“If you really want to see what is out there, you first need to understand what is inside — and how it defines your outer reality.” — Mary Elizabeth
Since the beginning of 2026, we have been revisiting PTCI’s Twelve Spiritual Energy Principles — guides for understanding how spiritual energy moves in our lives. These are principles we have gathered over twenty-six years of studying, reflecting, and teaching through the Personal Transformation and Courage Institute.
Today I want to provide a multi-layered teaching about the fifth of these principles. But first, let’s place it in the company of the four that came before — because each one builds on the last, and together they form a living map for navigating our inner life and, by extension, everything we experience beyond ourselves.
The Five Principles
- Doing follows Being.
- When we whole-heartedly commit ourselves to an intention, we begin to “see” and “feel” ourselves differently, allowing us to respond from a new place within ourselves.
- Energy follows attention.
- What we hide from ourselves and others has power over us and takes away our real power. (In other words, the thoughts, emotions, feelings, and actions that we deny, fight against, and fear control us until we bring then into our awareness, transform, and heal them.)
- The Inner and Outer Worlds are Reflections of Each Other.
The Fifth Principle: A Living, Breathable Truth
This fifth principle is both profound and practical. It teaches that we are not passive receivers of a fixed world. We are, in ways both subtle and significant, co-creators of what we experience. The lens through which we look shapes what we see.
Let’s explore this together — not as an abstract idea, but as something we can begin to experience right now, in our daily lives. The following are offered not as conclusions to agree with, but as doorways to step through.
1. We Are Creatures of Projection
Much of what we perceive as “out there” is filtered through the lens of our inner life — our past experiences, our fears, our longings, our beliefs, our joys and hopes. Becoming aware of this is the beginning of genuine freedom.
The world, in this sense, is a kind of mirror. It does not show us a perfectly objective reality. It shows us a reality that our own inner world has helped to shape. This is not cause for despair — it is cause for tremendous hope. For if we help create what we see, then as we change within, the world we encounter begins to change too.
2. Two Inner Operating Systems
The Episcopal priest, mystic and teacher Cynthia Bourgeault, offers a helpful image: we each carry something like an “operating system” — a set of habitual patterns, filters, and reflexes through which we perceive and respond to the world. Most of us run this default operating system without ever knowing it is there.
Psychologists such as Carl Jung, Freud, and Iain McGilchrist, and spiritual philosophers such as A.H. Almaas, have pointed to the same truth from different directions: we move through life largely on autopilot, shaped by patterns of which we are not fully, consciously aware.
Bourgeault teaches that a higher operating system becomes accessible when we shift our attention from the thinking mind to the heart. Whereas the default operating system filters experience through self-protection and separation, this higher operating system perceives from a place of wholeness — recognizing what is already and always true: that we are woven together, part of one living reality.
This is what contemplative practice is really for — to cultivate awareness of the higher operating system and gently shift us into a higher way of seeing. And when we make this shift, even briefly, the world looks entirely different.
The world, seen through the heart, reveals itself as a friend — a companion on the journey, and a teacher of the most patient and generous kind.
From the default operating system, the outer world can feel like a problem to be solved, a threat to be managed. But when we perceive through the open, receptive heart, something remarkable happens: the outer world stops feeling like an obstacle and begins to feel like something else entirely.
The difficult person becomes a mirror — almost as our “guru” or teacher, as Pema Chödrön reminds us. An unexpected loss becomes an invitation to honor the sacred past and move forward with an open, tender heart. We notice synchronicities — the universe in conversation with us. The ordinary becomes extraordinary.
This shift is available — not in some distant future when we have meditated enough or understood enough — but right here, right now, today.
3. The Total Mind We Call Heart
This wisdom is echoed in the work of Kabir Helminski — scholar, teacher, and translator of Rumi’s poetry, a bridge-builder between the Sufi tradition and contemporary spiritual seekers.
Helminski teaches that what we ordinarily call “the mind” — the analytical, reasoning intellect — is only a fraction of our actual cognitive capacity. Useful as it is, it cannot perceive meaning, unity, or the sacred. It was not built for that.
Beyond it lies what he calls the “total mind” — a vast, luminous realm of awareness that includes intuition, wisdom, creative and symbolic intelligence, a felt sense of unity, and spontaneous connection with the cosmic mind. And crucially: this total mind is what we access through the heart.
Helminski teaches that the word “heart” is not a metaphor or sentiment — it is the name for the highest and most integrated form of human intelligence. Let that land for a moment.
We have subtle subconscious faculties we are not using. Beyond the limited analytic intellect is a vast realm of mind that includes psychic and extrasensory abilities, intuition, wisdom, a sense of unity, aesthetic, qualitative and creative faculties, and image-forming and symbolic capacities… They comprise a mind in spontaneous connection with the cosmic mind — the total mind we call Heart.
— Kabir Helminski
Bourgeault’s higher operating system and Helminski’s total mind are pointing to the same territory from different directions. The heart is not the opposite of the mind — it is the fulfillment of it. It is mind operating at its full range, no longer narrowed by habit or ego, but open to the whole.
And when that fuller mind is active, the outer world is no longer mute or indifferent. It speaks. It responds. It meets us. What felt like a cold and complicated world reveals itself, slowly and unmistakably, as a living companion on our journey home.
4. The Heart as the Organ of Spiritual Perception
This insight appears across traditions and centuries — in Sufi teachings, in Buddhism, in the teachings of Jesus, in the Edgar Cayce readings. Again and again we are pointed back to the heart, not as sentiment or emotion, but as the deepest faculty of knowing we possess. Bourgeault calls the heart, our organ of spiritual perception.
At our deepest core, the heart is clear and unsullied. But over time — through habit, misunderstanding, and the wounds life inevitably brings — we cover it over. The good news is that this covering is not permanent. It can be gently loosened and removed.
Meditation, reflection, prayer, learning from teachers and sacred texts, and being part of loving, like-minded communities are among the great supports and gifts that help us gradually remove our blinders. We do not do this alone. We do it together, supporting one another on the journey toward wholeness.
5. When We Begin to See Clearly, Everything Changes
This is not a small thing. Seeing clearly — perceiving with the heart — transforms relationships, quiets anxiety, opens us to beauty, and helps connect with our innate wisdom and act with grater compassion. It changes everything.
Ultimately, what we are practicing is the art of seeing our deep interconnection with all that is. This is sometimes called Interbeing, or Oneness, or the web of life. In every tradition, the mystics describe the same wonder: we are not separate. We never were.
This is not a one-time realization but an ongoing deepening. Each moment of clarity opens us to more. Each experience of Oneness invites us into a still greater understanding of Oneness, which leads to even deeper and more profound experiences of being held by the Divine. There is a beautiful, ascending spiral — of seeing, experiencing, and seeing more deeply again.
“What might you begin to see if you looked with your heart instead of only your analytical mind?”
An Invitation
In the coming days, I invite you to notice what happens when you pause before reacting. Notice what shifts when you bring your awareness down from the busy, analytical mind into the quieter wisdom of the heart.
You do not have to do this perfectly. You do not have to have it all figured out. Simply be willing to look — with a little more openness, a little more tenderness — and see what the world begins to show you.
Because the inner and outer worlds truly are reflections of each other. And that means every small shift you make within yourself brings you clarity and healing…. and ripples outward into your relationships, your community, and the world beyond.
