In This Episode…

“The reason spiritual awakening is so incredibly rare on this planet isn’t that nobody wants to awaken. It’s that those of us who want to awaken also want something else that’s in conflict with awakening. We want security. We want to stay in control. We want to keep our self-image intact. As long as this division is in operation within us, we will not be a space within which awakening can truly occur and take root. This is why it’s so important to resolve this inner conflict and unlock the transformative power of an undivided heart.”
—Craig Hamilton

In “The Undivided Heart: Releasing Our Resistance to Awakening,” Craig explores one of the more complex obstacles on the spiritual path—our unconscious resistance to waking up.

There’s a part of us that longs to awaken, and another part that’s afraid of what it might require. While spiritual awakening offers a life of freedom, joy, and clarity, it also calls for a radical openness. This level of vulnerability can feel overwhelming, even unsafe, causing us to resist the very transformation we deeply desire.

This inner conflict is what keeps us stuck. In this episode, Craig explores why this happens and how we can resolve this struggle and unlock the miraculous power of an undivided heart.

If you’re interested in exploring more of Craig’s approach to meditation, you’re invited to tune in to a 90-minute online workshop Craig will be hosting called Meditation 2.0 – The Miracle of Direct Awakening. Register for free at: FreeMeditationWorkshop.com

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

When I speak about spiritual awakening, I’m talking about the always-surprising discovery of a profoundly sacred dimension of your own being, which already exists, fully formed, right now. This is not something we’re generating. It’s not something we’re striving to achieve or add to the person we already are.

The idea of spiritual awakening is that there is a mysterious, profound, luminous consciousness that’s always already here. It’s always already here, having the very experience of being you. But to the unenlightened mind and heart, it’s not visible. It’s not apparent. We don’t see it — or maybe we get glimpses of it, but even then we tend to not recognize it.

Awakening Unleashes Your Supercapacities

The experience of this deeper dimension of who we are is a remarkable thing that transforms our experience of being alive. But what’s so extraordinary about it isn’t just our experience of it. It’s that, as we discover and learn to embody this dimension of our being, we realize it already contains all of the higher human virtues and remarkable capacities that many of us spend our lives trying to cultivate and develop. There is a host or a suite of supercapacities that already exist fully formed in our true self, our true nature. Awakening to that nature unleashes these capacities into the world.

So spiritual awakening means awakening to something that’s already here. It has been called our natural state, our inherent naturalness, or our true nature. It’s who we already are and always have been.

Why Aren’t We Already Awake?

If it’s so natural, why aren’t we already awake? Why isn’t this how everybody is? If this is everybody’s natural state on this planet, why isn’t the human race more awake? There are a lot of reasons why, but here are a few that I want to talk about today.

1. Being Awake Means Being Undefended
Being awake means being completely undefended. It means giving up all of your ego defenses, all of your psycho-emotional defense mechanisms, and never picking them up again. And we human beings are all incredibly defended. We have a very complex defense structure that has been mapped by psychologists. They call this structure the ego defenses.

2. Being Awake Means Leaving Behind Our Deeply Held Biases
We also have a very powerful set of illusions operating within us, a set of biases that distort our perception of events and influence our responses to other people and to life. These biases condition the way we see and perceive and engage. Being awake means leaving all of them behind and it feels incredibly risky and even hazardous to our conventional ego structure and to the person we’ve known ourselves to be. Being awake means the end of being free to avoid uncomfortable truths or uncomfortable situations.

3. Being Awake Means Abandoning Our Personal Story
Being awake means leaving behind your personal story and all your investment in it, whether it’s a story of self-importance or of self-deprecation, because the ego will take either of those forms and defend it. I’m this kind of person; I’m that kind of person. I am the most important person; I’m the least important person. Often it’s a mix of both. Being awakened means we can’t go back to that, can’t live in it anymore at all. It’s over.

4. Being Awake Is a 100% Yes to Life…All the Time
Being awake means being a wholehearted “Yes” what life brings you, 100% of the time. It means you’ve given up any room to be ambivalent or half-hearted about anything ever again. It means you are “all in,” all the time, without the option to not be.

Part of Us Doesn’t Want to Wake Up

Although in our deepest longing, we want to be awakened, there is a big part of us that does not want any of what I just spoke about. There is a big part of you that doesn’t want any of that. Can you feel it? Could you feel it for any of those points I just made? “Oh, me being undefended, not avoiding anything? Facing everything? Being a wholehearted yes all the time? What about when I’m tired or I don’t want to, I’m uncomfortable or I can’t deal with it or I’m overwhelmed? I have to just show up? I have to be awake?”

So here’s the bottom line of the entire path of spiritual awakening. There’s a part of you that wants to awaken. It senses that awakening is the only thing that would give true meaning, purpose and fulfillment to your life. There’s a part of you that wants that deeply, and there is another part of you that doesn’t want anything to do with it — that rawness, that level of commitment, that single-pointedness and intensity of living, that fierce self-honesty of aligning with love and truth in every moment, without another option.

So that’s the dilemma that we as spiritual seekers find ourselves in. And often we’re not even very conscious of it until maybe someone points it out like I am right now, and then we start to study and observe ourselves on the path and we go, “Oh, I keep saying no. I keep saying yes, but then I keep saying no on a subtle level. I wasn’t really even seeing that.” This is what I call having a divided heart or a divided intention. And it really defines the human condition of the spiritual seeker.

Obviously there are all kinds of people who aren’t spiritual seekers and who don’t have that division, because they’re not trying to be enlightened or or to step into their higher nature. So there’s not a lot of division. There’s just an attitude of, “I’m doing what I want and living my life.” But the moment we’re on a spiritual path, now there’s this division within us.

So, I want to speak for a moment about why I’m calling it a divided heart, and why the answer to it is what I would call an undivided heart.

The Undivided Heart

I want to talk about the heart for just a moment. When I’m talking about the heart, I don’t mean your physical heart, and I don’t even mean your heart chakra, or the energy center of your heart per se. Maybe both the physical heart and heart energy are included in this, though, in some way.

I’m using the word “heart” in a more metaphorical or almost colloquial sense, which is the way we hear it spoken about. When we say we’ve put our heart into it, or we say, “She was so wholehearted in the way she showed up,” or “He tried to do a good job, but his heart wasn’t in it.” In other words, I’m using heart in the sense of our passion, what we truly care about, what we most deeply want. It’s like the motive force of our character: what drives us in the world. When your heart’s in it, you find you have access to resources that you never imagined. When your heart’s not in it, it’s just very hard to move.

The reason spiritual awakening is so incredibly rare on this planet isn’t that nobody wants to awaken. It’s that those of us who want to awaken also want something else that’s in conflict with awakening, and as long as this division is in operation within us, we’ll be able to make progress but we will not be a space within which awakening can truly occur and take root.

We will not be fertile soil in which the mystery of awakening can plant itself, grow and flourish. Even if it gets planted for a moment, we’ll uproot it the next day with a different choice we made. We’ll make a choice that’s in alignment with our awakening, and then we’ll make another choice that’s not. We’ll just keep going back and forth, and we won’t truly open to this higher potential.

But here’s the extraordinary thing. Although this is not something that we can use our will to directly control, it doesn’t mean that we can’t do anything about it. You see, there is something you can do that is actually just as significant as if you could simply choose to be awakened.

Choosing a Life that Is Aligned with Awakening

Wouldn’t that be the ultimate thing, if we could all just say, “I choose to be awakened,” and boom—it happened. But this is almost as significant as that. Maybe it’s just as significant because although none of us have the power to cause awakening—to simply cause it through our will—we do have the power to clarify our intention. We have the power to once and for all resolve the division in our heart.

In other words, you can decide once and for all that awakening is the only thing that matters to you or the thing that matters most, and from that point you can choose a life that is completely aligned with the energy of awakening, with the intelligence and wisdom of awakening, because it will now be revealing itself to you in each moment.

When our heart is no longer divided, when there’s nothing we want more than to discover and embody our true nature, then there’s nothing in our way. Spirit or God or awakened consciousness can’t help but show up and lead. We’ve removed the only obstacle there ever was—our divided heart. When we do this, we find everything in our life starts to become clear. Then, the way to live in each moment spontaneously reveals itself. And we’re filled with the power and strength, from somewhere beyond us, to embrace its emergence.

Wanting Awakening More than Anything Else

The reason this decision is essentially as significant as being able to choose to be enlightened, is that you really can’t tell the difference between an enlightened person and someone who has come to an undivided heart. When you have an undivided heart, there’s nothing preventing you from following “the way”—and the way is the way of enlightened living. So now your actions, your choices, your words, and everything else starts to emanate and flow from that. It starts to manifest that awakened consciousness. It was only having mixed motives and unclear intention, this division within us, that prevented this higher order of being from coming forth.

If awakening is the thing you want the most, everything gets very simple. You have an undivided heart. That heart will guide you. All you have to do from that moment forward is listen to the heart. Follow the clarity it brings. And when I talk about the heart, I’m talking about a faculty that transcends and includes all other faculties. So it’s not that your intellect isn’t relevant, it’s not that your emotional sensitivity isn’t relevant — all of that is relevant — but it’s now in service to one thing—living your life aligned with this profound depth of your true nature.

How Will You Know If You Have an Undivided Heart?

I know some of you are saying, “Well, okay, sounds good, but how do I know if I have an undivided heart? How would I know if I was listening to the right thing inside me? I’ve been deluded about that before. I’ve done things I thought were responding to my intuition, which didn’t pan out very well. “

Here’s how you know. When you’re living your life with an undivided heart, adhering to what it’s requiring of you, it will be opening you ever more deeply to the sacred mystery of your true being, your true nature. This will demonstrate itself through increasingly enlightened actions that will have an increasingly positive, enlightening impact on the world and others around you.

You will discover a growing capacity for infinite compassion, for profound intuitive wisdom, for a dynamic, free responsiveness in the face of what life brings your way. If these capacities are opening more and more, then you know you’re following the undivided heart at that point. It’s self-validating. It keeps showing it’s the right path because of where it’s taking you.

Embracing this Great Possibility

So this is the great possibility, and I hope you can sense it. How in that possibility the things we could intend to do and resolve to do would be infused with a tremendous transcendent power. It wouldn’t just be you, the individual, doing these things. It would be this great higher consciousness now doing those things, which would just add that much force and momentum to every one of these actions.

When the spiritual path is really working, that’s what it’s like. That’s how it works. That’s how it feels. That’s how it’s experienced. Everything is supercharged with the energy of the source itself because we’re now no longer divided. We’re undivided, and therefore that luminous force of the sacred can flow into everything. There’s nothing blocking it.