Robert Sardello - Heartfulness

Heartfulness

Heartfulness

RobeRt SaRdello

Goldenstone Press | La Veta, Colorado

Copyright 2017 Robert Sardello All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief reviews, may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, electronic or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

Published by Goldenstone Press

P.O. Box 775

La Veta, Colorado 81055

www.RobertSardello.com

ISBN: 978-0-692-85056-5

Edited by Lee Nichol

Cover and book design: Eva Leong Casey/Lee Nichol Cover image: After Rain by Lyle Novinski Printed in USA

Contents

Heartfulness 1

Deepening 49

Heartfulness as permanent presence 111

Heartfulness WitH OtHers 127

cOntemplative Heart-listening 159

Heartful actiOn 205

Heart anD eartH 253

tHe prayer/practices 297

sOme reaDings 345

With much gratitude to Lee Nichol andEva Casey for the preparation of sucha beautifully crafted book

Heartfulness

H eart awareness, heartfulness, locates being fully human within the soul and spiritual center of the body, the heart.

Practices of heartfulness contemplatively engage the actual organ of the heart, inwardly revealing what it is like to be incarnated in body and world. In 3

developing the capacity to creatively radiate from the center outward, the holy, whole, nature of the human body reveals itself as intimately united with imagination, creative presence, Earth-unity, and the unfolding of the livingness of all things. It feels like our natural state, forgotten long ago.

Heartfulness goes beyond being present to feelings, such as when we say, I feel happy, or I feel confused. The common meaning of feeling indicates the same 4

as emotion. Feeling, in its true sense, originates in the unity between ourselves and everything visible and invisible, given as the most primary way of knowing.

By becoming what we are present with

through the rhythms of our body, intensified most completely within the heart we know by communion rather than by the distance of mental-ness.

Artists, poets, painters, and musicians live this way of knowing, for through art we 5

know things that cannot be known in any other way. But confining such knowing to the arts conveniently sets up the arts to be dismissed as educationally unimportant in this abstract, mental world, and also sets up feeling as specialized, rather than the most central way of being human.

Heartfulness can be lived and experienced, not just in moments of contemplation, but as sensing, perceiving, knowing, and non-causal action.

We can yield to its beckoning in any and all situations, even the most mechanical 6

and the most technical, as well as in all relationships, and it turns the most practical work into artistic action.

Heartfulness alters what we know as power into receptive action, in harmony with the rhythms of Earth and Cosmos, from our feet to our head, from the widest expanses to the deepest interior.

No simpler way or path exists. We are not confronted with the challenge of finding heartfulness or developing it, or changing our lives in some radical manner.

We are asked only to shift our center of 7

attention, moving awareness from head to heart, from abstract cognition to being within practical contemplation, as a way of creative living.

Such

contemplative

presence

simultaneously beholds, embraces, and enlivens whatever we come into contact with, be it ourselves, others, nature, and even things.

Massive programs, activism, cultural change even if they could somehow take into account the heart cannot 8

do what individual heart-presence can do. Nor, however, do we imagine the multiplication of individual heart awareness gradually reaching a point of world transformation. The world in its spiritual, material, and soul essence already embraces the fullness. Heart awareness surrenders to the already-present but unknown and unlived human-world-earth completeness.

In contemplative presence, whatever we notice also notices us, and the distinction between ourselves and what we notice folds into a complex and beautiful singularity in which the center, the periphery, and all between exists simultaneously as bodily feeling, knowing, and act.

Such unified presence occurs through accessing the heart, noticing that we are 9

doing nothing more than uniting with heart-being, the contemplative center of individual life, as well as world-being. The resonance occurring between these two centers of the Center the Cosmos-Earth Rhythm takes us into the primary rhythm of existence, the ongoing creation of spirit-matter-soul, and true individuality.

This writing addresses the how, the

doing of heartfulness, what can be called method, rather than technique.

Technique consists of knowing what steps to take, and in what order, to bring about a sequence of actions leading to a desired result. Method consists of an intensification of the Whole in such a way 10

that the Wholeness reveals itself within a resonant instance of itself. We begin with the Whole, stay with the Wholeness, and elaborate it into moments of intensity.

The word Whole here differs from the way in which the term now abstractly runs about the world. Wholeness in this writing refers to the complex unity of individual-body-heart-world.

The only way into Wholeness is through the presence and preciousness of particularity. Any sensing, perceiving, or knowing devoted to the particular

rather than the general or the abstract 11

occurs through attentive devotion to the unique. We cannot proceed far with our abstract ideas or concepts of heart if we are to be within the actuality of heart. In order to be within heartfulness, we start with the actual lived presence of our heart.

We limit the way of imagining heart when we assume it to be only the anatomical organ located near the center of the chest.

This only physical organ pumps blood through the body; we can, sometimes, feel our heart beating. Heart also refers to feeling as the emotion of love. The 12

physical view sees heart as substance without metaphor. The emotional

view sees heart as metaphor without substance. Both views abstract away from the immediacy of the experienced heart as the originating quality of bodily-felt intimate participatory awareness.

The first shifting of awareness from disembodied abstraction into presence occurs through transforming a thought about into attentive presence with

the change from thinking about, to contemplating. Rather than thinking 13

about the heart, or even thinking about my heart, which is equally an abstraction, we instead notice what heart-presence at this place of heart is like. Only the capacity of attention-awareness can do such contemplating.

The great mystery of attention guides entry into heartfulness. It is a simple matter of placing attention where we intend awareness to be present, something quite different from paying attention to the heart. Attention acts 14

like a very subtle spiritual substance that can go anywhere through the act of intent. It can even be at several places at once, simultaneously. We can, for example, place attention within the heart and within the feet at the same time.

The word mystery covers so much territory. Here, the mystery of attention does not mean unknown and unknowable, which would allow a kind of obfuscation under the guise of wisdom.

Instead, mystery here indicates the 15