Theophile the Elder was back from Lyon where an international seminar about meditation took place.

– So, what was it like? What have you done there? Theophile the Younger asked.

– I was with Kamlesh Bhai. He gave us some deep and beautiful meditations. He also spoke about the chakras of the heart, a topic we have discussed recently (cf. The five elements of the heart and The five points of the heart, that has already appeared on the web). Do you remember the five points that shine progressively?

– I do remember the diagram, but what else did he say?

– As we have already seen, the five elements of manifestation are under the guidance of the heart. When it is free from any complexity, the heart governs harmoniously all the elements contained in its region. Contrarily, if any one of the elements is being disrupted, it will affect all the others and the heart itself will be disturbed.

– How is that?

– Well! Kamlesb Bhai gave a well-known example: suppose you dislike a person you often happen to see and the situation persists. It creates a strong impression in your heart, which results in some kind of unrest and directly alters Point 2, the seat for peace. If the situation continues, restlessness becomes a permanent state that affects Point 3 – a point that, as you know, contains the Fire Principle – and it generates agitation or even anger. The disturbance then reaches Point 4 – the point for Water – and it generates fear. When we are afraid, we lose our acumen, our capacity to discern, and reality becomes all blurred, leading to a state of confusion,   in relation to Point 5 – Point 5 is also the seat for illusion (maya). As you can see, each point contains a quality that can develop either positively or negatively according to our attitude and to the circumstances of the moment. That is the way we create ourselves the impressions that are going to affect the whole of our hearts.
Kamlesh Bhai also reminded us that the heart region is also home for at once illusion and acumen, or courage and fear, love and hatred, peace and disturbances, pleasure and aversion.
Ceaselessly, we have to face these opposites that all coexist in the region we call the heart region.
Such dualities are showing at the five points you know about.  The spiritual seeker will keep clear of duality only once he has reached the cosmic region, after his soul has completed the initiatory journey I mentioned earlier. That is how the Sahaj Marg path leads us to such a high level of consciousness. Through meditation, we train our minds to be more efficiently responsive and to better deal with any situation in our lives.

– Is that the reason why we do our cleaning practice every evening? Is it to keep our hearts pure and perfect?

– Sure. It is to clean all the conscious and unconscious impressions we can’t avoid.

– Does it mean we can’t escape it?

– Not really. We can avoid that, provided we maintain our inner connection with a higher vibratory level. That will create within us a luminous aura that will shine all around as if to somehow protect us. The light from our hearts illuminates all that we look at, all we listen to, thus preventing the formation of any further impressions or complexities. Gradually, we recoup the simplicity of our original condition.

Theophile the Elder
An excerpt from Dialogs with Theophile the Elder
Theophile the Younger’s initiation