Mar 6 — The Dormant Heart
"Love and do what you will." ~Augustine
H E A R T
Sufism is sometimes described as ‘the way of the heart’—a useful characterization since pretty much anyone will have some sense of what it means. If one is a socially-minded person, concerned primarily with the realm of relationships, family and community, then the way of the heart could be understood as, for example, the path of compassionate service. If one is more inward—writer, artist, contemplative—then the way of the heart is one of revelation: directly knowing what the intellect can only infer. If one is inclined to mysticism, the heart can be seen as the “organ” through which the One is experienced in the many, the Eternal in the temporary, the Real through the illusory, and so on.
WHAT IS HEART?
‘Heart’ is such a familiar word that it may be difficult to grasp the subtleties and layers of meaning Sufis intend. The following exercises should help to illuminate some of those nuances.
-
Sit quietly and bring your attention to your chest. Now ask yourself how you feel at this moment. The answer and how it arises is ‘heart’.
-
With your eyes closed bring into your awareness someone you love unconditionally. That unconditionality is ‘heart’
-
Put your hands out in front of you as if you were holding a good sized watermelon. Imagine that what you are holding is a sphere containing all the sounds you can hear at the moment. Listen without judgement. What you’re holding is ‘heart’
-
If you have judgments, these too are ‘heart’.
-
What are you absolutely sure of? Hold that in awareness for one minute. This certainty is ‘heart’. (BTW a viable answer to “What am I absolutely sure of?” could be, “Nothing”.)
-
Can you remember an experience of wonder in your childhood? The light by which you search your memories is ‘heart’.
-
Have you ever been reading and suddenly a sense of clarity and a depth of understanding arises as though you were actually in dialogue with the author? The ‘room’ in which you and the author are sitting is ‘heart’.
-
When was the last time you felt truly sorry for something you had done? Let yourself revisit that sorrow. The way your head bows as you enter that memory is ‘heart’.
-
Overnight snow has covered everything. “Poor birds,” you think as you refill the bird feeder on your balcony. That feeder is ‘heart’.
-
Remembering something absentmindedly foolish you did recently (like putting your car keys in the freezer while unpacking groceries) makes you laugh out loud. That little inner curl that spawns your laughter is ‘heart’.
-
You have a conversation with a loved one that brings a welcome resolution of a conflict. The lightness you feel in your head, chest and limbs is ‘heart’.
-
You have a conversation with a loved one that deepens the conflict. The heaviness you feel in your head, chest and limbs is ‘heart’.
-
How you listen to music that transports you is ‘heart’. How you replay, in your imagination, your favourite scene from, say, Midsummer Night's Dream is ‘heart’. When you quote Mary Oliver or Rumi it is likely your ‘heart’ speaking.
~Puran Lucas Perez
The Heart of a Sufi
Reflections on Murshid Fazal Inayat-Khan, founder of the Sufi Way
Listen with the Heart
Listen with the heart ,
Not just the mind,
Open up deep
To our self and the other.
Another human being,
Our sister or brother,
Needs us to really hear,
For their sake and ours.
Compassionate listening
Peace researchers call it.
Makes us fully hear
With true human connection.
Not for the facts,
Nor to fix things,
Non-judgmental,
Non-adversarial.
To hear their values,
Their needs,
Feelings,
And wounds
Control our own reactions,
Avoid mental critique,
Opening our heart,
Fully present to them.
Open and curious,
Need not agree,
But to respect
Out of our common humanity.
Alongsidedness,
Lovely new term.
Accept our differences
With our likenesses.
With an open heart
The whole being listens
With a spiritual ear.
A real encounter.
Include the other in our self,
Heart to heart,
Spirit to spirit.
The other IS our Self.
Our common humanity
Transforms conflicting energy,
Shifts from shadow to light,
With will and capacity.
From superiority to connectedness,
From our needs to the nature of the Divine
From entitlement to what is important,
Anger to strength, courage, endurance.
From obstruction to following higher truth,
From envy and hatred to understanding,
From reasons to wisdom,
Old habits to new letting be.
Deep connection
Of Heart and Heart
Of Thou and I
Unity in diversity!
Gabriel Leslie Mezei February 21, 2022
Incorporating the ideas of peace researchers
Brigitte Gagnon and Patrice Brodeur.
Love and Grief, the two sisters, were walking together.
Grief had wanted to remain alone, but Love insisted.
It will do you good, she said. As they went along
Grief pointed out the signs of death and loss everywhere,
roadkill, sick trees, lonely people. Love stayed silent.
She knew talking wouldn’t help. They soon came to a place
where a war was being fought, the landscape blackened,
artillery shells thudding, puddles of rain mixed with blood.
They stood and watched the hurried burial of a child,
the small body wrapped in a piece of sheet.
As the mourners left, Grief slumped to the ground
and wept. Love knelt beside her, covering her shoulders
with her cloak. Dear one, she whispered, I only ask
that you look to see where your tears start and why you care.
After a moment Grief looked up into her sister’s eyes.
They leaned into each other, and to anyone who might
have seen them there they looked like one silent figure.
Flashes ~ Pir Elias Amidon
The Heart of Perception
What did Christ mean when (according to Mathew) he said, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God”? As a boy in catechism class I remember thinking that this must be about some kind of “magic”, although I had no idea how it might work. Years later, I joined the Sufi caravan because I recognized in it ‘the way of the heart’—the way of love, creativity, and that same magic.
While I still can’t say how this magic works, I have a better sense of the relationship between a “pure heart” and theophany. And have come to better understand that the heart is the seat of perception, if we hope to behold anything beyond the material world. We might add to Pascal’s famous, “The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of” ...that the heart can see what the eyes cannot.
But what is meant by “pure” heart? Sufis suggest that the heart is as pure as it is free of attachment to transient phenomena, including the ego. To the degree that we are fixated on what is happening in time and space our hearts are blinded. Because life demands that we engage with the reality around us (as whole-heartedly as we can) it may be impossible to ever be completely free of attachment to our personal worlds. So we might amend the above Beatitude to read: “The freer your heart is of attachment, the more likely you are to see the Real”.
This theophanic vision could be said to have three primary “focal planes”. The first is that we can see the implicit in the explicit, the “Hand of God” we might say: the agency within and through which a particular manifestation is given its substance, shape and purpose. Then, we can not only admire, for example, the visible tree, we can see into its reality. We can become aware of its “spirit”: its aliveness, its “love” for its surroundings and fellow creatures and how perfectly, and unapologetically it is what it is.
The second focal plane is “intuition”, if by this we mean more than the subtle inklings that we all sometimes get. For the pure heart, intuition is a deeper sensing of the currents of life we ride—the deeper motions of existence. The Hindus call this, poetically, the Dance of Brahma. For Sufis it is the intuitive heart that awakens and guides us to that Dance, pulls us onto the dance floor and eventually dissolves any reality other than its divine Movement. This is the gnosis which Sufism intends—the pure heart becoming what it knows. Ibn Arabi sometimes refers to this simply as Love.
The pure heart sees the Hidden in the Manifest, the cause in the effect, the finding in the losing, as clearly as the sky on an autumn day. So we might call the third plane of theophany, the Face of God. This could be misconstrued if we forget that the Sufis’ shahada states that “There is no god (but God)”. In other words, the Face of God is nothingness. The God the pure heart shall see is emptiness—a gloriously beautiful, fecund and generous emptiness. Blessed indeed the one who enters there.
~Puran
Quotes suggested by trace:
"Often we must go outside society to confirm that we live inside the continuum of creation. One seeks solitude to know relatedness." (Joan Halifax)
"The tragic freedom implied by love is this: that we all have an indefinitely extended capacity to imagine the being of others. Tragic, because there is no prefabricated harmony, and others are, to an extent we never cease discovering, different from ourselves… Freedom is exercised in the confrontation by each other, in the context of an infinitely extensible work of imaginative understanding, of two irreducibly dissimilar individuals. Love is the imaginative recognition of, that is respect for, this otherness." (Iris Murdoch)
"What is the source of our first suffering? It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak. It was born in the moment when we accumulated silent things within us." (Gaston Bachelard)
“The possibility of being creative depends on not being shy with one’s intimate self and not being fearful for one’s personal standing. We must take very delicate chances—delicate because they are dangerous, and delicate because they are subtle; so subtle that while we experience a personal terror it could be that no one will notice.” (Maria Irene Fornes)
"Questions are powerful things. Questions elicit answers in their likeness. It’s hard to respond to a simplistic question with anything but a simplistic answer; it’s hard to rise above a combative question. But it’s hard to resist a generous question. We can ask questions that inspire dignity and honesty, and revelation." (Krista Tippet)
"We all know people who cannot bear great suffering, bt we do not realize that to fully enjoy great happiness also requires great strength and endurance." (Thich Nhat Hanh)
"Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what make you come alive. And do that. Because what the world needs is more people who have come alive." (Howard Thurman)
"In the dark times/Will there be singing?/ Yes, there will also be singing/About the dark times." (Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage)
Quotes suggested by Gabriel:
My soul lies dormant, restless, waiting for that moment when shackles are cast aside, and it is free to fly once more. Virginia Alison
The heart is not living until it has experienced pain. Pir-O-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan
Tuning the heart means changing the vibrations, bringing them to a certain pitch which is the natural one where you feel the joy and ecstasy of life, which enables you to give pleasure to others even by your presence, because you are tuned. Pir-O-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan
“There is nothing more important in life than uncovering our heart quality, our openheartedness. It's what allows the world to touch us, and what allows us to touch the world. … We can't grasp this heart quality with our intellect; we can't understand it, but we can free it.” Pir Elias Amidon
Deep down within anyone there's a flame that maybe had gone dormant, that can be fanned or ignited in case it had blown out. This is the flame of curiosity, the flame of wonder, of awe, of all the things that make you want to learn something more tomorrow than you knew today. Neil DeGrasse Tyson
“Giving credence to persistent intuitions awakens the dormant heart consciousness.”
Steven Redhead
The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched - they must be felt with the heart. Helen Keller
“The basis of Sufism is consideration of the hearts and feelings of others.”
Love’s Confusing Joy
If you want what visible reality
can give, you’re an employee.
If you want the unseen world,
you’re not living your truth.
Both wishes are foolish,
but you’ll be forgiven for forgetting
that what you really want is
love’s confusing joy.
–Rumi
(Rendition by Coleman Barks’ rendition of Rumi)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Solomon and the Gnats
Some gnats come from the grass to speak with Solomon.
“O Solomon, you are the champion of the oppressed.
You give justice to the little guys, and they don’t get
any littler than us! We are tiny metaphors
for frailty. Can you defend us?”
“Who had mistreated you?”
“Our complaint is against the wind.”
“Well,” says Solomon, “you have pretty voices,
you gnats, but remember, a judge cannot listen
to just one side. I must hear both litigants.”
“Of course,” agreed the gnats
“Summon the East Wind!” calls out Solomon,
and the wind arrives almost immediately.
What happened to the gnat plaintiffs? Gone.
Such is the way of every seeker who comes to complain
at the High Court. When the Presence of God arrives,
where are the seekers? First there’s dying,
then Union, like gnats inside the wind.
–Rumi
(Rendition of Mathnawi, III, 4624-4633, 4644-4659 by Coleman Barks)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Everyone is Dying
Everyone in the world, whether man or woman,
is dying and continually passing through the agony of death.
Regard their words as the final injunctions
which a father gives his son. In this way
consideration and compassion may grow in your heart,
and the root of hatred and jealousy may be cut away.
Look upon your kinsman with that intention,
that your heart may burn with pity for his death agony.
Everything that is coming will come:
consider it to have already arrived;
consider your friend to be already
In the throes of death, losing his life.
If selfish motives prevent you from this insight,
cast them from your heart;
and if you cannot cast them out, don’t stand inertly in incapacity:
know that with everyone who feels incapable,
there is a goodly Incapacitator.
Incapacity is a chain laid upon you:
you must open your eye to behold the One who lays the chain.
–Rumi
(Rendition of Mathnawi VI, 761-768 by Kabir and Camille Helminski)
FROM LIFE PRAYERS, Edited by Elizabeth Roberts and Elias Amidon
When sorrow comes, let us accept it simply, as a part of life.
Let the heart be open to pain; let it be stretched by it.
All the evidence we have says that this is the better way.
An open heart never grows bitter.
Or if it does, it cannot remain so.
In the desolate hour, there is an outcry;
A clenching of the hands upon emptiness;
A burning pain of bereavement, a weary ache of loss.
But anguish, like ecstasy, is not forever.
There comes a gentleness, a returning quietness, a restoring stillness.
This, too, is a door to life.
Here, also, is a deepening of meaning-- and it can lead to dedication;
A going forward to the triumph of the soul, the conquering of the wilderness.
And in the process will come a deepening inward knowledge
That in the final reckoning, all is well.
A. Powell Davies
Enough of science and art,
Close up these barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.
William Wordsworth
FROM PRAYERS FOR A THOUSAND YEARS, Edited by Elizabeth Roberts and Elias Amidon
May I, may you, may we
not die unlived lives.
May none of us live in fear
of falling or catching fire.
May we choose to inhabit our days,
to allow our living to open us,
to make us less afraid,
more accessible,
to loosen our hearts
until they become wings,
torches, promises.
May each of us choose to risk our significance;
to live so that which comes to us as seed
goes to the next as blossom
and that which comes to us as blossom
goes on as fruit.
Dawna Markova
This program is sponsored and presented by The Sufi Way
*You can find the essay, "Beloved Community" by Pir Elias Amidon here
click for
music
