by Berenice Andrews
Since this account is about you, please focus your attention on the middle of your chest. It’s the soul field location of an immense “container” into which the vibrations of love and/or lovelessness can enter and where you make your preparations to welcome (or reject) your Being. It’s your heart center of consciousness—the creative energies of spiritual connection—that people have been evolving for at least 75,000 years.
In the long-ago beginnings, paleolithic shamans crawled into the deep parts of Earth, into the huge caves that they somehow knew existed. There, in solitude and semi-darkness, these early spiritual leaders painted on the cave walls the scenes of their ordinary lives and the visions from their spirit journeys. Into those caves came their followers to worship their gods.
These caves were sacred containers of connection between this world and the Spirit World.
In the many unrecorded millennia after those beginnings, people slowly became civilized because they were evolving spiritually. Although for thousands of years, they worshiped the gods of nature and fertilized the earth with human blood—a focus on root chakra survival consciousness—there was an emerging awareness of loving relatedness, a gradual focus on heart center consciousness.
This evolutionary change could happen because the memory of the sacred caves was preserved in mankind’s myths; those marvelous attempts to explain the origins and the purpose of human existence. In many early myths, the cave was the Earth’s “womb,” from which emerged the sun god born each year at the winter solstice and requiring human sacrifice. In the later myths, the sacred caves were the birthplaces of god/men, who came to bring enlightenment to mankind. Those god/men, who were birthed by virgins in caves at the winter solstice, served humanity by healing the sick, raising the dead, and teaching brotherhood and self-awareness. All were described as the “Savior,” the “Light of the World” the “Anointed” and the “Son of God.” All died at the hands of their enemies, descended into the Underworld and resurrected in three days.
For many millennia, those wonderful myths have indicated (and fostered) a path of human spiritual evolution, for within that mythological context the wisdom teachings about the human heart as a connector with the Spirit were neatly nestled. Those teachings were (and remain) the kernel of the mystery religions that have informed people since ancient times. And, while that ongoing path of evolutionary spirituality has been long, with many detours and dead-endings, a steady development of heart connectedness can be discerned, up to the present.
Within the Western legacy, the ongoing path has involved the mystery religions (and the god/men) of ancient Mesopotamia and India, of Egypt, Palestine, Greece and Persia, and from northern Europe, the Celtic myths and wisdom teachings, likely derived from the Hindu. The Egyptian, Hebrew, Greek, Persian and Celtic teachings were still flourishing into the early Common Era, while the Christian Church was gestating.
Having been incorporated into Christianity or otherwise eliminated, all those ancient religions, except the Hebrew and the Hindu, no longer exist. Yet in the context of the Western legacy and evolutionary spirituality, all their myths and hidden teachings constitute the substance of that spirituality. And giving shape to that “knowing” are the heart teachings of Jesus the Christ, a god/man who, for the first time, taught that people were the creative medium, that what was in their hearts and expressed through their mouths was the means of generating life or death.
Jesus taught that the Spirit, which had always been worshiped as a distant (and punishing) god, was within them, that God was Love and that people were to express that holiness in all their interactions. During the centuries that followed, even in the Dark Ages, that spiritual light—a gnostic “knowing”—remained and became part of the evolutionary path.
Although Jesus had not spoken directly about the cave of the heart, there were remarkable parallels to his message in the wisdom teachings of Hinduism and in the much later Sufi writings. Both traditions have included the heart cave as a sacred place of regeneration and worship. Thus, the understanding that had started with the paleolithic shamans was completed. And the way was prepared for a modern evolved spirituality.
The Past Meets the Present
To those treasures of the past can now be added new insights about the human energy system, which have been derived from the ancient yogic teachings but combined with modern quantum physics—insights about heart consciousness as creative energies.
In the ongoing process of spiritual evolution, there has come about an expansion of heart awareness to encompass an understanding (and acceptance) of human existence in a scientific framework.
Although science can be (and often is) at odds with religion, scientific thought does not refute a spirituality that has evolved out of animal into human; a spirituality that encompasses the non-duality of spirit and matter, for both can be seen as creative energy.
Thus, in a modern spirituality, your heart center of consciousness can be regarded as a container for receiving Love and for birthing the being that is the “i-am” image and likeness of the Spirit—the One Consciousness that is Creative Energy. And you, in whom that container exists, can be described as an energy being, evolving from animal soul into human, whose heart cave is the sacred birthing place of your Being.
Please treasure your heart cave.
Berenice Andrews, now in her 80th year, continues to follow her bliss as a shamanic teacher/healer. To learn more about her teachings and to become her student, consult her book Rebirthing Into Androgyny: Your Quest for Wholeness, And Afterward and her web site, thestonecircleclassroom.com.
Author’s Note: There is a vast amount of information available about the ancient myths, the mystery religions and the heart wisdom teachings. For an excellent study of the paleolithic shamans, see Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind, by Graham Hancock. For the world’s myths, start with an overview in one or several of the encyclopedias of mythology that are available. For a scholarly look at the mystery traditions, see The Jesus Mysteries: Was the Original Jesus a Pagan God? by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy. Begin your study of the past and present wisdom teachings with Gail Godwin’s book entitled Heart: Its Myths and Meanings. Then read Jocelyn Godwin’s The Golden Thread: The Ageless Wisdom Of the Western Mystery Tradition and Sara Sviri’s The Taste of Hidden Things: Images on the Sufi Path. To relate the ancient myths to modern psychology, see Jean Houston’s The Search for the Beloved: Journeys in Mythology and Sacred Psychology.