Beautiful Cores
Life Dimensions #3: Mysterious Hearts
Last month was a fallow one for the podcast but I did get around to sharing my autumn equinox thoughts, Brown Trust, in audio form. Now for a breath and a heartbeat.
And so, another life direction, inwards this time, not at the periphery. It’s the first sound, the mother’s drum beat, pulsing around us in the womb, and we recall it when we stretch skins over wood, bringing beast and tree together, and create rhythm for our songs and our dances. And they rise, in turn marking the unfolding spiral, time a great marker of the path along which beauty can be revealed.
It’s an electromagnet, a great soft mist reaching out with frequencies measured, once more, in pulsing wavelengths, carrying mood-truths to the world around and to ourselves too, if we open our inner ears. Without the heart, there is no groove. And it’s connected, most immediately, to our lungs, in 4/4 time, heartbeats to breath. So take one, and release a song into the world. A fractal variation on the last one.
It’s got multiple chambers, four in fact, a number that has always oozed stability in motion, walls in action. And these caverns that give the blood vitality are a flowing reminder of possibility. Manifestation in four realms, perhaps, a little closer to the emotional seat here, into four kinds of feeling. In many traditions these feelings come in four classic categories. In the first chamber there is anxiety, fear, which is also close to the excitement of anticipation: future-focused, interestingly, like stage nerves before an interview or blind date or a powerhouse performance. Fear may ooze into the heart with the aid of remembered moments of genuine danger (personal or ancestral), or more often slips in via what we’ve seen happening to others, in our online doomscrolling or our parents’ mainstream TV screens. That all distracts from this emotion as a powerful heart-sensation, bringing us to a heightened alertness, like animals ready to run before shaking it off. Or to that anticipation before a moment of magic; that deeper excitement that is strongly connected to intuition. As such this is all very different from another vital emotion, a second chamber: sorrow, sadness, grief, which is invariably a response to something from the past. Perhaps very recently so, and still ongoing; or perhaps a recognition of something from long ago. Sorrow has the potential to awaken our compassion, to really feel what others have felt. No wonder it comes with tears, rocking through our trunk, if we open our chests and hearts to that possibility.
And then there’s anger, of course, an emotion that plunges us into action right now, and needs compassion and alertness to know if it’s justifiable and how to effectively express it if so. Though it’s of the same emotional order as passion, inspiration, a driving heart-force at the centre of what makes things actually happen, with boldness. Joy at the world is anger’s coronary corollary. Can you be righteously angry whilst also joyous for what you have? Of course. This joy is a bedrock: gratitude its clearest expression. The heart has more secrets to offer, however. Traditional Indian drama recognises nine kinds of emotion, rasa, that a performer can practise expressing. These include more variations on the “positive” emotion of joy – expressed as wonder, love, peace. The heart opens and feels all of these, lotus blossoming; or it closes and blocks them, and we become sour or bitter, no matter what taste sensations the world is bombarding us with.
So really we’ve just scratched the surface here, though the heart has no surface: it’s tucked away. But we can already see that it’s much more than this physical expression; so much more than a mechanical pump. Neurons found there shattered modern ideas that it was just that, even for the materialists, and so it’s returning to its place as a source of wisdom and knowledge if we remember, a compass for life’s journey. One that puts out an enormous aura. A place, of course, of true coeur-age. It’s the centre, from which life arises, moment to moment. Have you thanked yours today? Because of course, heartfelt gratitude lights it up in the receiving just as much as in the giving. The heart is the magical zone where we feel our connection to others, and our brokenness when we don’t, so it can’t be as hidden away as it pretends to be. Just opening it up as a topic for contemplation invites centuries of resonance with the hearts of others.
Straightforward analytical prose is probably not the chosen medium for heart-talk. One good line of poetry does that better; and the sounds of language resonate and connect us, open our hearts when we see the reverberations of ideas and emotions that ripple between tongues. It feels good to find links, cords, chords, harmonies: it feels good. Right there, in the heart. It’s a soft place, even though it pulses so powerfully far. We wear our ribcage armour to keep it safe. The ruby is lit, wanting to be discovered, nurtured. To be loved, of course. This is, in a sense, where the clichés take root and flight. The well-worn grooves. Can we tell a different story, or do we even need to? For we will return to this point, whose beating starts at the beginning and ends at our end. It is essentially the mystery made paradoxically manifest. The crossroads and the roof boss. Without it things become dry, polarized, brittle. We cannot be passionate about anything without it. And so, I feel in to its sweetness. Or its bittersweetness. Oxymoron and paradox are access points to its slippery truths. There are ways to open our shoulders, our arms, our hidden angel wings, that feel good (feel good). A more spacious place for its chambers, able to unfold a different kind of thinking that our brains grasp at in ways that give headaches; but only the heart can solve the equation.
The heart of our threefold body-being is more than one organ: it’s our trunk. Communications central, as the sap-flow of our blood moves into other organs. A place for picking up sensations, and responding to stimuli, and passing them on to be duly digested. For taking thoughts and pulsing them out into the ether. For giving strength to those limbs that stretch out to touch, and what we touch affects our hearts, moves our trunk. A place of semi-stillness, where actually the micro-movements are always busy. For this is another piece of the heart, for me: it’s hidden, and yet it’s not. We can see in your stance and your manner if your heart’s open. Or if you’re bent double to protect it. The rest of the body gives it away, and perhaps the rest of the mind too; if you’re spitting heartsore daggers in phrases we can tell something’s up. Your words might interpret what you’ve picked up, like the leaves know what’s going on inside that healthy or rotting core.
The thing above all that opens hearts is the experience of revealed beauty. When it took your breath away and your heart just grew, it skipped a beat. Those scents in the nose can do it just as much as the visuals we feel dominated by. The stirrings of Allegri’s Miserere still push mine open; tears that are pulled forth from a great moment of pathos in a play – Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day - but also in things I touch: the elegant edge of the garden chair, when I pay attention. I stop for a moment: there’s the clutch of eggs in that well-wrought nest, or the crest of that perfect sunrise barrel-wave, or the softness of your cheek. Beauty everywhere. We sell ourselves short when we give beauty over to the stylised flat creations of our Photoshopped screens; five minutes in nature opens the heart far more, as long as we have the key to unlock it. Beauty can step out of time like this; it can also play with time, in the elegance of the unfolding symphony or story. Narratives that reach that golden mean moment of climax, satisfying a need we have for grace perhaps even in the chaos. Light that reaches through the cracks, of course, like those pinprick starlights up there. Our imaginations soar and lead us to more heart-opening beauty. And when we stir the heart our visions are bigger, less self-absorbed.
Yes, these little hearts of ours are just pretending, like the little child in the manger. They’re infinite, actually, but they’re also here to reach and connect. To be that compass point. And to find the way between. Rudolf Steiner spoke of the two outer poles of evil into which we are drawn frequently; those that pull us too egotistically high, branches without roots; and those that pummel us down so we can’t see the connections or the point, roots without branches. The heart is our antidote, our talisman that guides us if we keep listening. These days the lower forms of evil are having their denuded soil field day, making us sleep through screens and separation. Electric solutions that put us to sleep. So the impulse to find the heart is a rising one; the im-pulse; taking us up to that fourth chakra, the centre point, the green.
Of course it’s green, this rainbow’s heart of ours. The colour the world gifts us, in so many rich shades and tastes, so throbbing with life. The birds love the greenery. Though all the other colours, too are also of the heart: for they give us another lens in which to experience and create beauty. Do we smell it? Little flutters happen when I open my curtains and take in the green. Yet we also cannot stop in it in stillness for too long. Because it keeps beating and beating us on and on. I was wary of it for long, preferred to live in fantasies rather than face the pain of my own self-doubt. Once I peeled back its layers, however, like the deepest heart-wood, I found riches I had not expected, possibilities, and a kind of listening that the ear alone cannot grasp. This is, ultimately, the place where the infinite soul resides, where the God in us likes to hang out, where all the wisdom of the ages can be tapped into. When I love you, what I most want to feel is this heart of yours. Where masculine and feminine meet and dance, if we are brave enough to let them. If Soul is atman then of course it is part of the greater Soul, the brahman of the universe. Where is the heart of the universe? Wherever we are, is the joke response. For there are a thousand Hearts of the World-Soul, as the Gopis knew when they each made love with the blue god; a thousand thousand thousand thousand. We were cut off from such awareness for a while, looking up to Sky Father alone, but our challenge is to help reveal the heart’s secrets that each of us has waiting for us. Not easy, and yet easy – it’s just a question of listening, of dancing to the drumbeats of Creation. The head may say, These are the Rules, this is how it is. The feet may move forward, acting in a way that seems right. Only the heart can mediate, can know that the way we’re moving and thinking is beautiful and leads to more lotus petals opening in others.
A hug with hearts touching is a hug that we can melt into. Not all the people I love, love long hugs. But many do. It’s the true yumminess of innocent presence. Reaching out those arms, electric love running down them from our centre, towards another’s, that we recognise is the same as ours. And a hearty future round many hearths in this heart-shaped country at the bottom of a heart-shaped continent at the heart of the planet is where I feel we’ve got to face the brokenness heart-on. Too many head-on collisions on our roads and in our streets. The way to move a heart is to give it a real experience, and this is something else I try to do at work every day. Take children towards each other and towards themselves, through a journey of words and feelings and towards making judgements. Real judgements, that are sensed, enfolded in a heart-language that recognises the Other as a being with a heart too. So look at that red rose, look at the spiral pattern of its five-fold petals, taking us inwards, while it’s got thorns too. No rose without thorns, for the rough and the smooth is a part of the heart’s story, it would not be as rich without them both. If four gives stability, incidentally, five is where the spiral begins. The invisible fifth chamber, perhaps. The five-pointed star has a pentagonal centre, Leonardo’s human with our head and limbs, and a core. Apples and paw-paw seeds, patterned to reflect the stars.
So everything has a heart. Our organ is an example of something that is already there; the centre, the core, the moment before the magic. And we’re always looking for it, perhaps within, perhaps in you, perhaps at the top of that hill that overlooks the whole province and insists on bringing palpable enchantment to the land, for hearts are necessarily portals to wider things. If our search for Twin Souls and Soul Mates and all the other stuff that gets sugary around mid-February has any substance to it, it is this quest for a radical honesty that only comes when the heart flutters. Where is the heart of the wood? Of the Amazon? Of the city? Of the ocean? We know this quest. There must be something special there. It’s the only reason to reach the South Pole, or the top of Everest, really. It’s to find that special place from where it all comes. The search for the pulse. The Milky Way, of course, churns and churns around an invisible core. It’s copied us too, it seems, or the gods are still turning the wheel. The heart symbol on your deck of cards feels like it’s got more to it than just something waiting for Cupid. Points and curves and dynamic whirls.
It is warm, our human mammal conception of that central place. Warm-blooded is a thing, warm people are full of heart. But it’s not always, is it. Cold-blooded creatures, like the lizards I saw on Mexican temples, probably have greater humility, needing the sun-heart to shine for their life forces to rise. Greater patience, perhaps. We humans can labour under the mistaken belief that because our hearts are still beating, we don’t need anyone else. But we do. We’ve taken incarnation and coming into flesh is not an easy thing. Appreciation, witnessing, acknowledging; these are heart-activities that help us all to be more of ourselves, more connected to the beasts and the rocks and the green, readier to join hands after a heartfelt prayer. Namaste.
Art, a celebratory activity that aims at capturing the movements from the heart-earth-hearth-party. This is our humanity at its best: wildly plucking on each other’s heart-strings (lyres and butternut gourds and guitars resonate with their own chambers, in honour of the rhythms within). Can we ride its expressions? Because for all its supposed stillness, the heart’s journey is a wild ride. Like a budding rose, we don’t want our hearts, or our children’s hearts, to be shattered too much before ripening. The fires need to be gently warm and crackling, like those first ones where the ancestors told stories. Stories of goodness, magic, mystery around the next corner, challenges and happily-ever-after possibilities, in lyrical rhymes that pulse back on themselves. The heart keeps us believing and trusting. Besides the daily consistency of the sun, there is the monthly consistency of the loony moon, the pulse within the pulse, the in-and-out that the lungs give to our heart-bellows.
It’s fractal, again, for there are always beats within beats. When we start diving into beauty in a particular way we get variations and worlds of stylistic knowledge within each other. Experts on mild varieties of succulents (those juicy little heart-plants) or potent varieties of cacao. On which note, there’s the plant-being that opens hearts right there. MDMA, by contrast, is derived from piperonal, which is very vanilla with almond overtones. Right there, evoking comforts and softness just as the heart loves, in the Middle Way the Buddha would perhaps approve of. Try a shot of espresso and alternate sips with vanilla ice cream and head towards heart-totality, as one of my Tantra teachers insisted. There’s something about the out-breath and in-breath, the bitter and the sweet, if repeated often enough, that takes us towards rapture.
Rapture is the heart’s secret, of course. Those early medieval Catholic types had an interesting split from their Orthodox colleagues (way back when) because they decided that Man had Soul but no Spirit, whereas the Orthodox were content to continue allowing meditations in clifftop monasteries without Benedict proclaiming the Rules. No doubt such a story had its significance to the unfolding of our age, the handing over of power to those self-appointed by the Self that is god. Rapturous moments are when the Heart shows the belief that we are not Spirit to be a nonsense. We are in-spired with having our own Spirit revealed to us. We re-spire in each moment. This is the baby in each of our mangers. Love Thy Neighbour, a simple heart-task we’d better keep working at.
If the heart is the place for binaries to resolve, that’s only a thing if there are binaries either side. That stylised heart shape again, or is it breasts and a vulva? The original source of Love perhaps, pertaining once more to the whole trunk more than the little potent organ. Two sides to be heard before being synthesised. We want to bring others closer to our fires. The bosom, in so many ways the thing that men can't help being inclined towards (even a gay friend of mine talks of his fascination with breasts. Loving them is so corny, but with a breath or two, we remember them as a place of deep double beauty, an exquisite reminder of the magnificence of God, like that koppie poking up above the plain). Taking a breath, giving a smile from the belly, or a twinkle from the gut, or a wink from the throat, all steps towards showing our hearts off. The heart is undoubtedly the place of dreams: of another kind of living that has no boundaries except waking up, which it does not worry about. Dreams bridge the gap between this waking mirage and the mysteries beyond. A hidden realm, that echoes into the day. Remember, remember the heart, feel it and be bold, my Love.