(Concluded from part 1, yesterday.)
So I was operating outside the intellectual level – in the experiential. Sri Aurobindo addresses the situation:
“Man, because he is a mental being, is prone to give the highest importance to the thinking mind and its reason and will and to its way of approach…. The heart with its emotions and incalculable movements is to the eye of [the human] intellect an obscure, uncertain and often a perilous and misleading power which needs to be kept in control by the reason and the mental will and intelligence.
“And yet there is in the heart or behind it a profounder mystic light which, if not what we call intuition — for that, though not of the mind, yet descends through the mind — has yet a direct touch upon Truth and is nearer to the Divine than the human intellect in its pride of knowledge.” (2)
I agree completely.
Notice the way this tendency to make the heart submit to the mind maps over patriarchy. Women are often associated with the heart and the feelings (“the weaker sex”), and men with strength and the mind. Men are said to control women. In the same way, the mind is asked to control the heart.
I agree that the heart is nearer to the divine. The hridayam or heart aperture is like a door. On the other side of it exists everything except this Third Dimension. It’s a doorway to the dimensions.
Moreover, what we want from life is available in the heart. Love, bliss, ecstacy, peace, depth, joy, etc. The heart is a cornucopia.
The heart is superior to the intellect in knowing and realizing the Truth.
Sri Aurobindo goes further:
“According to the ancient teaching the seat of the immanent Divine, the hidden Purusha, is in the mystic heart, — the secret heart-cave, hridaye guhayam, as the Upanishads put it, — and, according to the experience of many Yogins, it is from its depths that there comes the voice or breath of the inner oracle. (3)
Yes, indeed. The immanent Divine is none other than the Self. And the Self, if it can be said to reside anywhere, resides in the depths of the heart, the seat of the soul. I haven’t heard the Mother’s voice or breath, the inner oracle. That’s out in front of me and so I can’t comment.
But yes, “the seat of the immanent Divine, the hidden Purusha, is in the mystic heart.” Absolutely. I’ve seen it there.
But speaking about it as “the heart” is so unsatisfactory.
We transport ourselves somehow through the hridayam or heart door and we’re in another world. Do we call the heart “another world”? And yet it is.
Maybe back as far as 1990 I had an experience of suddenly rising up until I was on a promontory looking out over the whole universe. I saw the universe inside the heart.
The hridayam or heart door leads out of the Truman Show.
Just the love alone, as I’m experiencing this moment through writing about it, is worth the price of admission.
I imagine to the galactics our knowledge of the heart must appear less than rudimentary. We just lump everything under the words “the heart” and don’t inquire into what the heart might be, how it operates, where it leads to.
The only knowledge we have comes from enlightened sages, who can’t stop talking about love and the heart.
I wouldn’t be surprised to find that the study of the heart could keep a person occupied for a lifetime. I may find out.
Footnotes
(1) Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1983, 140-1.
(2) Loc. cit.