Absorb the senses in your heart

What the Method Is

The core instruction for this meditation technique is: “Blessed one, as senses are absorbed in the heart, reach the center of the lotus”. This method is designed for heart-oriented individuals and aims to draw consciousness from the external world, through the senses, into the heart center, and subsequently to the body’s fundamental root, the navel center.

How It Is Done

To practice this method, you should:

  • Determine if you are heart-oriented: This technique is specifically for those who are loving, feeling types, and emotional. A heart-oriented person experiences things with their heart, lives without reasoning, and is present in the here and now, unlike head-oriented individuals who are more cerebral, calculative, and future-focused. It is crucial to observe yourself impartially to confirm your type, as self-deception will prevent the technique from working.
  • Sensitize your body and senses: Modern civilization often makes individuals insensitive to their bodies and feelings. To counteract this, practice feeling sensations fully without intellectual interpretation. For example, when touching, feel the pressure and warmth rather than inferring the object. When taking a shower, feel every drop of water. Loving touch, such as massaging a friend’s body, can also increase sensitivity.
  • Practice “headlessness”: To encourage the shift of awareness from the head to the heart, cultivate a feeling of being without a head. This can be done by closing your eyes and feeling that your head has disappeared, allowing your center to fall to the heart. You can also try looking at a picture of yourself without a head and concentrating on it.
  • Absorb the senses into the heart: With a sensitized body and a focus away from the head, actively direct the experience of your senses into your heart:
    • Touch: When touching someone or something (e.g., a beloved, a child, a tree, the earth), feel the communication and warmth flowing from your heart, as if your hand is your heart stretched out to touch.
    • Listening: When listening to music or any sound, listen from the heart, allowing your heart to vibrate with it. Feel the music coming to your heart, letting your senses be joined to the heart, not the head.
  • Allow senses to dissolve: Continuously think that every sense experience goes deep into the heart and dissolves into it.
  • Remain in a loving state: Let your relationships be based on unconditional love, transcending the head’s management. This will naturally center you in the heart.
Commentaries and Insights
  • The Heart as a Gateway: This technique aims to shift consciousness from the periphery (the senses and mind in the head) to the inner center, which is the heart. While the head is the center of knowing and the navel is the existential root, the heart is the center of feeling and acts as an easier bridge to the ultimate center, the navel.
  • Distinction Between Mind and Heart: The mind is typically calculative, analytical, divisive, and focused on the future. It operates through reasoning and creates internal noise. The heart, conversely, is warm, non-calculative, and exists in the “here and now,” unifying rather than dividing. Civilization and education have trained humanity to be mind-oriented, leading to a diminished capacity for true heart-based experiences like prayer and love.
  • Path to the Navel Center: Once you are genuinely absorbed in the heart, it becomes “the lotus”, and the transition to the navel center (hara) – the body’s original, always-developed, and most basic root – becomes very easy. The navel is the “being” center, while the heart is the “feeling” center, and the head is the “knowing” center. All enlightened beings are rooted in the navel center, regardless of how they express their experience.
  • Transformation of Experience: When senses are absorbed in the heart, they stop feeding the “head” or the analytical mind. This allows for a deeper, non-conceptual understanding of reality. Love, when managed by the head, becomes possessive and attachment-based; but when it flows purely from the heart, it transforms into a state of prayer and deep contentment, leading to ego dissolution and timeless presence.
  • Tantric Acceptance of the Body and Senses: Tantra emphasizes starting from where you are, which is the body. It considers the body sacred, holy, and a vehicle for spiritual transformation, rejecting the notion that the body or senses are impure. This method exemplifies Tantra’s approach of accepting and using all aspects of human experience, including the senses, to go beyond the mind. It aims to make you more sensitive and alive, opening you to deeper inner experiences.
  • Overcoming Inner Noise: The mind is primarily composed of words and sounds. By focusing attention away from the head to the heart, this technique helps to quiet the internal dialogue, leading to a state of inner silence, or no-mind.
  • Authenticity vs. Deception: Osho cautions against the common tendency for individuals to deceive themselves into believing they are heart-oriented simply because love is a fundamental human need. True heart-orientation must be observed impartially; otherwise, the technique will be ineffective.
  • Spiritual Growth as Internal Flow: Energy in the body moves through various centers, with sex as the lowest and sahasrar (crown chakra) as the highest. When energy reaches the heart, it transforms into love. By absorbing senses in the heart, the energy is directed inwards and upwards, leading to the flowering of higher centers.