Living a life dedicated to awakening
Our mind (Sanskrit: Chitta) is the perfect vehicle for our illuminating consciousness, and its actual purpose is to lead a divine life. The operating principles of the mind comprise, in essence, the five senses (hearing, feeling, seeing, tasting and smelling), which we can direct inward as well as outward; memory; the intellect; and discernment. So if this really is "the perfect vehicle for a divine life" – why do we not experience the state of enlightenment permanently, the oneness with everything, pure bliss?
Like an engine that only runs on the right fuel, the mind depends on being used with the right orientation. If we use the mind merely to confirm our ideas about ourselves – so that it ultimately serves our identifications, our small self or ego – that is comparable to running a petrol engine on diesel. We are then, in the end, in resistance to life. And in every moment that produces deposits of unrealised experience, open karma, which is stored in our subconscious and settles like a veil over our perception, only to be realised after all, one day.
The Arts of Being help us to train our discernment, through applying the operating principles of the mind, so that our mind serves our highest, divine Self more and more – and the accumulated false ideas about ourselves less and less. In the process, the lens through which we simultaneously create and perceive the world is cleansed: a veiled perception becomes a crystal-clear view on every level, with every sense. Ultimately we let go of our effort to resist life and surrender effortlessly to our original immortal nature, which leads to an authentic life and to the expression of our highest potential.
At the core of the Arts of Being stands the Art of Compassion, which should on no account be confused with the understanding of "compassion" that is common in wide circles, where "compassion" has primarily to do with empathy – the focus of that "feeling into" ultimately being another person’s emotions. The Art of Compassion, by contrast, is the knowledge of the natural use of the feeling heart as an orientation for the mind toward truth – so as to find, in the face of illusion, the true self-reference, to abide in it, and thereby to express our highest potential in life. Like the spectrum of white light in a rainbow, this highest potential has different aspects – qualities of the heart which ultimately express the Divine Intent, Deva Vidhitsa.
Through devotion to the qualities of the Divine Intent, and through the effortless allowing of those qualities in our expression which arises naturally out of the Art of Compassion, we immerse ourselves ever more deeply in a life dedicated to awakening – and mastery of the Art of Compassion is, in fact, the moment of awakening itself.
