Heart is the deepest mystery of our existence, the meaning of which still remains hidden. I have spoken of its awakening for many years, but I must say that the essence of it was not captured till now. As we know, for humans the heart is a place where they experience various emotions related to their longing for love or feelings of pain, grief and sorrow. In spirituality the heart is associated most often with a feeling of devotion, sense of divinity or compassion. But what is the heart seen from a deepest perspective?
Unless we enter the heart, talking of it is purely theoretical. Even if one feels the heart, it is felt in distance from the commanding center of ego in the head, not in an actual heart. This is why we emphasize so much surrender to the body, so that we can embody our physical form and then enter the heart directly. In this process, you need to pass the relative layers of emotions in the heart so that you can enter its internal space, the real heart.
What is the real heart? It is the divine dimension of Self that we can access through our surrender. But who is feeling it? Ego is feeling it but through a combination of the emanation of its intelligence and an emotion that is created in the innate me. Even though it is coming from the innate me, you do not feel it in your head, because the amygdala is primarily designed to experience emotions only through the body, in this case in the heart.
You can only feel the divine through you, through yourself, which means through your own emotional interpretation. The divine is your own self, but because of your limited realization, it appears to be beyond you. What we feel as the heart is in fact how the divine feels itself through us. These two dimensions meet in the experience of the heart, but the experiencer is the individual who realizes it. The depth of the experience of the heart is determined by the depth of the awakening of our own emotion. When our emotion is neutral, we experience the heart in an impersonal way, as if it was a reality independent from us. This is not yet the realization of the heart, even if the heart becomes open. Awakening of the heart is a combination of entering it fully and activating our deepest emotions towards the Self in the heart. But this can only happen if our emotion merges with the heart, and there is no more separation. Yes, there is an element of duality because we are in relationship with the heart, but this is a duality in and of unity.
In this context, what is the meaning of self-love? This is self-love. Heart loving itself through pure and absolute emotion created in Me and as Me that merges with it over and over again, forever…. Me is not merely feeling the emotion of love, it is this emotion. Here, a confusion can arise. Who is the object and who is the subject of self-love? The emotion of love is both the subject and object of love. It is love loving itself. And why is it experienced in the heart? It is because this is where we originate from as the divine. That absolute emotion of love feeling itself is the Divine and it is Me. This is where we return to our origin of love.
It is easy to misunderstand the concept of self-love as a relationship of artificial duality within the heart. Such as we realize Me in the heart and then activate an emotion of love towards it, etc. In reality self-love is about the relationship of emotion with itself, the awakening of emotion to itself. As I pointed out, in the heart, Me is the emotion of itself that has to realize itself, awaken to itself as love. And this is self-love.
Is Heart Awakened through Feeling or Emotion?
Why do we use the term emotion and not ‘feeling’, when referring to the awakening of self-love? Depending on the context, we very often speak of feelings as being of higher quality than emotions; for instance, we speak about feelings in the heart and emotions in the solar plexus. Emotions are commonly more abrupt, agitated and chaotic, while feelings tend to have more continuity and calmness. It is all true from a certain perspective, but here the meaning conveyed is very different.
While feeling is passive or receptive, emotion is active (e-emotion). Feeling is ‘receiving’ the emotional experience. Emotion is giving the experience to feeling, so that it can feel something. When you feel love, love is active, and feeling is just identifying it. If you feel anger, anger is actively generated in your sympathetic nervous system and you identify it as a feeling of it. Same with feeling fear, or feeling sad. When you feel love in your heart, you receive the emotional experience of heart; whatever is happening in your heart, you identify it by feeling it. When you express to someone – I love you – you are simply expressing the emotion you have identified.
It is common that people who are in various kinds of relationships feel that they are obliged to feel love even though they do not experience the emotion of love, and tend to feel guilty for not feeling love towards a particular person. So what happens then is that through their mind they try to find a reason to activate such emotion. And indeed, sometimes they can reignite such emotion but often it is artificial and unreal. For instance, a husband tries to recreate the emotion of love towards his wife even though he actually does not feel anything of that sort anymore. So he tries to remember good things, or about their past passion, or about their marriage vows, etc. He basically tries to activate the emotion of love by trying to feel love. But what kind of love? In ancient Greece they divided love into several categories: passionate love (sexual love), friendship love, familial love, obsessive love (part of the romantic love, usually), rational love based on duty, universal love, and they even spoke of self-love interpreted as self-esteem or self-compassion. All these types of love are psychological, including the so-called universal love. And none of them represent real love, and certainly not true self-love. All of them are the mind’s induced feelings based on how the mind attempts to interpret the naturally occurring emotions or trying to modify them based on its preconceived notions.
However, in the awakening of self-love, it is just the opposite – the one who feels the heart is actively generating an emotion of love that changes the feeling. And it is obviously not psychological, it is spiritual. So feeling here is not registering an emotion, but rather emotion is creating feeling. Feelings normally are more conscious, because they identify the emotions that are inherently unconscious; they provide a second level of emotional recognition. Feelings occur when the mind gives a stability to unconscious emotion through conscious or subconscious recognition. And yet, when the pure emotion of love is born in the heart, it actually rises above the feeling of it, for it now constitutes the primary level of recognition…and then they merge into one. Anyways, while in the colloquial vernacular these terms are often mixed or used interchangeably, I am here using the term emotion with the specific intent that I am hoping you can recognize.
Our emotional existence is ruled by a sympathetic nervous system, and you cannot feel love unless it is generated by it, in conjunction with amygdala and the little feedback from the conscious mind. Love is not realized by trying to feel love, or merely feeling your heart. You cannot feel love unless you have the emotion of it first, and you have no control over your emotions; this is why therapies do not work, you just cannot change your emotions, period. What needs to be done is to reverse the order, and activate the emotion of love first before we can feel it. Love must be created by the divine emotion that has to awaken inside you within the sacred space of your heart. The heart itself is not love but rather a dimension where the divine remembers itself as love in each one of us. In fact, the heart is the original feeling of all that exists, which needs to be awakened as love through the emotion of love merging with it.