THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE HEART FACTOR
If a new and better society  is to emerge , it will be because  those millions of people in  every country in the world who  recognise how unjust our existing society is,  not only carry in their hearts a vision for a  new and more humane world, but are also  committed to playing their part in helping  such a world come into being. If we are to have a world that works - one where the different nations of the world recognise the need to honour and respect each other from a place of recognising that each has something unique to contribute to the whole, and that despite all our differences,  we all come from the same ground of human beingness - it will be because sufficient numbers of us want it enough and hold a vision , inside our hearts, of what a transformed world might look like.

 

And the key words are ‘inside our hearts’.  When something is held inside our heart, be it a thought or a feeling, a particular idea,  then something new –  call it a new kind of power – is invited in. I believe then, that what I will call the ‘Heart factor’, is the central ingredient out of which a new and better world  will emerge, and that if we lack sufficient heart or  don’t put sufficient  heart into our endeavours,  I doubt if, as a species, we possess the power or the wisdom or the  imagination or the ability  or the willingness or, most important, the love,  to  have something  truly innovative and workable materialise.  For let us not kid ourselves. Creating a new world is a huge undertaking; it is not something that  can occur without a lot of effort on many people’s part. And simply knowing about  what is wrong with our world, which, of course, many of us do - i.e., that it is full of injustice, inequality, violence, destructiveness, etc - is, of itself, not enough to have deep change come about. (If it were, we’d have a changed world today!)

 

I say that if we are to have a better society, it requires each of us, in Gandhi’s words, ‘To be the change we want to see happen in the world,’ which means that  we have to embody change in everything we do and say and are. And I say this because a new culture  is not ‘something that is legislated into being’, so much as something that emerges through all the many ways in which each of us relate to, and operate in, our world . It is born out of how we  conduct our business,  how we operate around money, how we  ‘do’ our relationships, bring up our children, relate to our fellow human beings, etc.In other words, it comes into being as a result of  millions of us  learning to function in new  and  more heart-full  ways, in which we allow the truth and the integrity we feel welling up inside our hearts, to be the guiding light in our lives.

 

PROBLEMS OF OUR WORLD RELATED TO INSUFFICIENCY OF HEART
My main thesis then, is that essentially what is ‘wrong’ with our world today is that not enough of us operate with enough heart.  There is not enough kindness around, not enough compassion or wisdom or joy or desire for truth. One could say that we suffer a disease of heart  insufficiency and that  this insufficiency gets translated into how our world operates, the way our politics function, the way we relate to money, education, our fellow human beings – everything..  And one of the main ‘symptoms’ of this insufficiency of heart is a lack of vision. Also, without heart, we are primarily motivated to operate in   self seeking ways, whereby we endeavour to do what we deem to be in our own interest (both personally and nationally), often with scant regard  as to whether our actions help or  harm the larger community of life.  The point is that without  sufficient heart, we experience ourselves to be very separate , which in turn leads to a lot of alienation and fear, a kind of subtle emptiness that terrifies us and which we are forever trying to fill with things. Therefore, instead of  our being able to be, we are continually on the treadmill of needing to have!  Without heart, we have not yet graduated into our humanity! And this is what is ‘wrong’ with our world today!

 

It is our hearts, you see, that enable us to trust the great process of the unfurling of life, even if we don’t always understand what is going on. It is our hearts that imbue in us a desire for justice, that  give us  an experience of unity, that allow us  to empathise with our fellow human beings. In addition, our hearts enable us to do certain things which would otherwise not be possible , such as recycle our less admirable emotions into something deeper and nobler, or, very importantly, reconcile  our conflicts. (We have conflicts out in the world because conflicts exist inside us. For example, the Palestine/Jewish issue has to  be solved internally as well as externally.) Indeed, our hearts  give us the courage and force to do things which our minds on their own, would never dare to do. In the words of the spiritual Master Osho:

‘The heart is the Master. The mind is only a servant. The  heart is the master because all that is beautiful and valuable grows in the heart, and when you have a heart that is alive, your mind’s quality will begin to change.’

 

That last phrase is   the key. So much of what is ‘wrong’ with our current culture, is  the  narrowness in the way so many of us think, which  in turn is born of our having suppressed or never having properly activated our heart life. Indeed, when we primarily live ‘out of our heads’,  which so many of us do today, there is always imbalance and an absence of the ability to think in terms of wholes. I maintain that it is the absence of heart  in us that lies behind the split between the rich and the poor and  is why the rich continue to grow richer at the expense of the poor getting  poorer. It is because the wisdom of our hearts is excluded that we continue to burglarise our planet’s limited resources without sufficient thought for our future, and why we seem  so hell bent on destroying ourselves by believing in such absurdities such as that we need to have perpetual war for perpetual peace!(The ‘vision’ of Bush’s neocons!)  At one level, it is because we are without the reconciliatory capabilities of our heart, that we continue to create surplus evil through our unwillingness to acknowledge the darkness inside us, which we instead continue to project outside of ourselves onto other people and other nations. (So long as  men like Mugabe exist, we can always protest our snow-white innocence!) Above all, it is our lack of heart that  underlies the  kind of stupidity that makes us believe we will be more secure by amassing ever more potent methods of destroying ourselves. This is insane. Our insanity is maintained by our inadequate heart lives.

 

Indeed when our heart lives are non-activated, when we  primarily live out of our heads, there is always something  inherently metallic or ‘dead’ about us. I think that when  Thomas Merton once remarked  ‘That we have lost Dante’s vision of that Love which moves the sun and all the stars and in so doing, have lost the power to find meaning in the world’, or when the theologian Matthew Fox suggested that ‘Our civilisation is without a cosmology and therefore is cosmically lonely and depressed’, both men were making statements about the consequences of the lack of heart in the life of humanity.

 

We need to understand that our hearts possess enormous power. The great visionary thinker, Teilhard de Chardin suggested that ‘There was more power inside our human hearts than inside the greatest atomic bomb’ and I say  that our heart is our greatest weapon of mass construction! Everything that is most valuable and precious and beautiful and soulful and truthful in our world has been created by men and women with big, wise, tender, imaginative and creative hearts, and who therefore have  instinctively understood what it means to be  most fully human. It is our challenge today to seek to emulate these people’s example.

 

NEED TO ACTIVATE OUR HEART LIFE TO CRESTE A WORKABLE WORLD
Therefore,   I say that unless each of us  take  very concrete steps to awaken and develop our heart life, which implies  committing to bringing out into the open and learning to express, some of the  many  different qualities  that live inside it, such as love,  truth,  beauty, peace, wisdom, joy, courage and strength (to mention but a few), no genuine shift will be able to take place and no new culture will be able to be born.

 

Put very simply, the challenge confronting  all of us today, is trying to create a world that has  a  more human face, a world that works for everybody, a world where there is more justice, more balance, more harmony, less dishonesty, less violence,   a world where individuals and nations  feel moved to engage in activities that help and support life, a world where wisdom is able to inform our institutions  and where energy is able to be used wisely, where the love  we have, is deeper and more unitive in nature. ( It is not that there is not enough love in our  current world,  rather  it is that because our hearts are too small and undeveloped, the love we have is too superficial and  conditional.) 

 

We must realise then, that without sufficient heart, we cannot properly become a human being, since everything that is finest, or most human, about us, lies inside our hearts. And if we cannot be a human being, we cannot  hope to fulfil the cultural role that Albert Schweitzer told us was our birthright, when he suggested that :

‘We who are heirs of a complex civilisation, are charged with one  major historical task: to aid the world in achieving true culture. It is up to us to make the light of a truly humanitarian culture shine throughout the world.’

What essentially he was suggesting was that we have a responsibility for learning to activate the light inside our hearts and then allowing that light to shine into everything that we do. Only then will we create a world that is balanced, a true culture.

 

 EMERGENCE OF PEOPLE POWER
New cultures, we remind ourselves, don’t  so much emerge from the top down,  as from the ground up.  Yes, our world leaders can point the way, set a context for change, but it  is we, the people, who have the greatest responsibility. One example of the effectiveness of people power was seen in the events that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall! The peoples of the Communist nations decided that they no longer wanted that regime. They took a  passionate stand for freedom. And the old order collapsed. Similarly, I believe that it was because Nelson Mandela had such a vast heart, one that was big enough to  have included his entire nation inside it, that the South African people were empowered to make the transition out of apartheid  and into a new regime without a single drop of blood being shed!

And the wonderful positive thing that I see in the world today is that  actually there are many, many people of big heart, many visionaries, all doing incredible things, each in their own way, to bring about change, each realising that they hold a different piece of the newly emerging cultural jigsaw. It particularly gladdens me to know that America is about to have new President, a new kind of human being, a man of vision and, I believe, of  heart. Unlike  the current President,  I believe Obama will be able to tap into to the deeper heart and soul of his nation and so guide it in a direction whereby it will be able to fulfil its true destiny, and discover its deeper purpose for being. So instead of America being the embodiment, as it is at present, of how degraded Democracy and Capitalism  can become,  perhaps under  his new leadership, it will reconnect to the vision of its founding fathers. My hope is that it realises its deeper spiritual purpose as a nation which is to discover itself by serving the larger community of nations of which it is a part, and that  as a result, other countries will follow suit.

 

AWAITING THE RIGHT MOMENT FOR NEW WORLD TO EMERGE
As I have been saying now, for the last few years, I believe the new culture is ready and waiting. I believe that, as our old world continues to crumble around us - and we are seeing this happening everywhere today - that  there are many wise-hearted men and women all over the world and in every profession who are simply  awaiting that ‘right moment’ to come into new positions of power. All the groundwork is being laid for this. Indeed, I believe that enough people are  ‘sufficiently ripe’ and that conditions are sufficiently ripe, for change not merely to be an idea whose time has come but one  that is  in the process of actually manifesting itself…..

 

 I suggest this for two main reasons. The first is, as I said, because  the new culture is now almost fully formed ( it has been quietly marinating in the wings over the last fifty years and is no longer the counter-culture of yesteryear) . As such, it doesn’t need to be created  (that has already happened)so much as ‘put together’ - arranged in the right way. Secondly,  as our world crises escalate in magnitude, increasing numbers of people, including those who even a few years ago, were resistant to change, now want  it and  are increasingly coming to see not only that  many of our old ways of doing things no longer work, but that if continued with,  they will actually destroy us.  More and more people are recognising that the sooner  they learn to  unhook themselves from their old perceptions and  attachments , and instead learn to see the world in a new way and relate to other people in a new way and address their problems from a new perspective, the better it will be for all concerned.

 

And this is a very positive sign.

 

FINANCIAL CRISIS: THE TRANSFORMING POWER OF SHOCK
Gurdjieff once suggested that man, being the inert creature that he is, that if he is to change,  he requires a shock greater than that of his own inertia.  I believe this and I believe  that  this is  exactly what is happening  today, particularly through our current financial crises,  which none of us are immune to, and which, one has every reason to believe, may well worsen in the months and years  ahead. Not only is this financial downturn  ‘hitting’ us in a place that none of us can ignore, but in doing so,  it is  also helping wake  us up out of our complacency and making us more aware of the rogue financial system in whose embrace we have all, wittingly or unwittingly, been participating for so long. From an evolutionary perspective,  therefore, this crisis needs to be seen as a gift, even if a painful one. As  the philosopher David Spangler put it:

 

‘Underneath the patterns of instability in the world, a profound spirit of love and good will is at work using the instability and the individuals that emerge from it as a farmer uses a plough, to turn the soil and prepare it for new seed and new harvest.’

I love this idea and I believe  very much in the ingenuity of man. Where there is a will there is a way, and with heart, the will can be very great.  In other words, I believe that in the long term,  we will establish a healthier  and more  substantial economy, where less will be wasted,  where we will free ourselves from our addiction to needing to consume all the time,  where  we will require less and derive more joy from it, where those who ‘have’, will  feel moved (from their hearts) to give to those who don’t have, where our toxicities (inner and outer) will be properly recycled, where small can begin to be regarded as beautiful, and where, so very important, we come to recognise  the difference between ‘real work’ or ‘good work’  - that is, work with our hands, work to help others,  work directly to improve the quality of life - and false work, e.g., like gambling with stock markets, and where we will increasingly come to  realise that we can only survive by  sharing our resources and working cooperatively with our fellow human beings.

 

And this shift, as I said, can only come about with heart.  With heart, we realise the absurdity of a system which requires us to consume more than we need, in order to survive. With heart, we realise how absurd it is that we ‘have’ to be making profits all the time , and how this results in a situation in which the poor inevitably lose out. In fact, I see our obsession with needing to make more money (and feeling inadequate if we don’t!) as being all about a desire to compensate ourselves for the inevitable vacuum we feel as a result of our undeveloped heart lives, whereby, unable to savour the ‘real (spiritual) gold’ inside us, we try to compensate ourselves – fill the gap - with ‘things’. Jesus  once said that it was ‘Harder for a rich man to go to heaven than for  a camel to go through the eye of a needle’,  and he was damn right. So long as we are sated by too much materiality, we are insufficiently motivated to develop our inner life, and perhaps, if we all have less, we will be more motivated to work at doing this and in the process, uncover our true values, which we seem to have lost.

 

It may be that one of the  many initiations, which, as a species, we are being called to go through at this time –  this being  part and parcel of  the  process of the establishing of a new culture - is one where perhaps we have  to ‘lose out’  at a material level in order to ‘gain’ at a  much deeper level. Perhaps this ‘loss’ has to occur if we Westerners are to wean ourselves  ( cold-turkey like) off the treadmill of needing to define ourselves all the time by what we have (outwardly) – in terms of our material  possessions,  our outer success or societal  status, fame, glory or whatever, leading to a feeling of failure  if we feel we possess none of these things. If a culture of  true abundance is to emerge, it will surely have to be born out of our having learned to move beyond these goals, as a result of our connecting to our true source, which, as all spiritual teachers will tell us, is the key to living a truly magnificent, happy and wholesome  life.

 

SHIFT FROM PERSONAL TO UNIVERSAL
One of the effects of our current crises is that they are  helping to lead us away from being so personally identified  with everything - whereby we are primarily moved to protect what we see as being ‘ours’ (and to hell with what happens to the rest of life) - to  our instead becoming more universally oriented, whereby we remember  that we are  in actuality part of the larger community of humanity, and as such are required to honour that larger whole and recognise that ultimately what serves its greater well being, is also  what is best for us. And while of course, our minds may know this, we cannot in fact act on this information until this knowledge  will have penetrated us more deeply and  will have become an actual  felt experience in our hearts.

 

I think it sad that all too  often, we  seem to require catastrophic events to blast open our hearts, but there it is! The Tsunami was one such event and it did have the effect of temporarily causing a mass heart awakening. Instead of our being closed down, as is our wont, to other people’s suffering, many people’s hearts opened very wide as a result of reading about or seeing the news reports about,  the disasters suffered at the other end of the world as a result of that terrible tidal wave. Many reported that it felt  as if   it were their own family that had been drowned, their  own livelihood that had been lost, their  own heart that had been broken, their own home that had been swept away.

 

 The consequences  of this profoundly empathic resonance, was   the pulling back of the old shutters that ordinarily keep us feeling so separate, and a huge outpouring of generosity and altruism.  In a few days, millions of pounds of aid flowed directly towards the stricken areas. This was the new culture at its best.

 

THE POWER AND JOY OF SERVING
And while sadly, the universal heart of humanity did not remain open, and  after a few weeks, the shutters began to close down again, I believe that a new window of opportunity had been opened and  that many people had a personal experience of how good it felt to be generous and kind. Many came to see  that actual  giving away was not a sacrifice but on the contrary, a great gain and therfore realised the truth of Albert Schweitzer words, that if ‘We want to find out how to be happy, we need to learn to serve!’ Many people, therefore,  temporarily savoured the truth that the great Masters have always known and spoken about, namely, that the only way to be properly human and to feel free, is to have our lives be about helping our fellow human beings and our world, and that the more we choose to do this, the ‘bigger’ our humanity  will become.

 

It is only, then,  as we work at consciously  awakening our hearts, that we can begin to experience - deep in our core -  not only how much love and beauty there is all around us, but also how much suffering there is in the world  and how much we have brought it  upon  ourselves. From this realisation, we  may  begin to say to ourselves: ‘There needs to be another way. I will take a stand for truth, beauty and integrity in the world and will never in any way participate in anything that is to the detriment of life on Earth.’ When we can state this from a deep place inside our hearts, is the moment when we become a true ‘friend of the Earth’, a significant force in the establishing of a new culture.

 

The process, then, of seeking to be of service  or  of choosing to have our lives make a difference, has another important side effect that can only be understood if  actually experienced. As our hearts begin opening, we naturally begin to  awaken to  the deeper treasures that ‘live’ inside them, which, as they become spontaneously ‘outed’, serve as counterbalancing forces to the distortions out in the world.

 

 For example,  as we  experience more of the heart quality of  love, much of our indifference to world suffering evaporates. The more we access joy, the less prone we become to creating painful dramas or to be drawn to work in dysfunctional organisations where our living  is earned at the expense of our humanity being burned out of us. Similarly, as we learn to tap into our own  inner beauty, we  become increasingly aware of the ‘ugly, superficial face’ of  society and as such, far less prone to be part of it in any way, and as we begin to find peace in our hearts, we  find ourselves far better able  to handle conflict as well as to be no longer moved to project our shadow side onto other people but instead to wish to re-own it. And so on. Do you see how our lack of heart  conspires to create a dysfunctional society and how the return of heart naturally addresses that balance. People of heart are  less and less part of the problems of the world and increasingly part of their solution.. This is why I believe that  the single  most important thing that any of us can be doing with our lives, is  discovering how best to awaken our hearts.
 
HOW TO AWAKEN OUR HEARTS
Here is the advice given us by the Sufi poet Rumi .

‘If you wish your heart to be bright, you must do a little work. If metal can be polished to a mirror-like finish, what polishing does the mirror of the heart require?’

In short, we need to work at it. Ordinarily, our hearts or our humanity will not awaken unless time and energy is devoted to this undertaking. Very often, our  journey  begins by our discovering what  it is that  has wounded our heart and so has conspired to deaden it and keep it small. Is this due to the heartlessness of  the culture around us,  or is it more the result of traumas that happened to us early in our life? Or might it be a bit of both? Might it also be because of dark  and destructive patterns  that we have ‘brought in with us’ to this life, as a result of insufficiently transmuted patterns relating back to other, prior incarnations?

 

All these questions need to be asked, together with what we feel are the best methods for healing ourselves .This ‘inner work’  is so important, for if it is not done, often with the best intentions, we will simply project our own  unredeemed contagion and toxicity onto our desire to be  an agent of innovation. This fact is behind the remark about the road to hell being paved with good intentions! Thus we need to understand the relationship between our having a clear heart and our ability to grow our heart life. Jesus was only too aware of this and advised his disciples   to‘ Not let your hearts be troubled’. I don’t interpret  this as him implying that they should close off and not feel the pain of the world – remain aloof to world suffering – so much as that they take care to address the pain in their heart, as  a heart full of pain implies a heavy heart, and a heavy heart implies a closed and dysfunctional one. Much of Jesus’ work in ‘taking on the sins of the world’ was about him trying to help humanity with their heart wounds as he understood  so profoundly, the connection between imbalance, evil and the wounded heart.

 

If we wish for a healthy heart, then, it is  also very important that we learn to take care of it. And this implies that we feed it the kind of nourishment that makes it feel warm and happy, as a happy heart is a strong heart.  As such, we need to make space in our lives for activities that give us  genuine pleasure, which  may mean that we give ourselves ‘time out’, just to be, to sit on a beach,  say, or to daydream under a tree! Hearts are happy when we are out in nature. They are also nourished by certain kinds of music. And , of course, by kindness.  They love being in truly loving relationships. They feel ‘good’ being around the kinds of friends who allow us to be who we are and  who celebrate what is best about us. In such  ‘en-heartening environments’, our hearts can grow stronger and blossom. They can begin to dance. For many years, I have taught spiritual retreats in sunny places, with exactly this purpose in mind.

 

Many spiritual practices also help deepen and strengthen our hearts. Especially Meditation which focuses on calming our restless mind and so allows our hearts more space to breathe. Indeed, the calmer we become, the easier it is to journey inside ourselves and discover new dimensions to our humanity. The more we can come to realise that who each of us really is, is a spiritual being, the more we become a  potent force in the creation of a better world. **

 

While at one level, this creation occurs quite naturally, as the spontaneous by-product of our allowing ourselves to be more fully who we are (which only our hearts truly know), at another level, it happens through our choosing to take stands on behalf of the better world we wish to see emerge. Here, not only do we desist from all activities which look back to the past and help keep our existing culture (which is trying to die) alive, but we also discover our own way of saying no to all the forces of injustice and non-integrity that we may encounter. Whatever particular form our ‘mission’ takes – it may be we are  trying to bring about change through politics (Obama) or Economics or through Science, etc  - it is  very important that we no longer countenance a world where women and children are trafficked for profit, where  wars are fought, where the poor and destitute continue to be forgotten, where billions continue  to be spent on irrelevancies while important activities remain unfunded . And so on.

 

 This is not being fanatical; it is being brave and strong. It is being a conscious agent of that true culture that Schweitzer spoke of. For example, one of the  ways   that those who work for Greenpeace do this, is to go out to sea and do their best to disturb  and  challenge those ships which are breaking the law by killing whales!

 

I will conclude by saying that each of us have a different Heart path to tread, a different aspect of the new culture to implant into society, and a different method of doing this. Some of us are implanters by action, some of us through our thoughts, others of us through the words we speak. Some of us may be propelled to important positions in society. Others of us may work quietly behind the scenes.  We may be an Agitator for peace, an Infiltrator (someone working behind the lines of the old culture),  a Decimator ( a shatterer of the old world order), an Initiator (bringing in a new vision). Rather than compare ourselves with others  or say that one way is better than another, it is preferable that we acknowledge our own unique challenges. Our hearts will guide us towards whatever specific piece or pieces of the new culture are uniquely ours to work with and to bring into expression. To this end we must never forget Mother Theresa’s wise words that ‘It is not about how much we do that is important, but how much heart, how much care and  love, we put into what we do’….

c) Serge Beddington-Behrens.