At the Heart of the Cycles of Time

As the sun’s annual rhythm extends daylight in the South and reduces it in the North, we return to a point of balance between both halves of the world and are reminded of a more essential identity that embraces the whole of our planetary life. It is as though we pass through a gate from the little individualised self into a vaster Self within which one knows all others as oneself, as though there are no other selves.

This realisation of Self is quietly enlightening consciousness everywhere. A recent post on the “next Door” neighbourhood app reminded readers to treat one’s neighbour as we would treat ourselves. This simple directive is at the heart of all major world religions and yet is only now beginning to enlighten the vast field of the human heart from where it distils into action and so changes our world.  And a new civilisation begins to emerge out of the crumbling of the old.

Just as the sun is the heart of the system, the human heart is the sun of the organism. There are many sun-hearts, and the Universe represents a system of hearts; that is why the cult of Light is the cult of the heart. To understand this abstractly means to leave the heart out in the cold; but as soon as the Light of the sun-heart comes alive, the need for the magnet’s warmth will make it shine forth like a true sun. … You can look upon the rhythm of the heart as the rhythm of life. The Teaching about the Heart is as bright as the sun, and the warmth of the heart speeds as swiftly as a sunbeam. Everyone has felt astonishment at how a ray of the rising sun can instantly insulate everything from the cold. The heart can do the very same thing!
I am speaking of the warmth of the heart now that it is especially necessary. A thought surging forth in aspiration sets space on fire, while the warmth of the heart is a constant hearth. Courage dwells in the warmth of the heart—remember this! The manifestation of the dark forces acts like frost on a sown field. Only the heart’s warmth provides a radiant shield… [Heart 62]

As the Earth cycles through the seasonal phases our expectations rise and fall but always revolve around the heart of the system – the Sun. Its eternal presence is a silent reminder of the immortality at the heart of the cycles of time – whether the reincarnating cycles of individual souls, or the greater cycles of our system within the Cosmos. The Life at the core continues onward in rhythmic Presence.

And as awareness expands out from the individual embodiment of it, we begin to realise, and so enter into, that vital dynamic presence that eternally exists. It never dies even though the embodying forms may decay and crumble. The more we remember and resume this essential yet vast identity, the less we are held by the illusion of death. Material forms may dissolve but their animating essence lives eternally in the memory of the universe. The Tibetan Master explained this current of human thought:

…the great Teacher, Vyasa, … gave one simple and needed message that death is not the end. From His time, the thinking of humanity about the possible immortality of the soul can be seen to stem. Vaguely and instinctively, men had hoped and sensed that the discarding of the physical vehicle was not the final consummation to all human struggle, loving and aspiration; …. In this period of culmination in which we now live, the work of the spiritualistic movement, in its many forms, is in reality the emergence of that stream of thought-energy and of the idea which Vyasa, thousands of years ago, implanted in the human consciousness. The effort of the intellectuals to prove the scientific possibility of immortality is part also of this great stream, carried onto intellectual levels, thus salvaging Vyasa’s work from the mists and glamours and the psychic dishonesty with which it [has been] surrounded. The fact of immortality is today on the verge of scientific proof; the fact of the survival of some factor has already been proved, though what has been demonstrated as surviving is apparently not in itself intrinsically immortal. The factual nature of the soul, and the fact of soul survival and of its eternal livingness, go hand in hand and have not yet been scientifically proven; they are, however, known and recognised as truths today by such countless millions and by so many intellectuals that—unless mass hysteria and mass deception is posited—their existence is already correctly surmised. [The Reappearance of Christ, page 104-5]

The presence of loved ones who have passed out of the material world continues to be experienced by us as we remain here a while longer.  Their eternal “sound” still sings in our hearts.  And each “sound” is an expression of the dynamic Life that vibrates at the heart of every atom.

Whether conscious of it or not, this truth is so inherent in us that we are always acting or reacting to it. If we do harm to anyone, we may feel guilty and offer recompense or we may feel the need to rationalise our actions because deep in our hearts we know what is good and just because we share the same life.  Just as Adam and Eve, knowing they had transgressed, attempted to hide from God in the garden of Eden, so do those who commit crimes hide behind rationalisations and fabrications – because the heart knows.  As the heart awakens in people everywhere, deceit and spin become transparent and truth is revealed.

It is as though we are emerging from a miasma that has for too long clouded hearts and hidden the pure, life-sustaining light of the Sun which has always been at the heart of our life embracing all without distinction of form, colour, culture, or current illusion.  The Tibetan clarifies the evolutionary process that unveils our inherent life.

…this process of constant death followed by constant resurrection … is the evolutionary keynote and the evolutionary technique, and only because men love unduly that which is material and hate to lose contact with the form aspect of nature do they fear death.  It is wise to remember that immortality is an aspect of the living spiritual being, and is not an end in itself, as men seek to make it.  To the Knowers of Life such a phrase as ‘I am an immortal Soul’ is not even true.  To say ‘I am Life Itself and, therefore, am immortal’ approaches closer to the truth, but even that sentence is …only a part of a larger truth.  Symbolically, nature is ever portraying to us the essential facts in the annual progress of the four seasons, in the cycles of light and dark and in the wonder of the emergence of beauty or colour or useful function out of a seed which has struggled—because of its inherent life—into the light of the sun. [The Rays and the Initiations, page 731-2]

Let us follow the rhythmic spiral of the Sun-heart into the beautiful, expanded world of the future.