Quote:Hey Richard,
In Sufism the heart is focused on slightly more because people believe that if the heart is strong all other chakras will be amplified by it.
Hey Ali,
Interesting bit of synchronicity here. The reference to Sufism, that is. Just today, I ran across the following. I bookmarked the spot this afternoon to go back to.
The Teaching of the Heart
by Hazrat Inayat Khan
There are three ways of seeking God in the human heart.
1. The first way is to recognize the divine in every person and to be careful of every person with whom we come in contact, in our thought, speech, and action. Human personality is very delicate. The more living the heart, the more sensitive it is. But that which causes sensitiveness is the love-element in the heart, and love is God. The person whose heart is not sensitive is without feeling; his heart is not living, it is dead. In that case the Divine Spirit is buried in his heart.
A person who is always concerned with his own feelings is so absorbed in himself that he has no time to think of another. His whole attention is taken up with his own feelings. He pities himself: he worries about his own pain, and is never open to sympathize with others. He who takes notice of the feeling of another person with whom he comes in contact, practices the first essential moral of the heart.
2. The next way of practicing this religion is to think of the feeling of the person who is not at the moment before us. One feels for a person who is present, but one often neglects to feel for someone who is out of sight. One speaks well of someone to his face, but if one speaks well of someone when he is absent, that is greater. One sympathizes with the trouble of someone who is before one at the moment, but it is greater to sympathize with one who is far away.
3. And the third way of seeking God in the human heart is to recognize in one's own feeling the feeling of God; to realize every impulse of love that rises in one's heart as a direction from God; realizing that love is a divine spark in one's heart, to blow that spark until a flame may rise to illuminate the path of one's life.
-- HIK, Volume 9, "The Religion of the Heart"
Reading that peaked my curiosity as to who Hazrat Inayat Khan was. Considering that he passed on in 1927…I guess some wisdom truly is timeless and universal.
Richard