Do you believe that you can have anything that you want? I mean, really believe? Have you ever even asked yourself the question?
So often, we let doubt win before we even give ourselves a chance to consider possibilities. In the moment this may seem like the rational way to go about things, but from a distance it is easy to see that this is quite irrational. A critical thinker would seriously consider a possibility, rather than dismissing it outright. A critical thinker would, you know, think about the situation a little more, rather than pretend that it’s not worth giving attention to because of some impossibility, which hasn’t even been proven as impossible.
You think you’re so smart. You think you’re well on your way, because long ago you decided to stop dreaming and to stop listening to your wacky desires. You think you’re a no-nonsense guy, and that your nose is nice and clean.
Nice try. Your nose has been steeped in shit.
Misplacing Irrationality
It’s so common to keep our hearts closed. You may not think this is the case, because many people seem so irrational and emotional. It looks like they don’t listen to anything except their hearts. They are impulsive and misguided. Of course they’re listening to their hearts! That’s what a heart does—it makes you crazy!
But is that true? Is it your heart that makes you think the daily dramas that play out in your social life are so important?
What if I told you that it’s actually your mind that does this? What if your heart is actually what keeps you above senseless conflict?
It is your mind that enables you to see the world, isn’t it? If your beliefs “exist” anywhere they are located in your mind, correct? And it’s your beliefs that determine how you view situations and thus how you react to them—right?
So why are you blaming your heart so much? Irrationality isn’t over-emphasis on the heart. It’s a misuse of the mind. You’re being irrational and you are misguided when you use your mind incorrectly.
This means that, if you want to go through life with heightened emotional intelligence, you have to get your mind to cooperate—not your heart.
But there’s more to it than that. What if the heart is actually more fit to lead than the mind? The mind sets the context in which the heart does its business. In that sense, it may seem that the mind is in the lead. But the heart can detect when the mind is full of shit. It lets you know through negative emotions. Negative emotions are your bs-alarm. When you feel badly, it’s because you’re thinking badly.
You may even go so far as to think that you ought to suppress and close your heart, so that’s what you do. Now you’re really in deep. Not only are you thinking poorly, but you’re ignoring the emotional signals that can get you back on track.
This is how you get yourself stuck on an unfulfilling, unfruitful path of life. This is how you make your life suck.
Heart vs. Mind
Of course, you don’t really have to do that. Why would you? You only think that you do—and, as we know, your thought-processes aren’t exactly sharp-shooters.
So, what are you to do? Well, first, you have to open your heart. This is the reason why so many people stay stuck for so long. When your circumstances are undesirable to begin with, opening your heart is scary. You’re making yourself vulnerable to all sorts of horrible things—evil people, bad television, doom-carrying news, other people’s ignorance and stuckness, and so on. Surely these horrible things will crush your poor wittle unused heart.
But that’s where you are misguided once again. Yes, opening your heart means that you can no longer be aloof and trapped in your head. It means you have to be honest and forthright about what you see. It means that, indeed, you do have to communicate, and authentically so.
But you assume that the heart is weak. You assume that the heart is highly susceptible to being broken.
But it’s never outside forces that break the heart. Your heart inside you, in your chest. TV news can’t get inside your chest, silly. Your heart is well-protected from such things.
No—it is only something internal that can give the sense that the heart is broken. That something internal is your mind.
It is only the mind that can suppress the heart and keep it from doing what it needs to do. Whether it is communicating honestly, forgiving, trying something new, or taking on a challenge, it is always the mind that holds you back. Never the heart.
Thankfully for us, the heart is far more powerful than the mind. You can allow your heart to open once again without having to address every mentally-based fear and fallacy. Even better is that having your heart open can override these beliefs, since living from this heart-centered way of being enables you to see the world in a way that defies inaccurate limiting beliefs.
It is the heart that allows you to take leaps. It is the heart that allows you to choose to trust and to act, even when you don’t have enough data to be certain of what you ought to do. In fact, it is always the heart that takes the last step of the decision-making process. The mind can intellectualize and oscillate forever, trying to find the perfect algorithm for action. But the heart doesn’t need this. The heart already knows what it wants. It can just go for it.
What you are waiting on, when you have not yet made a decision, is the mind. You are trying to intellectually justify a certain decision. When you cannot decide quickly, it is because your mind has doubted your heart. The mind may have closed off the heart, so that it is hard to hear in the first place. Or, the heart has been heard, but the mind doesn’t have the proper ideas and explanations (i.e. beliefs) in place to see the desire as in your best interest, so it becomes afraid. It tries to talk you out of the desire.
Of course, the mind can’t talk the heart out of anything—the heart is far more powerful. But it will try. The longer it tries, the longer you wait and remain stuck.
The Collapse Into Delusion
You could make life easier, you know. You don’t have to put yourself through so much unnecessary suffering. You can’t even see how much you do this. You try so hard to please people you don’t have to please, to live up to standards that don’t actually matter, and to be someone you are not. Yet you believe that you have to do these things. You believe this because they keep your heart closed. They keep you from having to truly think. They keep you from having to take true responsibility for your life. They keep you from really challenging yourself and pushing beyond your limits. They keep you from really being yourself.
In essence, what you have done is believed that this way of living, whereby you attend to mostly-unnecessary things, is easier. This way of living doesn’t ask you to be bold and to do things that you think are scary. This way of living is cushy and predictable, and it allows you to remain aloof and disengaged.
But this way of living isn’t really that easy, because it requires you to work against your heart. Maybe you’ve been doing this for so long that it’s old hat to you now, which means that it is easy indeed. It seems easy because you’ve been locked into automatic almost 100% of the time.
But is it really? How easy is it for you to wake up in the morning to go off to do unfulfilling work? How easy is it for you to lie constantly? How easy is it for you to pretend not to care about things that you really do? How easy is it for you to watch your life, and your self, waste away?
Though many people have done it, working against your heart is very, very hard. It puts immense strain on the heart, the body, and the mind. It is exhausting, largely because there is no relief to be found in a heartless life. Relief is experienced when you open your heart, so if you never do that you can never experience relief. This means you can never truly recover and be restored—at least, not fully.
So, you never get to rest. Your life is an endless, sleepless night. You’re constantly running on near-empty. You have to put so much energy into ignoring yourself, it’s no wonder you can’t accomplish anything meaningful. It’s no wonder you can’t think clearly. It’s no wonder you sit around lazily whenever you get the chance—provided you ever even give yourself such a chance.
It’s a cycle. It’s a debilitating, degrading, damning cycle. The mind kills the heart, and in so doing it kills the body as well as itself. Your heart could save you, but your mind has so degraded its abilities that it could not imagine listening to the heart. So instead you continue living a delusion.
Getting Unstuck
The way to get out of this cycle is to choose the heart. Of course, by the nature of the way the heart works, this is a leap of faith—at least, that’s what it seems like it is. For even just a single moment, you have to bypass the mass of thoughts- the swamp of delusion- and just let the heart lead. Even if it’s for five seconds.
Can you do that? Can you put your attention on your heart for five seconds, and let your doubts carry on in the background (rather than in the front of your mind, where they control you)? It’s not a long time.
There isn’t really anything that you have to “do” here—you just have to pay attention. Just put your attention on your chest, on the location of your physical heart. That’s it. It’s dirt simple. You don’t have to make yourself feel happy or excited, and you don’t have to dig around for your hidden desires. Just pay attention.
If it feels comfortable, you can even ask a question, such as, “What is the purpose of my life?” Don’t rush in with presumptions. Again, just listen.
What will happen when you do this is that you will feel calmer and more self-assured. You’ll feel secure. You’ll feel solid, able to handle whatever comes your way. You may even get a sense of the vast power you actually have, and this will scare the living daylights out of you.
You’ll start to get a sense that the heart is powerful indeed, and all you have to do is listen to it. If you haven’t done this before, it will have a lot to say. Yet, the heart does not seek to overwhelm you. It gives you only one message at a time, and that message is the one you most need to hear right now. Each message is powerful, but the heart is not like the mind, which tends to flood itself with thought. The heart is much simpler. It is more focused. This is what allows it to be so powerful: it focuses all of its power in one place.
You could compare the focus of the heart to a laser. But the heart is actually better. It does have single-pointedness of focus, indeed. But locking into this focus doesn’t affect only a single point. Rather, the heart transforms literally everything. It turns down the doubts of your mind. It energizes your body. It enables you to see more clearly. And when you change, so the sayings of Subjective Reality go, the world around you changes. People become friendlier and more understanding. The world looks more beautiful and inviting. Birds sing. Children laugh. Life is much kinder. With all this in place, the path to the fulfillment of the heart’s desires at last becomes accessible.
The Heart of Aliveness
You see, you actually love being alive. You love transcending your limits. You love learning new things. You love seeing things more accurately. It is only natural to evolve, not just biologically but also intellectually (and as a spirit). Take a look at human history, and you will see the evolution of humanity unfold. You will see people coming up with and implementing better ideas and explanations for how to best survive and thrive. You will see technology advance. You will see the world become safer and more peaceful. You will see the world become more accessible, as people gain the ability to travel far, both by means of advanced technology and by foot.
It is only in your nature to love the path of growth. Likewise, as a part of the world, it is only natural for you to love the world. As a human, it is only natural for you to love other humans. And as an expression of life, it is only natural for you to love life.
Why deny yourself these things? Love is immensely pleasurable. Love fills both whatever it is directed toward and whatever it is being directed from. Love makes everything awesome.
Why would you want to run away from that?
I see the evolution of consciousness as an increasing embracement of this love. The more conscious we become, the more in touch with this love for all things we become. And because life is one of the things that we love, conscious growth also means that we become more energized—we are livelier. The pursuit of growth is also the pursuit of life. This is what makes it so rewarding—it just plain makes life better.
All you have to do to begin or to continue your path of conscious growth- particularly if you are stuck right now- is to listen to your heart. For a moment, give it your attention. Tune in to that message it has to tell you. Then, for as long as you can, let it overtake your whole being. Let it push your doubts aside. Let it make you feel alive.
Take action. This is the perfect time, whatever the action may be. It might even be introspection. Consider taking this opportunity to go to work on your mind. Use this heightened state of consciousness to instill more accurate and empowering beliefs and ideas. Take in this friendly outlook of the world. Play with it. Interact with people from this state of being. Try something new. Do something that seems hard.
See how different your overall experience is from normal. How do you explain this experience? Do you conclude that you are merely awash in chemicals that make you feel good, and this “high” will wear off soon enough? Or do you consider that there is a way of thinking about reality that you never saw as possible until now?
When you get stuck, I implore you to entertain two thoughts. The first is this: Maybe life can be okay. The second is this: There is something here that I am not seeing. Don’t over-intellectualize this. Just repeat them to yourself and then take a look around. Just let them swim around in your mind for a little bit. See what happens.
I will spare you specific answers- those are for you to find-; but, you may just find that when you question your assumptions and you take a stance toward a positive future, your heart opens at last.
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