Dear Mr. Swartz,
Here I am again! I didn’t expect to find your
website so interesting. The Advaita
websites in general don’t seem to have much content but yours is
different. Anyhow, much of the
spiritual writing talks about the ‘heart.’ I have not read the whole site but I noticed
that you do not seem to talk about the heart. What is the ‘heart’ and how
does Vedanta see it? Thank you for
your reply to my last email.
I’ll look at Panchadasi.
It sounds like an interesting text.
Neil M
Dear Neil,
‘What is the heart?’ is
a good question. It has been a hot
topic in the spiritual world for a long time and there is a lot of confusion
about what it means. Let’s
start with a simple working definition: love. It is frequently claimed that love,
which is often said to be the nature of God, is the ultimate goal of spiritual
life.
On a more mundane level love means
positive emotions toward oneself and others. This is a fairly reasonable, if somewhat
crude, definition. Many people feel
a lack of love and seek to experience it.
Much love seeking takes the form of a desire for ‘community’
or ‘connection.’ In
lieu of community, the need to bond with a group, people often seek
‘connection,’ a feeling of love brought on by identifying with
someone or something.
If connection seems to elude you,
you can always opt for a hug.
Perhaps you have heard of Amachi…she is
very famous, even made it into the New York Times…the ‘hugging
Saint.’ She has been hugging
thousands of people a day for a couple of decades. People stand in line for hours for a ten
second hug, a telling commentary on the emotional condition of our
societies. Anyway, the desire to
love and be loved is pretty much universal. So it is natural for people to believe
that love is the ultimate goal of life…but is it?
The word ‘heart’ has at
least two other meanings. It can
refer to the physical heart. A
third meaning opens up the true spiritual significance of the world. At some time you have probably heard the
saying, “Let’s get to the heart of the matter.” In this context heart
means ‘essence.’
But what does ‘essence’ mean? It means ‘that because of which a
thing is what it is.’ For
example, the essence of sugar is sweetness. Take away the sweetness and it cannot be
called sugar. The essence of fire
is heat. Fire is never cold, just
as ice is never hot. You take the
‘dogness’ out of a dog and I don’t
know what you have…a bundle of flesh and bones perhaps…but it
isn’t a dog.
So what is the essence of a human
being, or any sentient being for that matter? It is life. And what is the essence of life? It is Awareness. You can certainly exist without a hug
but you cannot exist without Awareness because Awareness is the essence of
everything. If you could remove
Awareness you would have nothing.
But it is impossible to have nothing because Awareness is omnipresent
and eternal.
It is for the sake of Awareness,
your true essence, that you do everything.
This is devotion. Awareness
is there before you even exist. It
is there before you do anything. It
is there before you set out to love or be loved. You do not love your wife or kids for
the sake of the wife or kids. You love
them for the sake of the Awareness in them. Even after their bodies are dead and the
elements have returned to the universal elements from which they came you still
love them. This is quite possible because they live eternally in you as
Awareness.
Vedanta says the essence of
everything is Awareness. Therefore
if you have a self, which you must if you exist, (and you cannot claim not to
exist because you would have to exist to make such a claim)
it has to be Awareness.
Awareness is not what most people
think. It is not personal. It is not the things that you are aware
of. Contrary to popular opinion,
you cannot be more or less aware.
Different objects, like thoughts, feelings and experiences, come and go
in Awareness, but Awareness is the substratum of everything. It cannot come or go anywhere because it
is non-dual; there is nowhere it isn’t. And it does not change, as do the
objects in Awareness.
The hard and fast realization
‘I am limitless Awareness and not this body/mind’ is called liberation
or enlightenment in the spiritual world.
So what does this have to do with love…which many people believe
is the goal of spiritual life?
Love is a feeling or an experience
of non-dual Awareness in the Subtle Body brought on by identifying with someone
or something. The Subtle Body is
what most of us call ‘
You cannot get lasting love without
knowing that you are limitless Awareness.
Why? First, because the
‘you,’ that wants to get lasting love is already limitless non-dual
Awareness. Or if you prefer to use
emotional language you are Love itself.
You are the ‘heart.’
What does this mean? It
means that Awareness, Love, is a non-dual partless
whole. It is not something that can
be obtained because there is no one other than it to obtain it. It can only be known, or to use the
‘spiritual’ word it can only be ‘realized.’
Second, the ‘you’ you
take yourself to be is by definition limited and separate from what it
wants…in this case love. So
any ‘experience’ of ‘connection’ or love would be just
another experience. I do not mean
to suggest that there is anything wrong with love experiences. But experiences have one glaring
problem: they never last. Seeking
the experience of love is highly unfulfilling as everyone knows because
experiential love comes and goes.
So the essence of the love problem,
the ‘heart’ problem, is only resolved in Self knowledge. If you want eternal love you need to
know who you really are. This
knowing does not take place in the emotions; it takes place in the
intellect. Yes, it definitely has a
profound and positive effect on the emotions because emotions and feelings are
sourced in ideas. Ideas are a much
subtler and more powerful level of reality. The emotions and feelings are tied to
the senses but the intellect is the subtlest manifestation of the Self, limitless
Awareness.
People seek love, or anything else
for that matter, because they have an idea that they are incomplete and
separate from reality. This notion
is called ‘duality’ and it is not true. Duality operates in the thinking of
99.99999% of the human race. When
this notion is destroyed by an investigation of the ‘heart,’ love
is revealed to be one’s nature.
How can you seek what you are?
You can only know it. So if
you’re out there looking for love you should probably call off the search
and look for your own Self.
I hope this is helpful. I am yours in
Love,
Ram