Wednesday, June 22, 2022

our confusing, obscuring emotions

 
 
 

 
 
In the psychological climate of our own times, our emotions are almost always
considered to be virtually identical with our personal authenticity,
and the more freely they flow, the more we are seen to be honest and
“in touch.” A person who gravitates to a mental mode of operation
is criticized for being “in his head”; when feeling dominates,
we proclaim with approval that such a person is “in his heart.”

In the Wisdom tradition, this would be a serious misuse of the term heart.
Far from revealing the heart, Wisdom teaches that the emotions 
are in fact the primary culprits that obscure and confuse it. 
The real mark of personal authenticity is not how intensely we can express
 our feelings but how honestly we can look at where they’re coming from
 and spot the elements of clinging, manipulation, and personal agendas
 that make up so much of what we experience as our emotional life today. . . .

In the teachings of the Christian Desert Fathers and Mothers, 
these intense feelings arising out of personal issues were known as the “passions,” 
and most of the Desert spiritual training had to do with learning to spot
 these land mines and get free of them before they did serious psychic damage. 
In contrast to our contemporary usage, which tends to see passion as a good thing, 
indicating that one is fully alive and engaged, the Desert tradition saw passion
 as a diminishment of being. It meant falling into passivity, into a state of being
 acted upon (which is what the Latin passio actually means), rather than clear
 and conscious engagement. Instead of enlivening the heart, 
according to one Desert Father, the real damage inflicted by the passions
 is that “they divide our heart into two.”. . .

The heart, in the ancient sacred traditions, has a very specific and
 perhaps surprising meaning. It is not the seat of our personal affective life—
or even, ultimately, of our personal identity—but an organ for the perception
 of divine purpose and beauty. . . .
 
Finding the way to where our true heart lies is the great journey of spiritual life. . . .
 
 
 
 
~ Cynthia Bourgeault
 from The Wisdom Way of Knowing: 
Reclaiming an Ancient Tradition to Awaken the Heart
 art by Picasso


 
 

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