Music is coherent sound, where rhythm, melody, tempo, and harmony unite to produce its coherence; without these imposing forces, we live in a random sound field of noises. Similarly, the six heart virtues take the emotional energy we are all imbued with and impose coherence, and in this coherence our emotional energy is transformed from a “noisy radiation” into a healing, directed and transformative force.
Imagine you are at the ocean and you’re watching a beautiful sunset. The light radiates in striking colors of pink, orange and red, glistening off of the turquoise water. The air itself seems to hold this radiating color field in some suspended, slow-motion dance. Now, from a scientific perspective, the light is incoherent. Despite its spectacular colors, the light photons are unaligned, fanning out in every imaginable direction.
For the sake of contrast, let’s imagine this same light were somehow made coherent like a laser beam of light, so that all of the light particles or photons were traveling in the same direction on the identical wavelength. The light is now transformed into a new functionality, one that can now be used for surgical applications or measuring the distance between the earth and moon with never-before-imagined accuracy—to name just two examples.
These different aspects of light are good metaphors to understand as they apply to emotions. Emotions, when incoherent, radiate in all directions as energy, creating an impression within the space or field of our senses. Sometimes this impression is beautiful like a shimmering sunset when the emotions are soft and light, and sometimes it is more akin to a furious storm when there is anger or depression. If our emotional energy can be aligned in coherence it can be transformed to a higher functionality like the laser, and its range goes well beyond the range of our senses, it can truly touch the outer edges of our world or delve deeply into the inner realms of soul.
The keystone of the when-which-how practice is coherence, the reason being that the expression of the six heart virtues builds coherence and the attendant ability to radiate your emotional energy to selected targets anywhere, and to any time. This is the outreach of soul—to heart to mind to heart to outflow—and in this cycle, the emotional energy becomes the connective ingredient that integrates the individual with the community of humankind, and even more generally, to all life forms.
There is growing awareness that humans are part of a vast ecology of energy that includes the sun and planets within our solar system, and perhaps even beyond. Our sun generates space weather that interacts with earth’s geomagnetic field and creates profound influences to our weather, mood, chemical balance, and even the fine-tuned senses of our intuition and psychic abilities. It is not a leap to say that the sun—ninety-three million miles away—influences our primary centers of the heart and brain in surprisingly vibrant ways.
