The Volition of the Heart

We’ve had a remarkable week here in the Servers Council, following up on Trustee Sessions the week before. It was glorious in the room here. And I’m happy to report that people online had a very engaged experience. Sece was our head of online engagement. Thank you, Sece, for helping to make that happen. Thanks to everyone who participated and contributed to what occurred, which is culminating in this hour, and then in the Service Expansion period at 1:15 here.

I’d like to continue with a theme that we were on in the Council that I was speaking to yesterday afternoon. I’d like to see where we can take it together. To me, it is provocative.

As I first began to think of this sometime in the last week, it struck me as highly provocative for myself. I don’t know how it will strike you, but we’ll give it a go here and see where it goes.

I want to start with this. The indigenous peoples of the world look at postmodern humanity and see a sickness of the heart. You can research it if you like. It’s prolific throughout many indigenous peoples around the globe. This is how they see it. And of course, it concerns them.

There are the Kogi people in Colombia, some of whom came here several years ago. They live high up in the peaks of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains in northern Colombia, with peaks that ascend to 18,000 feet. The Kogi were isolated from the rest of the world until recently. They came down out of the mountains to express their concern and bring their teaching to the world. And on their world tour, they came here.

They see themselves as the elder brothers and postmodern humanity as the younger brother, and they came down the mountain to address the sickness in the heart of the younger brother.

That story has proliferated around the world. Oftentimes, the sickness of the heart seen by indigenous people is associated with humanity’s relationship with the Great Mother and the Earth that is the embodiment, at one level, of the Great Mother. There is a concern expressed about something out of integrity, something off in the relationship with the Great Mother. And that relates to a matter of the heart.

There’s the story of what goes wrong for us as human beings at the very beginning of our Bible. When you think about it, would you say that that story was written by a First Nations people? We don’t think of it quite that way now. Now it’s seen as an icon of Christianity and Judaism. There was no Christianity when it was written. There was no Judaism when it was written. This was a First Nations people who wrote it.

It is the story of what goes wrong for us as human beings, and especially what goes wrong in the heart and the consequences of that. It is the story of Adam and Eve. It’s hard to know exactly what the author had in mind when they wrote it. Undoubtedly, there were circumstances under which it was written that they were addressing. And there was the symbolism of the story that related to those circumstances, not all of which we can really know. But here’s what we can do. We can intuit for ourselves the significance of this story in terms of our own life experience. So, I’m inviting you to see it a certain way, to try that on and see if it illuminates something for you. I’d like that to be the test here, not whether it’s accurate to a past that we don’t really know for sure anyway.

What I want to suggest to you is that in the story, Eve is the human heart and Adam is a representation of the human mind. It’s a story of what happens between heart and mind, and not only between themselves, but in relationship to the highest order of identity, portrayed in the story is the Lord God, walking in the garden in the cool of the day.

So, what happened? The idea came to Eve that there it would be good for her to gain the wisdom, as it was put, of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. What would be good and what would be bad—we might imagine, what would be good or bad for her.

Instead of allowing that tree to be in the hands of the Creator, so that the unfolding of Creation happened according to its own times and seasons, its own direction and purpose and pattern, she realized that she could eat of that tree, meaning that she could change the cycles of Creation unfolding around her in a way that would be good for her.

The story is of the collusion between heart and mind. The heart says, Hey, mind, I’ve got a great idea here. Will you collude with me to make things better and make me happy? I would be happy if you helped me arrange the pattern of life around me in a way that would be pleasing to me.

It seems logical. Why not? Yet we know how the story goes. In that act of collusion, what was cut out of the picture was the Creator—the presence of the Creator, the wisdom of the Creator, the wisdom of life itself, the wisdom of how to create. The wisdom that allows human beings, the planet, and all life to prosper was cut out of the picture.

There’s something so remarkable in this story. It tells of the volition of the heart. Volition. It’s not a word we use that often. Volition has to do with will. In the origin of the word is also the word wish. So, volition is our wish, our will, and implicit in that is choice. And so, the story is a story of what the heart chooses to do. As the story goes, the mind went along and then blamed it on the heart.

So why is this so significant? Why is it significant to recognize that the heart makes a choice? It is for this reason: if the heart can make one choice, it can make a different choice.

I think I tended to see choice as a matter of the mind. But consider this. Your heart has a choice to make. And the choice of the heart establishes the basis for the rest of human experience.

If the heart makes the choice that Eve made in the story, the mind is helpless. That’s a strong word, yes? Helpless. The best the mind can do is stay steady and stay centered. But without the heart, the mind can’t create. It can use its rational faculties, but it is unable to create in attunement with the Lord God, because the means for the connection with the Lord God is through the heart.

The best the mind can do under those circumstances is to stay steady, undeviating, and be a coach for the heart. This applies to the individual who might have a little conversation with their own heart. Hey, it’s gonna be okay. Hey, you could recenter here, you could open to a higher reality. And sometimes this plays out between people. And still, at the end of the day, it is the volition of the heart that allows all the rest of what is meant to happen for us as human beings to happen.

When the heart opens to the presence of the Lord God, it opens up the connection between heart and mind. The subconscious mind is linked to the heart. And realms of the subconscious mind begin to open up and become available to the conscious mind when the heart makes a different choice. It invites the mind to think loving, spiritually connected thoughts.

If your heart is frozen in fear, full of reactive anger or shame, do you think very well? The heart and the subconscious mind are highly linked. So, in such a case, the subconscious mind is not ready to play its part to offer up what it should offer up. It’s impossible to be truly intelligent on that basis.

And so, we have postmodern man: tremendous intelligence on one level—the intelligence to build an atomic bomb—but incredibly ignorant. Only someone who has a sickness of the heart could build such a thing.

As I began to think about these matters and how all this goes, there is something incredibly sad in the story, and something incredibly sad in where we’ve come to as humanity. But there’s also something happy portrayed in the story. And it is the simplicity of the path back to wholeness, to the healing of the psychic break, as we’ve spoken about it. It tells how the break between the human psyche and the higher reality of who we are occurred. And it points to the simplicity of healing that break.

In its outworking, there’s complexity to the process of healing. But at the root of it, it is simple. It is the volition of the heart—a heart choice. And if our heart has made one choice, it could make a different choice. And when it makes that different choice, everything is set up for success in the human experience.

The choice is so simple. It doesn’t depend on anything other than finding the source of love, identity, and Presence within yourself, and turning to it with all your heart. That’s all. In that turning, we open ourselves to receive the River of Being into our hearts. Doing that, yes, there’s something to think, and there’s something to do. I’m not saying that the opening of the heart is the end of it. And I’m not saying we should be mindless people. I’m just saying that the road back to wholeness as a human being and as a human race begins with an act of the heart.

And so, here this morning, we’re speaking to the body of humanity and bringing this change of heart to the fore and calling attention to the opportunity for that simple act of turning the heart and opening the heart and letting in the Spirit of Love.

The most natural thing in the world occurs when love comes into your heart. You love back. And when you let love in and love back, there’s a generation of love in the human capacity that begins to burgeon and affect everything in the human psyche and then begins to flow out into our world.

I want to cite a second story here in the Bible, in Genesis. There are a number of stories in Genesis, as I’ve pointed to recently, of what goes wrong for us as human beings, just as there are in all cultures. Perhaps the most familiar story from world culture might be the story of Pandora’s box, portraying the role that curiosity plays in our undoing.

There are four or five such stories right at the beginning of Genesis. And one of them is the story of the Tower of Babel. I’ve come to view it as a humorous story.

And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.

And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.

And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. 

—Genesis 11:1–3

What could be the significance of that? They had brick for stone and slime for mortar. It is generally thought that slime is some kind of petroleum product. Can you imagine building a tower to heaven with gooey petroleum pitch in between the bricks? That’s destined for failure right at the start. And they didn’t have stone. They didn’t have like the real thing, which is what you would want to build it out of in those days—stone. They had this humanly manufactured thing—bricks. They had bricks and slime. It’s a story of not building out of reality.

And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name…

 —Genesis 11:4

Let us make us a name: So, you have a human effort to make something of ourselves. Any ego in there?

The remainder of the story goes back to a superstitious view of the world that was prevalent then and even now. And in the superstitious view of the world, the gods are doing everything. There are supernatural powers at work. And if we screw up, we blame it on them. They’re taking it out on us.

So, it’s portrayed exactly this way in this story. I say that just because you have to understand that element of the storytelling to understand what is being portrayed.

And the Lord came down to see the city and tower, which the children of men builded.

And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they all have one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.

Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.

So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.   

—Genesis 11:5–8

It is a story of misunderstanding and division among people. This story comes after the story of Adam and Eve. And there is a logic to that sequencing. The choice the heart makes affects our ability to understand each other.

Etzion Becker, who lives in Israel and speaks Hebrew fluently, writes about Genesis. He asserts that the Hebrew language can’t be accurately translated. For people who truly understand the Hebrew Bible, it is speaking to them at many levels, and those levels aren’t communicated by a mental translation of the words. There is vibration in the original that is lost.

The Hawaiian language sings with vowels. They are not just sounds between consonants but the very breath and flow of the language itself. In chants and song, vowels stretch and resonate, carrying the spirit of the land and of the ancestors. They give voice to mana—the living power of Creation. If you listen closely, you might hear the sounds of the Motherland.

Uranda said something similar of the Motherland tongue. The vowel sounds were far more important than the consonants were. And through those vowel sounds, the essences of Spirit were conveyed.

Does it strike you that these things are related to a matter of the heart? That true communication among people involves the heart and the heart’s ability to express essences of the Creator and essences of Creation. So, what happens if the heart has made a choice not to open to the Creator and not to be a vessel for the processes of Creation?

If one individual makes that choice, and another individual makes that choice, then the basis for communication is undone. There is no basis for speaking one language. And you could get all of the intellectual components of what is said and shared right, and there will not be oneness, and there will not be communication. Because without a communication of the heart, which brings the communication subconscious to subconscious, there’s a Tower of Babel. And as it said, you can’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again that way. That’s not how it happens. It happens because there’s something that’s happened in the heart—an opening to the Lord God. And when that happens in the heart, there’s something that happens in the mind, conscious and subconscious. There’s a communication that’s possible, subconscious to subconscious, heart to heart, and then the mind can be brilliant.

One of the things that’s portrayed in the story of the Tower of Babel is a quality of human bravado. “Let us make a name for ourselves.” That bravado was in Adam and Eve. This will be good. This will work well. We’ll be happy.

Following the psychic break in humanity, there was bravado. “This is going great.” And for centuries, that bravado continued. We think of Atlantis as being a place where there were all kinds of inventions, all kinds of technology. Bravado. We’ve eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We’re doing this on our own. 

There were people who had not broken their allegiance, alignment, and entrainment with the Most High. We can only imagine that when other people looked at them, they were seen as ineffective and unenlightened.

Look at the Kogi people. Who are they? Funny little men climbing down out of the mountains? But they know something.

Western civilization, and in fact, the whole world, has totally underestimated this matter of the heart. It gets so overlooked. In both East and West, there’s a tendency toward intellectualism. There are different manifestations of it, but it is a failure to recognize the matter of the heart that is so pivotal underneath it all.

In the King James Version of the Bible, how many times over would you say the word heart is used relative to the word mind? Five times over. We might not think of it this way. The Bible is often thought of as a moralistic book, a book of dogma and doctrine and so on. But within it is a teaching of the heart.

“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart.” And what do you think the Psalms are about? What was Jesus teaching? He was teaching something of the heart in a spiritual context with vast spiritual consequences. And yet, what he was teaching was something that so challenged the human heart to do something different.

And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.

—Matthew 6:12

In the Hindi tradition, the heart center here is Anahata Chakra. Here it is, at the top of the breastbone, halfway up and halfway down the stairs, with three centers above and three below. There is something here that is so vital, embodied in our physicality. And as there’s a softening here, the higher centers within the human experience can descend and move into the lower centers, and what’s below can rise up.

But it requires openness of heart. When that is present, there is the openness of the heart to the source of Love above. And then there’s the descent down through the heart into the world so that we take heart-filled action in the world. We call that courage.

This Pulse of Spirit speaks of ancient stories and indigenous people. But ultimately, it is about us—about our own heart choice and the way we are together because of it. It is about the volition of the heart—the reality that our heart is choosing something. If we become conscious of that, we could choose something different if we need to.