And I would like to stretch your imagination a little further still and suggest that this collective or global heart in turn is contained within a bigger, more expansive heart still which I am going to call simply, the spiritual heart of life and which to the extent we have a link to the global heart, we may also potentially draw from.

Please note, however, that I use the word potentially. By this I mean that a deeper heart connection is not a given.

It is not a given because if we have little or no conscious connection with our own heart (and please note here that when I am talking about heart, I am referring to our inner and not our outer heart) we cannot have any understanding of heart presence or heart energy in the same way. For example, that if we are blind we cannot experience what seeing is.
Is this clear?

In a word, with many of us, and this can be especially the case with those of us with six or seven doctorates to our name, i.e., the really clever ones, our own hearts may be small and undeveloped. And they are this way because, unlike with our minds, we have never considered it relevant or important ever to work at developing them, and hence of ever evolving any kind of relationship with them.

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.