Stubborn Heart
January 10, 2012
In his autobiography, the twelfth-century mystic Ruzbihan Baqli tells of a dream he had. He was walking in the crowded street of a marketplace, when he saw the Lord walking toward him. Overjoyed, Ruzibihan cried out, “Lord, you have come for me!” But the Lord shook His head and said nothing. Then Ruzbihan noticed that the Lord’s hand was closed into a fist. He opened it, and Ruzbihan saw it contained some fabric. “Lord, what is it that you hold in your hand?” Ruzbihan asked. The Lord replied, “It is your heart, Ruzbihan.” The Lord then began to unravel the fabric, unfolding and unfolding the material until it covered the whole earth. “Look, Ruzbihan,” the Lord said. “There is nothing more vast in all of existence.” When Ruzbihan woke up, he took his dream as a warning. His whole life, he realized, he had been waiting for God to fill his heart, when all the time, his heart was bigger than all things — bigger, even, than his idea of God — and was always already full.
What does this mean, to have a heart as vast as existence itself? There are times when we sense that the heart has no edges, that, in love, we know more about the universe than our poor, conditional brains can fathom. Yet we distrust this vastness, and perhaps with good reason: we are not yet ready for it. It’s one thing to speak about a heart without edges and another thing to live this truth. But it’s also important to understand that what separates us from the vastness we glimpse in love is not any mystical boundary. What separated us is, quite simply, that we confuse our hearts with our preferences. People say, “I followed my heart,” but what they generally mean is, “I followed my preferences.” They mean, “I left my wife because another woman seemed more exciting,” “I quit my job because I disliked it,” “I destroyed my body with bad food, alcohol, and drugs, because life seemed intolerable without continual stimulation” — or something to that effect. This confusion of the heart with one’s preferences leads to a sense that the heart is small and far away from what it desires. As we give more and more weight to the voices in us that say we are creatures who like and dislike certain things, we begin to know the universe from a narrower and narrower vantage point. Our love becomes twisted, folded into the shape of a fist.
We all have preferences, and we all think we know what they are, but even though we can list them ad nauseum, we don’t really know them — we don’t really know our preferences as they truly are. This is because we think that our preferences are what is alive in us, when, in fact, our preferences are what is dead. Preferences are like light from a long-dead star. The likes and dislikes we think are at the core of who we are are, in fact, just resonances of events, traumas, and situations that no longer exist. This is why one of the first lines in A Course on Miracles says, “I am upset because I see what isn’t there.” And this could be worded even more strongly: to the extent that we identify with our preferences, we are already dead.
It’s important to understand that the alternative to identifying with our preferences is not adopting a passive, blob-like consciousness in which we are neutral about everything. Many people cling to their likes and dislikes precisely because they feel they are nothing without them, and on some level, they believe that everything else is fantasy. “Sure,” they think, “It would be great to be fine with everything, but I can’t be that way.” The alternative to identifying with one’s preferences is not being “fine with everything,” though. It is just the opposite of this: seeing what is truly there, but doing so consciously and with choice about what one puts one’s attention on.
This seeing with the heart, if you will, is not an idea; it’s something that can be learned with practice. Every time you meet a person, for example, you can ask yourself, “What good is in this person?” and then be observant. If you do this reflection honestly, you will find that you can identify some goodness in everyone, whether you like or dislike him or her on the whole. This is not just an exercise in good manners; this is a practice of emotional survival: if you can’t identify what is good in others irrespective of your likes and dislikes, how can you identify what is good in yourself?
One of the hardest things to learn in any relationship is when to hold on and when to let go. Let’s say a woman tells a man she doesn’t want to be with him any more. Should the man say, “Okay, I will let you go,” or should he say, “I refuse to give you up”? If you’ve ever been in that situation, you know that people will give you conflicting advice about what to do. Some will say, “Respect her wishes!” and others will say, “Show her your love is eternal!” In fact, the right advice to give is neither of these, for there is never a simply right or wrong course of external action in love. But there is a right answer when it comes to the inner actions we take with our hearts. The answer is: be stubborn with your heart, but not with your preferences. Never let go or hold on based on your likes and dislikes; only do this with your heart. This means understanding what Ruzbihan understood, that the heart is as vast as existence itself, which means it is bigger than any person or relationship. If you put your attention on what is good in yourself and other people, knowing when to hold on and when to let go will happen on its own and without pain in either case. It takes a stubborn heart to get up every day and practice this. To remind ourselves constantly, in the words of one teacher, “When we learn to see clearly, we will act impeccably.”
Paul Weinfield is the singer, songwriter, and founder of Tam Lin, a New York City-based band whose sonically-adventurous brand of folk music has earned it comparisons with Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, Radiohead, and Talk Talk. Tam Lin’s newest album, Garden in Flames (October, 2011,) is available for free download at http://tamlin.bandcamp.com/
