The Burning Heart

Children are at the heart of the Kingdom. Let us be like children, and trust not to our own understanding...

I.P.: But if the spiritual heart is not manifested physically, how can you tell where it's located and whether it has awakened or not?

A.M.: When the spiritual heart has awakened, you feel a kind of burning, an influx of energy, a feeling of peace in your chest. When it only starts awakening, you feel pain in the chest. At first it's like heart pain, often quite strong. Those who don't understand what's happening, think it's heart trouble. We've had cases in our commune when people felt acute pain at the time when their spiritual heart began to awaken. Doctors thought it was a heart attack, but cardiograms showed no heart disorders. Objective evidence spoke of good health. When the action of the spiritual heart expands, you may feel pain in your chest or even your shoulders. At first the area of action expands, but then it is localized and forms a kind of sphere in the middle of your chest. After a while the pain goes away and you feel the action only once in a while.

At the time of acute self-consciousness at the birth of adulthood, when the
soul is still innocent and open, has not been hardened, and the world is a
big apple with possibilities that are seemingly limitless, and relationships
can seem to be so perfect and so easily perfect, and the soul has been just
awakened to the intense sense of personhood, self-hood, and asks (for the
first and sometimes only time in one's life) the question of who he is and
why he's here, the soul is wide open and seeks to go beyond itself. The
person feels deeply and intensely, having not yet learned to block and hide
these feelings which later prove too painful, and he longs to share this
feeling, this self-awareness, this itensity, this pain with others and to feel
what others feel, especially those who are going through the same thing.
Everything is poured out freely, sometimes too freely, and there is no
attempt to guard one's inner world from being trampled on. The child who
has never been hit by a car, if he is not told of the dangers, will have no
fear of walking into a busy street.
However, when the person gets older, as time passes, the perfect "soul-
mate" relationships which began so intensely, like a wonderous blossoming
flower, become disappointing because there was nothing higher to hold
them together; and the seemingly endless possibilities which present
themselves in youth become smaller, one possibility closing itself off after
another once one goes further on a certain path ( for each person can only
take one path at a time). And then occurs what has formerly been feared
and rejected - a layer forms on top of the raw person, a protective  coating;
and it cannot be helped, for pure vunerability is too painful.
All this explains why youth of today fear so much to get old, why they will
do anything to prevent it.