Secrets of the Heart:
The Alchemy and Science of Divine Love
An 8-week online course with William Keepin,
based on his book
Belonging to God: Spirituality, Science, & a Universal Path of Divine Love
Next 8-Week Course: April 12 – May 31, 2022
Course Overview:
This course introduces the interspiritual path of Divine Love — including practice and study of this path’s mystical and scientific underpinnings. The foundations of this path are hidden secrets in the heart, which become available to sincere seekers committed to the inner disciplines of spiritual practice, devotion, service, and the wisdom of the heart. The first half of the course articulates this path as revealed in sacred texts and mystics from three of the world’s major religions – Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity, with reference to mystical traditions of Buddhism, Judaism, Alchemy, Hermeticism, and other ancient traditions. The second half of the course explores a wide range of scientific phenomena that reflect and illuminate the patterns of Divine Love. Heart-based meditation practices and spiritual inquiry and dialogue practices are integral to the course.
Course includes:
Students who take this course will:
- Gain familiarity with spiritual texts from several traditions
- Learn about mystical lineages within these traditions
- Explore the interspiritual intersections between these traditions
- Hear about new scientific research from several fields
- Study the relationship between science and spirituality
- Receive introduction to several heart-centered spiritual practices
- Create a community with which to share ideas and experiences
- Receive spiritual guidance from instructor and peers
Spiritual/Contemplative Practices:
- Silent meditation centered in the heart
- Cultivation of the Fire of Love in the Heart
- Invoking the Divine Name/mantra, japa
- Centering Prayer, and related practices
- Human being as miniature galaxy
- Transmuting negative energy: tonglen
Community-Sharing Practices:
- Individual In-Class Reflection and Sharing
- Small-Group Sharing and Discussion
- Large-Group Discussion
- Questions & Spiritual Inquiry
- Fractal Fire of Divine Love
THE INNER SCIENCE OF THE HEART
The path of Divine Love is intrinsically “inter-spiritual” because it transcends any one religion, yet exists at the foundation of all of them. It has often been hidden or obscured, yet can be discerned through study and practice of mysticism in the major world religions and spiritual traditions. The path of Love also reawakens long-repressed feminine aspects of the human and the Divine which have been denied or underemphasized by patriarchal religion for millennia. This course explores the path of Divine Love, and the spiritual practices and practical inspirations from male and female mystics who help us walk this path in our own lives.
Unfortunately, the vast inner universe of the heart remains largely unexplored and unrealized by most people today. The hidden currents of divine love that flow ceaselessly in the depths of the heart are largely lost upon us because our culture emphasizes almost exclusively the outer concrete realities of physical forms and conceptual structures of the mind, relegating all inner subjective realities to secondary or inferior status as inherently ‘unreal.’ Yet mystics across the traditions testify that the mind cannot comprehend spiritual truths that transcend the mind. “The mind is the slayer of the Real,” say the Hindus. “Understanding the inability to understand is true understanding,” says Sufi mystic Ibn Arabi. “We advance by not understanding,” declares St. John of the Cross. Catherine of Siena explains, “I had not been able to show, by finite things, because My love was infinite, […] I wished you to see the secret of the Heart.” The words of these mystics point to an altogether different kind of science—the science of the heart, fueled by the power of Love.
“Heaven and earth are too small to contain Me,” declares God in an Islamic Hadith, “but I fit easily inside the heart of my beloved devotee!” Even with its 100 billion galaxies, the universe is much too small to contain God, yet the heart can embrace the fullness of God. By delving deeply into the heart within, we come to know the vast expanses of Divine Love and Truth “out There,” for as the Upanishad says, “what is ‘There’ is here, and what is not here is nowhere.” We ‘know’ these higher realities by becoming them, because the inmost essence of the human being is none other than the transcendent essence of the absolute Godhead. Mystical experience, as described in sacred texts and the writings of mystics across the traditions, reveals the ways in which spiritual practice of Divine Love opens us to experience more fully the truth of who we are — namely, manifestations of the same Divine Love that shapes the entire cosmos.
Although this vision may sound grandiose, it has a subtle, ecstatic reality that must be explored to be believed.
The fire of Divine Love burns on every level of existence—from the heart of the sun, to the human heart, to each tiny cell in the human body, to the subatomic particles and the core of every star across all galaxies. It is a grand fractal fire of Divine Love! There is no force in the cosmos more powerful, and nothing propels spiritual evolution as swiftly as Love. Ultimately, Love is a transforming fire that burns away everything that is not Love.
When it comes to the essence of the true spiritual journey—the utter self-giving, the intensity and humility of genuine prayer, the rigors of purification and facing one’s own darkness, the intimate communion with spirit, the alchemical transmutation and divinization that transpires in the depths of the sincere soul who is fully surrendered to God—the parallels across the faith traditions are remarkably deep.
If you explore the depths of consciousness, you discover in your own being everything that goes on at the cosmic scale. As transpersonal psychologist Stanislav Grof emphasizes, “Each of us is everything.” The doorway to this universal consciousness is through the heart, which opens inwardly to the implicate order that links us all together.
– William Keepin, Belonging to God
Whatever name we give to this process… whether it takes place in a Christian or Muslim or Hindu or as a spiritual
but not religious practitioner, the process is basically the same. The soul is transformed into the Divine, by the Divine, through participation in the Divine. We cannot understand the process; we cannot master it; we cannot force it; we cannot co-opt it any way for our own purposes. We can only give ourselves to it, if we choose, and consent unconditionally to this process on its terms. And if we do this—or rather, allow it—the living truth of love empties
us of ourselves and fills us with Divine Love.
~ William Keepin, Belonging to God
Course Outline
Week One: The Path of Divine Love — Answering the Call
Week One introduces the path of divine love as it manifests within the various spiritual traditions, and within the organizing principles of the universe itself. Although both religious and scientific concepts are addressed, the course continually returns to the conviction that the key to authentic spiritual life is direct connection to the Spirit deep within the heart, rather than any outer prescription or formula. Week One outlines the significance of the esoteric, practice-oriented path of divine love, in contrast to the exoteric approaches found in most organized religions.
Practice: Silent Meditation of the Heart, which is foundational to all the other practices in the course.
Week Two: The Yoga of Divine Love in the Bhagavad Gita and Hindu Mysticism
Week Two provides an overview of the Bhagavad Gita’s articulation of the essential stages on the path of spiritual realization. The Gita is viewed as a progressive revelation of the path to union with God, and broadly accords with the classical stages of mysticism: purification, illumination, and union with God. We explore the Gita’s major spiritual paths, and the supreme secret given at the end where we are enjoined to give ourselves entirely and utterly to God, to consecrate one’s entire mind and heart and every action as a sacred offering to God.
Key mystics include Shankaracarya, Anandamayi Ma, Mirabai, and Ramakrishna.
Practices: Purification of the Heart
Week Three: The Compassion and Majesty of Islam
in the Qur’an and Sufi Mysticism
Week Three focuses on the spiritual path of love in Sufism, including how the Qur’an and the aHadith articulate teachings relevant to this path, and how these teachings relate to similar teachings in other religions. We shall see that, contrary to widespread popular misconceptions, the core of the Islamic faith is profound devotion and surrender to God. The word islam is Arabic for “surrender,” or “submission,” or the “peace that comes in submission” to God. Foundations of the Sufi path are introduced that unveil the transformative journey of the soul to God.
Key mystics include Rumi, Rab’ia, Ibn Arabi.
Practices: Invocation of the Divine Name, and Remembrance of the Divine
Week Four: Divine Love and the Divine Feminine East and West
Week Four examines deep parallels in the Christian scriptures as they correspond to the Bhagavad Gita’s “supreme secret” and related teachings from the Qur’an and aHadith. We explore some of the leading women mystics in these traditions, and how they embody the Divine Feminine, including Juliana of Norwich’s teaching of God as Mother. Important bridges are established across diverse traditions, across gender, and across West and East and Middle East. A shared universal emerges: the supreme covenant of love between God and the human soul.
Key mystics include St. Teresa of Avila, Juliana of Norwich, Madame Guyon, Lalla.
Practice: Centering Prayer (Christian), and its counterpart in other traditions
Week Five: The Inner Net of the Heart — Science and Spirituality
Week Five highlights breakthroughs at the frontiers of science – breakthroughs that help to weave the insights from the scriptures and mystics into a larger unifying vision of the spirituality and science of divine love. Key contributions from Quantum Physics, David Bohm’s Holomovement, Fractal Geometry, coupled with the ancient science of the Correspondence Principle in Heremticism contribute to the key emerging insight that beyond the physical realm, invisible patterns and principles somehow organize what we observe and experience in the physical world. The stage is being set for another major scientific revolution, one that will eventually weave science and spirituality—matter and spirit— together into a larger unity.
During weeks 5-8, we continue to work with the practices introduced in the first four weeks.
Week Six: The Infinity of Divinity — The Fractal Structure of Consciousness and Logos
Week Six utilizes relativity theory, universal divine light, and “fractal consciousness” in positing that consciousness itself has a fractal structure. This understanding helps to explain a wealth of spiritual and mystical insights
including mystics’ claims of oneness with God, as well as the remarkable parallels across diverse religious traditions. Using fractal geometry as a kind of springboard, one can understand something profound about the nature of spirituality and structure of consciousness, which in turn opens the gateway to subtle ways of knowing in the
depths of the heart.
Week Seven: Science and Mysticism 
Week Seven further explores science’s growing discovery that “something transpires behind that which appears”,
a theme which is emerging in field after field: biology, physics, nonlinear dynamics, brain physiology, complexity theory, transpersonal psychology, near-death experience and other consciousness phenomena, psychoneuroimmunology, and ethnobotany, to name a few. Week Seven emphasizes the Science of the Eternal, Near Death Experience, and the Afterlife, and how these areas of research are pushing Western science toward the existence of a realm beyond the observable, material, empirical world.
Week Eight: Deepening into Divine Presence
Week Eight engages the Hindu concept of prapatti, which teaches that the most profound love for God is fulfilled through absolute self-giving to God. Prapatti connotes an active spiritual disposition in which the devotee
surrenders fully to God deliberately, with complete self-awareness and conscious intention. There are five pre-requisites called angas, which are similar across the theistic religions. Prapatti appears to be something of a universal practice of divine love, and helps us to see why both Christ and Krishna say that the greatest love is demonstrated by the greatest surrender, and why the very essence of Islam is submission to God. Such surrender or submission to God activates a remarkable divine grace, beyond all imaginable measure.
A portion of this week is devoted to reflection on one’s spiritual direction, and planning for support along the path.
Course Instructor: William Keepin
William Keepin, PhD, is co-founder of the Satyana Institute and the Gender Equity & Reconciliation International project. Keepin has studied and practiced intensively in Eastern and Western spiritual disciplines for 35 years, immersing himself in contemplative practices from the Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, and Sufi traditions, and he trained with psychiatrist Stanislav Grof. His spiritual mentors include Father Thomas Keating (Christian), Swami Ambikananda (Hindu), Jestunma Tenzin Palmo (Buddhist), Llewellyn Vaughan Lee (Sufi), Ravi Ravindra (Hindu/interfaith) and Sr. Lucy Kurien (Christian).
Keepin is also a mathematical physicist, social activist, and environmental scientist whose research on sustainable energy and global warming influenced international environmental policy. He was a whistleblower in nuclear science policy and presented testimony to the US House of Representatives and the parliaments of Australia and several European countries. He holds a Ph.D. in applied mathematics, M.S. in mathematical physics, M.A. in East-West psychology, and an honorary doctorate in Spirituality and Social Change (from the California Institute of Integral Studies). Keepin has over 40 scientific publications in peer-reviewed journals, and his books include: Divine Duality: The Power of Reconciliation between Women and Men (Hohm Press, 2007), co-author of Women Healing Women (Hohm Press, 2009), and co-editor of Song of the Earth: A Synthesis of the Scientific and Spiritual Worldviews (Permanent Publications, UK, 2012).
In his most recent book, Belonging to God: Science, Spirituality, & a Universal Path of Divine Love (2016), Keepin sought to recover the esoteric heart of spirituality, which has the potential to create peace and respect between religious traditions and between science and religion. Identifying the “path of divine love” as a kind of universal spirituality that leads to mystical mergence into the very essence of God, Keepin traces this invisible doorway, deep within the heart, both as it is described in spiritual texts and as it is symbolized in ways observable to contemporary science.
