Getting to the Heart of Things
Author: Rosalind Pearmain

One of the confusions that often arises in our approach to transpersonal development is the way in which the means and methods have become conflated with the ends. In meditation, we withdraw attention temporarily from one area in order to develop attention in another one. If we focus solely on this aspect in transpersonal development we may be left with the notion that advanced states of consciousness are states of lofty detachment, creating a kind of emotional lobotomy that extinguishes human relating and contact with the world. The means to develop deeper and subtle perceptions may require a removal from extra sensory stimulation in order to develop intra sensory stimulation. But it is only in the living of everyday life that this awareness can be integrated into existence. From the academic and intellectual point of view, we can identify states of cognition and philosophical insights into the nature of self and other in the configuration of stages of development, but again we are lacking some of the vibrant, affective and intentional qualities of mature humanness, if we can only describe these changes as kinds of cognition and insight. We need to find some heart in it all. The mind/body split has also been affected by the dominance of attention to vision as opposed to other sensory modalities. The visceral and affective dimensions which are going on at the same time have been ignored. I met someone recently who had become blind for a few years as a child. He reported how he had felt far more inside the world when he was blind. Vision skews this intimate mingling of all sensory modalities that are felt within us. In most meditation practices we close our eyes. Yet there is also a dominance of visual metaphors in the descriptions of mystical states which continue to give this flavor of separateness and distance - we have words such as insight, illumination, vision-logic, enlightenment. If we contrast this language with the language of Sufism for example, we can feel a very different resonance when Inyahat Khan talks about attunement of heart, or Rumi - the mystical poet talks of his experience, as an embodied highly motile and dynamic way:

So I would like to focus more on the experiential and perceptual aspects of transpersonal development - since these seems to convey more directly the integration of cognition and feeling throughout developmental stages. Brown (1977) has mentioned neglect of these as significant when it is the nature of affective changes that are central to development. In particular, I would like to relate these to research on - in infancy and in the transpersonal stages when we are required to draw on experience that cannot be conceptualized in language and that has to be conveyed in an expressive synthesis of sensory/motor and affective qualities.

This conception of perception as the base point of existence enables us to see the development of human, spiritual consciousness as primarily to do with feeling (in a broad sense of sensing and relatedness) as a cornerstone of perception. It is important to distinguish here between feeling as affect, emotion, desire, as strong mental or instinctive feeling such as love or fear (earlier, it meant agitation, disturbance of the mind); and feeling as capacity to feel, a sense of touch, a physical sensation (often followed by a particular emotion), a particular sensitivity for, an opinion, notion - especially a vague or irrational one, vague awareness, sentiment readiness to feel sympathy or compassion, the general emotion response produced by a work of art, music, emotional commitment or sensibility in artistic execution. Thus, feeling represents far more complex capacities of perception that perhaps require further elucidation in new language? I would like to suggest that human development is shaped by a steadily refining quality of perception which we could call a subtle process (i.e. making finer and finer distinctions) which enables perceptual systems to continue to develop throughout human life. Each of us becomes expert in the areas of life which we are perceiving most often and with most attention - those who work in health care detect very faint changes in skin tone, an electrical engineer can detect faint currents, it applies in all areas. But in the process of transpersonal development, such attention to experience becomes something that can also translate to other areas too in terms of sensitivity and awareness.

The relation between mind and feeling has been approached in different ways but with some correspondence. Suzanne Langer in her work Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (1988) attempted to trace this truth through scientific biology. She aimed again to show that mind is feeling: "I hope to substantiate that the entire psychological field - including human conception, responsible action, rationality, knowledge - is a vast and branching development of feeling." Her conception of feeling was rooted again in a sense of living rhythmic forms in dynamic interconnected patterns which are clearly expressed in art as well as language. More recently, Nicholas Humphrey, a clinical psychologist has examined the notion of consciousness in his work The History of Mind (1992). This traces the development of the processes of sensation and perception through an evolutionary context. In the absence of bodily sensations, 'I' would cease. I feel, therefore I am... Conscious thoughts are typically 'heard' as images of voices in the head - and without this sensory component they would drop away. However, in Raj Yoga and other esoteric teaching, the idea of feeling in this general way has always been linked with the concept of the heart which has been known as the base of mind. Ramana Maharshi says: "(The heart) is the abode of the vital forces, the mind and the light of consciousness" (1972).

My own teacher, Ram Chandra, who is the founder of a modern form of Raj Yoga, Sahaj Marg, says: "(The heart) is the field for the mind to work, and this is the instrument by which we develop the discriminating faculty. The subtle force works in this place for the descent of Divine energy. The heart is the only point, at which the connecting link between the animate and the inanimate is most clearly felt..." ( 1968).

In linking east and west in this way, we may be able to address the notion of heart in relation to our conceptions of embodied perception as the basis of experience, and, in this sense, knowing. Such a perception is multi-modal, it involves all the sensory sources combined with proprioception, the sense of our own movement which is often very mixed with affective elements. It is this stream of experience which allows different conceptions of self to be distilled and modified through development as schemes that can be gathered into coherent cognitive/affective/sensory-motor structures which are modified throughout life. Several theorists have claimed that affect is the central gathering modality which creates a sense of continuity and identity over time.

My own interest in this area began over twenty years ago when I started practicing a form of Raj Yoga called Sahaj Marg, which means natural or simple way. Raj Yoga derived from the body of sutras or threads of teaching gathered by Patanjali within the millenium before Christ was born. The eight limbs of yoga are similar to the Buddhist eight-fold path and proscribe a spiritual approach which includes physical, emotional and mental existence. It is a practical means for experiencing directly the subtlest levels of reality. According to Patanjali and Vivekananda, the practice of Raj Yoga will lead to the acquisitions of more subtle perceptions.

Sahaj Marg is a modern form of Raj Yoga that has only come into existence in the last fifty years. The focus for meditation is the supposition of Divine light in the heart - not a visualization but a suggestion of quality of light. There are two unusual features of this practice: the first is that practicants feel an inner connection within their hearts, with the most subtlest source of pranahuti which is transmitted from the guide across time and space. The second is a cleaning aspect, which removes impressions at a causal level. The third element is that the focus is on the heart, with sub-points that correspond to Sufic descriptions. In Sahaj Marg, the heart is the field for the mind to act on. As the heart is purified, then there is a clearer and more direct perception of deeper and finer realities. So there is a dual process between mind and heart. The mind focuses on the heart and penetrates through finer and finer layers of experience.

The instrument of attention to internal states is the mind. Vivekananda says "a part of this practice is physical, but in the main it is mental. As we proceed we shall find how intimately the mind is connected with the body... The Yogi proposes to attain that fine state of perception in which he can perceive all the different mental states. We know very little about them (our bodies). Why do we not? Because our attention is not discriminating enough to catch very fine movements that are going on within. We can know of them only when the mind becomes more subtle, and enters, as it were, deeper into the body. There are many subtler levels to our perception of the world which we cannot normally detect - for example higher frequencies of sound, sub-atomic levels. Yoga teaches that not only do these subtle levels of creation exist but that subtler than subtlest lies the Self. The only way to experience this absolute Consciousness is to refine the mind's ability to perceive" (Shearer 1982).

I have kept a journal throughout twenty years and have also had the opportunity to notice developments within two or three hundred people on an informal basis. The principle change I have noticed over time in terms of living life is an increased capacity to feel and a greater relaxation. It has not been enlightenment, nor a superior mental process, nor a kind of detachment floating in bliss or peace which is so often conveyed in the mapping of transpersonal levels of consciousness. Nevertheless, in meditation, my capacity to discern more and more subtle qualities of experience within different kinds of scale and dimension has gone on developing too. By feeling, I mean a kind of sensing/perceiving at all levels. For example, I noticed after a visit with my spiritual teacher, that the music playing on those agonizing first-generation aeroplane earphones had an exquisite beauty and resonance more than the best sound system could have conveyed. I discovered a whole new palette of qualities of emotional feeling of colors and dimensions that I would not have known existed. Thirdly, I discovered a greater capacity to feel what other people are feeling, a kind of ability to be more attuned and resonant - obviously relevant to my work as psychotherapist and supervisor. All of these could be summarized in brief, to be more in touch. However, this development that I noticed within myself could be specified further. There was a capacity to detect more and more subtle elements within a formless quality of space which could be described in cross-modal qualities of feeling, nuance and vibration. This did not seem to be something innately esoteric or weird but more a further development of existing perceptual systems.

Latterly, I have been undertaking more formal qualitative research and some quantitative research for a doctoral thesis. I have been interested in understanding these changes further. Why should feeling and empathy increase with meditation? How can perception become more and more subtly attuned? What is involved with this? And how might we understand this better in psychological language?

In researching the perceptual changes associated with Sahaj Marg form of meditation, I have undertaken a series of interviews with subjects. This has taken the form of pilot semi-structured questionnaires and interviews of forty subjects, followed by more extensive semi-structured interviews with thirty subjects. In the original pilot interviews, the preliminary questionnaire asked how the process of meditation was experienced. If any changes had been noticed over time? And if any changes had been noticed in daily life? Further elaboration and specification of these themes were prepared as a result of analyzing the first pilot responses. Evidently, there are several methodological difficulties in such research which may encourage demand-led responses and reporting from memory on complex experience.

A further twenty-two interviews were collected in taped interview form. Of these twenty-two, sixteen were women and six were men from British, Malaysian, Irish, Indian, Danish, French, Italian, German, American and Sierra Leone background. These meditators had meditated from between one and twenty-five years. The age range was from 26 to 66 with an average age of 43.5. The interviews were semi-structured in open-ended questions.

I found that the subjects mainly reported changes in psychological, perceptual and philosophical terms. There was more emphasis on psychological changes than I had anticipated. These were reflected in attitudes towards others and self and a sense of well-being. Respondents noted significantly less fear and anxiety, removal of depressive and volatile emotional patterns, a letting go of a false persona, more balance, a return to a childhood sense of openness and possibility, acceptance of self and more compassion and a capacity to be open to whatever happens. These would seem to correlate to the measures of openness to experience. Secondly, there were existential developments which affected individuals' relationships with meaning, a sense of purpose and death. Thirdly, an increase in empathy and intuition was reported by those particularly involved in healing or inter-personally oriented work. In terms of descriptions of meditation and changes in meditation, there was a very high incidence of a particular pattern. This traced changes from an initial emphasis on fairly, explicit physical sensations and visual imagery towards more and more subtle awareness of the process which was harder to put into words. A very high proportion of respondents in interviews and questionnaires emphasized a 'deepening' of experience over time. Deepening was a consistent process that went on and on. This was linked with experiencing a loss of conscious awareness, a sense of absorption whereby participants lost sense of body and normal consciousness of self.

There is some difficulty in relating these aspects of meditational changes - which stress psychological and inter-subjective changes within the maps that are available within the field of Transpersonal Psychology. From the beginning, in this field we can see a cautious approach from the physiological measures of altered states, towards a more qualitative and phenomenological approach. Researchers have been interested in getting hold of the changes in attentional awareness with meditation, but the emphasis is still mental. As Roger Walsh has pointed out - more attention has been given to heart rate than heart opening (1995 pp.66).

Yet there is an important aspect in the focus on initial increase of awareness of physical or emotional states. These findings correspond to those of a variety of other researchers. For example, Daniel Brown and Michael Forte (1984) compared phenomenological differences among those practicing self-hypnosis, mindfulness meditation and imaging. One of the main differences they found between meditators and others was that meditators learn greater awareness of bodily processes and experience changes in the perception of time and self. Perhaps this is supportive of Wilber's existential level which is so crucially formulated from an integrated body/mind perspective. What we need to articulate further is how that embodied unity may go on becoming more and more differentiated and highly sensitized with subsequent development through the psychic, subtle and causal levels. The perceptual system that evolves is increasingly differentiative of this flux of cross-modal experience into its different elements. Another way of clarifying this is the development of proprioceptive awareness. There is a simultaneous proprioceptive and exteroceptive awareness in existence which changes the conception of self - as head riding on top of body to a being-with-in-relation flux, a kind of surrender from control and a sense of separateness to a sense of flow. One of the issues that arises with attention to pre-attentive states is whether they are regressive. Lesh (1970) and others discussed the increase of empathy with meditation as an aspect of regression in service of the ego. Werner and Kaplan (1964) in their ground-breaking work on symbol formation linked physiognomic perception to primitive peoples and children.

We can compare the way that Daniel Stern (1985) has creatively made use of Werner and Kaplan's (ibid.) terminology to describe the pre-verbal senses of self that may be construed within the infant and apply it to the transpersonal stage. The emergent aspects of self which reflect the dynamic qualities of experience, synthesized cross-modally, are accessible throughout life in his view and remain the province of art and aesthetic perception. This may provide another clarification of the pre and trans fallacy. Meditation facilitates increased perception of these emergent states yet within a different cognitive framework. In meditation, the meditator is again plunged into an amodal and global field of experience in which s/he gathers a sense of profound underlying coherence and organization that is steadily re-shaping and re-defining as s/he progresses, but of a deeper Self process rather than egoic construction.

The innate general capacity to take information from one mode and translate it into another is not understood. Stern (ibid.) suggests that information is not experienced in one mode perhaps and is encoded into an amodal representation which can be recognized in any of the sensory modes. There is also a form of physiognomic perception when categorical affects are experienced rather than perceptual qualities. Different patterns of lines, for example, are experienced as possessing particular affects. The third quality of experience is called 'vitality affects'. These can be conveyed dynamically or kinetically in such terms as surging, explosive, decresecdendo, fading away, fleeting and so on. The different forms of these feelings are impinging on the organism all the time and are involved in all the vital processes of life. These aspects will become involved in the consolidation of a sensorimotor schema of experiencing moments. Affective and cognitive processes cannot be readily separated at this stage. This breakdown of elements of pre-conceptual experience are helpful to match with Brown and Englers' (1986) studies on meditation subjects' response to Rorschach tests. There is ample evidence in the field to suggest that meditation facilitates awareness of pre-attentive processes in cognition, that there is a kind of deconstructing of experience which is normally out of conscious awareness. Gifford and May (1994) describe how when there is only a sense of space, it may still possess presence and subtly cognize the mind's activity in fleeting, fluctuating qualities of movement.

As I have mentioned earlier, in many ways, what has often been missing from a description of meditational levels and stages are the affective aspects. Affect is often crudely understood as specific emotional states. Within transpersonal experiences, affect is subtly interwoven with qualities of movement, texture, spaciousness, e.g., extracts from two of the interviews:

I feel it is getting more and more subtle and tasteless...I could express as tastelessness which was beyond and could only be seen as something light instead of heavy...
I could feel that quality I had experienced from the beginning, it was the same thing which I could feel, ...there was a kind of simplicity, it was the same quality that I got and I liked very much to feel it...later I could not see but I knew it was there. Things like presence... and I had to learn to experience it in a more and more subtle way…
I have identified four dimensions to the changes in affect over time. The first is the effect of uncovering of existing repressed emotions, or of residues of past experiences, in yogic philosophy they would be called - samskaras (impressions) - which may be felt in emotional or physical ways. The second may be experiences of emotion in greater than normal dimensions, positive and negative - as Grof (1982) has described - global loneliness or joy unbounded; a profound bliss or an absolute level of anguish in the soul, which are clearly linked with profoundly deep psychological changes. Thirdly, within the Sufi tradition of discussion of stages of development, outlining the stages of development without affect omits the vital quality of the process. They describe spiritual conditions as states which enter the mystic's heart through desire, anxiety, thirsting, bewilderment, illumination or intuition. Feelings and emotions continually change. Spiritual stations are permanent and are movements between opposites of contraction/expansion, gathering/separation, sobriety/intoxication, annihilation, subsistence, presence/absence. The fourth may be more important and central to the cognizing of experience itself: when qualities of feeling are intimately interwoven in the qualities of space, intensity, movement and subtle sound.

Knowing in this sphere is through feeling the most thread-like skeins of perception. When these affective and perceptual elements are included within the mapping of transpersonal development, then we can get closer to the juice, to the flesh and heart within spiritual development. Ram Chandra has said that emotion is to feeling as smoke is to fire. Fire is the real thing and smoke is the irritating thing that comes out of a badly lit fire or a fire which is too wet. The ideal energy conversion is to have smokeless fuel. The emphasis on purifying the heart is to achieve a more direct perception. In psychological language we have to penetrate the complexes we have (or skhandas) obscuring perceptual systems in all levels of cognition, emotion, embodied schemas and proprioception, in order to reach a simpler and more basic ground of knowing.

As we have seen, aesthetics is one source to provide this delineation of the elements that are conveyed expressively and simultaneously through many modalities and with affective residues. If we have to talk about surgings and fadings, looming and expansion, flowing shapes and qualities of intensity and texture, then, often the best analogies are in music. James Gibson's (1979) work on ecological perception is also helpful. He argued that much of the work on perception was carried out in static, laboratory conditions, whereas perceptual systems have evolved for motile organisms needing to scan the textural laminations in surfaces of a moving environment through ambient arrays that are changing. This image captures, more successfully perhaps, the experience of meditation. It resembles the mystics' emphasis on the cosmic dance. In attending more acutely to a vibrational flux ,we feel we are moving through a certain kind of landscape. There is also an interesting aesthetic principle in evolution here in parallel to the ideas of minimalist designers, artists, composers, and to Chinese and Japanese forms of art. The more the development, the more the simplicity and delicacy in form and execution. Such forms convey greater depth within more complex systems of feeling and also more coherence. There is perhaps a natural elegance in perceptual development which becomes more succinct and focused on the essentials, on the heart of the matter. This can be related then to the models of transpersonal development also.

As my research has continued with more in-depth interviews, an increasing number of subjects talked about their sense of development of inner experiential awareness as synonymous with heart, a sense of softening, and expansion. The heart is a mysterious concept. As both a physical organ and a subtle centre of living and love, it is concrete, metaphorical and metaphysical. In perennial philosophy, the heart is the base of spiritual cognition, yet it is phrased in an infinite number of ways, an organ of perception according to the Sufis. In Sahaj Marg, it is the field for the mind. My respondents spoke of the heart as a kind or orientating radar, as akasha, space, as the divine within and as a way of knowing. How do we go about understanding this? There have been some accounts of research by Damasio which suggests that there are neural transmitters in the heart which are vital to decision-making for example. Yet many questions are provoked which need to be explored much further. When we are considering the notions of evolution, it is not a question of mind or emotion/feeling. It is the relationship between both, heart and mind that is so central to spiritual development within all traditions.

In summary, there is a lack of research in this area on the development of affect and feeling in spiritual development and perception. Secondly, we need more precise understanding of the differences between emotion and feeling. With the gathering recognition of the pre-attentive, cross-modal aspects of pre-conceptual cognition, we are beginning to find language and terms to describe these aspects more specifically and this is promising and exciting. Aesthetics can give us useful terms to describe these presentational aspects of experience. In addressing all these areas with more rigor, we may be able to be more precise in touching the poetics and experience of deeper states of being without reducing their numinous quality and portent.

Transpersonal experiences are so extraordinary because they move us, touch us more profoundly than anything else. There is nothing that can be reified into static form, only a continual novelty which goes on changing and creating a sense of permanent unfolding.

Rosalind Pearmain,
September, 1997.

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Rosalind Pearmain: School of Psychotherapy and Counselling, Regents College, Inner Circle, NW1 4NS. Transpersonal Section of BPS Conference, September 1997.