The Yearning for Transcendence

By Keith Sherwood

The human heart’s most important role is to reflect energy. When the human heart is functioning healthfully and is not burdened by karmic baggage and external projections, it will reflect energy like a clean mirror reflects light, without any distortion or loss of radiance. However, we rarely see that in the real world. That’s because most people carry layers of karmic baggage in their subtle field, particularly around their energy centers and their three hearts. Adding to the problem are external projections; these intrusions of distorted energy can interfere with the functions of the chakras and the flow of energy through the subtle field, the non-physical field of consciousness, energy and subtle matter that interpenetrates your physical-material body.

Even when karmic baggage and external projections are not being reflected off the human heart, their presence can block, or at least distort, the energy that’s being reflected.

This explains why human love can’t serve as the foundation for transcendent relationship.

In fact, when enough qualified energy is being reflected from the human heart, you can learn to love almost anything, particularly if you obsessively cling to the human heart and the distorted energy being reflected from it. In an amusing passage from Love and Death, Woody Allen makes it clear how difficult your relationship can be if it’s based exclusively on human love:

“To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering, one must not love. But then, one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer, and not to love is to suffer. To suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy is then to suffer. But suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be unhappy one must love, or love to suffer, or suffer from too much happiness. I hope you’re getting this down.”

The Second Heart

Your second heart is the heart chakra. Unlike the human heart, the heart chakra is a vortex through which life-affirming energy flows into your energy field. Because it’s a vortex and doesn’t merely reflect energy, the heart chakra is much more reliable than the human heart.

With a much more reliable foundation, intimacy will become a stable part of your relationship.

Your heart chakra also upholds your personal rights, including the right to control your physical-material body, express your feelings and emotions, make decisions that are appropriate and manifest your ideas and creativity freely.

The Third Heart

The third heart (Atman) emerges from the right side of your chest, directly across from your human heart and to the right of your heart chakra. You can think of it as the doorway through which Universal Consciousness enters your subtle field. Although you’ve always been in union with Universal Consciousness, it’s unlikely that you’ve experienced all the benefits, yet. That changes once you’ve made the transition to the third heart.

By making that transition and recognizing your a priori union with Universal Consciousness, you will become the observer of the movie of your mind. Beliefs and taboos that once restricted your freedom will melt away, and intimacy and joy will become permanent features of your relationships. However, making the transition to the third heart isn’t easy; normally it begins with the yearning for truth, freedom or divine love.

The Yearning of the Third Heart

The yearning for any of these three is in fact the yearning for union (or intimacy) with Universal Consciousness. Some people experience the yearning for one of these three all their lives; others do so when they meet a partner who moves them deeply. Still others experience the yearning only after they’ve engaged in a process of transcendence.

Although both human love and intimacy are powerful forces, neither of them are capable of transforming your relationships or bringing you into conscious union with Universal Consciousness. However, if you yearn for more from your relationships, you can go deeper, to the place where Universal Consciousness emerges into your conscious awareness – your third heart.

It’s important to note that to make the transition from a traditional relationship, where intimacy is intermittent, to a transcendent relationship, where intimacy with Universal Consciousness and your life-partner is permanent, you must recognize that relationship is not attachment, dependency or bonding. And you must be willing to give up the will to power and/or the belief that control and security are more important to you than transcendence. In fact, unless you’ve recognized that the experience of transcendence is essentially the ongoing experience of truth, freedom and unconditional love, and you have the yearning for one of these three, you won’t be able to make the lasting transition to transcendent relationship.

That said, it’s time to learn more about the yearning of your third heart for truth, freedom and unconditional love.

The Yearning for Truth

The yearning for the truth is not the yearning for accurate information. It’s the yearning for integrity and personal honesty. Integrity means, more than anything else, being yourself no matter what the personal cost. Being yourself and not what someone else or even your individual mind and ego want you to be is essential if you hope to experience union with Universal Consciousness and share transcendent relationship with your partner.

Indeed, living with integrity means being what you are now, without dressing it up or putting a sugar coating on it. It means letting go of the guilt and shame associated with trying to live up to someone else’s expectations or ideals, and normally failing. It means doing what is appropriate, even if it means disappointing someone you love.

The Yearning for Freedom

The yearning for freedom is not the same as a desire to be free from external domination or oppression. Nor is it the license to do whatever you want. Freedom in this context is liberty from the domination of karmic baggage and external projections. It’s the freedom to be authentic, to be who you are and to express yourself without being badgered by personas, entities or individual fields of qualified energy.

Freedom of this sort is enduring. It is a state of permanent intimacy, that can’t be taken away by any outside agency. It can only be given away because of ignorance. However, even then, the loss of freedom is only a temporary condition because the essential condition of every human being is freedom from attachment and of union with Universal Consciousness.

The Yearning for Unconditional Love

The yearning for unconditional love is the innate yearning for union with Universal Consciousness. In fact, on the deepest level of awareness, human beings know that separation is impossible and that union with Universal Consciousness endures from everlasting to everlasting. Freud called this innate knowledge an infantile belief in immortality. Like many of his generation, he misinterpreted what he observed. The fact is that every human being is an eternal being, not made in God’s image, but a vehicle through which Universal Consciousness can manifest pleasure, love, intimacy and joy on all dimensions of the phenomenal universe.

Because the yearning of the third heart motivates people to consciously re-experience union with Universal Consciousness, the question you’re probably asking yourself is whether you have the yearning of the third heart – for truth, freedom or unconditional love. The exercise that follows should help you to discover whether you have the yearning for one of these three and whether you’re ready to make the transition to transcendent relationship.

Before you begin, it’s worth noting that the yearning for union with Universal Consciousness will emerge as a yearning for truth whenever your karmic condition demands that you live with greater integrity in order to overcome personality issues and experience intimacy and joy in your relationships. The yearning for freedom will emerge whenever your karmic condition demands that you break free from attachments in order to experience union with Universal Consciousness. The yearning for unconditional love will emerge whenever your rights have been violated and you must live more authentically.

Exercise: Enhancing the Yearning of Your Third Heart

To begin the exercise, find a comfortable position with your back straight. Then close your eyes and breathe deeply through your nose for two to three minutes. Continue by counting from five to one, then from ten to one. Then assert, “It’s my intent to center myself in my third heart.” Once you’re centered, assert, “It’s my intent to turn my organs of perception inward on the level of my third heart.” Finally assert, “It’s my intent to experience the yearning of my third heart.”

Many people notice something like bubbles popping off the right side of their chest when they turn their organs of perception inward on the level of their third heart. They may pop off individually or in clumps. Some of the clumps may be quite large, and your muscles may react by quivering as they pop off. Other people report that the muscles of their chests feel like they were being stretched and flattened one layer at a time. Don’t let any of those experiences distract you. If you’re patient, you will experience a unique sensation after a short time; that will be the yearning of your third heart.

To check whether the yearning of your third heart is for truth, freedom or unconditional love, assert three times, “The yearning of my third heart is for truth.” If the yearning of your third heart is for truth, your energy will flow better, and you will stay centered without effort. If the yearning is not for truth, the flow of energy through your energy field will weaken slightly, and you will have to remind yourself to stay centered in your third heart.

If the yearning for truth resonated, bring yourself out of the exercise by counting from one to five and then by opening your eyes. If the yearning for truth didn’t resonate, continue by asserting three times, “The yearning of my third heart is for freedom.” If the yearning for freedom resonates, bring yourself out of the exercise by counting from one to five and by opening your eyes. If the yearning for freedom didn’t resonate, continue by asserting three times, “The yearning of my third heart is for unconditional love.” If the yearning for unconditional love resonates, bring yourself out of the exercise by counting from one to five and by opening your eyes.

If you don’t experience the yearning of your third heart or if it’s too weak for you to be sure whether you have the yearning for truth, freedom or unconditional love, repeat the exercise when you are more relaxed, and your mind is more at ease.

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Who’s Your Mama?

By Keith Sherwood

“M” is for the million things she gave me,
“O” means only that she's growing old,
“T” is for the tears she shed to save me,
“H” is for her heart of purest gold;
“E” is for her eyes, with love-light shining,
“R” means right, and right she'll always be,
Put them all together, they spell “MOTHER,”
A word that means the world to me.

Howard Johnson’s famous song, written in November 1915, illustrates the kind of idealism that has made it difficult for many people to overcome their most entrenched personal problems. Mothers play a pivotal role in every child’s life – as do fathers. But in the real world, not all moms conform to Mr. Johnson’s rosy image. In fact, many of the things your mother gave you may have upended any possibility that you will achieve your goals and enjoy a satisfying relationship, with an appropriate life-partner.

The why is simple: your mother, like the other people you’re closest to, probably had a karmic relationship with you in one or more of your past lives, which explains why you have unresolved relationship issues in this life. What that means should be abundantly clear; your mother’s personal investment in sharing life-affirming consciousness, energy and etheric matter with you in this life may be weak or non-existent. Mom could even have karmic patterns that compel her to compete with you, disrupt your polarity and authentic identity or, in extreme cases, violate you in both overt and covert ways.

If your experiences with your mother in a past life were positive and you shared the same life vibrations and core values, then it’s quite likely that you will experience much of the same in this life. But if you had negative karmic attachments to one another, your life vibrations were incompatible, and your relationship issues weren’t resolved before you incarnated in this life, then you will have ongoing problems in your current relationship.

An ancient Yogic adage declares, “You get what you want most.” That means, if a woman desperately desired something from you or was obsessively attached to you in a past life, it’s possible for her to incarnate as your mother in this life. The possibilities are fraught; the woman in question could have been a jealous friend, a romantic rival who wants to punish you, a hateful family member or even an evil stepmother.

Of course, these are worst-case scenarios. It’s more likely that the woman who became your mother in this life had a mixture of both good and bad karma and mixed feelings about you. In that case, there would be attachments, but they would not necessarily be as destructive as in the worst-case scenarios described above, nor would they preclude love, affection and support on both the physical-material and subtle levels of consciousness, energy and etheric matter.

Socio-biologists and primatologists, such as Sarah Blaffer Hardy, maintain that “loving motherhood is not automatically programmed into the female of our species, but is an extremely complex equation of genetic, evolutionary, emotional, and social factors aided by powerful hormonal influences.” In her book ‘The Woman That Never Evolved,’ she explains that the “sexually passive, noncompetitive, all-nurturing woman of prevailing myth never could have evolved within the primate order.” This means that the mother Howard Johnson idealized in his absurd song doesn’t normally exist.

However, in patriarchal societies, we often find women who appear on the surface to embrace these qualities. More often than not, these women are faking it, often quite successfully. Unfortunately, these fakers end up even deceiving themselves and, like Stepford wives, they go through the motions without feeling or empathizing with their children or themselves.

In spite of their best attempts to cover up who they really are, the truth is that most of these women have had their subtle fields disrupted by projections of distorted consciousness, energy and etheric matter – or even the intrusion of non-physical beings with a self-limiting agenda. Any of these factors can have unintended consequences. They may reverse a mother’s polarity or create a woman that loves her male offspring, but hates male energy. It could create blind spots that take control of mommy when she’s stressed or her expectations aren’t met.

You may think that at least such a mother will love her female offspring. I’m not disputing that moms feel love, but relationships are much more complex – and a mother’s love doesn’t heal everything.

The Influence of Patriarchy

If a woman has been raised in a patriarchal society, her natural development will be disrupted, and she will find it difficult to manifest her authentic femininity. This will influence the condition of her subtle field and her ability to nourish her offspring or even empathize with them.

Additional problems include karmic baggage and the attachments they create as well as the poisons of the ancestors that mom has carried into her present incarnation. She may have attachments to her offspring that disrupt their subtle fields or life vibrations that are in opposition to theirs. These issues, which are ubiquitous in contemporary families, will muddy the water and make it difficult for family members to communicate and/or empathize with one another.

There is also the condition of your mother’s other significant relationships as well as inappropriate decisions that she’s made in this life that forced her to deviate from her dharma. If your mom has a dysfunctional relationship with her parents or husband, if she is intimately involved with non-physical beings, is addicted to drugs, sex, food, etc., or if she has been sexually abused, she may not be able to express her authentic feelings and emotions freely or establish a strong, stable identity.

The truth is that any form of trauma that remains untreated as well as blind spots and ancestoral poisons that trap mom in distorted patterns will disrupt her relationship to her children. According to an article published in ‘Frontiers in Psychology’ in September 2014, ‘A mother's unresolved trauma may interfere with her ability to sensitively respond to her infant … potentially contributing to the intergenerational transmission of trauma.’

So, what does that mean? Simply that the role of mother has been distorted by the core values of patriarchy and mom’s relationship to her kids can be based on core values that are self-limiting and, in extreme cases, self-destructive. Mothers who adhere to the core values of patriarchy or whose subtle fields have been blocked by projections of distorted consciousness, energy and etheric matter will lack empathy and the ability to sense the feelings, needs and fears of their children.

In contrast, children with mothers who are sensitive, empathetic and who express authentic emotions and feelings will grow up with an ability to engage in intimate relationships and successfully pursue their dharma.

The Same Old Same Old

Unfortunately, society in general expects women to be the primary care givers and lays the burden of caring for children (and family) on them. By doing that, it continues to subvert motherhood by making it difficult for women to experience their personal power and to achieve their personal goals at home and in the workplace.

Although women and men are experiencing a Renaissance of freedom and self-awareness in the twenty-first century, if you look behind the curtain, you will find a legacy of archetypes, expectations and karmic attachments that have prevented mothers from becoming the radiant, dynamic women they are capable of being.

To overcome the patriarchal archetypes and subtle manipulation represented by Howard Johnson, every woman – especially mothers – must recognize that the universal qualities of the feminine include healing and the power, creativity and radiance that support it. They also include pleasure, love, intimacy, joy and the qualities of good character, which for millennia have been traditionally embraced by women in matriarchal cultures. These qualities include non-harming, loyalty, perseverance, discipline, patience, long-suffering and courage. By knowing themselves as an expression of the universal feminine, women will empower themselves to be them “Selves” and share themselves in their fullness with their partners and children. In fact, by celebrating the universal qualities of the feminine, alone or with their partner, women will affirm the truth that “Women are Gods; women are life; women are adornment.” These words of Dr. John Mumford in ‘Ecstasy Through Tantra’ were attributed to the Buddha.

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