Being Present
Integrating Three-Centered Awareness
One of the greatest challenges in life is simply to remain present to our experience in every dimension of our being. This is true regardless of the content of our experience, whether we would describe it as painful or pleasurable or somewhere in between. It is difficult to be fully here, now.
Where else could we be? When I examine myself, I notice how often my attention goes somewhere else, whether in the past or in the future. I can revel in nostalgia or regret.
“If I only she hadn’t done that . . .”
“If only I had responded this way . . .”
“Remember that perfect dinner when . . .”
“When he was president, things were so much better . . .”
I can also fantasize about the future; how much better or worse it will be.
“Once I retire, then I can . . ."
“What if the test result comes back positive, then . . .”
There is a quality of unreality about both the past and the future when inhabited in such a way as to take us out of our present experience. The past is no longer happening (assuming I’ve even remembered it rightly). The future has not yet happened (and rarely turns out the way I anticipate). What is real is here and now.
This doesn’t mean I can’t learn from the past. There are disciplines such as historical research or psychotherapy that invite reflection on the past in service to the present. There are methods of planning and risk reduction that support our resiliency and flourishing in the future. These actually strengthen our capacity to be present to our experience. Memory and imagination, used rightly, are vital human faculties that can liberate us from our captivity to the past or the future. But they also can imprison us. The various forms of obsessive-compulsive behavior and dissociative states are diseases of the memory and imagination.
When we are present to our experience, it is rarely with our whole being – body, soul, and intellect. Drawing on the teachings of G. I. Gurdjieff, Cynthia Bourgeault discusses this as the challenge of “three-centered” awareness. Awareness is three-dimensional, mediated through sensations, emotions, and thoughts.
The “moving center” refers to intelligence by way of sensation, the way in which we know the world through our bodies. This includes all the ways in which we find a sense of balance from within, as in learning to ride a bike or sail a boat. The “moving center” is a network of sensory connectivity to the world that conveys vital information. In fact, as Bourgeault notes, the great movements of the spiritual journey are all encoded in gestures and postures, transmitting truths patterned in and on our bodies. In the West, the “moving center” is frequently underdeveloped and the body is ignored or vilified as a mode of presence to our experience.
The “intellectual center” refers to intelligence by way of separation, the way in which we know the world through subject-object perception. Such binary thinking is a very useful tool – a grand separating, evaluating and measuring tool. But it is not such a useful tool for the journey toward mystical union or nondual attainment or enlightenment. Trying to do so with the mind alone is, as Bourgeault describes it, like trying to play a violin with a chainsaw. A chainsaw isn’t bad, but it is used to cut apart. The intellectual center alone cuts us off from life.
The “emotional center” refers to intelligence by way of empathic entrainment. It is the capacity to know things from the inside, through vibrational resonance or intuition. We experience it in the immediacy of a felt sense of “rightness,” an intuitive response to people and situations. This capacity is spread throughout the body but finds its nexus right below the heart.
Most people are present to their experience through the mediation of one or perhaps two of these centers, but rarely through all three. The Christian wisdom tradition describes the integration of the three centers as the Way of the Heart or the Awakened Heart. It begins with the heart of Christ and winds its way back to the heart of Christ, and in between is the heart of all sentient beings. In this tradition the heart is understood as an organ of spiritual perception, not just the seat of affectivity. It sees things that are invisible to the senses alone, or to the rational mind - what the church calls “faith” – which is not believing impossible things but being fully present to our experience with all of our being at a much more subtle level of perception. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.”
Jesus comes out of this lineage that understands the heart as an organ of spiritual insight, luminosity, clairvoyance. It senses pattern, coherence, and meaning, operating beyond our binary rationality; it operates as conscience in the moral sphere – we just know in our gut the right thing to do. The heart is a fractal, holographically united to the cosmic heart. Your heart isn’t something that you have so much as your participation in this resonant, radiant, loving, mutual feedback loop between your heart as a holograph of the divine heart – this whole energetic field.
The heart is not just a metaphor describing our yearning for God. It starts with the heart in your physical body. It works as a muscle in the physical body, as the source of feeling in our emotional body, and as a great electromagnetic resonator in our spiritual body – connecting us with the world and beyond.
The Way of the Heart entrains the brain to the rhythms and vibrational field of the heart. What the Eastern Orthodox tradition calls “putting the mind in the heart.” This purity or singleness of heart unites the three centers. It opens a new way of seeing; not from separation, but from profound participation and belonging. We become present to our experience with all of our being, and so find ourselves on the inside of the sacred heart of the world.
Andrew Harvey recommends a very simple spiritual practice that unites the three centers. It includes three elements:
15 minutes daily in in some form of meditation to bring the intellectual center in alignment with the heart;
15 minutes daily in the recitation of the name of sacred Beloved, however you name the divine, as a way of enkindling the feeling of divine love within the heart;
15 minutes of ecstatic dance, to whatever music inspires you (he recommends Tina Turner!), to awaken our senses and embrace our embodiedness.
While Harvey doesn’t explicitly refer to “three-centered” awareness, the practices he recommends align well with Bourgeault’s teaching about integrating our modes of perception in the Awakened Heart.
What gets in the way of your capacity to be present to your experience? In what ways do you seek to manage and control reality? In what ways do you try to escape from it?
What spiritual practices support your capacity to integrate the three centers in the Awakened Heart?
Note: Cynthia Bourgeault’s teaching on three-centered awareness is from lectures in the “Introductory Wisdom School” course offered by the Center for Contemplation and Action. Andrew Harvey’s teaching on integrative practices is from a lecture given in a course on “Interspiritual Fluency” offered by Spiritual Directors International.