Balanced mind and heart

The heart has always ruled the human world. Otherwise religions would not have survived so long. Religions and their gods are some of the most powerful and widely used entities for taming the human heart. Gods long to reside in the heart.

If gods actually resided in our hearts, our world would have been a paradise. We know that it is dangerous to let god(s) enter our hearts. So we keep them in churches, temples, and other such places, and lock them up too except at times specified by us. We decide when to let gods into our lives. We decide when gods should stay shut up in a tabernacle or a sanctum sanctorum.  

If we actually take god into our hearts, we would have to request Him (or Her, if you prefer) to avert His eyes a thousand times a day. A lot of things that our hearts make us do are not what God would approve of. A lot of our actions are driven by greed, jealousy, hatred, and so on.

We even go to the extent of justifying those actions which have such wicked roots. We use even religion to justify them. Culture, nationalism, race, etc are other elegant justifications.

And we create a lot of evils all around us. We slaughter people for the greater glory of our god.

The world can be a much happier place. It doesn’t have to be such a brutal place at all. We need to recalibrate our hearts. And our brains too.

Our behaviour is driven by our awareness as well as our feelings about the world. If we change our awareness and our feelings, our behaviour changes. Right ideas and attitudes generate appropriate emotions. Appropriate emotions create harmony within our personality. Inner harmony leads to harmony with others.

It is quite as simple as that. In other words, we need to make some alterations in our hearts and brains. In our awareness and our emotions.   

This is what most thinkers like Socrates and Lao Tzu said. This is what our modern psychologists teach us.

Compared to the previous times, our own times make it more difficult to follow these teachings. We know we live in a terribly unjust world where the wicked flourish and the virtuous perish. How do we choose virtue then?

The truth is that it is difficult to live a virtuous life nowadays. We live in a time when heroism has no place at all. No place. That’s worse than heroes being persecuted. Even persecution would have rendered heroism strangely meaningful. But when heroism is just made to vanish, what happens?

The old masters are still relevant. We need to tame our hearts with right thinking, which in turn will generate right feelings, which will generate harmony within and without. We need to do this in spite of our present-day leaders and teachers! Our happiness lies within us, in spite of our present-day leaders and teachers. 

PS. Prompted by Indispire Edition 328: How can you evolve yourself into a person with a well balanced and stable mind and heart. #lifemind