When the Mind Serves the Heart

How can it do so without trying to take the lead?

It is the peculiar vulnerability of the intelligent person to cave to the temptation and allow the mind to take the driver’s seat in the conduct of life. Ahh. Mistake. Life is a serendipitous dance with the spirit, best guided by the heart and soul. The mind is an apt student and and public servant of heart intuition and soul wisdom. Mind, however, flounders badly when trying to plot out the optimal steps to make life a “perfect” performance.

Life is a living, spontaneous organism. It is NOT amenable to engineering, though one DOES need an engineer’s ability to translate and refine the callings of the heart. This is why, according to my ex-wife, engineers ultimately make good tango dancers if they stick with it long enough. There are patterns upon patterns to learn, but it culminates in two hearts and bodies dancing in tune with the music that blends these patterns in original and creative ways.

Life, similarly, is an invitation to discard unhealthy formulas, patterns, and habits and turn the healthy patterns and habits to the service of an open-minded, open-hearted, open-souled larger, more spontaneous dance. The mind is absolutely necessary in this process, as long as it attunes with, connects with, and faithfully serves this expansive, deepening spiritual dance called life— and all that it offers up: Love, relationship, humility, freedom from illusion (including the illusion of the mind’s leadership and supremacy).

It is and will always be: “I am. Therefore, I think,” rather than the other way around. I am ever-connected heart and individually separated head. I am ever beloved heart and forlorn head. I am ever co-creating heart and glorying head who takes credit for my co-creation as its own. You see both the problem and the opportunity here? There is a fruitful contradiction, between the calm wisdom of the heart and the precocious intelligence of the head.

The head is indispensable, but it tends to “own”, organize, and domesticate our experience into predictable rituals, patterns, and ways. Perhaps this is a leftover habit from its commandeering days on behalf of our physical survival. Threat had to be managed for our species to live long enough to propagate, and yet the mind forgot the most important challenge amidst the hubbub: Since we all die anyway, and the sun itself will die in a few billion years, taking us and the solar system with it, why survive at all?

The answer, beyond mere will to live, comes to us in the “green fuse” of the human spirit flowing through the young heart under the guidance of an old soul. This answer gives irrefutable information about our substance and character— what we “are” (affirmative Truth— “I am”) versus what we are not (reactive illusion— “I am ‘that’”). Radiance versus reflection. The moon versus the finger pointing at the moon. Universal love versus tailored ideas of love that have our best life already imagined and laid out. For what else gets us to pine for the formula of a healthy, non-dysfunctional birth family, a childhood sweetheart with whom we marry and grow old and die together, those beautiful children and grandchildren, and, of course, a satisfying life-long career and pleasant retirement.

Yet, what if we were to be granted these dreams as actualities? What would we be but skin-deep and shallow-witted? All has come as imagined by the necessarily limited mind and we end up fulfilling its infantile needs and images— a predictive prescience dreaming into its comfort, rather than an adult curiosity serving a larger calling.

But this pre-manufactured dream misses everything, in particular that each dream IS an illusion, perhaps a pleasant one, not unlike the pleasant dreams we may remember fondly upon awakening, or the day dreams in our waking life that either “come true” or offer amusement. In the depths of our hearts we know there is something inherently shallow about these constructed dreams, which limit themselves to “my” individual imagination and motivation.

What the mind is not equipped to do

Life is always and constantly the invitation to find out what’s true, to unlock every illusion. And you only know you’ve gotten to the bottom of it, when the illusion is gone.— Adyashanti

Though these dreams may be laudable, especially when manifested in a successful business or a beautiful painting, we often miss what gives rise to an authentic life. Authenticity is not accomplishment, for all accomplished things fade. It is not illusion, for illusion fades. It is a certain Truth with a capital “T” that you and I are expressions of, the eternal underneath it all— infinite spirit, freer than a bird in air, and more knowing then all the computers that could ever be built in infinite time.

And yet this is a frightening turn. We commonly experience Truth with some degree of dread, and we resist its truth. Mind is evicted from the throne of our life. We do not simply “lead” our own lives as “doers” with our conscious choices, plans, and decisions; we are “being lived” and breathed as spiritual works of art, as “deeds” flowing from pure presence, something greater and deeper than we, with the ultimate choice to surrender to its deeper “I am” wisdom and love.

Truth replaces you. It takes up residency.

There is a presence which is unnameable, which thought cannot touch. It is not your possession. It is what you are.

Don’t try to hold on to what is realized, be what is realized. You cannot maintain realization or sustain it. In order for it to always be, you must be it yourself— in your humanity— Adyashanti

I came to terms with this apparent contradiction— the mind’s desire to be aware and alive that can only come to fruition by surrendering the mind’s limited and pointed desire to a deeper, blunt heart recognition. I agree to enter a deeper reality not of “my” making, but of My chosen participation, my willingness to let go of the reins and co-create, my vulnerability to mix and mingle, according to my nature, and my opening to a trust with the loving, unfailing source of my nature.

What then is the proper relationship of heart and mind, and what is the mind to do?

I had a dream last night, a lucid dream, one where I knew I was dreaming, and I knew that the dream was metaphorical. I was playing Ultimate Frisbee, which is basically frisbee football where, if one successfully passes the disc down the field against another team into an “end zone” without dropping it, one scores a point. In this dream we were allowed to pass or run, a kind of combination between flag football and ultimate frisbee. I faked a throw and ran right past the other team on the opening kickoff. They claimed I had stepped out of bounds which I clearly had not. I then flung the frisbee into an adjoining field and lost track of it. The game was effectively over, and I spent my time searching for the lost frisbee.

Isn’t this like life led by the mind? Insistence on following rules. Selective self-righteous application of those rules to benefit the self. Isolation and lostness for “winning” on terms that destroys play and replaces willingness with willfulness.

The mind has won, but life has lost.

I decided to do a compassionate meditation, a supportive conversation between my heart and mind. I know the mind means well, but it keeps shooting itself (and me) in the foot! How might it cease its desperate need to win and lead? Here is what my meditation came up with in reflective writing early this morning:

Perhaps the mind tries too hard and attempts to engineer achievement so much because it knows it is going to die and disappear. It is almost as if the mind were to say in a moment of vulnerable honesty: “Let me leave you something, let me leave others something to remember me by.” Yet I hold the mind in the empty, warm hollow of the heart’s hand. Heart says to it: “Head.. mind… brain… even you know that all accomplishment and meaning fade. Love itself is the only lasting legacy. Love itself is the only medium in which we participate and offer ourselves, that is of an eternal nature— needing no accomplishment or memory at all.”

For Love exists of itself, in itself as the everlasting succor, the infinitely deep, long, and wide all-encompassing substance of God. “Let it be known, mind, you are a fine son or daughter. It is for you, O mind-knight, to sacrifice yourself in service , provision, and protection to love almighty, your King and your Queen. That is your calling and your purpose pulsing forward in waves from the tides of the heart!”

Go, go, go to the furnace of Love and cast yourself into it. Be reborn, not of ashes nor of convictions, but by that gentle searing touch of Love. Give yourself nobly and wholly to the service of Love herself, the living, throbbing, rhythmic reality of joy incarnate, made for you. For all those who might be objectified by the mind into “that” or “them”, this love is made for you.

Let not a single thing be cut away and rejected. Let all that is dark and fearful be committed to the intense warmth of the furnace of love. Let the vaunted conceits, pride, egos, and hard-heartedness melt away, become transformed and refined as gold ore in a smelter. We are so beautifully and perfectly imperfect, and ever so we, as humans, shall brilliantly be. In this, we have a deep and desperate need of God to whom we bend not on knees but by surrendered spirit, the spirit born of love and longing to drown and return to Love, beings infused and resurrected.

The Spirit of Love within us, without us, around us, everywhere and no place at all. For spirit is the unfathomable proof of God within us, this pervasive reality that we are never and can never be abandoned.

We are always beloved children in this clan of the Cave, warmed by the fires of our hearts, in the thawing glow of community, in the welding torch of relationship. Let us draw pictures on the walls of this cave. Let us create with gratitude and longing. Let us become compassionate and at ease with the exaggerated, frightening shadows on the wall. Let us awaken amid the indirect rays of the morning spiritual sun, refracted and reflected into our dim abode. May they find their way into our sleeping chambers and our sleeping, dreaming heads.

Awake and arise, ye beloved children. Remove the crust from your eyes and your mind both! Let dreams, both pleasant and unpleasant, flee at the approaching rays. These rays come to anoint, not to disparage. You are small, yes, and such is revealed by the light. But you are also mighty, and that too is revealed by this same light. Arise, and follow the dim light! Follow it until it grows strong and brings you to the mouth of the Cave.

Like Jonah, allow yourself to be disgorged into the sunlight and Nature’s sweet embrace, its mushrooms, earth, and trees, which thrive in both Light and Shade. There is nothing to defend in this place. You are wonderfully made and fearfully loved. All this was not a contradiction or a joke, after all.

It was a dance of joy.

All blessings,

Zeus