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THE HEART PROBLEM OF MAN
And I would like to suggest that this lack of relationship with our
own hearts and hence our having little or no understanding of what a
‘heart life might be’ is what I want to call the Heart Problem of
man.
And I want to say that this ‘Heart problem of Man’ is one of the
biggest problems if not the biggest problem we have in the world
today and it lies at the back of every other problem, and far too
many of us are affected by this, to a greater or a lesser extent.
For the problem about this heart problem of Man is that it makes us
approach life, the issues in our life, and the challenges we face,
in the wrong light, and generally, with insufficient love and
insufficient wisdom. As we don’t really understand the meaning of
the term ‘coming from heart’, we don’t know what it means to see
with heart or feel with heart or act from heart or simply,
experience the pure essence of heart. And this means that we can
never ever reach into the real core of anything we are relating to.
(Interestingly, the Latin for heart is cor). Thus, we are never able
to be truly intimate with life; we are always the outsider; we are
not going to be able to see any issue from a wide enough or wise
enough perspective in order to come up with the most intelligent way
of dealing with it.
CONNECTION OF HEART WITH HUMANITY
We must understand that why this is so, is because our hearts are
intimately bound up with our humanity. Much of what it means to be
truly human lies inside our hearts and is therefore unavailable to
us if we are disconnected from them. In other words, if, for
whatever reason, our hearts are ignored or are closed or small or
blocked up or non-functional in some way, then our ability to be
human will be radically affected. And if we are notable to be
properly human, this will affect everything about our lives.
Indeed, if we are not able to be properly human, how on earth are we
going to be able to live in a balanced and humane way, in a wise
way; how on earth are we going to be able to address the many
different kinds of problems that currently face us in the world?
The answer is that we are not,
THE IMPORTANCE OF HEART INTELLIGENCE
Generally, we think intelligence is the answer. But it isn’t.
Certainly not the kind of intelligence that comes from a mind that
is cut off from heart. Not only is this kind love-less, wisdom-less
intelligence probably not going to be the answer, but it may well be
that it t will have created most of our problems for us in the first
place.
To give you some obvious examples, if the intelligence of the heart
and of the mind were to have combined better over the years, we
would never have been moved to use it to create weapons of mass
destruction and spend money that could go to feed the world’s hungry
on developing deadlier versions of them. If heart featured
prominently in man’s thinking, we would not have totalitarian
regimes or neoconservative worldviews espousing ‘perpetual war for
perpetual peace’ or Islamic martyrs wanting to spread war all over
the middle East in preparation for the creation of a world-wide
caliphate. People with heart don’t ethnic cleanse, don’t exploit
other or burgle the limited resources on our planet; if we had more
heart, we wouldn’t, as a species, feel so empty, be so selfish,
greedy an, self-destructive.
You see, inside our hearts, lie a wonderful pantheon of treasures,
which if owned, can make our lives abundant. Yet many of us, because
of our non-existant relationship with our own hearts, do not know of
their existence and as a result often our lives become dictated by
the most heartless aspects of ourselves.
HEART GIFTS
For example, inside our hearts, lies the capacity to love
unconditionally, to be brave and true and honourable, to respect and
reverence ourselves and others. Inside our hearts lies the capacity
to be kind and compassionate and courageous, to act with a
generosity of spirit, to feel awe and joy, and to have a sense of
wonder about life, to experience life’s essential goodness as well
as a profound desire to serve and express that essential goodness.
And I see our planet being out of balance because, as a species, not
enough of us have been able to access the laws of harmony that only
live inside our heart. Similarly, because we are unaware of our
heart’s natural healing potentialities and that dimension of its
being that allows us to forgive, we behave inhumanly to one another
and hold on to hate and resentment. Also, we cannot seem to solve
our world problems because the reconciliatory wisdom enabling us to
do this lies hidden within our hearts.
NELSON MANDELA AS WORLD CITIZEN
In this context, I think we can look at what Nelson Mandela achieved
and ask ourselves how he was so successful in uniting his country
and avoiding bloodshed. The answer, I don’t think, is that he was
necessarily any cleverer than any other world leader struggling with
similar kinds of issues. The answer is that he had developed in
himself something most other leaders don’t have and that is a big
heart. Mandela for me is a wonderful example of a man connected to
the global dimension of heart. In his political work, he was not
just coming from his own agenda; he was coming from the heart of
life. And as a result, a considerable heart power, a very great
reconciliatory force was able to operate within him and flow through
him to his people.
Put another way, his heart was big and wide and strong and resilient
enough to take his entire nation into it and at the same timeenable
him to act as a focal point allowing for its healing and integration
to occur peacefully. One could say he was an instrument of the
spiritual/planetary heart.
HEART POWER
Indeed, what Mandela achieved gives us some idea of the
extraordinary power which potentially lies inside the human heart
which is becoming awakened. (Another extraordinary achievement of
Mandela’s was to have forgiven his jailors who kept him imprisoned
for most of his life).
Therefore I think that the great evolutionary theologian Teilhard de
Chardin was quite right when he suggested that there was more power
inside the awakened heart than inside the atom bomb. (When he wrote
this, in the 1940’s, there were only A bombs! but I would suggest
that this applies to the most terrible weaponry that the heartless
mind of man could ever create.
And that is some thought. Take it into your heart now and consider
it. Consider that right here, in the centre of your chest, where
your heart chakra is located, lies all this wonderful wise and
loving power.
Feel this place. Let your powerful heart communicate itself to you
for a moment and feel what your life would be like if you identified
with this place, if you lived from your heart more and more.
Over the years, I have been privileged to have been in the presence
of a few remarkable sages who have lived fully out of their hearts,
who at a heart level, have been fully awakened, and I have felt the
awesome power of their presence and it has always affected me
deeply. I have also seen with my own eyes extraordinary healings and
transformations taking place fuelled entirely by the power and grace
of love. I have even had one of these healings done to me and had a
serious disease eliminated overnight as a result of prayer focussed
through the spiritual heart.
This is why I believe that if we wish for a better world for
ourselves and our children, we need a counter weapon to build up the
forces of wholeness and goodness and love and peace in our world and
I think our hearts are that weapon; I think they are the greatest
weapon of mass construction that we possess and that it really is up
to us to treat them well at all times and never ever allow anyone or
anything ever to trash them.
BEING A HEART AGENT OF
TRANSFORMATION
Indeed, I feel that two very profound things can happen for us if
the above is allowed to happen and if more of us begin consciously
to connect to the world of our heart and intentionally work at
deepening and expanding that world. The first thing is that we will
feel much happier; we will be much more at peace with ourselves, we
will experience much more joy, we will be able to look at life much
more positively; we will be able to bring much more light and
healing into our dark side instead of often being controlled and
rendered miserable by it. And I’ll mention, by the by, that most of
the people who come to see me in psychotherapy, complaining that
life has little meaning, that their relationships don’t work, that
they feel depressed and can’t handle life properly,, suffer from a
heart dysfunction of one kind or another.
The second profound thing that can happen for us as we begin to
relate to our hearts in a new and fuller way, is that less and less
do we become part of the problems of our world and more and more do
we naturally and spontaneously become part of their solution. In
other words, as we tap into the many wonderful qualities of heart,
and try to work at embodying them so they can then begin to flow
through us into our world, we begin to function as a healing
antidote to all the problems we have in our world. It is as if a
universal heart awareness begins stalking us! We can say that the
bigger our hearts become, the more of our world we are able to hold
inside them, the more effective an agent for transformation we
become.
NEED FOR BOTTOM UP, AS WELL AS TOP
DOWN, ACTION
I know many people who sit around waiting for their world leaders to
do things to create a better world, and of course, it is true, if we
are to have changes, they do need to come from the top down.
What they forget, however, is that top down on its own is not enough
and that action from the bottom up, from the person in the street,
from the grass roots, is equally important.
What we often forget is that our emanations or our vibrations, at
any time, have a profound influence on the environment around us.
Depressed, unhappy, angry people, only bring more dark energies into
the world, while people who are learning to live more and more with
heart are able to channel much more light which in turn can be
focussed into whatever kind of work they do and serve as a dissolver
of darkness.
HEART POWER MAKES A DIFFERENCE
Yes, you and I can, if we choose, make a difference to our world.
But only really if we have heart. If we try to ‘improve things’
without the power of this weapon of mass construction on our side,
we will only contaminate our activities with our own personal
agendas, with our own ‘stuff’, our own desire to look good or be
seen as a hero or whatever
I know this may sound a little harsh but it really is true.
I repeat again: Heart power is the force that will allow
transformation in the world to take place: Heart power will help
heal all the many breakdowns in relationship between ourselves and
others, between nations, and most importantly all the splits and
schisms inside ourselves. If we discover how to open up our hearts
not only to our own pain and despair but also to the pain and
conflict out in the world and if we consciously choose to keep them
open, we will find that our hearts possess the extraordinary
capability of being able to metabolise or ‘gobble it up.’ Our hearts
in truth really are the alchemical part of ourselves, that weapon
that may not only dissolve external tension but also transmute our
base metal into gold. .
With heart on our side, all of us possess the wherewithal to serve
as a healing ingredient in those particular areas of world imbalance
that we feel especially drawn to address.
VESTED INTERESTS
I hope it is clear now why the heart problem or the heart lack is
such an issue. Very simply, without it we don’t shift; without
heart, we are full of fear and one way this manifests is a
resistance to change, a terror of breaking through zones of being
which have become comfortable for us if not especially wholesome.
And at present, too many vested interests still exist in the world
and these vested interests of course, tend to be very against change
of any shape or form.
Here, I am not only talking about the big, powerful corporations and
big government, I am also talking about us. You and I, with our fear
of heart, do just as much to oppose change in the world as all those
powers that be that we love to blame and scapegoat for all our world
ills!
THE EGO ISSUE
You see, without enough heart, we feel too insecure, too inflexible,
too blocked, too suspicious, too resistant to shifting. In a word,
ego flourishes when a person’s heart force is weak and we feel
inherently separate. In such occasions, all we primarily consider is
our own requirements. We will always put personal survival above the
well being of the large whole and in so doing we threaten that
larger whole.
In other words, it is not only the big multi-nationals who do this;
but we do it as well and we must take responsibility for this. The
power of millions of millions of individual egos behaving in a
separate fashion, hardly helps balance our planet.
Put simply, ego identification keeps us bound into the ‘what’s in it
for me’ mindset, how can I get fame, power and glory for me, and
manipulate the rest of life around me in order to serve me, game.
And it is this mindset that needs to change in us if we are to have
a more functional and harmonious world. Yes, our politicians may
lack wisdom but so long as we, their subjects, demand that they keep
our egos fed and our dysfunctional appetites sated, they can only do
so much.
And the great gift of heart is that it diminishes ego’s hold over
us. As our hearts grow, our egos become tamed. And this doesn’t
happen with our minds as ego can much more easily learn to bend mind
to its own usage than it can heart.
A lovely little example of collective heart in action took place
recently in the Ashes series, in the cricket matches between England
and Australia. The English team played with huge heart and little
ego and with a spirit of friendship towards the opposition, a
gratitude towards it for its excellence thus enabling them to raise
the level of their own game.
And this kind of heart is very important. The whole nature of the
way we ‘play the game of life’ becomes raised. Heart people engage
in life very differently from ego centred ones.
HEARTLESS CULTURE
You may say, ‘But Serge you are exaggerating this. We are not all
that heartless.’ And my reply is, ‘O yes we are. OK, some of us may
pay lip service to heart, but it is not big heart or deep heart, it
is generally to what I call small heart or superficial heart, and
certainly we westerners tend to be obsessed with the whole domain of
romantic love (many of us thinking it is the only kind of love that
exists) but on the whole a lot of us give small shrift to a deeper
kind of heart life.
At one level, we can say that this ‘heartlessness’ of ours is not
our fault. It is not especially embedded in our culture. At school,
for example, our motto was ‘a healthy mind in a healthy body’, no
mention of heart, and when I went to university, nobody thought that
the education of the heart had any importance.
And of course this is not new and has existed for a long time and is
connected to the whole rise of our Scientific materialism where only
what can be seen and touched and measured is give value and where
things that cannot be explained rationally – things mystical or soft
or feminine – are somehow deemed unimportant.
But if we recognise a lack and recognise the price we pay for it,
not only in terms of global imbalance but also in terms of the many
dysfunctional families full of men and women who divorce because
they have never bothered to learn to love and nurture each other at
deep levels, then we may be motivated to do something about it. Love
is not scarce. ‘Love’, Mother Theresa told us, ‘is a fruit in season
at all times and within reach of every hand.’ But if we have no
depth of heart in which it may take root and sprout, then it seems
scarce. In other words, if there is no compassion and tenderness
inside us, we will not be able to recognise it outside of us.
RADICAL SHIFTS COMING
But but but but….fear not. I see huge changes coming. I see many
signs that humanity’s heart life is beginning to open up and that
many extraordinary catalysts or what I’ll call ‘world events’ are
seeming to play key roles in this awakening. I’ll mention three.
There are many more but these three are enough to prove my point.
THE TSUNAMI WAVE
Interestingly, what this destructive wave that claimed over a
quarter of a million lives also did, was to activate a counter wave
of compassion and love and generosity to arise in the global heart.
Suddenly, the global heart opened as millions of people the world
over were touched by this terrible disaster. And the response was
very different to that in which humanity ordinarily responds, which
is: ‘It’s not really a crisis, because me and my kin are untouched.
It only happened to those over at the other end of the world far
away from me, so I’m fine.’
With this Tsunami, it was quite different. Man’s habitually numb
heart thawed very quickly, and many of us entered into the awareness
of those at the other end of the world from us who had lost
everything precious. Many of us opened our hearts to their
unbearable suffering; we experienced that common ground of humanity
shared with our fellow human beings on the planet and suddenly we
wanted to give. Within a few days, millions had poured into relief
efforts. Even street people gave the contents of their begging
bowls. People gave up their work and went to the other side of the
world to help. Something precious and noble that resides deep within
all of us, had been activated. Temporarily, our habitual ego mindset
had been shattered.
And here one was reminded of something which Gurdjieff said many
years ago, namely that:
‘Man being the asleep and inert creature he is, he tends to need a
shock greater than the sum of his own inertia to wake him up.’
And that Tsunami was that shock. A very dear friend of mine lost her
husband and very nearly her son, when they were out on holiday in
Thailand. I spoke to her about it. ‘My faith in God has not been
shattered’ she told me.’ Something in me has died but something new
in me is being born. I can feel it. Yes, I grieve horribly for my
beloved husband, but I feel somehow more connected to life than ever
before. The preciousness of the gift of my wonderful son is greater
than it has ever been.
When life conspires to strip us of everything, all the comforts that
we had been able to hide behind and define ourselves through, and we
touch the bare bones of our humanity, it is often then that our true
heart can come out of hiding. We get behind all the pretences we
have and the games we play may fall away. My friend was so real that
day, so naked, so powerful, that I wept in her presence. Something
so profound about her touched something in me and for a bit I felt a
little ashamed of how covered up my own heart still was, how
un-naked I still was!
THE DESTRUCTION OF THE BERLIN WALL
The collapse of Communism as a world force created an extraordinary
awakening of the global heart or perhaps we can say that the global
heart was behind this extraordinary rallying of hundreds of
thousands of courageous people on the streets defying the repressive
and oppressive forces of life and saying yes to freedom and no to
these forces.
Extraordinary love and extraordinary courage went into these people
that day, conspiring to unify them. That was another example of the
power of heart.
I remember being so excited as I watched the Berlin wall crack open
and it felt also as I too was being liberated, as if little chunks
of me that oppressed me were also being chiselled away.
Indeed I see the global heart as being behind all the great
spiritual and evolutionary movements happening in our world today.
We see it present in the Women’s Movement, Friends of the Earth,
Greenpeace, Amnesty International, etc., and all the many
initiatives on behalf of a better world, all the many organisations
and centres and institutes promoting the emergence of new spiritual
values and a higher consciousness.
SIR GEORGE TREVELYAN
I believe it was the Universal Heart that guided Sir George to do
all the wonderful and inspiring things that he did to help educate
people to the idea that spiritual realities exist and that the truth
about man is that he is a spiritual being in an earthly body. (For
those of you who don’t know, Sir George Trevelyan was the founder of
the Wrekin Trust and an enormous source of inspiration to all of us
today who are trying to carry on the inspirational work which he
pioneered.)
Just like Nelson Mandela, Sir George also ascended beyond his
individuality and thus could be an instrument of the universal heart
guiding him and empowering him and ensuring that all who came into
his presence could be similarly connected to those selfsame sources
that he was. That is the gift that these universal heart citizens,
as we can call them, can offer us.
Sir George for me, was a wonderful example of what we can call a
‘seed person’. In carrying about his being, a profound understanding
of the next step in human and planetary evolution, he was able to
bring about a gradual germination of that message in the hearts of
those who would come into his orbit.
THE DEATH OF PRINCESS DIANA
My third heart awakening catalyst took a very different form. It
occurred at the death of princess Diana, which I would also like to
argue, was also
a special world event and precipitated a profound opening of the
global heart. Indeed, perhaps in her dying, Diana did more for
humanity than she ever did when she was alive.
Yes, I agree with those who say that the Princess was flawed, was
narcissistically very wounded, and therefore so empty that she
needed the love of the whole world to fill her. That is probably
true. Nonetheless, there was also something unique about her and
perhaps even her own emotional wounding had something to do with why
her death initiated such a profound healing for so many people.
As with Mandela and Sir George, I believe her significance was more
than just a personal one. She stood for things intimately connected
with the emergence of heart in the world; she stood for the sacred
feminine, the goddess energy and its return into society; she stood
for things soft and kind and beautiful, the re-emergence of
right-brain thinking and the demise of patriarchy. In her life she
did her best to give love and I think she also stood for inner
royalty, or the importance of developing ourselves as ‘aristocrats
of spirit’ – evolving our heart and soul lives.
At her death, millions of hearts that had been clenched shut, began
to open and as they did so a powerful healing began to happen.
Here, we remind ourselves that as hearts open, they not only do so
to the joy and light inside them, but also to the pain and grief
that will also have accumulated (which is one reason why we often
fear opening our hearts as we don’t want to re-experience old
painful memories that we may have done our best to try to cut
ourselves off from.)
But the truth is that to the extent that things are unresolved
inside our hearts, or to the extent that we hold a lot of pain and
hurt there, perhaps personal memories of tragic things that happened
to us in our lives, perhaps human collective memories of our
violent, destructive and painful things that happened in humanity’s
past – to that extent, we cannot properly move on. We need to
release some of that heaviness first.
And that was the gift of Diana’s death. It granted us permission to
grieve at a much deeper level.
In my own case, and in the case of many other of my friends, while
our grieving began over her death, it began soon to shift. In my
case, it moved over to grieving my mother’s death and the
realisation that this was by no means finished and I still had a lot
of loose ends to tie up here.
And as this deepened, I found myself moving back in my life and
completing certain other painful experiences that somehow had been
buried in an undigested form. Gradually I found myself moving deeper
still and grieving over the plight of our planet and those in our
world who seem to have such sad and tragic lives, things which all
too often, we wish to close down to, not let ourselves feel. Later,
it felt as if I was moving into deeper domains of grief still, where
it was not so much me that was grieving but something bigger than me
using me to complete a particular process.
And while painful, this was also deeply humbling and opening.
If only we realised what a price we pay for not allowing ourselves
to feel life properly, for in closing ourselves off to things that
are painful, we also do not allow ourselves to experience and enter
into the many subtle joys and beauties and mysteries of life, and we
become a kind of semi-dead person. And many of us are like this and
have been like this all our lives, robotic, focussing only on
externals.
At that time I saw more clearly than ever how our modern culture so
insidiously tries to invalidate those who endeavour to live an inner
as well as an outer life, and I realised that if we are to have a
world that works, that we need to regard the earning of our inner
living to be just as valid and precious as the earning of our outer
one. Perhaps one of the gifts the Princess gave us in her death was
that she helped connect millions of people to these kinds of
realisations.
TAKING RESPONSIBILITY FOR OUR OWN
HEART EMERGENCE
OK. Here we have seen three expressions of the emergence of global
heart and I think we need to ask ourselves this question.
While perhaps, up until now, there may have been a reason for us to
have been initiated in these most radical of ways, due to that
numbness of ours that Gurdjieff remarked upon.
But, we need to ask ourselves, does this have to continue? Cannot
we, as a species, progress beyond needing such explosive situations
in order to give ourselves a wake-up call?
Cannot we intentionally de-numb or un-numb?
I say we have to.
Because there is something innately perilous about these
‘evolutionary opportunities’ and if some grow from them, many die. I
am sure in that Tsunami, many thousands also must have died of
heartbreak.
And that is the risk in this heart work.
Also – and this is an important point – the awakening was not
permanent.
In all three scenarios, if the deeper heart or the spiritual heart
of man had been accessed, if some of us were given a ‘sneak preview’
into a new, more heartful way to be, the ‘clang back shut again ’
effect took place a few weeks later, when the media began to shift
its focus and the ego began reasserting itself once more, thus
confirming the truth of T.S. Eliot’s remark that ‘Man cannot bear
too much reality.’
What I say is: Cannot we move beyond this? Cannot we begin to assume
more responsibility for our lives and claim deeper realities as our
own and make the choice to remain in them? After all, Eliot made
that remark half a century ago.
I think that what our global situation calls for, is for us all to
try to take much more responsibility for our own heart emergence and
to muse upon what living more of a heart life might require of us,
and not do this necessarily because we are facing some new crisis
outside in the world or are especially unhappy ourselves, but simply
because we realise the benefits of engaging in this kind of work and
the price we pay for ignoring it.
As Sir George used to say a decade ago, and today his words are even
more pertinent: ‘It is urgent that we change. Our world will not be
able to support for many more decades this continuation of our egoic
behaviour.’
He is right. It won’t. It is not their responsibility (whoever they
are). It is ours. Like Atlas we must take our world upon our
shoulders with a joyful open heart
WAYS OF WORKING WITH HEART
And heart awakening, I have to stress again, is not a given. Some
areas of our life – our physical maturity, for example, happen
spontaneously. We don’t have to work at growing taller and older.
But not so with spiritual development. If we want to claim the full
contents of our heart life, and be more and more who we really are,
then we need to work at it and make this work a central and a very
joyful part of our everyday living.
As helping people with their heart life seems to have been part of
my own heart development, I will conclude with saying that there are
many different levels of working with heart, and also many different
ways.
The six ways I classify are as follows:
Way 1) Heart Knowing. Here, we
practice becoming more aware that we have an inner heart and we
learn gradually to find new ways of befriending it, discovering its
deeper essence and the fact that it has much to offer us as our
‘best friend.’
Way 2) Heart healing. As we have
seen, if hearts are to evolve, they first needs healing and
cleansing and emptying of the various kinds of dross that will have
accumulated inside it over the years and which prevent it vibrating
at higher frequencies.
Way 3) Heart Feeding. Just as
our minds need stimulating, so too do our hearts if they are to
develop healthily. Activities that feed our hearts might include our
doing things we love doing, being with people we love being with,
being out in nature, meditating (very important, as our minds
quieten, our hearts have more space to open) and praying (talking
directly to the spiritual heart, asking for its assistance in our
work.)
Way 4) Heart Expression. Our
‘heart muscles’ strengthen as we practice being more open-hearted
out in the world, spreading joy, embodying courage, sharing wisdom
etc. True expression cannot fully come about unless we discover our
true vocation and actually do it so that our work, whatever it is,
expresses our heart life in action.
Way 5) Heart Awakening. Here, we
do spiritual processes to deepen our heart, to help it open wider,
to help ‘globalise’ it so it can rest in its universal and
ultimately, its cosmic function more and more
Way 6) Heart Surrender. Here,
our work is about our surrendering to the deeper heart of life,
allowing ourselves to rest in the divine heart so that more and more
our little self can be subsumed in the greater spiritual heart self.
These ways do not occur in any order. Also, they all interweave with
each other and often we may find ourselves working at different
levels and in different ways all at the same time.
The last thing I’ll say is that if we wish to engage in this work,
we can ask our hearts what to do and where to go and if we learn to
listen to them and trust what they are saying, they will guide us
accordingly.
Good luck and thank you.
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