We will go into detail about the following steps in future weeks. I want to draw you a very brief map, a very superficial map. The first step is just this and this is all I wish you to practice for now. Inviting in the heart light, allowing yourself to rest there. In a future week we will observe that heart light, shaping into a brilliant, radiant diamond. We see that it can be an expansive sun or it can shrink, contract itself.

This instrument has spoken to most of you about her own personal meditation experiences of the unconditioned expressing out into the conditioned world in the form of a cornucopia. The Unconditioned is the tiny center at the base of the cornucopia and the whole conditioned realm expresses out of that base. This heart light, in essence, is the base of Unconditioned, that tip of the cornucopia. So in a future week we will speak of how to allow it to contract itself into that infinite brilliance. And then in future weeks, I want to teach you how to work with whatever catalyst comes to you, drawing it into that heart light. It’s like taking the conditioned world that is expressed out there and bringing it home, seeing that there’s nothing there but the Unconditioned, nothing but God.

If, for example, a demon is after you, and you see that demon as something other than the divine, it calls forth in you all kinds of fear and desire to attack and control, the whole illusion of separation. But when you remember to draw that demon back into the heart light, all that’s left is the divine core. Everything dissolves in that clear light. Everything is seen as conditioned substance and in its origin, divine. Thus, everything loses its power except this expression of the divine, and there’s nothing to fear.

This is related to dzogchen but it’s not quite dzogchen. Most of you, who have done dzogchen practice, will find that practice is quite helpful as we move into this clear light practice, even if you’ve felt that you’ve not perfected your dzogchen practice. So long as you have some basic understanding of that expanded outward state, that will aid you. Dzogchen is part of the pathway, this is the finishing touch. It really is a practice of ultimate freedom. You are all very far from the end of your incarnation but it is never too early to practice.

Practice is useful such as this instrument experienced this week. When you can’t find center, and you call forth this heart light – when the various demons of pain, discomfort, fear and aloneness are arising and you invite them into this heart light – this is all you will need to do after the transition. Your skill at doing it then depends on your practice doing it now. It is not the only practice. Your continued insight practices are important. Your ability to live this life with love, with kindness, with skill. But this enhances the other of course.

So I will teach you this practice step by step, offering you ample time to ask questions, and to practice with it for several weeks before we begin a new step. I am happy now to hear your questions. I thank you for your attention. That is all.

Barbara: Aaron is asking, as we did that could you at least get some sense of this energy? Only conceptually? He says, Okay, that’s fine. He says, one way to work with it, D, is to take someone, M, for example, to think of M and bring him into your heart. And to feel your heart and feel the love of him, and to allow that light and spaciousness to be in focus. He says it doesn’t have to be pure light, just some sense of radiance there.

Others? Was everybody able at least to get some small sense of light in that area? Yes.

Q: It is interesting for me, in the bodywork at hospice primarily, is using these diamond shapes in focusing energy around the heart as a guided support to the individual.

Barbara: Others? Any comments?

Q: I’m not sure I had much conceptual experience, but I certainly did feel a very intense burning sensation. I thought maybe it was the heat from my hands, and indeed it may have been, partially. But I moved my hands away and I still felt it.

Aaron: I am Aaron. I am happy you experienced that energy, my brother. That you experienced this as burning is not a problem. Each of you will experience this differently. There’s no one right or wrong way. You simply want to note potential difficulties as they arise so they do not become hindrances to your practice. For example, if it is too strong a sensation of burning, it could become a discomfort or place of fear.

I think you are all familiar with the concept of a black hole. We begin with the experience of a sun in the heart, but the next step is to invite it on to its logical conclusion as a white hole. That is, a tremendous crystal, a diamond of radiant light, infinitely brilliant. The smaller it gets, the more brilliant it gets. It will eventually begin to be felt as a cool light. Here it no longer burns in the same way.

Again, to whatever degree visualization is useful to you, please do it. Some people find it useful literally to stare at some kind of small gemstone such as a small piece of crystal or even a diamond.

This light, this diamond in the heart, becomes the basis of the passageway through which you travel. You’ve heard people talking about walking through a tunnel during the death experience, seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. It’s a loooong tunnel. The light is a very tiny speck. But it’s not way out there, it’s in your heart.

Remember to keep this slow. So long as this blazing sun is not in any way discomforting to you for now, for this next week or two, let it be a blazing sun. And then we will further discuss allowing it to contract itself into this heart diamond. But if there’s a sense of burning that creates discomfort, you can allow that cooling and shrinking to begin now. I pause.

Barbara: He asks, does that make sense to you all? He says, Tibetan practice is very visual, it works with all kinds of visualizations. It works with immense realms of various kinds of deities and so forth in whom the people have a real belief and a real relationship; that makes it easier to get into the visualizations. It’s hard for many of us because we’re not in that Tibetan mindset. He says, but we don’t have to be. That’s not necessary. It just makes the path a little bit more difficult. If we persist, we will have the same results. But with more presence, because we don’t have to call up all this visualization to support our experience.

He wants to emphasize that to whatever degree you experience this is fine, and to relax and just let it be. Don’t try to make anything special happen.

He’s asking me if I will take a minute to describe what I was doing these past days. Basically, most of the time I was asleep, and I was having strange dreams. Some of them were high-fever kind of dreams. Weird things running around, occasionally chasing me. Bottoms falling out of things. Uncomfortable experiences. And each time I would experience something like that, I would simply hear Aaron’s voice say, “Open to the heart light and draw the whole experience into your heart.” And whatever was there, I would draw it into my heart and feel it dissolve and then fall back asleep into a very peaceful slumber. I must have done it a hundred times a day, these past 4 days. It’s been very powerful because everything just lost its solidity like that (snaps fingers) . You know those kinds of dreams, you’re half-awake and you go back to sleep and the dream is still there, it just keeps running; it didn’t have that quality at all. It just was very clean and stopped. There was a deep slumber for awhile and then another thing would come up.

Aaron says it’s important to note that we do the same thing not just with dreams, not just with nighttime dreams, but with anything. With our anger, our fear, our physical pain, everything can be invited into this heart light. You are not inviting it in to get rid of it. If there’s physical pain, for example, you are not trying to be rid of the physical pain so much as to have a different perspective on the physical pain, to release some of the tension around the pain. So, whatever is there, anger, fear, he says this heart light becomes like the north star, it’s always there, you can always see it. And we can always set our bearings by it and whatever is there, just invite it into this light.

He started working with me in this practice at my retreat last spring, so I’ve been doing it for about a year. It’s very connected for me to dzogchen and vipassana, there’s no way I could separate them, it’s just a logical extension of them both. That’s all. Any questions?

Q: On the way over here, I was talking to (I.). She had tapes, Tibetan tapes about death. And she was saying that he said in the tape that we have to let go of everything when we die; all the people we love… And it suddenly made me feel very frightened. And I was thinking about the people who have near-death experiences who often don’t want to come back. And I myself have had a death experience when I worked with Stan Graf. So I don’t understand why I got so frightened.

Aaron: I am Aaron. The concept and the reality do not match, here, Rebecca. I think what frightens you is the fear of loss. To say the words, “You must let go of everything.” On one level, these are true words. You can’t take human experience beyond the transition of death. You can take the memory of human experience but not the experience itself. You cannot take that specific relationship you had as human beyond the experience of death because here in your relationship each of you is bound into this density with its own veil of forgetting. No matter how awakened the human, there is still the density of the bodies which filters all experience.

This does not mean that you cannot take relationship and love with you through the transition. If you love somebody here, you will continue to love the essence of that person. If you are loved by somebody, you will continue to be loved. If that person continues to exist as a human, that human that they are will think of you with love. When that person also makes the transition, rather than humans each caught in their own separate worlds, striving to love and relate to one another, you will be two spirits with a much clearer sense of each other, both of the illusion and the reality of the boundaries that proclaim self.

I would prefer to say, you can’t hold on to anything, than to say you can’t take anything with you. To hold onto means to be attached, to cling. The one who begins the transition and continues to cling is the one who is living in a delusion and will spend as much time as is necessary to break free of that delusion and enter the clarity of the astral plane. You cannot enter the clarity of the astral plane and still hold on to anything. So there is this in-between or bardo of letting go, of returning to clarity. That period is made much more comfortable and easy, and offers the result of freedom from samsara, when “letting go” or non-holding as practice has been perfected in the incarnation.

It’s very useful, then, to observe the ways you are holding on, the way fear is prompting attachment. To practice bringing fear and any other heavy emotion into the light; literally, in this case. I have spent years teaching you how to make space for heavy emotion. This next step can only be begun when there is that space, when there is some degree at least of equanimity with pain, with fear, with loss. This next step is how to release it.

So I think that the tension you experienced, Q, is based upon hearing the words, “You can’t take anything with you,” and a fear that you will find yourself in some empty space where you are not touched by or are touching anything. Some void. That is exactly opposite from the reality. I pause.

Q: You said that when you were sick and dreaming, you would take in the experience into the heart light and it would dissolve, dissipate. What did that feel like?

Barbara: I need to go back and talk about this from a step back in order to answer clearly..

I spent a lot of time last summer sitting on the dock out at the lake, doing this practice in three parts, feeling the sense of the light in the heart with my eyes closed. Really feeling that. Then opening my eyes, doing a kind of dzogchen practice, just expanding outward, and then drawing everything back in, into the heart, just, all boundaries falling away, but with a very keen sense of continuation of this… it was like instead of expanding out there, (pointing out) I was expanding into here. (pointing to heart Can you picture what I mean? It’s like a funnel that comes down to a tiny point. You can expand from the base of the funnel right out, no boundaries left, and then you do a reverse and you come back to that tiny point of the funnel and through. Everything comes from there. And you can cut through it, into it. There’s nothing there but light. If you keep going into that light, It’s like it opens into a whole new realm. It doesn’t stay small, it gets bigger, but it’s like the eye of a needle, it opens through.

So what I was doing was expanding during dzogchen, expanding outward but very aware of this light and also expanding inward into this light. Then as a thought or physical sensation would arise, and I would notice a tension around that, I would simply ask myself, per Aaron’s instruction, to invite it into the light, with no effort to get rid of it, no effort even to change it, just to let it be seen in the truth of this light. And as I brought it into the light, there was nothing separate there, nothing solid there that I needed to contract against. This wasn’t concept bu experience. The light was “real” not just an idea.

The release was not letting go of that particular thought or physical sensation, it was a letting go of any contraction around that thought or physical sensation. Just seeing it dissolve into nothing. It would be like if somebody had a giant ice cube they were lowering from the sky, and I looked out and said, “It’s going to be icy cold!” And suddenly the sun came out and melted it, and it was just water. There’s nothing there. The water turned to steam, to vapor, to mist. So, every thought or sensation began to be experienced in that way and brought back into this heart space. A very very freeing, very empowering experience.

How it felt in my dream was the same way, very freeing, very spacious. After awhile, Aaron stopped needing to remind me.

I will tell you more in April after my next retreat. I find the past few days I’ve been able to maintain this to a good part in my sleep, but on a daily basis it’s been difficult to maintain that intensity of brilliance, especially while feeling very sick. I have been coughing and the pain of that really pulled me up short (Barbara had pneumonia) But when I meditate and there’s something that’s disturbing, I am able to come back to that.

Aaron says he wants to remark here (I’m paraphrasing him) that no practice is useful for everybody. For anybody here for whom this is difficult, that’s OK. He says that is not the only practice, it’s just one practice which he finds it a highly valuable in preparation for the experience of death and the kinds of illusions that come up as we move through that transition, because we really learn to take everything and just bring it back into the unconditioned aspect of ourselves and really to rest there, no matter what chaos is going on around us. And then our mind will create whatever chaos it creates, based on our karma and experiences. But whatever comes up, it’s just what’s there.

Are there other questions?

Q: Do you think that is why you had this illness, as a way to practice this?

Barbara: No! I think I had the illness because my son came home from school with flu and I took care of him and not of myself, when I caught the flu. Whatever comes up, we can put to good use if we choose to.

It was interesting to me to see to what degree I could focus even at a time when I felt I can’t possibly focus. I was reading a book that D gave me called The Bean Tree. I would read 2 or 3 pages and doze off, and all the images and characters in the book would come into my dreams. It was very strange.

Q: I am reminded of a statement by Ram Dass. He said, “Death’s very safe.”

Barbara: Aaron says it feels like if you’ve been deep underwater and you feel all closed in, and you suddenly glide through the water, and then come up to the surface.

Q: Emmanuel said it is like taking off the tight shoe.

Barbara: It’s got to be safe, we’ve done it however many times! We’ve survived it somehow.

There have been a lot of questions coming in in the last 2 weeks over email from a few people about things Aaron doesn’t usually talk much about. This whole transition into New Age harvest, if you’re familiar with that word– anybody familiar with that word as used in these terms? That there is a shift going on on the earth plane. Some people are trying to pin down a year when it will happen and Aaron says it’s a process. He says can you tell me when you “grew up”? Somewhere between the ages of 15 and 35, or 45 or 55, you suddenly looked back and said, “I guess I’m a grown-up.” So the thing that interests me that Aaron said about that, I would like to ask him to repeat to you one brief thing that I found very interesting. And I think we will stop at that point and if this sparks any questions we’ll pick them up next week.

Aaron: I am Aaron. A small bit of intergalactic politics, here. The earth plane is a very important plane of expansion. The power of beings to grow strongly in compassion and wisdom as they come through the earth plane has been proven. In this you, who enter incarnate experience, are explorers.

You know that there are negatively polarized beings as well as positively polarized. The earth plane is protected; there is a positive force-field around it so that intensely negative extra-terrestrial energy cannot enter. Because we must permit all beings free will, we cannot stop negativity from entering, we can only enclose earth in a forcefield of positivity and hope that that will be a sufficient deterrent to those beings who are terribly repelled by positivity. And for the most part that has proven to be true.

Positivity proves itself more adaptable, more able to bear with and make space for extreme negativity. So positivity is not repelled by negativity in the way that negativity is repelled by positivity. Positivity practices itself with the catalyst of negativity!

Quite literally, both of these forces are fighting for earth. It is still not certain whether earth will move into 4th density experience as a positively, negatively, or neutral polarized planet. For the benefit of the whole galaxy, it will be wonderful if it is positively polarized. And so an enormous amount of energy is being focused your way. The work that each of you does in sessions like tonight and in your own private meditation, to bring yourself increasingly into alignment with positive polarity, to clarify your own energy, is not only to lead you yourselves to deeper peace and freedom but truly it is a gift to the entire galaxy. It is only this which I wish to impart, not to create pride in you but simply to remind you that your work serves so many many beings. That you have, as it were, an enormous cheering session shouting, “Go team!” I thank you. That is all.

Barbara: I caught a little bit of that when Aaron talked about it before over the email,. I asked, “Do they wave pennants?”