The Three Teachings

This is my experience/opinion about three of the primary flavors of teachings that are floating around out there in spirituality-land, and how I have experienced them to be linked, even though they can seem disparate on the surface.

What keeps us from recognizing our own freedom? At its essence, it’s our attachment or aversion to present circumstances and or dogged focus particular experiences. That doesn’t mean experience is wrong or should be ignored, but simply not grasped. It’s ignorance that traps.

Our experienceâ€"our creationâ€"is sensed by our body. There are the five senses, but then you could also say that there are three large intelligence centers of the body: the head, the heart and the gut. Biology even reflects this with bundles of active nerves in the solar plexus, heart, and the brain.

Adyashanti, and others with awakenings that appear very holistic, speak of awakenings that happen in the head, heart and gut. You can feel into this yourself. For me the head seems concerned with clarity and truth, the heart seems concerned with connection and emotional wellbeing, and the gut seems concerned with comfort and safety.

The three primary flavors of teachings that I’ve seen (and all sorts of blends in between) seem to address each of these primary intelligence centers of the body, and help to ease the attachment that each of those centers have on experience.

Note that these teachings are not strictly confined for any one intelligence center of the body, and for some people, any teaching may be experienced more holistically.

The first is the one we’re most familiar with here: nonduality. This is found in Zen Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta and the like. This seems to be primarily a head teaching, especially neo-Advaita (Ramana Maharishi and later). It clears the mental attachments to thoughts and concepts, including the concept of an individual self.

The second teaching for the heart can found in teachings like Sufism, Jesus’s teachings, and the Bodhisattva and other compassion teachings of Buddhism. They are also in the “love yourself” New Age teachings. These help clear our emotional attachments and aversions that maintain an emotional separation from both our own body and other people.

The third teaching is the most misunderstood, because compared to working with thought and imagery in the head, and emotions and feelings in the heart, the gut deals with physicality. Physical things are often seen to be lesser, or distracting, especially when most of us spend all that time working with the more abstract stuff first. Yet, the gut is the intelligence of the instinct and living in the physical.

The gut teachings are the ones that emphasize that we live in abundance. This is where we get the teachings that deal with the law of attraction as explained by Abraham-Hicks, or the New Thought teachings of people like Neville Goddard. These teachings are often shunned for their apparent materialism, but a deeper dive into them reveals that they are dealing with the comfort and safety concerns of the gut, and show the gut that we live in abundance, and that our physical needs are met if we can sit back let life flow and change through us.

In summary, the mind teaching points to our nature and pure undefined possibility, the heart teaching is pointing toward our nature as pure unconditional love, and the and the gut teaching is pointing toward our nature as pure abundance and creative power.