July 2, 2026—Asheville, NC

There is always a heart-thread of connection between two humans.

All of us are connected in our hearts.

Whenever we interact, whenever we converse, whenever we communicate with each other, we are attempting to translate into words this profound sense of being connected in the heart space, from this potent sense of being simultaneously individuated.

As individuals, we are individual instances of universal consciousness, that is the field of all hearts, that is God.

Some of our attempts to translate into words this very profound sense of being connected in the heart are flawed.

Words allow full range of expression, and graciously, make space for flaws.

Our attempts to speak Love in words are, thereby, often flawed.

And yet, words being individuated instances of the vast field of meaning-making that connects us all, are the perfect mode for individuals to speak Love through.

So then, we might find ourselves mocking each other, angrily yelling at each other, being mean, being passive aggressive.

There are a wide range of ways in which we mess up in trying to speak the Love we feel in our hearts towards every other human.

Love is the unified field of all hearts, which is God.

To attempt to be complete, this does open up a side inquiry—are all the beings that appear to be humans actually humans? Does each carry a heart? And what creatures—ethereal or embodied—are not connected in this field of all hearts?

Let’s say you are sitting at your favorite bench at the Merrimon Whole Foods facing the parking lot, and you are eating lunch from the hot bar.

Summer has wrecked your appetite for food.

You sold the window AC units you had too soon and now you are sweltering in the summer heat at home.

You were also quite looking forward to traveling to India and Vietnam in May but the damn immigration court notice came through a week before your flight and you realized that you needed to make drastic changes to your life path.

Instead of setting up base in Asheville, NC so you could continue traveling every now and then while maintaining a steady routine of gym, writing, prayer and good conversations, you realized that your base needed to move to India.

You had heard the knock on your heart for India a year ago. But you ignored it.

The Pastor had closed his eyes while baptizing you and said very clearly that God wants you to go back home. You balked at it.

A few American women started doing God’s work and convinced the handful of Americans who were willing to invite you home, to not invite you home—because you were a first “Trump supporter”, then a “transphobe”, then a “sexual assailant” and yet you fought to stay in Asheville.

And then the knock came through impeccably loud and clear through the American immigration court. A knock that asked directly for your money and your time if you wanted to stay in the country.

Nah mate, not on my money or my time.

You recall the point in your MAGA journey where you had realized that MAGA is just an instantiation of M*GA. Make <insert nation name> Great Again.

You felt validated in your M*GA hypothesis when you saw Iranians in the US chant “Make Iran Great Again” with a photo of the exiled son of their Shah.

You had realized as you turned MAGA that we are truly in an era where the dream of 19th century Classical Liberalism—to convert physical conflict into economic conflict via free markets—might be coming true.

You had then deduced that you needed to figure out which nation to swear your allegiance to and had been in a limbo state for a year—wondering whether it should be the US, which gave you easier travel access to more countries without needing to tolerate the vagaries of the bureaucratic tourist VISA system, or India, your motherland.

You had settled on a strategy of going for the US Passport and the Indian OCI card, so you could create a base here in the US and another in India. Why not have your cake and eat it too?, you thought.

But then the big arm of bureaucratic America struck. The immigration justice complex. Slap cases on immigrants. Pay the judges. Pay the lawyers. Report higher GDP numbers.

It was sweet karmic justice in a sense.

While you were MAGA, you had turned an uncomfortably blind eye to the dehumanizing ways President Trump was implementing his policy of deporting “illegals”.

You nodded along when he said that especially “illegals” who had committed “sex crimes” needed to be rounded up and deported.

Then as the USCIS committed a “bureaucratic” mistake and sent you a Request for Evidence to a different address than what you had updated, and then followed up by cancelling your Green Card because you didn’t respond to the notice in time.

A notice you never received. But the latter cancellation notice came through on your email, suspiciously enough.

Around the same time, a handful of American women declared you to be a “sexual predator”. A “harmful” person who deserved to be barred from community gatherings.

You weren’t that different from those “rapist illegals” eh, mate?

As you contemplated this, you realized the flaws of legalism.

Systems that are designed:

1. with laws
2. with the intent to bring alignment through punishment
3. with a proclivity to create more laws
4. with a default to punishment if the alleged criminal doesn’t respond within a certain time frame

Such systems seem to create ripe circumstances for escalating punishments trapping an individual.

This is also the underlying structure of community cancellations, which you also experienced last year. The main difference being that the system that legally punishes is more transparent than the system that cancels an individual in a community.

Intriguingly enough, this also seems to be the underlying structure of the Law of Karma, with Death being the final punishment. The transparency of the Law of Karma is even lesser than the transparency of how liberal social justice warriors cancel humans, so perhaps the cancellers are a bridge between a transparent justice system and the mysterious karmic laws?

As you digest these experiences, you realize that you were not that far from being a sex criminal. The lady with whom you had a terrible date a couple of years ago where she froze and fawned through the evening, thinks of that unfortunate incident as a “sexual assault”. So you are not as far as you thought you were from a rapist illegal immigrant.

You realize you might be in a season of life where if you don’t have empathy towards a certain category of humans, God brings you experiences where you come very close to that category yourself.

You hated Trump in 2017 and became MAGA in 2024.
You turned a blind eye towards ICE atrocities in 2025 and faced a deportation hearing in 2026.

But, on the positive side, you awaken to the inherent flaws in punitive, legalistic systems. And how odd that you had just begun reading the Book of Leviticus!

The Old Testament is a punitive, legalistic text!

8 out of 10 of the commandments of Moses are prescribed in the negative. Thou shalt not.

Contrast that with what Jesus had said when he was asked what the greatest commandments were—

“Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”
Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
Matthew 22:36-40

Two commandments prescribed in the positive emphasizing Love. Amorphous enough in structure to allow for each individual to chart their own unique life path while still adhering to the commandment.

Love in all its varied forms.

So you are sitting at your favorite bench at the Whole Foods on Merrimon eating from the hot bar. The immigration court notice means that you can’t travel till the case is settled. You are so sick of cooking food and doubly sick of cleaning dishes, so you have just switched to eating from the hot bar, which offers plenty of opportunities to people watch.

And as you people watch, some of the humans walking by are familiar to you, some are not. Amongst the familiar humans, some you have physically touched—shook hands, hugged—and thereby, you can confirm that they exist in the physical plane. It makes you wonder if the practice of hugging each other came along in ancient times to confirm the physical existence of another being.

There’s some other humans who are walking by that you haven’t physically touched but you can hear the sound of their speech. The capacity to make sounds that can be heard by your physical sense of hearing also seems confirmatory of the physical existence of another being.

But, some of the other beings could, to be rigorous, not exist in the physical plane and be an apparition, no?

I suppose you could sit long enough and say hello and shake hands with enough humans to verify their physical existence but there is no way to conclusively say that all the beings passing by as you eat that breaded fried chicken, which you often soak in the sweet & spicy sauce from the tofu stir fry, are physically embodied. No?

There is a possibility that as you attempt to shake hands with one of them, your hand would pass straight through. No?

Such a possibility exists, but for the sake of this essay, let’s assume that any beings that pass by and appear to be human, are actually humans with hearts. Even if they aren’t, I have explored entity release practices sufficiently enough to conclude that maintaining a loving orientation with disembodied beings is better than screaming at them. Setting boundaries compassionately and firmly works well with humans as well as entities.

As two make failed attempts at translating the expressions of their hearts into words, both the minds tend to be on guard.

That is what our minds do. They take in words and assess them for threat level, interpret them. In the interpretation, there is often a dualistic choice—interpret through the lens of grace or through fear. Once that choice is made, the connection is allowed to unfold.

If there were no words exchanged when two met, I wonder if we’d have that dualistic choice. Is that why when we see non-verbal creatures nuzzling, we get all gooey?

We yearn to sidestep our minds so that we can stay with the gooey heart threads. But the words, man! The damn words often get in the way.

Words and their meaning.
The desire for being understood and the disappointment of being misunderstood.

The heart-thread of connection however exists all the same. It has existed from before we became verbal. And in any moment, no matter how heated the verbal conversation gets, you can always tune in to the heart-thread.

Listen between the words. Listen beneath the words. Sense what the heart is speaking. Your heart. Their heart.

The best intellectualized verbal framework I have found for this is Non-Violent Communication.

NVC proposes that underneath all expression, what is often being spoken is of the form:

Then it offers a vast vocabulary for filling in the blanks.

The vocabulary above is carefully chosen.

Notice that there is no attacked or dismissed listed in the Feelings list. Because those are actually not truthfully descriptive of an actual feeling. Instead, they are subtle accusations. When you claim to feel attacked, you are actually claiming that the other person is attacking you. You could claim to feel scared instead and that’d be more truthful as you would be presenting a picture of what’s happening inside you, instead of a claim of what the other is doing.

Now if you were perfectly healed and thereby omniscient, then your claims of what the other person is doing (eg. attacking) would be free of projections of your past wounding and thereby be true. But most of us are not perfectly healed so we ofen project our woundings when we make judgments of others.

Appropriate use of NVC can magically dissolve moments of conflict to prevent charged escalations. All it needs is a handful of well-structured sentences conveyed with honest heart intent. If that isn’t magic, I don’t know what is.

A well-structured sentence and whoosh, the conversation can drop into the heart-thread.

Now of course, NVC is a tool.

Like is the case with any tool, you could use it for creative purposes or destructive purposes.

Consider a hammer.

You could use it to build a composting bin for your backyard or a makeshift little cot because you sold your bed and mattress in preparation for the move. You could source pallets for free from Marketplace and with just a hammer and a few nails have a piece of furniture ready as you marvel at how neat it is that pallets are so freely available everywhere in the US and that you can build so many things using pallets. What a hack in the American Capitalist system!

Or you could use the hammer to make holes in the wall of your house.

Creation or destruction.
Same with our words.

Our words can be used for creation.
Our words can be used for destruction.

In the chapter 1 of the Gospel of John, he says how in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

I believe that reveals something about the essence of words, even the most destructive, abusive words are flimsily attempting to coat over the Word of God. The Word of Love.

Making a sound is a creative act. No act of creation can be engaged in minus the seed of the Source of all Creation.

Connect to that seed when you hear another speak. Express from the seed in your heart that connects you to the heart in front of you.

Have Grace as you or the other fail. And try again. Grace allows us multiple attempts and Grace is abundantly available.

Listen to what is in the thread of their heart. To what they are feeling, even as they struggle to express what they might be feeling and the struggle comes out messily with accusations and judgment and blame.

Each of us inherently, on account of being created in the image of God, carry this skill of pausing, slowing down, being with breath, being in prayer and listening. And then offering. Making different offers till the heart-thread is fully established.

Would this help you? Would that help you? What do you need? Is ___ what you need?

Do that outwards towards the other and inwards towards any parts of you that might be activated.

Stay connected to the heart-thread. Stay steady. Taste the spice coming towards you but do not make it about yourself.

No judgments expressed by an other are truly about you.

In the moment an other judges, they are revealing to you the depths of their wounding.

Be with it but don’t take it in.

Listen to the heart-thread till it is clear what the heart is saying and then respond to that.

Most conflicts and escalations happen because people are responding to the words being spoken. When you practice waiting for the heart-thread to reveal itself, you can respond to the Word being spoken with your own Word.

The Word that was God, that was with God, that is the Spirit of Love.