Awakening the heart of consciousness requires no specific material objects, rites, rituals, beliefs, or intercessions. Everything we need already exists within our bodies and minds. We only need to understand how to consciously engage the faculty that awakens us to the divine source. While we have sense bases to experience the sense worlds in and around us, we also have the innate ability to imperience consciousness directly.
Imperience is our umbilical connection to the heart of divine consciousness, the absolute, or God. Imperience awakens the light of awareness and allows personal consciousness to know its source. It is through imperience that we feel unconditional love and compassion in our hearts and can share in the joy of others. Imperience is how we sense our true conscience—how we intuitively know right from wrong—even before thought arises and before we turn to conditioned feelings or outside opinions for guidance and support.
We regard profoundly wholesome qualities of being, such as love and compassion, as matters of the heart, and when they are awake in us, we imperience them throughout our bodies and beings. The depth of these feelings reflects their source in divine consciousness, which we are able to sense most directly and personally in our blood. Because our blood is most concentrated in our chests, we feel love and empathy most prominently there, and that is why we consider these qualities to be matters of the heart.
The heart of divine consciousness is shared by all beings. This book is not to endorse any particular being or spiritual tradition as supreme or any dogma or belief system as essential to the realization of enlightenment. There is actually no specific need for any religiosity or even religion. Whether we are persons of faith or no faith, spiritual practitioners or not, we can benefit from understanding the fundamental nature of mind and matter and the core principles that govern them.
I use terms like God, divine consciousness, the absolute, and the heart of consciousness to refer to the nondual domain of supreme being—not to any unique supreme being. These terms are nonsectarian and inclusive by nature, and they do not represent an exclusive form of spirituality. Once we drop subjective cultural language and conditioning, all names for God consciousness point to the same divine reality, regardless of what we call it or choose to believe about it. It is generally wise and compassionate to understand our own heartfelt connections to source in whatever terms best suit our personal beliefs and temperaments, and embrace other names and expressions of devotion as well, in the spirit of loving kindness, tolerance, and empathetic understanding.
In the relational world, appearances sometimes divide us, but it helps to see the ways our individual self-identities can confuse how we understand our shared relationship to divine consciousness. We typically identify with personal consciousness—our own hearts—and tend to believe it is our true self or soul. However, personal consciousness is our own in a similar way that the air we breathe into our bodies is our own, never separate from the air outside. Our heart’s nondual relationship with the whole makes all beings one with God and one with each other. We can awaken this insight intuitively through our innate ability to imperience divine consciousness directly for ourselves.
Consciousness awakens from the inside out—from firsthand imperience within our own blood and being. Imperience, a natural function of consciousness that we use whenever we are conscious, is strengthened by deconditioning our minds from the unwholesome, self-oriented, mental habits and self-limiting beliefs that cloud it. Intuitive insight is clearest and brightest when our minds are at peace, holding nothing for or against anyone or anything, including ourselves. Even though reports of profound energetic expressions like white light, bliss, and sublime lightness of being get most of the attention in the spiritual arena, subtler awakenings in daily life are also vitally important for developing intuitive clarity.
One way we can sense the subtle spaciousness of imperience at any time is by releasing (not rolling) our eyes softly backward into our skulls, while releasing the sense of “I” we’re holding behind our eyes. We can feel this more deeply by simultaneously releasing any holding of the breath around our bellies, and allowing our inner being—the heart of consciousness—to gently release and open.
Whether our eyes happen to be open or closed, this simple moment of presence will interrupt the train of thought and awaken heartful awareness here and now. Moments like these may be brief and fleeting, but they help reveal and fortify our umbilical links to divine consciousness in ways that are difficult to fathom and almost impossible to explain. This book offers a way to understand this link—both rationally and intuitively—and explains how to imperience the heart of consciousness for oneself.
