What triggered me to return to this topic?
Here I am, back again, struggling to understand more clearly what the heart is exactly in spiritual terms and why it matters so much to me.
What has triggered me this time?
I think the first nudge in this direction came from my re-reading of Jill Bolte Taylor’s My Stroke of Insight. As I explained in a July post, ‘I had a complex, positive and intense reaction to reading once more Jill Bolte Taylor’s brilliant account of her battle with the consequences of a massive left hemisphere bleed. What triggered me to read a book that I thought I had already processed in sufficient detail in the winter of 2010 was seeing a friend of many years struggle with serious brain damage.’
Amongst other things I quote there she states:[1]
To the right mind, no time exists other than the present moment…
… Our right mind is free to think intuitively outside the box, and it increasingly explores the possibilities that each new moment brings.… It allows our artistic juices to flow freely without inhibition or judgement
… our right mind to perceives each of us as equal members of the human family.
The spiritual implications of connecting with the right hemisphere are clear throughout her description of her experience. This partly accounts for why I have tended to see the heart, in its metaphorical sense, as a trope for the right hemisphere.
Rapidly following on from this trigger came the critical one. I was part of a group of three who started to explore more deeply the concept and practice of reflection.
How was that relevant to the heart exactly?
The connection for me is inescapable. As I wrote in my recent sequence on reflection:
In many contexts Bahá-u-lláh compares the heart to a mirror, for example in The Seven Valleys:[2] A pure heart is as a mirror; cleanse it with the burnish of love and severance from all save God, that the true sun may shine within it and the eternal morning dawn.’ ‘Abdu’l-Bahá also points out that (my emphasis)[3] ‘the meditative faculty is like unto a mirror,’ and that if we ‘put it before earthly objects, it will reflect them.’ He explains that this level of detachment allows us to connect with our higher Self and beyond that deeper truths:[4] It is an axiomatic fact that while you meditate you are speaking with your own spirit. In that state of mind you put certain questions to your spirit and the spirit answers: the light breaks forth and the reality is revealed.
As a mnemonic, I find it helps me to detach from my ideas if I remember that a mirror is not the same as the grime that sticks to its surface or as the passing images that it reflects, and therefore my consciousness at its core (my heart) is not the same as its ever-changing contents either.
Why does it matter so much?
To explain that more clearly I need to revisit my early perplexity as I started on the Bahá’í path, as well as sharing some so far unpublished insights from by Hearth dream of 1997.
When I set my foot on the Bahá’í path in 1982 there were many things that puzzled and tested me. I have already dealt with one of the main ones – ‘mind is an emanation of the spirit ‘at considerable length. That most certainly was not the only one.
Another was the phrase ‘understanding heart.’ This occurred at least 30 times in Bahá’í texts translated at the time. It made no sense to me at all then, but it challenged me by its regular occurrence to grapple with what for me was its irreconcilable paradox. The head, in my view at the time, did the understanding: the heart did the feeling. In so far as there was a relationship between them it was better to keep the heart in a subordinate position and let your head rule, OK. Understanding in an emotional sense bordering on thought was found in such expressions as ‘She’s very understanding,’ and had nothing to do with penetrating into the meaning of profound statements about spiritual reality.
My first step was to read all the Bahá’í Writings at my disposal – I had no computer, not even a Concordance, at this time. I noted down on index cards every reference to the heart that I could find. There were hundreds of them. I arranged them into various groups. I think this work was probably what brought me to the point where I had the hearth dream. More on that in a moment. Sadly, I have long ago shredded the cards thinking that they had served their purpose, not realising then that I would have need of them now.
Into the mix of my muddled understanding at the time went ideas about reflection. After all Bahá’u’lláh had quoted the hadith ‘One hour’s reflection is preferable to seventy years of pious worship.’ These I have also explored at length elsewhere. Reflection was something I saw as very closely related to meditation and heavily dependant upon, if not overlapping with, aspects of detachment. We’ve just been through all that again so I won’t labour it here.
At this time, that was pretty good going really for a recently derailed died-in-the-wool atheist. Then I wrote:
But, as life went out of its way to prove, it was by no means enough. So I’m back here once more feeling I need to pull together stuff I’ve learned over the years in an attempt to dig even deeper into this paradox. Sometimes it feels as though the rest of my life might depend upon it in some way I don’t quite understand yet, probably because of the heart problem I’m talking about.
And I’m here again, though, pulled in by not so much the alleged paradox of the ‘understanding heart’ but by discovering, for example, that the Báb places the heart at the highest level of four in terms of representing human reality. As Nader Saiedi explains it in Gate of the Heart:[5]
The Báb employs a symbolic schema to represent human reality in terms of four levels: heart, spirit, soul, and body.…
The highest of these levels is the heart.
And on top of that I discovered, as I researched, that in the Sufi literature to which Bahá-u-lláh was responding in The Seven Valleys there is more than one kind of heart. As Julio Savi explains in his study of The Seven Valleys & the Four Valleys:[6] ‘there are four different aspects of the heart as the organ of inner knowledge and the seat of the divine presence: the breast, sadr, the heart qalb, the inner heart, fu’ád, and the innermost heart, lubb.’ I suspected a closer exploration of these might help me understand the meaning of the Báb hierarchy of levels.
Those conundrums alone would probably have been enough to trigger me to revisit this territory. However, the dream is another compelling factor. As I have explained elsewhere, it is the only dream I have ever had that included the presence of Bahá-u-lláh, the Founder of the Bahá’í Faith. I don’t feel I have accessed all the implications of this dream and don’t think I ever will, which would be motivation enough to press me to keep investigating further.
It’s emotional charge on top of that heightens my need to keep going.
The following quotation from a diary entry of 11.20 p.m. 27 March 1997 should be enough to convey a sense of the intensity of that charge. It describes my Gestalt exercise which led to the PEAT insight I’ve blogged about before but goes into much more vivid detail. The Gestalt approach I used at the time involved my acting the part of different components of a dream.
Until now, interestingly, I’d forgotten the chloroform insight completely.
The page describing the effects of that almost certainly deserves to be quoted at length. You can’t take it as literally true in all respects. For example, I have had a lifelong attachment to trees and have always followed my Uncle Harold’s footsteps in my love for walking in the countryside. What I seldom did was immerse myself in the experience of nature as a whole.
The Gestalt Exercise:
‘I looked at the word HEARTH convinced there was more meaning locked in it than I had so far and disentangled. I came downstairs to our front room. I sat in my Aunt Ann’s old bedroom chair as my “ordinary” self, to set up the Gestalt imagework.
‘I felt moved to put a cushion near our fireplace for me to sit on while I felt my way into being the hearth. I sat on the cushion and an unspeakable feeling of heaviness crushed me down. I bowed my back, my shoulders, then my head. My mind went dark and I could hardly think. I felt my ordinary self put questions to this oppressed darkness in me.
‘I said: “I’m old, very old. Cold. Dying. I’m dying.”
‘I felt the question: “What do you need?”
“Fuel. Fuel. Fuel. Warmth. Light. Light. Light.” I could only grind out monosyllables through heavy dribbling lips that wouldn’t obey me.
‘I went back to Aunt Ann’s chair. I assured the cold hearth that, to the extent I was capable of love, I loved it. I said I wanted to help. I lit a coal fire in its grate in my mind. I switched back to the cushion. I still felt deeply oppressed.
“I need EARTH, the EARTH. Peat from the earth. I need Peat.”
‘So, back in Aunt Ann’s chair, I imagined from the depths of my ignorance about such things as digging peat, drying it and building a warm, soft fire.
‘When I went back to the cushion, my whole spine and shoulders were tingling. I could sit up straight. I was very aware of the light. I could see many things clearly. My fire had been extinguished fifty years ago by chloroform. I needed contact with earth. I needed to burn peat, the core of my identity; all my repressed love and anger had to be rekindled, was being rekindled…
‘I felt myself reaccepting and re-integrating whole disowned and previously dying parts of my being. The word HEARTH encapsulates the experience.
‘Why the experience of hospitalisation cut me off from Nature and my own nature so radically I am not quite sure. I lost warmth, spontaneity, a feel for the physical – as though when my faith in Christ and in my family were shattered on the anvil of my abandonment in that benighted hospital, I lost faith in all creation as well.
‘Only books were left. They never abandoned me and I have given them my deepest loyalty in return ever since. So art is at the centre of my hearth: the earth was invisible to me. I hated anything like gardening as it reminded me of the earth and thereby the pain of what I have lost. . . . To welcome back the earth into my hearth is to rediscover myself (PEAT!). I can be rekindled again to burn with the flame of life. With the gum in my left cheek, I was stuck in the wrong – abandoned, bereft – attached to empty patterns of futile behaviour, which I couldn’t abandon while my hearth was empty and cold.’
What else?
There is also a hugely relevant diary entry of 17 April 1997, which I had never checked since I started blogging. I began by quoting from Bahá-u-lláh’s Gleanings:[7]
O My servants! Be as resigned and submissive as the earth, that from the soil of your being there may blossom the fragrant, the holy and multicolored hyacinths of My knowledge. Be ablaze as the fire, that ye may burn away the veils of heedlessness and set aglow, through the quickening energies of the love of God, the chilled and wayward heart. Be light and untrammeled as the breeze, that ye may obtain admittance into the precincts of My court, My inviolable Sanctuary.
Then I wrote:
We used this in the deepening section of the teaching workshop tonight. I could not possibly capture all the mind-blowing implications of that quote in the light of my PEAT-HEARTH dream.
It is uncanny that I should first have selected this quotation for the teaching workshop a month ago. It wasn’t used because only one person turned up. Then I had the dream and yet never thought of this quotation in connection with it. And now, the astounding, unexpected and even disturbing implications have become all too obvious.
Need I say more.
Well, perhaps I need to add one more thing into the mix.
My encounter with a closely related poem at a much later date reinforced even further my connection with the dream.
In reading Stephanie Burt’s Don’t Read Poetry in 2019, imagine my astonishment when I came to page 120 of her book and was blasted by the sight of a poem by Ronald Johnson, part of his ‘beams’ sequence in ARK.
The sceptic in me had to ask, ‘Was the dream yet another example of possible cryptomnesia?’ Had I read this poem somewhere before my dream in the late 90s? The poem dates from before then.
I checked all my anthologies and also my books of criticism to see if I could find any references at all to Johnson’s poem and drew a blank. For now, it’s an open question. Maybe I had encountered the poem in a library book sometime. If so I have no memory at all of that event. Possibly it is just a coincidence. My creative dreaming had come up with a rich vein of imagery that another creative mind had already discovered.
Who knows? I don’t.
Coda:
Whatever the answer to that quandary is I hope I have managed to explain why I am going to test your patience with another long exploration of this topic. As I will hopefully be capable of eventually explaining clearly, there is a deep connection between the state of our hearts and the state of the world. Until we reach the tipping point where enough hearts long for and have the capacity to be united both within and without, we will never achieve a sustained peace on our divided world.
Much more on all of this to come!
References:
[1]. My Stroke of Insight – page 30.
[2]. The Seven Valleys – page 21.
[3]. Paris Talks – page 176.
[4]. Op. cit. – page 174.
[5]. Gate of the Heart – page 102.
[6]. Towards the Summit of Reality– page 448.
[7]. Gleanings – CLII.
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