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SECTION 4. Comments on the Practice
Meditation
Need for Consistency
Looking for Results
Emergence
Test the Theory
Awareness and Sensitivity
Observation
The Pain of the Moment
The Ups and Downs of Practice
Blame
Rapid Re-alignment
Renewed Energy
Crisis
Increased Light
Reflection and Review
Acceptance
Alignment and Insight
Empowerment
Freedom to Be Honest
Energetic Transfers
Remembering To Practice
Neutrality
Experience Comes with Practice
Maintaining Perspective
Summation
COMMENTS ON THE PRACTICE
“There is an eye of the soul which. . . is more precious far than ten thousand bodily eyes, for by it alone is truth seen.” Plato, The Republic
In this section we will examine key elements of our practitioner’s day. I have repeated the important aspects of each timeframe for easier reference.
Meditation
6:30 AM.
• A 5-minute time of reflection on the six heart virtues.
Naturally, each person is free to meditate for the length of time they feel is appropriate. In most cases though, 5-10 minutes is a nice compromise between brevity and lengthiness. These energies are very potent and the quality of the work is more important than the quantity of time spent in each session.
As explained elsewhere, the practice of when-which-how lays the emphasis on practice over the more traditional concept of sitting for long periods of time in meditation. Nevertheless, meditation and times of reflection still play a role in emotional self-mastery.
Need for Consistency
• I have been doing the Virtuous Cycle Technique from the “Living from the Heart” paper. Some days I feel too tired or I’m in a bad mood, and I just can’t seem to do the meditation.
Most people would agree that consistency is important in any discipline, whether it is working out at the gym, attendance at work or school, or dieting. Spiritual practice is also a discipline in which consistency is important. At first, it is a difficult adjustment to set aside time to meditate, especially in the morning when we are usually rushing around to get ready for work or school. But, if we really want to work with when-which-how, we will find a way to adjust our schedules to accommodate the practice.
Like anything else, once you get past the initial week or two, the daily rhythm of practice will become a normal part of your day. Consistent meditation will reward you with deeper insights into the virtues. This wisdom of the virtues adds increased depth to your daily practice of when-which-how in your everyday encounters.
Looking for Results
• Some days, even when I meditate, it’s doesn’t seem very effective. But I’m trying my best to do it as often as possible and for the past couple of weeks I’ve been steadier in the practice.
Don’t worry about results. Remember that the concrete lower mind (“lower” in contrast to the higher, more abstract mind) is predominantly responsive to the outer world and its phenomena. Meditation practice is oriented in the opposite direction, toward the quantum and sub-quantum densities. Consequently, the lower, ego-personality mind is not very sensitive to the inner, subjective energetics of the six heart virtues. This is not to say that the transmissions are not being received. They are, but the conscious, lower mind has difficulty detecting them in the presence of all the “chatter” it is receiving from the external world.
Eventually, your mind will become more sensitive to the presence of these new energetics in the form of deeper insights into their meanings (as mentioned previously). It is likely that any “results” of your daily practice will not be apparent for the first few weeks or months, but of course, there are always exceptions. In the majority of cases, it takes time for the lower mind to adjust and become sensitive to the subtle, but powerful presence of the new energetics.
So, looking for results is like pulling a seedling out of the soil each day to see how the root system is developing. Exposing the young, delicate roots too soon only interferes with a process that nature is quite capable of handling at the beginning stages of growth. Later, the results will be obvious.
Emergence
6:50 AM. Breakfast
• I am getting irritated and am bordering on anger when I suddenly realize that this past year I have become callous and thankless in relation to my family because of the stress and anxiety of my job. I have been avoiding the guilt associated with this and feel ashamed of myself.
This is an example of the emergence of the virtues into the consciousness of the practitioner. The consistent practice of when-which-how opens us to the sensitivity of the heart, and as a result, the virtues begin to emerge in our awareness. These intelligences will emerge if we do the needed work. In this case, compassion and appreciation emerge in response to our practitioner’s awareness of his callousness and thanklessness. This is because compassion and appreciation are the polar opposites of callousness and thanklessness.
In the section on meditation, we discussed results. This sudden emergence of an awareness of a deficiency in compassion and appreciation is the effect of the meditation and his effort in applying when-which-how. Without getting too technical or complicated, it should be noted that meditation and application of when-which-how are two forms of practice. In actuality, meditating on the virtues and applying the virtues are practicing emotional self-mastery. Meditation is a pro-active subjective or internal form of practice and applying the virtues in our daily encounters is a pro-active objective or external form of practice. Both are valuable and support one another.
It’s like a feedback system. We meditate on the virtues, keep some notes in a journal and during the day we suddenly realize a deficiency in our application of the virtues. We take action and apply when-which-how. During our next meditation session, we may recall subtle details leading to deeper insights concerning the objective aspect of the previous day’s work with the virtues. These insights now become integrated into our overall store of wisdom in emotional self-mastery.
This practice is different from many spiritual disciplines of the past in that more emphasis is placed on objective practice (applying when-which-how in daily encounters) than on subjective practice (long hours spent in meditation). Again, both are necessary, but with a new emphasis.
• I don’t know what comes over me, but I spontaneously decide to try the Six Heart Virtues Grid Meditation that I read about in “Living from the Heart.”
This continues where we left off above. As you can see, our practitioner decides to do the grid meditation. The interesting part of this is that he is performing the meditation in the kitchen, at breakfast, with his wife and kids scurrying around getting ready for the day’s activities.
So, even though he is not performing his usual meditation session, he is still essentially actively engaged in a subjective form of practice. In other words, he is performing an active meditation.
Test the Theory
• So I breathe the virtues through my system and into the energy fields of my family. At first this feels kind of weird and airy-fairy, but I finally admit that it actually feels kind of nice.
Many people who are drawn to the Event Temples website and spend some time reading the material, may feel that all this stuff is weird and airy-fairy. One of the main points of Event Temples, however, is to demonstrate that this “stuff” is not weird and airy-fairy—that, on the contrary, it can be scientifically proven to be practical and effective—if people will give it a fair trial. We must simply give it a try, just like our practitioner, who had to admit that once he did the visualization, it felt kind of nice.
Awareness and Sensitivity
• Aware of my insensitivity, I realize that I need to show more appreciation for my family…
Perhaps for many people who have done work on themselves in the area of interpersonal relationships, this remark does not seem extraordinary. Nevertheless, in the context of practicing when-which-how, it signals an important moment because this individual is experiencing an increased awareness and sensitivity involving when to apply the virtues and which virtues to apply. Prior to this moment, he has been unconscious of any negative actions or feelings directed toward the family.
This is an example of the effects of opening the meditative heart-mind system to the virtues by practicing the Virtuous Cycle Technique each day. Eventually an awareness of the lack of a virtue (in this case, appreciation) bubbles to the surface of consciousness amid the activities of daily life. This is a sign of increasing sensitivity because the detection of the absence of a virtue can only occur if there is the awareness of that virtue already. Meditating on these virtues imprints these virtues on our heart-mind system. As a result, we become sensitive to their absence in the environment. This triggers our memories and we realize that the “when-which-how moment” has arrived.
Observation
• The arguing kids are too much to deal with now and I don’t know what to do about the irritation I feel because of the wet newspaper. All I can do right now is observe this irritation and feel it in my gut.
Part of this entry pertains to the pain of the moment. This is discussed in the next entry, but here we will focus on observation. This ability was discussed in the last section and I have brought it up once again because of its significance. This individual is developing the power to observe his environment. On the surface, this may appear to be insignificant, but in a practice such as emotional self-mastery, the ability to observe one’s own actions and reactions is paramount to effective practice.
We must develop the capacity to be present in the moment as often as we can. We must learn to be present to our own thoughts, feelings, and actions. This sense of presence gives us the power to manage these three areas of our lives with more efficiency. When we think, feel, or act unconsciously we are little more than robots performing our programmed functions throughout the day.
You are the entity using the human instrument of thought, feeling, and activity. Without your conscious presence, the instrument—through the conditioning of the social order—carries out its duties with almost no input from you, the supposed manager of the instrument. So there is no way to practice when-which-how unless YOU are present, consciously aware, and able to direct, manage, and observe the results of your self-initiated expressions of the heart virtues. So, the statement: “All I can do right now is observe this irritation and feel it in my gut,” is not such a futile activity as it first appears. If our practitioner was unable to observe the presence of irritation, how could he even begin to remedy this lack of emotional self-control?
This does, however, bring up another more subtle issue. This is the initial difficulty of increased sensitivity without the ability to be present and observe it. Through our work with the virtues, our individual energetic bodies (human instrument) are being imprinted with more intense energetics. Therefore, we need to try our best to observe this increased sensitivity of our individual energetic fields to these incoming forces.
A simple analogy might be that of parents with a newborn baby. While the baby is still an infant it requires care and an increased sensitivity on our part. The infant can be placed in a playpen or crib and it will be relatively secure and will require less observation than a two year old. The two year old is walking and climbing. It requires not only sensitivity, but a greatly increased amount of observation on the parents’ part. A more sophisticated, mobile, and curious child requires increased observation so that we can manage the child’s higher, more intense energies. The parents’ conscious presence becomes of prime importance.
The same holds true for our practice. Our responsibilities increase as the power of our energetics increase. We must be consciously present to observe and manage their use.
The Pain of the Moment
7:30 AM. Morning Traffic Jam
• I realize that it isn’t easy to activate the virtues when negative emotions have gotten into my system and are running riot. It takes a while for me to allow these negative emotions to subside before I can focus on bringing forth the feelings of humility and understanding.
Honestly speaking, it’s easy to send someone compassion or forgiveness when we are in a secure and comfortable mood. When our emotions are calm and we are in a state of well-being, it’s not too difficult to practice when-which-how. In fact, this is the whole point of emotional self-mastery—to create an individual human energetic field (IHEF) that is firmly rooted in the energetics of the soul—the solid platform of the energetic heart. This firm foundation brings us emotional control, strength, and serenity in the midst of chaos, which gives us the opportunity to serve others (and ourselves) in distress.
Have you had the chance to practice when-which-how in the midst of your own emotional turmoil? Try recalling your state of mind and emotion at the instant of sharp dispute or stubbing your toe. What emotion were you feeling? Love and peace, or anger and pain? If someone had asked you at the moment you stubbed your toe, what is 96 + 47, what would your answer have been? You probably see my point.
When we are in the midst of a personally emotional situation, it is highly likely that we will not be able to initiate the when-which-how practice in a timely way. In such situations, we are probably in much pain, and as our previous examples showed, when we are in any kind of pain it is difficult, if not impossible, to think and feel clearly.
Here is a personal example that will probably appear insignificant to most people, but the wonderful practicality of when-which-how is that we can even use it for the most seemingly trivial incidents of our lives. Let’s remember, though, that this practice is not about the events or contents themselves, but about how we react to them. With this in mind, here is my example. When I first began to practice when-which-how, I was watching a baseball game. My favorite player was at bat and he was hit in the hand with the baseball, by the opposing team’s pitcher. It turned out that the batter’s hand was broken. He was the best hitter on the team and he was disabled for a month with a broken bone in his hand.
I was angry and frustrated, yet immediately remembered when-which-how. I thought to myself, “This is the time to engage the practice.” Do you know that I was so upset and irritated that I could not begin the process? In fact, believe it or not, I was having a difficult time recalling the names of the six virtues! I was doubly shocked. Not only couldn’t I think straight, but I couldn’t feel straight either. I was trapped in an emotional whirlpool of pain and frustration and had no hope of engaging the heart virtues.
On an intellectual level, I knew the pitcher had not injured the batter on purpose, but yet I couldn’t express understanding, compassion, or forgiveness into the situation. This, I believe, is an example of how the pain of the moment affects our ability to practice when-which-how.
In our example here, our practitioner has sensed his lack of appreciation for his family, but he is soon overwhelmed by his irritation with the wet newspaper and the larger issue of his arguing children. He is in too much emotional pain and turmoil to engage the practice. The ability to overcome this impediment comes with experience in the practice. At the beginning stages, if you are overwhelmed with a situation, don’t blame yourself for your inability to express the virtues. Be patient and wait for your emotions to subside and later, when you have some time to spare, do the work of sending what you feel to be the appropriate virtues. Remember that the energetic heart and higher self operate in a non-spacetime, non-local manner. This means that you can perform your service later (in time) if you are unable to engage the practice when the situation is occurring.
The Ups and Downs of Practice
8:30 AM. At Work
Blame
• I get to work just in time for my project meeting and I immediately find out that something has gone wrong with the project. I know it’s not my fault, but is obviously the fault of some idiot in another department.
This initial reaction is obviously a low point and is a normal reaction under the circumstances. It’s normal to be defensive in a situation like this one and many of us usually look to shift the blame for mistakes to others rather than ourselves. Nevertheless, practicing when-which-how demands that we have the valor to face situations with honesty and this especially pertains to our own attitudes and behaviors. Although this is a low point, he soon recovers from this reaction.
Rapid Re-alignment
• Observing the thoughts and feelings that come into my mind, I cannot avoid the fact that I have just condemned someone for making an error even though I have no evidence to back it up. My heart tells me that this is not the right attitude.
Still able to observe his thoughts and feelings, our fellow practitioner has unconsciously drawn from the energy of valor to admit to himself that he is condemning some unknown individual for a major mistake on this important company project. This is obviously a high point. He comes to terms with his selfish reaction and desires to send an apology to this other person. He does this by sending the virtue of forgiveness to the unknown individual he has falsely accused for the foul-up. In this case, he is not only forgiving the other individual, but asking this individual’s forgiveness for his unfair judgment. This is an instance of how a virtue is used. This is an example of releasing oneself and others from a negative and energy draining thought pattern.
Just as important, this is a good example of how rapidly we can recover from a negative emotional state when we align with the energetics of the heart virtues. Our ability to quickly regain our positive emotional state becomes stronger the more consistently we practice when-which-how.
Renewed Energy
• A couple of months ago, I would have been irritated at least all day over an incident like this one. Comparing that feeling of irritation with this new feeling of forgiveness is like a breath of fresh air. Instead of feeling locked into an irritable and uncomfortable emotional state, by contrast, I feel liberated, able to let go of this emotional discomfort. Ordinarily, I would have been drained of energy all day, but now I feel energized and somehow more empowered.
Now that he has been able to forgive, he is suddenly aware of how energized he feels. This is one reward of working from the heart—we have the strength to break free from the burdens of guilt and shame associated with our inability to face our internal shortcomings. To paraphrase a description from Lyricus, surrendering these iron weights of the ego to the gold of the heart is the beginning of liberation and a sense of renewed energy.
Crisis
10:30 AM.
• My boss calls me into her office to inform me that it wasn’t an idiot from another department who screwed up, but it was, in fact, me. I am the idiot who screwed up. I am suddenly in a state of shock!
Our practitioner has just come off a high point in his practice and now, out of nowhere, he is hit with this shocking news. I am not championing the experience of shock in our lives, but the rapid appearance of unexpected news is a real opportunity to move forward in emotional self-mastery. A life crisis is almost always accompanied by pain at some level. Life is filled with turning points that are like forks in the road of living. They represent signposts by which we can change the direction of our lives. Sometimes we make these decisions on our own and sometimes they are made for us through some unexpected news. In any case, they are unavoidable. In our example here, a crisis has broken out in this practitioner’s life and in the first instance, he did not have the practice of when-which-how to fall back on. In the second instance he does. Spiritual crises are often difficult and painful experiences, but they are invaluable lessons in psychological and spiritual development if we take advantage of them. Change is going to happen to all of us anyway, so why not prepare ahead of time. If that change does contain pain, we can lessen it considerably through practicing emotional self-mastery. More importantly, we will learn something new about ourselves and the world, thus giving us valuable knowledge to apply the next time a crisis emerges in our lives.
Increased Light
• Here I am, sending forgiveness to someone who made this huge mistake and all along it was me. I was nice enough to take the time to send forgiveness to somebody and they didn’t even need it! I AM an idiot. Not only that, I am a conceited, egotistical idiot, for I automatically assumed that because I am such a superior person the mistake could not possibly have been mine.
Our friend is really beating himself up over this mess. Not only is he in shock, but he is ashamed of himself for being so egotistical. Even though this self-flagellation appears to be a down situation, it is actually an up situation because our practitioner is experiencing his ego-personality in the light of his own soul. This light is powerful and once activated in the consciousness shines brightly on the “good and bad” of our egoic self. Without this feedback, how are we to practice when-which-how? Pain in the physical body is a necessary and self-protecting feedback system for alerting us to health problems. The same holds true for emotional pain. As long as we don’t feel the mental and emotional pain we cause ourselves and others, we have no ability to improve our relationships or harmonize the inner chaos and turmoil we live with everyday.
The energetic heart is the open window through which the blazing light of the soul shines into our consciousness. If we have the valor to examine the contents of our consciousness that are revealed in this higher light, we will make rapid progress in our journey. We simply have to take the time to look.
Reflection and Review
12:00 Noon
• Sitting in my office at lunchtime, I reflect on the morning’s events. I have recovered enough from my emotional reactions to look at the attitudes and behaviors I expressed as a result of this crisis.
Although not explicit, our practitioner is communing with his higher self through the energetic heart. He is turning within and examining the day’s events through the clear lens of the soul, instead of the ego-personality (which always must create excuses for defending its temporal existence). The mind is playing an important role, now that it is free from the influence of ego’s defense mechanisms. Working within the unbiased light of love, the mind is able to use its power of reason to clearly judge and decide the best course of action. From this, the mind and heart can formulate a plan. This plan consists of using when-which-how to bring healing, harmony, and order to the situation.
These reflection and review periods might be thought of as counseling sessions with the higher self that take place in the hallowed chambers of the heart. In many ways, this is similar to that place in consciousness described as the chamber of self.
Acceptance
• Okay, enough wallowing in what has already been done. All I can do now is realign to my energetic heart. Immediately, I close my eyes and visualize myself as a point of divine love surrounded by the six virtues.
After replaying the events, he decides that he has spent enough time on self-pity. Often times we cannot help feeling sorry for ourselves and marveling over the apparent fact that everything always seems to happen to us. It’s almost an instinctual reaction, like when something gets too close to your eye and it blinks. Or when the doctor tests your reflexes by tapping your knee. Our sense of victimization is so ingrained in our energy fields that we have trouble consciously intervening and powering down these reactions. Don’t worry about it. If you find yourself in self-pity, wallowing in your misfortune, accept it for what it is, but move on. Acknowledge it without conditions or excuses and get back to the work of realigning with the heart, so that the higher energetics can start to flow through your energy fields once again. Naturally, all crises are not created equal and therefore, each one will subside in its own timeframe. Nevertheless, initiating the grid meditation—visualizing yourself as the center of divine love, with the six heart virtues surrounding you—will eventually restore your alignment and open your connection to the network of spiritual energetics.
Alignment and Insight
• The simple act of performing this exercise, allowing the energies of these virtues to flow through my being, somehow renews my spirit.
• This crisis is turning into a breakthrough. I now see that my heart has led me to the soul itself. I feel uplifted and shifted in consciousness to a state of serenity and unity.
When we seek alignment with the energetic heart, we are also aligning with our higher self. The more we make the effort to align ourselves with the spiritual aspect of life (instead of the material, form side only), the more insights we will receive. If we have the will to persist in practicing when-which-how, we discover that our lives and our practice merge into one expression of living. This comes later on, but it does no harm to mention the goal of our work.
First we live the life of unity—unity with the world of material living. We are practicing the social order. Next we discover a spiritual teaching that resonates with us. As we engage the new practice, we begin to live a dual life. One is the ordinary life of material living and the other is the life of spiritual living, such as learning to live from the heart. This marks the dual stage. Eventually, this stage is superseded by the integration and fusion of the material and spiritual pathways. Your two life expressions become indistinguishable as they combine to form one life expressing emotional self-mastery. These uplifting moments, often born of crisis, foreshadow that future day when the two become one.
Empowerment
1:00 PM.
• Feeling confident about this heartfelt experience, I do something that I never would have dreamt of before today. I go to my boss’s office and ask to talk to her. I apologize for my emotional outburst and the mistake I made on the project. I am especially sorry for blaming someone else for it before the evidence showed the true source of the error. I think to myself how great it feels to admit my true position in all this—to not have to defend a false position. The virtue of humility has lifted this burden from my shoulders.
Here we see that our practitioner has found the courage to be honest with his boss. He expresses humility through his apology and regret for acting so egotistically. This humble and honest admission is powered by valor. In this case, even though he has brought the virtue of humility into his life experience he has not expressed it openly. Valor is the energetic power source for driving the virtues into expression. Expression can happen two ways, internally to ourselves and externally in our relationships to family, friends, and co-workers.
Of all the virtues, humility is probably the one that is most repugnant to the ego-personality because the ego must feel itself to be in a superior position in relation to others. Interestingly, of all the virtues, humility has this negative connotation attached to it and its cognates. For the ego, to be humble is humiliating. This virtue is interesting in this sense and warrants deeper thought for those who want to investigate it further.
Freedom to Be Honest
• I then find the courage to tell my manager that I really can’t stay overtime today to correct the problem because my son is playing in a soccer match after school.
Due to his new sense of freedom from the heavy ego mask, he feels comfortable with being himself, without all the defensive walls in place. It actually feels good to be upfront and not feel the need to make false excuses for himself.
Energetic Transfers
• For the first time since I have worked for her, she is sharing information about her personal life. She relates that her daughter also plays soccer and that she always tries to attend her daughter’s games.
As a result of this practitioner’s efforts to practice when-which-how, he has affected his relationship with his manager in a positive manner. His valor and humility have freed him from his ego’s defense mechanisms and allowed him to be honest about his son’s soccer game.
It appears that his manager may have been affected by the radiatory effects of this practitioner’s earlier distribution of the six heart virtues into the energy fields of his co-workers.
Remembering To Practice
• I make a quick mental note to remember to do this more often because, up until today, I have only remembered to apply the technique once in a while. If I can discipline myself to be more aware of my interactions, I can increase my opportunities to apply the virtues to the small difficulties of life and prevent them from growing into major problems, like the crisis today.
As he reviews the day, our practitioner marvels at the difference in the outcomes of these events, compared to his previous defensive lifestyle. Despite all the problems he encountered today, he learned much from them and had the power to work through them with much less emotional turmoil. His energies weren’t drained and he feels “right” with himself. Not self-righteous, but aligned with a more genuine center of being than his ego-personality. He is now heart-centered and receiving the spiritual energy and guidance of the higher self in the form of the six heart virtues.
Realizing all this, he resolves to remember to apply the when-which-how technique more often. Remembering to practice is obviously vital to living from the heart. The problem is that we are so habituated to our emotional reactions that they have already occurred before we notice them—if we notice them at all. At least noticing these reactions is a good start.
So, we have come full circle in knowing when to initiate the practice.
• First we have to be present in the moment, aware of what is happening around us.
• Second, when we are present in the moment, we can observe our internal state and the external activities around us.
• Third, our awareness and observation allow us to detect the absence or deficiency of the virtues. Clues to this can often be found in the presence of their opposites.
• Fourth, we must then remember to apply the virtues to the situation. Thus, remembering to practice is a composite of awareness, observation, and sensitivity to an encounter.
We forget to engage the technique when we lose our self-awareness and become identified with the unfolding situation. It’s like being sleepy and telling yourself that you must remain awake. Several seconds, minutes, or even hours later you realize that you fell asleep and never knew it. Our entire life we have been asleep in relation to our higher self. Our encounter with Living from the Heart is like an alarm clock waking us up to our real world. Our difficulty stems from our sleep habit. We wake up for a second or two, but fall asleep without even knowing it has happened.
The crisis experienced by our practitioner is analogous to a family member shaking us out of our dreams and urging us to wake up because we are going to miss an important appointment. In order to improve our practice of when-which-how we must discover how to maintain wakefulness in our daily encounters. Experiment to find the best way for yourself. No matter what technique you use, the more you interrupt the ego’s sleep habit, the less influence it will exert in your day-to-day encounters.
Neutrality
5:30 PM. The Soccer Game
• Halfway through the game, my son’s team is losing and no one is happy. Meanwhile, I’m thinking about this whole concept of competitive sports and how it fits in with emotional self-mastery. Should I be sending the heart virtues to anyone right now? What if I send valor to my son’s team, but not the opposing team? How can a person send courage to one team and withhold it from another? Where is the compassion in that? I decide that I should be neutral in terms of the current soccer game…. So, I decide to send both teams valor.
Although this soccer game is not a critical issue, it brings up some deeper issues such as, personal attachments, vested interests, conflicts of interest, and prejudice, to name a few.
Our practitioner is faced with a dilemma—should he send valor to his son’s team, so they have the strength to win the game? Ordinarily, this is not a problem. We see this every day in sports all over the world. There is nothing inherently wrong about wanting our team to win a game, but how can we send heart virtues to one team and not the other? If everyone is playing by the same rules, either team has the right to winning. Excuse the pun, but there has to be a level playing field when working with the virtues of the heart. In fact, we have to raise the level of the playing field while keeping it level. In the case of this soccer game, sending valor to both teams appears to be the right choice. Either send it to no one or send it to everyone, but don’t choose sides.
This example is a form of neutrality in the practice of when-which-how. When we recognize when to send the virtues, we cannot withhold the energy transfer because we judge the recipient to be unworthy. If this happens it means that we have slipped back into the sleep of the ego-personality and we are judging the situation, person, or group in terms of the duality of good and evil. The bottom line is that in our encounters with our fellow human beings it is best to be neutral in our distribution of the virtues.
Experience Comes with Practice
8:00 PM. Dinner
• We are finally eating dinner and my wife is telling me about the chores that must get done this weekend. I am nodding in agreement, but I haven’t heard a word because I am thinking about how I am going to straighten out the mess at work. I then realize to my dismay that I haven’t been present. My mind has drifted off and I am not giving my wife the attention she deserves (that anyone deserves).
We have already discussed the importance of being present in the moment and of being aware of our surroundings and the people in our lives. The point of mentioning it here is not only to reiterate its importance, but to use this as an example of how quickly our practitioner is remembering to engage the practice. He quickly wakes up to the fact that he hasn’t been present and therefore has not given his wife the attention she deserves.
This is an example of the cumulative effect of performing when-which-how as often as possible. The more we practice it, the more experience we gain, and this experience adds to our skill and ability to build in the habit of living from the heart instead of from the ego-personality. Below are more examples of the snowballing momentum that we can build into our lives through practicing when-which-how. All of these realizations are born from the virtues of the heart.
• I apologize for not paying attention to our discussion.
• Through valor, I am able to honestly express my situation at work and explain the reasons for my callous and thankless behavior of late.
• I express to her how appreciative I am of her efforts to support the family in so many ways.
• I express my understanding for how she must have felt during this stage of our relationship.
• Turning within, I put myself in her position and can feel compassion welling up in me, and I send it to her.
• Meanwhile, another argument has broken out between the two kids in the next room and instead of screaming at them to shut-up and go to bed, I inform them that my wife and I will help resolve their argument in the morning.
• As the music is playing I picture the six virtues energy grid surrounding me and enveloping most of the rooms in our home. A new atmosphere of harmony descends upon our family…at least for awhile.
Maintaining Perspective
10 PM. Bedtime
• As I drift to sleep, I am aware that my efforts to apply the heart virtues are turning out very well. I have a lot to learn about how to use them more skillfully, but I am pleasantly surprised at how effectively they work, even for a novice like myself.
There is much to learn, but we grow into this work. As long as we maintain our perspective, our practice will unfold according to the intelligence of our heart. Through the virtue of humility we don’t overestimate ourselves nor underestimate ourselves. We recognize ourselves for where we are in the practice. In this case, our practitioner knows that he is a novice and he is comfortable with knowing where he is because his intuition tells him that he is headed in the right direction.
Summation
You may already have noticed that much of this work has to do with honestly facing ourselves and admitting that we too often ignore the problem areas of our emotional lives, or that we become insensitive to these areas due to our denial of their existence. A large part of the when-which-how practice is opening ourselves to these shadow areas of our ego-personalities. Therefore, a great deal of this work is speaking truth to the power of our own egos.
Our practitioner has admitted to himself that he has been insensitive to the needs of his family. He has acknowledged that his ego has gotten in the way of his attitudes to his co-workers. He recognizes that many of the difficulties he faces are self-created.
His relatively brief experiment with the practice of when-which-how has yielded positive results. He can feel them and experience the difference in the quality of his life. His decision to align with the heart virtues has helped him make objective observations of his life and relationships. Living from the heart has increased his sensitivity to his inner and outer life, and the virtue of valor has played an important part in this unfolding process.
