I awoke at first light to a landscape obscured by a ‘pea souper’ of an English fog. Not knowing where I was, I continued along the country road, thumping slowly along through the mist, eerily alone except for the swirling wraiths and muffled reverberations from my exhaust. It took all my concentration to focus attention on the road as the fog eddied and swirled around me, its elusive contours undulating sinuously in front of my wheels . . . Even so I found my gaze being drawn to something off to the left of me, a dim shape emerging through the fog . . . At first I was unable to make it out, but as the angular obelisks slowly came together in the mist I realized that I was gazing on the massive slabs of ancient Stonehenge . . . floating towards me like an apparition out of the misty white.

It was the first time I had ever seen it and I couldn’t have been more unprepared . . . or perhaps more perfectly prepared . . . for the mind-stopping, time-arresting, time-transcending impact of its appearance . . .

Over the last few years we have experienced the arising - like a luminous shape out of the mist – of what Jung would call an archetype. And just as with Stonehenge, up until the moment of its appearance I had no idea it was there.

I had already been a Zen Buddhist for twenty years when The Goddess arose out of the emptiness. She was a complete surprise then and still, twenty years later, she continues to surprise and delight and challenge and - for those who are willing to accept her help - to quicken the process of spiritual realization.

This forum is for the community of those of us who have begun to make Her acquaintance.

Back then, in the uncertainties of my first wild encounters with Her, and still unsure of my footing, I found myself in a moment of clairvoyance, apparently conversing with the spirit of Carl Jung. Realizing that I needed all the wisdom that I could get and that a disembodied Jung might qualify, I asked the question uppermost in my mind: “Can She be trusted?”

The answer I received has echoed down through the years and continues to ring clear and true, as both promise and warning. Here it is, word for word:

“She can be trusted . . . but She will starve and suck you dry if you do not pay heed. The beginnings of your experience will be satisfied eventually by an all-superceding Light – the Oneness of All Things. These are not meant as words of prophecy for your amusement, but as words of warning . . . lest your ablutions be not readied . . . Have faith.”

Thus forewarned, I fully entered Her strange embrace. This I did with full intent and in the spirit of all that was good and true and beautiful and in service exclusively of the Heart, and like the good Buddhist I was, for the sake of the awakening and liberation of all beings from suffering.

And these terms, so it seemed, were acceptable to Her.

After twenty years of the rigours of Zen I was ready to enter a path that was tantric and renunciate and in the words of Jung would ‘twist like a serpent, cut like a knife’.

Those of us who have made Her acquaintance have been required to move through changes, challenging ones often, but always creative ones for those willing to ‘ride the tiger’. Our groups and our relationships have witnessed and undergone these changes. Our practices have evolved, sometimes in response to hints and nudges – sometimes downright instructions. As well as these collective shifts there has been a pattern of spontaneous one-on-one connectivity between individuals who have responded intuitively to the shakti-energy as they have felt it in the heart. All of these impulses together form a mandala of inter-connections, each one mysterious in its own right, but coherent in its totality and radiating and fanning out through an ever-evolving lattice-work of heart-filaments.

In this climate of post-modern scientific materialism you don’t hear much talk about deities. Even in spiritual circles the preferred terminology is of techniques and modalities . . . Most people become quite uncomfortable if anyone starts in with god-talk, much less goddess-talk. We somehow imagine that we have outgrown all that ‘mumbo-jumbo’.

But we haven’t outgrown it. We have only gone into denial about it. In a misguided allegiance to our mechanistic conceptions we have swept such mysteries under the carpet. We support our confusion in this by citing Buddhism – which we consider the most sophisticated of the wisdom traditions - in its supposed denial of divinities. But we conveniently forget that Buddhism also denies the ego, the reality of the self and any suggestion of a separate anything at all. In fact, all of the ‘10,000 things’ are ‘empty’, according to Buddhism . . . including the deities and all the yogas and practices associated with them, and including all of the teachers and students and ‘realms’ – material and immaterial - that make up the vast scope of the Buddhist Dharma.

Indeed, this is the highest of teachings, but none of these things that Buddhism calls ‘empty’ are actually removed from the picture by dint of that teaching. Not God nor gods nor egos, nor their influence on us.

In truth, whether we call these appearances deities or archetypes, they are as real as you and I, and if one of them should choose to make itself known to you, my advice - in line with the wisdom traditions generally - is to pay attention. There is a time for ‘killing the Buddha’, along with the ego and the ‘ten thousand things’, but there is also a time for paying attention and there is a time for bowing. When we fully understand the teaching of emptiness, these are not-two.

The wisdom traditions of the East – including Buddhism - recognize that there is a place for deity-yoga, for guru-yoga, for bhakti-yoga, for all of the forms of practice that are devotional and relational. In fact all of the spiritual heart-traditions – from esoteric Christianity to the mystical Sufism of Rumi and Hafiz through all the bhakti and tantrika traditions are paths of love and eros, are forms of heart-relationship with the Divine Beloved.

But this is not ‘Comparative Religion 101’ . . . we are not concerned with picking through the traditions, of one tradition being right and another being wrong. This is a matter of one’s heart being activated. I was for many years deep in the practice of Zen without my heart ever being activated, at least not in the way I now use that term. And once my heart – through Grace – was activated I could no longer describe myself as simply a Zen Buddhist. But there was no need to find the right label. I could still sit in zazen, but now in the heart-fire. Once the flame is lit, that is how it is. There is no need to gild the lily, only to tend to the flame and to what it illumines.

How is one to do that?

In the mandala of this community the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts. The ego, however, typically only sees the surface movements and misses the unseen mover. It is by bringing attention to this unseen aspect that the magic of this Way is realized.

This mandala that is forming our individual and collective participation unfolds from within like a blossom. It is like a self-organizing intelligence, more of a noumenon than a phenomenon, forming more like an organism than an organization. And if we each of us pay attention and take responsibility and deal intuitively and sensitively and courageously with what presents itself to be dealt with in our own corner of this mandala we may discover that we are in a human community ‘naturally’ ordered on timeless principles, beautifully and esoterically connected with each other.

And just like that we may come to discover that we are being ‘lived’ by the Heart. And by whatever name we call it and whatever face it shows us, it will turn out that it is our own true face that we are discovering.

And so in this shakti-transmission, our connecting with one another has dimensions far transcending the merely social. In fact it is this sacramental connectivity that gives this heart-process its particular and distinctive character.

A sacrament – as implied by the word’s roots - is something we approach with a ‘sacred mind’. But it is more than that. The actual presence of the sacred is implied. Jesus said, “When two or more are gathered in my name, I am there.” This is the point. The ‘mental’ part of sacramental suggests that we remain conscious of this sacred dimension of our experience. In actuality, when the heart-transmission is activated we may be almost completely unconscious to the workings of the shakti. But soon enough, through moments of Grace and synchronicity, we become aware that we are in a ‘process’, one with a life of its own, and that we are silently being ushered into new spaces.

This heart-process may unfold in many forms: as Goddess, Guru, the shakti, as the Christ . . . there are many ways in which we can be touched by this Grace. But howsoever we are touched, our response is required.

How then are we to respond?

The response that is required is to do the sadhana. The sadhana forges our realization. Being initiated onto this path does not deposit us onto some broad and smooth ‘yellow-brick road’. It does and it doesn’t. There are pitfalls we must negotiate along the path to realization. But these pitfalls themselves provide the method of our realization. In fact, without them there is no realization, no grounding of our spirit in the real.

This website is here then, not to provide us with a ‘social network’, but to serve this sadhana. Consequently it comes with the rules and responsibilities associated with a true spiritual path. We may not know exactly what these rules are. Sometimes we have to break them first . . . and then someone has to go to the trouble of writing them down . . . but intuitively we already know them. They are written in our deepest self. At any rate we can count on the Goddess to let us know when we overstep them.

Essentially this Way of the Heart-transmission is the way of real love, of the activated heart in relationship. Our sadhana is to deepen our capacity for love and consciousness in relationship. In this heart-field our emotionally immature, mentally dissociative and reactively narcissistic ego is the obstructive element and must be dealt with. This is the meaning of self-surrender. This is the practice of self-transcending love: surrendering the patterns of emotional and psychological immaturity that have contracted us. This is the meaning of sadhana.

There is an energy – a shakti - a feeling of ‘sacred space’ when two or more of us connect. Let us notice this. It need not become a self-conscious thing, as if ‘sacred space’ were something imposed on reality, something ‘extra’ or egoic. There is something already sacred about spiritual individuals connecting with each other in the service of the Heart: ‘When two or more of you gather in my name, I am there.’ When there is a shared consciousness of our true nature, then our coming together is naturally a sadhana, naturally a sacramental connectivity and everything is in place for Grace to operate.

Our practice is to amplify this transmission through allowing the opening of the heart. It is not as if this is a commonplace understanding. It is certainly not the dualistic and mechanistic understanding of reality that holds sway in the minds of the general public. Nor is it a typical spiritual or New Age understanding. In fact it is barely understood at all in our time and culture. We have to go to other times and other cultures to find examples of this empowered connectivity.

Nor is this kind of transmission a focus of Buddhism generally. In the practice of Zen, for instance, the notion of shakti-transmission is absent. Awakening is something to be cultivated via the purity and isness of zazen. In Buddhism it is only in the Vajrayana – the last of the Buddhist yanas - that there is the idea of a specifically energic transmission in association with the lineage. Not surprisingly, it is also in the Vajrayana tradition that the idea of the guru is given emphasis.

We can come to enlightenment in a cave, reach full awakening through solitary practice, live a life of realization ‘cloud-hidden, whereabouts unknown’. Even so, what characterizes this particular heart-process of ours is from the outset its relational connectivity. This is one of the characteristics that make it tantric. The very notion of heart-transmission implies this mysterious connectivity, a power of love subordinated to a higher purpose, and of an influence being communicated through this divine or sacramental connectivity.

One could realize this Way in a solitary cave because it is universally true that the Unborn Source, the Heart of Guru and Goddess is never anywhere absent, but still the quickening nature of this heart-transmission is such that it flows through this medium of human connectivity.

This element of conductivity in an activated heart-field is what ‘satsang’, or sitting in the presence of Guru, is about. While this traditionally requires the Guru’s ‘presence’ in the form of a person, a human personality who embodies the guru-function, it is also recognized that Guru is ultimately a transcendent principle. Like ‘the Beloved’ or ‘the Goddess’, ‘Guru’ is an archetype deeply embedded in consciousness and senior to all of the specific forms through which it operates.

Sri Ramana Maharshi – “The Guru does not bring about Self-realization. He simply removes all the obstacles to it. The Self is always realized. God, Guru and the Self are identical. The Guru is God in human form and, simultaneously is also the Self in the Heart of each devotee. Because the Guru is both inside and outside, his powers work in two different ways. The outer Guru gives instructions and by his power enables the devotee to keep his attention on the Self. The inner Guru pulls the devotee’s mind back to its source, absorbs it in the Self and finally destroys it. While the Guru is indispensable for those seeking Self-realization, the Guru has no power to bring about realization in those who are not energetically seeking it. If the individual seeker makes a serious attempt to discover the Self, then the grace and power of the Guru will automatically start to flow. If no such attempt is made, the Guru is helpless.”

This grace or siddhi of the Guru is the living spiritual principle experienced in the heart-field.

Just as radio waves are all around us but indiscernible to us unless our instrument is tuned to the right wavelength, just so the heart-transmission.

And as soon as our heart is activated it is as if – ding-dong! – the cosmic piano tuner comes through the door and goes to work on our instrument. From that point on our heart is being attuned to an ever deeper resonance with the One Heart underlying cosmic existence. All the ensuing dramas that then unfold – inner and outer - are the stresses and strains we must endure as our wonky instrument is gradually brought out of its state of dissonance into harmony with the one True and Eternal Nature underlying everything and everybody.

While there are spiritual practices whose purpose is to arouse the shakti or kundalini energy by one’s own efforts, with heart-transmission the awakening of the shakti-energy is done by Grace and the entire process is led by a Divine Intelligence. The sadhana required of us then is to come into union with this descending Grace through the practice of self-transcending love. This is the discipline of the heart-process.

At first the ego in its ambivalence towards this influence swings between resisting and playing catch-up. Only through patience and maturation and persistent commitment do we come to realize the truth of Sri Aurobindo’s words:

“The greatest bliss a human being can know is to serve the Divine.”

Transmission may initially be something of a stealth process, imperceptible even, and not necessarily of our conscious choosing. It does, however, require the readiness of our psychic being. Without this it cannot occur. In other words, it is only when in our deepest soul we are ready for it that heart-transmission occurs.

Once activated the shakti moves out of our unconscious and into the circumstances of our life, inner and outer.

Initially the ego resists this movement of Grace because it sees it as a threat. And rightly so, for the unreconstructed ego wants to bring all of its life circumstances under its own control and dominion. But actually, this is the sheerest folly on the part of the ego. Nonetheless it is a folly to which the ego clings out of predilection going on panic. It is this, the ego’s inbuilt ‘resistance unto death’ which – with its perpetual anxieties and neuroses – the Grace is here to liberate us from.

The life of the ego is a half-life in comparison to heart-realization; and the ego’s ‘death’ is actually the necessary passage into the deathless condition of our true nature. It is a passage, however, which the ego has no interest in undergoing if it can at all help it. The ego yearns for freedom, but not from itself. This is the paradox of the stuckness of the egoic condition. Its stuckness is its own frozen and panicked response to the heart’s impulse towards liberation.

For some of us then, we only truly commit, only truly surrender when our reactivities and avoidances have come to the point of being so ‘in our face’, so ‘stuck in our craw’ that our habits and shticks have become even more oppressive to us than the sadhana. This frustration - even disgust - at our stuckness is a gift in the same way as is the compulsion to throw up. When our whole organism is ready to free itself of the toxicities it has ingested our greatest ally is this instinct to purge.

Such is the purificatory nature of a real sadhana. And this is why we cannot design our own sadhana . . . even though every ego tries to. The mark of an authentic sadhana is that the ego doesn’t want to do it.

Buddhism teaches that the native condition of the ego is dukha, or perpetual craving and dissatisfaction in relation to the circumstances of life. This is a condition that persists until is resolved by awakening or by death. Neither is there much escape from this in the sadhana, which can be equally distasteful. As my Zen teacher, Roshi Kapleau, would say, “Zen is not the way out of your problems, it is the way in.” The essential difference between dukha and sadhana is in the orientation towards this circumstance of being human.

In dukha the orientation is dissociative, avoidant and egocentric, being the perpetually frustrated compulsion to have the circumstances of our life conform to our preferences. By contrast, in sadhana the orientation is heartfelt, self-surrendered and in a relationship of gratitude to the Giver of life. It is a life of sacramental connectivity founded in the profound understanding that we are ‘of God’ . . . that we “arise from bliss, we return to bliss, and a fully realized human life is an expression of bliss”.

To do sadhana is to adopt the natural orientation of the enlightened mind, of consciousness freed from the tyranny of ‘me’ and ‘mine’. The natural expression of enlightened consciousness is love – sometimes tough love - in all relations. To take up this sadhana then, is to consciously undertake this selfless course and to be matured and made right by the discipline of it.

It is to do what needs to be done. It is to ‘do the right thing’. It is to act with integrity from the heart. As we meet the challenges the Goddess gives us our capacity to intuit and to perform this ‘right thing’ is deepened. As we surrender our egocentric attachments we begin to move in a clearer light and from a clearer space.

In the words of Sri Aurobindo,

“Once the Shakti descends, the only sadhana required is surrender.”

And we do not have to scale a Himalayan peak and search out a guru in a loin-cloth. With heart-transmission the whole mountain complete with its Guru, Goddess, mysterious signs and cave of demons, arrives at our door as if delivered by Ikea, but in this case self-assembling and merging seamlessly with the circumstances of our life.

One of the obstacles - as the landscape morphs around us - is sheer hide-bound disbelief. There is a tendency, out of some kind of unconscious tribal solidarity, to stay mired in the same benighted cocoon as the society around us. This all-pervading egocentric, fixed-minded, consensus trance of our culture is just one thing we must overcome if we are to come with a clear mind to spiritual life. Most people simply have no idea how deeply they have been entrained into this egocentric mind-set. This is still true even of those who talk the spiritual talk. Until something awakens us, we walk through a thick fog of hypnotic self-talk that remains narcissistic however ‘spiritual’ the subject matter happens to be.

And thankfully, on this path we do not need to wear robes or badges or special hats to recognize each other. There is no need to institutionalize this transmission. Although we practice formally at certain times, such as at heart-transmission gatherings or on meditation retreats, once activated, shakti-transmission happens spontaneously and organically and at random moments of connection . . . coming on like a sudden ray of sunlight or an illumination . . . an eruption of heart-feeling or energy . . . or an attraction . . . or a mysterious call in the heart to connect with someone more deeply. This is the heart-impulse.

The appropriate response to these moments is to make ourselves available to what is calling us. This is the natural response to these heart-impulses. It is also true, however, that the ego in its contraction resists. But on this path even this reactivity has its value because now our resistance is being revealed to us. As the process evolves, these contractions and avoidances becomes more familiar to us, and so the possibility of transcending this resistance, as we increasingly recognize it, becomes more of a workable sadhana. Through moments of insight and acts of self-surrender we deepen and refine our understanding and grow in realization. As we work through and let fall away our habitual ‘shticks’ we deepen our capacity to embody love and the heart-transmission radiates, through this deepening connectivity - even into the very matter of this material realm. Amazing!

In this Way of the Heart then, we follow the heart-impulse as it mysteriously calls us. As we progressively get ourselves out of the way of the Heart - as we purify our compulsive ‘selfing’ - we come closer to the Heart of the Matter. In due course we awaken as the Heart.

We may be mavericks or even renegades on this path. At any rate, we are who we are and it turns out that at the end of the day that is all that is required of us. That is the beautiful secret we uncover. To become authentically uniquely ourselves . . . and yet, surrendered to the Heart . . . ‘in the Tao’.

It sounds dead easy – to become ourselves – but as long as we are bound in our neurotic and narcissistic egos we are dissociated from our true and authentic self.

However, if we increasingly and persistently rise to the moral challenges the shakti brings up - within us and around us - to test and purify and straighten us out, we discover that we are becoming agents in a precision process. This shakti moves with precision . . . not with the precision of a mechanism but with the precision of synchronicity. As we move intuitively and in alignment with this unfolding connectivity we find ourselves functioning beautifully and precisely as agents of a Divine Intelligence.

And when we are not functioning beautifully and precisely as agents of a Divine Intelligence it is probably because we are moving as ‘self’, our heart and consciousness funneled by the ingrained habits of attachment and avoidance that have historically formed our ego-self. And ironically, it is this, our precious sense of self, that most resists our becoming authentically and fully who we are. But as is taught by Buddhism, the egoic self is but a delusion superimposed on reality, a ‘false’ self, a usurper. Our True Self is no-self. And in the process of the heart-transmission, as our True Self shines through, the bind of our egoic contraction becomes more and more painfully apparent.

This is where the sadhana comes in. In submitting ourselves completely to the practice of the Heart we are given access to a secret. We are given entry into the sacramental nature at the centre of our beingness. Our True Self is empty of self.

And we discover that essentially we have been – from the beginning - That Very One who is ego-less and free.

And so, that being the case, what needs to be done?

Nothing!

This is our freedom.

But we must do something.

Love – or Buddha-activity - is the spontaneous expression of such freedom.

It only remains to awaken to this truth and so realize the Heart in the circumstances of our life.

Humans tend to think that they cannot possibly know the meaning of life because life must necessarily be beyond all human comprehension. This may be so to ego-consciousness, but as the Buddha discovered, we do indeed realize the meaning of our human life when we awaken to our true nature.

And this, it turns out, is what we were looking for all along.

All of this is better served the more we can become conscious of it.

To become more conscious of it – together - is the purpose of this forum.