Heart Is Not About Emotions — by Cynthia Bourgeault

If you can't find a more relevant forum, use this one!
Post Reply
User avatar
Welles
Family
Posts: 1609
Joined: Mon Apr 01, 2013 5:55 pm
Please type in these numbers: 46373: 1111
Location: Santa Cruz, CA USA
Contact:

Heart Is Not About Emotions — by Cynthia Bourgeault

Post by Welles »

"Put the mind in the heart." From page after page in the Philokalia, that hallowed collection of spiritual writings from the Christian East, this same refrain emerges. It is striking in both its insistence and its specificity. As this ancient teaching falls on contemporary ears, it is inevitably heard through a modern filter that does not serve it well. In our own times the word “heart” has come to be associated primarily with the emotions (as opposed to the mental operations of the mind), and so the instruction will be inevitably heard as “get out of your mind and into your emotions” -- which is, alas, pretty close to 180 degrees from what the instruction is actually saying.

Yes, it is certainly true that the heart’s native language is affectivity—perception through deep feelingness. But it may come as a shock to contemporary seekers to learn that the things we nowadays identify with the feeling life—passion, drama, intensity, compelling emotion—are qualities that in the ancient anatomical treatises were associated not with the heart but with the liver! They are signs of agitation and turbidity (an excess of bile!) rather than authentic feelingness. In fact, they are traditionally seen as the roadblocks to the authentic feeling life, the saboteurs that steal its energy and distort its true nature.
Heart Is Not About Emotions — by Cynthia Bourgeault

https://www.awakin.org/read/view.php?op=audio&tid=2502


Image
User avatar
Sandy
Staff
Posts: 23822
Joined: Sun Jan 30, 2005 8:51 pm
Please type in these numbers: 46373: 1111
Location: Illawarra District, New South Wales, Australia
Contact:

Re: Heart Is Not About Emotions — by Cynthia Bourgeault

Post by Sandy »

Thank you Welles.
:loves
Sandy
“We measure and evaluate your Spiritual Progress on the Wall of Eternity." – Guardian of Destiny, Alverana.
Post Reply