Blessed one, as senses are absorbed in the heart, reach the center of the lotus.
- For heart-oriented persons only — those for whom love comes before reason (‘I just love, I don’t know why’). Head-oriented types feel even love cerebrally, plan and reason about it. Test yourself without self-deception: nearly everyone imagines they are heart-oriented because the need is so basic. The technique fails silently if you are not.
- Heart = here-and-now, individual; head = always future, always abstract. The head turns the beggar into a datum (a social problem for tomorrow); the heart helps him now.
- Touch instruction: close your eyes and touch anything — beloved, child, tree, the earth. Feel your hand as your heart stretched out. Something warm flows from heart through hand; let there be a meeting, a communication. This is the quality: heart-warmth (giving) versus head-coldness (calculating).
- Music/listening instruction: while hearing music, imagine you have no head — feel headless. Let the music arrive at the heart; let the heart vibrate with it. Apply this to all senses: feel each sense going deep into the heart and dissolving there. Heart = the lotus; every sense = a petal.
- Once the senses are fully absorbed and reasoning has stopped, you fall to the navel automatically — the sutra does not even need to mention this. From the heart the door to the navel is open; from head, or stuck between head and heart, it is locked.
- Deep love (heart only, no head managing) becomes prayer; the beloved becomes divine. The head destroys love the moment it tries to manage it — Jesus: ‘Love is God’ means love is the door.
- From Q&A — three practical preparations: (1) Headlessness exercise — walk, sit, look in the bathroom mirror feeling you have no head. Initially ‘as if,’ it becomes actual; the center then drops to the heart. Energy denied the head flows to the heart, as a blind man’s energy flows to the ears and hands. (2) Universal loving attitude — not just toward people but toward grass, food, objects. Touch food lovingly, feel gratitude toward the chair giving you comfort. Violent, indifferent eating (killing with teeth) blocks the heart; lovingness opens it. (3) Active aesthetic participation — music, dance, poetry as active participant, not passive spectator (cinema leaves you a voyeur). Dance however awkwardly; jump, play like children; forget prestige. Passive watching closes the heart; active doing opens it.
- The head analyzes and divides (molecules, atoms, electrons — endlessly); the heart synthesizes and gives unity. Through the heart the whole universe is seen as one — that oneness is God; analysis can never reach it.
- Once the heart center is alive, you can move from heart to head and back at will. That mobility reveals you are neither — an X beyond both. Awareness of this X is what leads you to the third center: the navel (which is not developed but discovered — ‘there, YOU ARE’).