How to Live in Five Dimensions
What is the heart if not a pump?
A fellow writer, Trista Ainsworth, is shining her light on the path of happiness with her “How to live in Joy” series:
She asks a question — Do you listen to your heart? — and I looked into my own heart to find an answer.
Heart. The word comes from Sanskrit, as so many do. hṛ́daya or हृदय in the Devanagari characters.
Yes, it pumps the blood around, and if it stops working, you do too.
But we also see it as the seat of emotion, and that’s what Trista is asking. What you hear from your heart isn’t “lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub”. It’s something deeper.
Well, it’s love, innit?
Good answer. Listen to your heart, you get love. All you need is love. Can’t go wrong there.
I see the heart as something more than that. Something more than love. Something so powerful.
Think of love, you think of your heart. Hell, you don’t think about it, you feel it. And I don’t mean in the gooey happy yummy way that we say we love Cherry Garcia icecream.
Our heart loves things that are not physical. Things like beauty, justice, joy. And love. Who doesn’t love love itself?
And more than that, the heart is what we use to communicate with other souls. Sure, you can think the words, but if you look deep enough, you are connecting through your heart. Getting inside another’s heart to feel what they have, what they lack, what you might give them.
No, seriously
I read about a man in London and a guru in India. They met, they began corresponding. This was in the Sixties, and you didn’t send an email. You didn’t pick up the phone unless you wanted half an hour of crackling and muffled telephone operators at enormous expense before a few seconds of connection. Just like meditation, right?
They wrote letters to each other. They asked questions and received answers back weeks later.
Strange thing. After a while, they didn’t need to write. They knew what each other was thinking. They had a connection deeper than words. They had their hearts working together.
And how often do you hear about someone suddenly aware of a close friend or relative, in trouble, or at some turning point in their lives? They might be in a distant land, but there is some connection that scientists cannot explain. They dismiss it, but it is too widespread a phenomenon to ignore.
I don’t know how it works, but it works
The heart is how we communicate. Not at the surface level of words and how’s the weather and what about that local sports team, hey?
But when we want to communicate something deeper. Reach into your heart to touch your lover, your child. You know them, they know you. Words are not really needed.
People remote in space and time. Your grandparents maybe, impossibly remote and beyond texts or letters or any physical communication.
But there they are right there in your heart. No matter if you grow to a great age yourself, there they are, holding your hand, looking into your eyes.
Space and time vanish. You transcend them, go beyond words, to live in a moment that somehow doesn’t exist in the physical world, but is as real as the sunshine on your shoulders or the sound of your heart beating.
When I listen to my heart — truly, deeply listen without the words — I hear you.
Britni
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