Post eight of fourteen, in section About Awakening
Heart-knowing is different from mind-knowing. Mind-knowing is where perceptions, ideas, and constructs live. The knowing that exists in the heart doesn’t come from an evaluation, a weighing up, or a judgement; it is a more direct knowing than this. It is the felt sense of the world that you feel to be meaningful and trust to be true.
It is an innate knowing that comes from the things that you have absorbed into the core of your being over time – the things you have learned to trust in are the things you know ‘off by heart’.
Like the taste of honey or the softness of a cat – you don’t have to think about these things; you just know them directly. You can have the direct experience of it without your mind second-guessing or layering a level of concepts over the top.
It’s important to distinguish the two, mind-knowing and heart-knowing, because so many spiritual teachings talk about themes like truth, knowing, and experiential reality. Spiritual teachings often talk about things like what can and can’t be known, how to let go of knowing, or ways of getting in touch with knowing the truth, for example.
When people don’t distinguish between the two – the mind’s categorisation and reification of experience and the heart’s open trust in experience – then a practice instruction can be understood completely the wrong way.
One Sense Door
When you are present in your heart, it creates a more direct experience of life.
Hearts are the space where all your sensory input and systems can collide to create a single flowing experience that you are immersed in. You aren’t watching anything or controlling it; you are receiving experience wholeheartedly, and all of your sense data, physicality, meaning-making, emotions, and thoughts become an inseparable part of the experience of the flow of life itself.
Life is free to come and go and express itself to you and through you. It’s just doing whatever it’s doing, and you are in touch with all of it.
Being able to be in the heart space is about knowing that you can remain open to experiencing whatever is being expressed. It takes time to build up the trust to do this with different and new types of experience. Particularly painful or difficult experiences.
When you’re connected to your heart space, your experience is meaningful, rich, embodied, and accepting all at the same time. You are immersed in the direct experience of life without being entangled or fused with it.
Hearts are the space where all your experience comes together; they are the part of you that is most inclusive. It can connect to the different aspects of being without making one aspect the dominant part. Hearts are the only place that are able to hold this experience in its entirety without a sense of separation. They are the home of non-duality.
No Single Source of Truth
Thoughts, emotions, and physical bodies all like to lead you to believe that they are the most important and one and only source of truth. The emotions want you to believe their stories as truth; the mind wants you to understand everything and thinks only the things it can see are true; the physical body wants things to be fixed and solid, and it can feel like only that which is grounded in physical reality is real.
The heart can hold all of these and connect to what is beyond, while recognising that there is no single source of truth. It knows that awareness is what helps people see experience, that felt sense is what helps people have experience, and that emotions are what helps people navigate experience.
The heart is the home where everything has the space to be as it is.
The Soul
Part of being more present with your heart-knowing is recognising and validating the parts of experience that your mind can’t understand. It’s being able to let go of fixed ideas of what the world is and open to a more mysterious and curiosity-fuelled way of being.
Some examples of this are the imaginal, the archetypal, and dreams.
In waking life, it is possible to play with how you access this more abstract realm of the soul. Through imaginal practice, for example, you can allow the subconscious and the ineffable to express themselves so that you can see the landscape of your inner world with more clarity or connect to something mystical beyond your current understanding. For this to work, you have to be able to let go of the mind’s desire to be in control.
This is happening all the time in a subconscious way, and it’s fun to be able to make it more conscious.
Subconscious Expression
The way that heart-knowing exists separately from mind-knowing is no better expressed than through the artwork of highly schizophrenic patients. People who can’t string a sentence together or understand a simple direction can paint rich and complex paintings with structure and meaning that will evolve and develop over time. Creative expression can help people make sense of and engage with the world, even when they have a total lack of conscious awareness of what they are creating. This process can be inherently healing and connecting, without people needing to understand it fully in a logical way.
It turns the idea that the mind is in control on its head.
‘People don’t have ideas. Ideas have people.’
Carl Jung
Creative practices allow the emotional, soulful, or subconscious aspects of experience to express themselves freely without needing to be understood first. Awareness and understanding can be brought to it afterwards, sometimes long afterwards, or it can remain a mystery.
Conclusion
Neither the logical understanding of experience nor the innate creative resonance are a single source of truth. They arise together. And if you can learn to trust each of these components for what it is, you can land in a rich, embodied, and immersive experience of life. This is the freedom, openness, spaciousness, and inclusivity that heart-knowing can afford.