Heart Over Mind — Decolonize Your Heart
“Existence is meaning hidden in form”
- The Diwan of Shaykh Mohammed Ibn Al-Habib
As I approached the small table I noticed the metal shimmering in the sun, there it was a treasure to me 10 years before it would become a family heirloom. In that plaza in Mexico I wandered into this piece of metallic art, a carving — the symbol of a heart with flames coming out of the top and bottom with the heart shape at the center covered with a mirror. The beauty of this symbol struck me in that moment and made me think instantly of my Mother and the spiritual journeys we both embarked upon near the same age in each of our lives. She loved her pictures of Jesus, angel figurines and candles, and while I knew this heart had some connection to Christian history and iconography, its deeper reality lay outside the earthly confines of religion for me.
I bought it for her and presented it to her on my return home, and there it hung in her living room for nearly ten years. After she suddenly passed from this life in April of 2014, as we were cleaning out her house there it was the metallic heart still hanging on the wall in her suddenly empty home. I began to stare at the heart shaped mirror and in that time of deep sorrow, pain and longing for my Mother I saw her in me. I saw my grandparents, my sister, my nephews and all that she had touched with her heart of service and love during her life. Looking deeper I saw our layers of ancestors, those that we know about and those we do not, all the way back to our shared ancestors at the beginning of human existence and to our Creator who said BE.
The mirror was dirty with dust over it and some water spots and as I looked into it I began to think about my Mother’s heart, her soul now that she was gone, and the mirror as a reflection of my own heart and that which is everlasting that she had passed on to me. Her belief, her love, her joy, and her pain, her suffering and her longing to see a more just world than the one we live in. On top of that lay what God had opened and placed into my heart, what I had learned from my teachers and the examples of the Prophets that lives with us today.
At our core, our beginning and our end, our heart is the single most important thing in this life, and it is for each of us to reflect on what has been placed inside of it and the layers that have been added by our parents, our families, and the societies we were born into. This is why I sat out to write this book, as volumes have been written about decolonization, dealing with politics, cultures and even with our minds, and while this is all important none of it compares to what we lose if we lose the core of ourselves.
Our essence and the only reality that goes with us beyond our bodies and this world is rooted in our heart, yet for Western philosophy the primary focus has been that of thought and the mind with little said contemporarily about the heart, the soul, perception, and discernment. This divide, that of existence centered in the mind versus existence centered in the heart is one of the greatest divides on this earth. However for the majority of humanity, people of different religious, faith and spiritual backgrounds these divides did not exist traditionally because the soul, the heart, the mind and the body were all taken into consideration in integrative forms of holistic knowledge systems.
The mind only became the center of human existence as Western philosophers placed themselves at the center of the universe literally through forms of egolatry (the ego/ self at the center of one’s worldview as a form of idolatry) as they removed revealed religious texts from discussion because according to them the existence of God could not be proven using empirical rationalistic methods. Descartes “I think, therefore I am” became a clarion call that placed the mind and Western White men on a pedestal with this conception of the rationalistic thinking MAN at the center of our planet, while displacing and putting into question the humanity of non-European, non-American, and non-Male beings. Putting man over the human, the mind over the heart and the soul, and ultimately Western White Being as the center of existence while the rest of humanity who did not fit neatly into these categories could easily be placed into a reality where they were seen as and treated as non-human.
These categorizations of being and non-being, race, and white supremacy have played central roles in human history over the last 500 years. Once a group was placed in this category of non-being or non-human then their murder, your rape, your lack of self-worth, knowledge or history could easily be rationalized, justified, and executed. We have seen this play out over and over again, from the mass murder of entire indigenous populations of the Americas, to the enslavement of one-hundred million plus Africans, to the colonization of the entire planet cut into pieces to serve false White masters and White desires, and today a global American military that can easily destroy any group of people that attempt to go too far from the norms of Westernized, neoliberal capitalism’s call for humanity to submit to the desires of unbridled consumption.
This is a global system that has rained death and destruction on this planet like no previous way of being. This is a system rooted in greed, lust for power, racism, sexism, and the an existence based on following only our whims and immediate desires no matter the consequences. We as humans have been called to live as if all life is sacred and as protectors of each other and the planet. Instead, we live into a bestial existence focused only on ourselves, our immediate families, and our lowly desires. This is a global system in crisis with humans struggling for meaning at the center of it all.
Ours is un mundo invertido (an upside down world) where right is seen to be wrong, where falsehoods become truths, and where lies are told about all peoples who do not fit into the globalized regime of westernization.
The time has come for each of us to begin to ask what is my path towards personal transformation?
How do we build collective visions for a future free from racism, war, and gross inequality?
How do I free myself from this existence before I end up wallowing at the closed door of some shopping mall when this is all gone?
Do I free myself now or stay shackled to this existence and be remembered in death only as what the world around me made me?
These are questions that we must ask before it is too late for each of us individually, and for all of us collectivity.
This book is a call for us as human beings to live up to what we have been called to as sacred beings and protectors of this earth, and to end our lives as lowly desire machines who are destroying this earth for all of existence. It is a call to throw off these chains making us lowly beings and it is a call to re-examine our existence with one key difference, that we look at and examine these realities with our hearts and not only our minds.
When we see the symbol of the heart abstract thoughts about love come to mind, or maybe we think of the physical heart and blood beating through it, but what if we began to think of it instead as the center of our being. The center of our perception, the center of who we are in this body, and at its core in its essence as who we are for all of our existence beyond this body as a soul. What if we began to feel with our hearts, people joke about having Jedi type powers, but if you develop your heart this reality of perception is real. Ok maybe you can’t move objects but you can read situations, you can discern the clear differences between right and wrong, you can feel spiritual light as it grows in your heart and you can feel pain in your heart when you do something wrong or you harm someone. Our hearts are powerful vessels at the core of our being and if we use them correctly and understand how to transform and strengthen our hearts, we could change the trajectory of human existence and birth a new age of existence.
In thinking back to that metallic heart on my Mom’s wall, I think of the flames coming out of the heart at the center, what does this heart on fire mean? The allegorical meaning is nothing short of the divine illumination of our hearts, to have our hearts filled with light to be transformative beings and active agents for light and beauty in our world. Each of us can have a heart that glows and is filled with light, this spiritual illumination is possible, even in the darkest of times. Believe me as the mad scientist who has experimented and felt those depths of pain and suffering in my own heart. Pain that in certain ways was central in my own journey for meaning in this life and for spiritual growth and transformation. Perhaps a story from my own life will help to illuminate this point further.
As a young man seeking truth and guidance I was in the desert on the Dine (Navajo) reservation on land that was once an ocean tens of thousands of years ago. I was staying with the Johnson family who have been resisting removal and corporate colonization of their sacred land for the last twenty-five years. In the evenings, the sky above us came out in its natural form, a beauty that seemed otherworldly to those of us from big cities, being 90 plus miles from the nearest small town of Tuba, Arizona.
Each night the horizons lit up with the glory of the cosmos and the divinity of our Creator as the sky was filled with continuous shooting stars. One after the other they fell as I slept outside on the red clay that was once the ocean floor, time and space seemed to leave me.
One night as I lay there reflecting on the universe and the divine a piercing bright light lit up the night sky so bright it seemed suddenly as if it were day. It shot into the atmosphere and turned into a ball of fire flying across the horizon, it seemed to land right near me and then it’s cosmic boom sound followed.
Imagine a light like that, and lights like each falling star you have ever seen.
Now imagine those lights falling into your heart and illuminating it. That is the goodness that we put out into the world and gifts of light from the divine that we are blessed to take in. These lights vary in strength and power, but the key for each of us is keeping that light within us.
The opposite of this light, you could imagine a similar pattern in the sky but this time rather then being from the heavens beyond our world imagine a hellfire missile fired from a drone, some other war machine, or a laser. These things shoot into our beings and literally bomb our hearts, create a hole in them and create a spiritual darkness that can consume our hearts and our existence. The negative, evil or sinful things we put out into the world cover our heart as if a storm cloud were covering them from the light of divine guidance and mercy.
Imagine then each of the chapters in this book as representing pieces of light and darkness all of which merge in us at our literal core based on what we put into our hearts, what we give out, and what we put into the world whether it is goodness or evil. These chapters are diverse in their topics and this is intentional as to begin a process of decolonizing the heart we have to understand the world as it exists around us. This book is broken into three parts and in these parts there are short chapters that are meant to be introductions to these topics with further reading, resources and reflection questions at the end of each chapter for the reader to go deeper on the subjects they are most interested in.
Decolonizing the Heart is broken into three shorter books each with different themes: Book 1 — The Book of Openings, Book 2 — The Book of Reality and Book 3 — The Book of Transformations.
Ultimately this book is a prayer for humanity, a prayer for my family, and a prayer for myself to master these realities I have been working on for all of my life, while knowing that although I can write these words to internalize them is a process I know I will be always be working on. In this life we must set our intentions high while knowing the qalb (heart), the term for the heart in Arabic, is that which fluctuates and is in a constant state of change.
May we all have consistency and balance in our hearts, clarity and light in the visions of our hearts, and the spiritual strength and the divine assistance to transform ourselves and the world around us. Ameen
Dustin Craun is the founder and executive editor of Ummah Wide. He is a writer, an entrepreneur and activist. You can follow him on Facebook and Twitter.
For a more in depth and more deeply philosophical reflection on this topic check out this article by Dustin Craun:
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