There comes a point when and where it ceases to be relevant talking about the head, the mind, the body, and the heart. That point is beyond time and space, beyond when and where. You will know when you’re there.
In the interim, whilst we are still bound within the perception of the UN-enlightened condition, these semantics serve a potentially important purpose. They are intended to draw your attention to certain “centres” within your psyche, and thus within the luminous field in which your essence resides. All words are only that. Tools or pointers to draw our attention in certain directions or to certain manifestations of Life. Any topic I talk to you about will draw your attention into an appreciation of that topic. The degree to which I know the subject matter at hand will to some extent determine how vividly, lucidly, and viscerally my words can lead you into the topic. Of course, you play your own part. If your attention is distracted or blocked (usually by preconceptions and fixed ideas) then my words will do little more than aggravate the dilemma of your own self-induced limitation.
I speak of Yoga of Heart, or a Path with Heart, only so long as we remain split in our approach to reality, to Life. So long as people approach Life in a disjointed way—and not as a wholeness or a Totality—I must refer to man in a way that implies he is made up of parts. Modern Euro-centric Man tends to relate to life through the rational thinking mind. Like all things in the world of duality, this has its own unique advantages and disadvantages. We are all mostly familiar with the advantages—as they are what draw us into such an approach to Life—so I won’t expound on them here. Some of us are not, however, so keenly aware of the disadvantages. I will explore those in detail sometime soon in an article on The limitations of Western Science. In the mean time I will touch on this subject a little here.
The primary disadvantage of approaching any aspect of life solely through the rational thinking mind is that this is a faculty of Man intended only to map out the world. Mapping is a process of transcribing the unknown into the known. Mapping is our way of depicting our known in a way that other people can hopefully understand in some meaningful or utilitarian way. It doesn’t matter if we are talking about a map of the human psyche, a map of a country or town, a map of the universe, or a map of the inner structure of the atom. Maps are maps.
Something we can too easily forget or overlook is that mapping is the transcription of the unknown into the known. The question is how do we access the unknown? If it is not yet known to us, how can our rational (map-making) mind access it or perceive it? The simple answer is that we can’t. Yet every day Man is mapping entirely new things from the unknown into his known map of the world. How do we do this? How does this occur?
In simple terms I would say it is the intuitive capacity in Man which functions as his doorway or window into the unknown. It is also fair to say that this intuitive capacity to draw new things into the known is a creative faculty in man. We literally create the world around us, piece by piece, moment by moment.
The next question is, where in man does this intuitive aspect reside? Where is that centred in man? Is it centred in his brain? In his logical mind? Or is it centred in that quality of man I refer to as the Heart? Of course I am of the sentiment that it is within our Heart. The Heart is not only our doorway into the unknown it is also that capacity in man to embrace and hold all things. The rational mind, in its effort to make sense of things, tends to splice, dice, and reduce things. It’s commonly referred to as reductionism. It’s also an aspect of the philosophy of materialism, because we only focus on slicing, dicing, and reducing that which has material (physical or energetic) substance. The shortcoming of this approach is that it makes it impossible—or at least a very drawn out process—for modern man to come into any sort of meaningful relationship with his own consciousness. Consciousness has to be denied, or at the very most is granted the limited status of being a phenomenon produced by the summation of the material parts of “man”.
Yet what if the summation of the material we call “man”—all his many “parts” right down to the subatomic level—is actually a phenomenon arising out of consciousness, and not the other way around? The rational mind is not really able to deal with that possibility. At least not in any kind of experiential or gnostic way. At the best it can be some kind on intellectual entertainment to think about such things, but we never really come to know them in this way.
Here again is where the Heart comes into play. It is through that quality of man I refer to as Heart that we are able to experience a kind of gnosis or knowing of spiritual realities. When I say spiritual I am not referring to something separate from the material. Rather I am referring to the fabric or consciousness that resides under the surface we know as the material world. Ultimately I am referring to the subtlest and most profound aspect of reality, as opposed to the superficial aspect. The Heart is a doorway into that subtlest reality.
Of course, as man delves into the subtlest realities, he quickly discovers there is no longer any utilitarian purpose in distinguishing heart from mind from brain from thought, et cetera. It’s all the same. We use the Heart as river into the ocean, but once in the ocean there ceases to be any purpose in distinguishing the river from, say, the land across which it flows.