The Mind and the Heart
Everything starts with an idea. Before it manifests, the idea is whole and abstract. A seed. When it drops into reality, it fans out into opposing forces, so if you’re sitting at one end looking at the other, you see the opposite. The difference can be mild. Or, in my case, it can be pretty extreme.
I’ve seen duality in other things, as well. The trunk of a tree rises into the air, while the roots force themselves into the soil. The wave comes in, and then goes back out. Day becomes night becomes day. You breathe in, you breathe out. You dig deep into one extreme and you force the equal, opposite extreme into existence.
There is a point in all these examples where there’s no force, a neither nor, a still point, where male and female energy are one — potential energy. When we experience time, our minds process it into past and future, but the present moment is when the duality breaks down. The still point is now. This is when we engage reality. We engaged it in the past, but that’s all in our minds now. Same goes for fantasizing about the future. It’s not real. The only time we can live outside our minds, outside the duality, is now.
Our minds and hearts both process the now, but while the mind observes and then goes off creating its own worlds, the heart accesses the universal energy of reality, and since that energy is the greater whole, the heart bends toward unification.
When I’ve opened to the now, I’ve felt interest, sometimes fascination. I’ve felt calmer, more centered. Sometimes meaning dropped away and all I saw were forms and movement. Sometimes laughter bubbled up for no reason. Sometimes tears. Many times I felt there was something much larger than me, listening.
I believe this is the great challenge of our lives, first learning to burn away our beliefs* and knots so our minds become tools for awareness instead of stress, and then allowing life to flow through us unhindered and guide us and open us up to its wonders and mysteries.
The now is open to anyone at any time. You don’t have to sit a certain way in a certain room for a certain amount of time. If you can be still and silent for a few moments, you can open to the nothing that holds everything.
* I’m NOT talking about religious beliefs. I’m referring to the ones that cause us stress and hold us back.
If you want to read more about my ideas and experiences, read my book, a guided journal called The Hunger for Home. It’s available at Amazon.
