There is a heart. There is a mind. One could say the heart is an aspect of the mind, or turn around and say the mind is an aspect of the heart. I wouldn’t argue with either view, as long as that view was derived from experience rather than reasoning. Reasoning is a helpful tool for setting goals and taking steps to achieve them, but never proved much good to me for finding answers in the spiritual domain—hypotheses, yes; but not answers. For example, what’s the difference between the heart and the mind? Reason may build a structured explanation, beautiful in its symmetry, but it can come crashing down in a moment of insight.
I don’t like to proclaim there is a heart and a mind. My raw experience reveals there is thought. That’s it. Even perception is just thought. I can’t know anything without thought. Thought is not necessarily words. It’s any experience. The question I love for its piercing simplicity is: What of “you,” upon close observation, is not experience/thought? What I see is that from the height of awareness to the tip of my toe, it’s all thought.
But what’s behind thought? What’s in back of experience? If you look in an interior direction, now you are getting closer to the heart. The heart is a place, a transition point from nothing to something. Maybe. You’ll have to look and find out. Where do you look? To the beginning of thought. Or look to its end. Whichever is more appealing—the rising up or the falling away. It helps greatly to find a way to make the search appealing. If not, you will gravitate to the latest headline to read, and story to finish, as if the damned, utter amazing mystery of our interior world wasn’t enough to keep us entertained.
The title of a Gurdjieff book comes to mind: Life is Real Only Then, when “I Am.” Which I most un-assuredly assure you means “The heart is only full when I rest near its fire.” What Gurdjieff’s “I Am?” Look inside and see. What is rising up inside you? Get as close as you can to pre-verbal, proto experience. Standing in the fire, look and see if what you truly are is smoke or flames.
This probably hasn’t helped you. I’m too democratic, wallowing in apologies for every side of the coin I’ve forgotten to acknowledge. I should get my Trump on, and tell you like it is. But I can’t. Everywhere I look I see the confusion of words. Heart, mind, thought, reason, insight, perception, experience, interior world. Devote a chapter to each, and still it would miss the mark. There is only this one thing necessary: direct, interior looking and the finding of ways to entice ourselves to do so and means to improve our skill in so doing.