Sabotaging the Heart

by Bruce Du Vé
January 2004

There are only two principal life styles: namely heart living and head living. We are all familiar with both, but as adults, more habituated to head living.

Head Living

When one lives from the head, the mind is engaged in a ceaseless struggle to order and organise both its environment, and the ego, that conglomeration of its ideas it labels as "me". The principal activity is that of passing judgement, on every little detail the mind encounters. Every judgement it passes becomes a belief, which filters its perception of the object judged, and all others that resemble it. The more judgements it passes, the more it filters reality, until so little of the light of truth gets through, that all it can perceive is the product of its own imaginings.

Being defensive by nature, the mind tends to stack a preponderance of negative, fear based judgements into its belief systems, which interlink to enmesh the mind-owner into an ever-narrowing confine of experience. The more trapped one becomes in these systems, the less freedom one feels, and the more stuck one becomes. The spontaneous unfolding of one's destiny grinds to a halt. And that is when we start to worry about the future, and the past.

A hallmark of this way of living is the desperate need to be right, even about the most trivial of things, and especially about others being wrong. Any challenge by another, to one's self-righteousness is further judged as, and felt as an unjust attack. The challanger, be it a person or a situation is further judged and resisted, to become one more addition to the innumerable thorns in one's side.

The increasing challenges to ones righteousness consequently continue to mount, and life becomes more and more an experience of struggle and stress. The longer one keeps this up, the more narrow-minded and intolerant one becomes. Given enough time, the eventual outcome can leave one so stereotyped as to become the butt of such remarks, as "There is no fool like an old fool". This is not a happy state.

Heart living

When one shifts one's viewpoint from the head, to that of the heart, everything changes. This generally happens to adults only by accident. When we lose ourselves in some form of playfulness, such as humour, we release our grip for a little on the incessant mental judging, and lighten up. We feel bright, happy, even joyful. We laugh effortlessly, even at ourselves. The problems start when we try to do this deliberately.

Any attempt to deliberately structure our reality brings the judgemental mind back on line. Its mere presence as the principal initiator of an effort dooms that effort to another sinkhole of rationale, confusion and struggle.

However, if we can avoid that shift back to the mind, and maintain our heart centred viewpoint, even the mind can become a participant in a delightful game. That is in fact what humour is, the heart playing with the mind.

Achieving Deliberate Heart Living

Head living bases itself on the process of disintegration , i.e. the dividing of the whole into tinier and tinier pieces. A return to the heart centred viewpoint is most commonly achieved via a deliberate, objective review of the creations of the mind, and a return to integration . Practises like those of Tibetan Dzogchen, Byron Katie's Work and Harry Palmer's Avatar processes, succeed in recovering the attention charge invested in judgements, belief systems and entire identities, and returning one to the state of integrity, or wholeness. This is a shift into the perspective of the heart.

Such a shift is well known to be strongly catalysed by the influence of, and association with, someone who has already mastered the art of heart living.

As one practises such processes, one becomes familiar with the way it feels to be in either state, and it becomes progressively easier to recognise which of these one is in. Eventually, it becomes just a simple, and preferred choice, to drop the struggle, and fall into the viewpoint of the heart.

One can then practise doing daily tasks from the heart reference point. Take walking, driving, eating, communicating etc. Notice when the mind is engaged, let it drop, and choose to walk from the heart, drive from the heart, eat from the heart, or speak from the heart. It is such a different experience.

The Experience of Deliberate Heart Living

Judgement falls away. Relief, ease, peace and eventually bliss, replace the familiar struggle with life. The world opens up. Everything somehow seems brighter, bigger, has more depth and perspective. Hitherto unnoticed possibilities reveal themselves, and life begins to flow, effortlessly.

Each next step becomes obvious. The appropriate move is easy, and is made without the necessity for laborious mental analysis. Attention expands out into the world, and the limited ego-self, with its endless justifying and rationalising, simply disappears.

This is so easy, that before long, it even continues during sleep. One awakens from sleep with the heart open and free, the mind quiet, and with a profound and innate sense of joy, gratitude, understanding and a feeling that all is perfect, just as it is. Those who can recall their early childhood will recognise this experience.

Sabotaging the Heart

But even having achieved this revolutionary state of being, it is quite possible for the mind to step in and sabotage it. Why is this so? The problem is, that the Love oriented perspective of the heart, is the greatest possible threat to the mind-centred ego. Choosing to live in this way, signals the death knell for the judgemental mind. So seeking to sustain its very existence, the fear oriented mind, struggles desperately to defend itself.

Someone once said: "He who seeks to save his life will lose it, and he who lays down his life for my sake will have eternal life". But to realise this outcome, someone has to die. And that someone is the personal ego, the sum total of everything we hold to be true about ourselves and our relationship to the world. This "someone" seems very real and personal to us. This "someone" will try virtually anything to protect itself.

Something always comes up in life. We experience a conflict, and become engaged in a struggle with our perceptions of a demonised other who threatens us in some way. We cry out for justice, and pit ourselves valiantly against the perceived aggressor. In the heat of battle, we forget that the heart viewpoint ever existed.

We may fall in love and throw ourselves into our new infatuation with immense energy, never noticing that we are really just trying to manipulate the world outside us, to give us the love and attention we will not give ourselves. If our self-contempt is strong enough, we usually manage to get ourselves rejected, and then the poles reverse and we find ourselves telling a new story of treachery, deceit and abandonment. And it is always someone else's fault.

We can get so caught up in trying to fix what we perceive as being wrong, that we forget we ever had any real happiness, and fall back into the old, habitual struggle with life. The mental restlessness and justification of head living, consumes all of our attention. We are back in the maelstrom.

Recovering Heart Living

The answer is as simple as moving back into the heart's viewpoint. But when we are engaged in the struggle, and identified with the world's viewpoint, how do we get off the conveyor belt?

Best of all, is to find a genuine master of the art of heart living, and submit oneself to his or her guidance. The process of transformation is accelerated exponentially by the association with such a person, whose own radiance engulfs the student, offering the emerging heart a guiding hand as it were, as it takes its tentative steps out into the light. Also, a master can recognise and subvert any attempts the mind may make to reclaim its old, accustomed dominance.

The first step is to understand the process of sabotage. If we know that it is the mind's job to keep thinking at any cost, no matter how negative and destructive those thoughts might be, at least we can take a step back and look at the process. This step is as revolutionary, as moving from being caught up in the machine, to observing the machine at work.

The next step can be to forgive the mistake. After all, it never really was a mistake, just a simple and commonplace misunderstanding. But we can never do that from the head's viewpoint, because forgiveness is something we feel , not the result of thinking. So the easiest way to forgive the unforgivable is just to step back into the viewpoint of the heart, and take a fresh look. It is amazing to notice how it is just impossible to maintain a judgemental stance, from the perspective of the heart.