VBT – Meditation 16.1
Heart-Oriented
People go to the master, and the master asks them what type they belong to. They don’t really know. They have never thought about it – about what type they are. They have just vague conceptions about themselves, and those conceptions are really just imagination. They have certain ideals and self- images, and they think – or rather, they wish – that they are those images. They are not, and often it happens that they prove to be just the contrary.
There is a reason for it. A person who insists that he is a heart-oriented person may be insisting only because he feels the absence of heart, and he is afraid. He cannot become aware of the fact that he has no heart.
Look at the world! If everyone is right about his heart, then this world cannot be so heartless. This world is our total, so somewhere, something is wrong. Heart is not there. Really, it was never trained to be there. Mind is trained, so it is there. There are schools, colleges, universities to train the mind, but there is no place to train the heart. And the training of the mind pays, but the training of the heart is dangerous. If your heart is trained you will become absolutely unfit for this world, because the whole world is run through reason.
If your heart is trained, you will just be absurd in the context of the whole pattern. When the whole world will be moving to the right, you will be moving to the left. Everywhere you will feel difficulty.
Really, the more man becomes civilized, the less and less the heart is trained. We have really forgotten about it – that it exists, or that there is any need for its training. That is why such methods, which can work very easily, never work.
Most of the religions are based on heart-oriented techniques – Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and many others. They are based on the heart-oriented person. The older the religion, the more it is based on heart-oriented persons. Really, when the Vedas were written and Hinduism was developing, there were people who were heart-oriented. And to find a mind-oriented person then was really difficult. But now the reverse is a problem. You cannot pray, because prayer is a heart- oriented technique. That is why even in the West, where Christianity – which is a religion of prayer – prevails, prayer has become difficult. Particularly, the Catholic Church is prayer-oriented.
There exists no such thing as meditation for Christianity, but now even in the West people are becoming crazy about meditation. No one is going to church – and even if someone is going, it is just a formal thing, just Sunday religion – because the heart-oriented prayer has become absolutely unknown for man as he is in the West.
Meditation is more mind-oriented, prayer is more heart-oriented. Or we can say that prayer is a technique of meditation for heart-oriented persons. This technique is also for heart- oriented persons: BLESSED ONE, AS SENSES ARE ABSORBED IN THE HEART, REACH THE CENTER OF THE LOTUS.
That is why prayer helps. That is why Jesus could say, “Love is God.” It is not exactly right, but love is the door. If you are deeply in love – with anyone, it doesn’t matter who… Love matters; the object of love doesn’t matter. If you are in deep love with anyone, so much in love that there is no relationship from the head, if just the heart is functioning, then this love will become prayer and your beloved or your lover will become divine.
Tags: Heart-Oriented
