All writers keep talking about the heart in poetic terms- Brave heart, sweet heart, good heart, black heart…but as a cardiologist I cant help being skeptical. For us it’s little more than a marvellous, highly efficient pump. What do have to you say?” — An eminent doctor chatting with me at a party.
I say it takes more than a cardiologist to unravel the truth of the human heart. What you don’t need for that is a degree in medicine, which puts coldly rational blinkers on your mind — gives you an illusion that you know a lot- when in truth you haven’t scratched the surface of its real mystery at all. What you really need is to possess a rare quality of being sensitive to what’s happening inside and outside your being. Let’s bypass all the known medical facts. In fact let’s avoid whatever can be surfed on Google and head straight for a sense of direct experience. If what I write seems indecipherable, I would urge you to dwell on it nevertheless, and figure out an original experiential route that makes better sense to you.
I take a plunge into the seat of my emotional self, where lies concealed the deepest secret of human existence. My hidden heart is camouflaged, as always. And despite my best efforts I am drawn only to the fringe of its influence, as always. Living at the fringe, I dwell on all the things that excite me, not realising the simple truth that it is the heart that causes the excitement to happen and the heart that causes me to be alive to feel the excitement happen.
As the seat of my emotional being, I cannot feel a feeling without my heart triggering it. And yet, it recedes when I focus on it. Never in the open, always concealed, it discreetly remains out of sight, out of mind.
The mystery of the heart seems inaccessible, inscrutable, inviolable.
I cannot amplify its lub dub on a speaker phone and say I have accessed it. I cannot hear its ultrasound that roars like a washing machine and hope to know it. I cannot see the squiggles of an ECG and pretend to know it.
The real heart is secret, sacred, for in it dwells the gateway to a Universal experience, which some call Divine, others Mystical, I would just call it Profound beyond description.
That’s the basic difference between a cardiologist and a mystic. The doctor attends to a diseased physical heart. The mystic elevates a healthy human heart into higher realms of experience, and urges it to throw open its doors and reveal the grand mystery of our existence.
More on this next week. Merry Christmas to all you guys and lots of good wishes for the New Year.
