The heart as a sense

'If we would be only thinkers, and had nothing else in our souls than the capability of thinking concepts and combining them with logic, or analysing complicated thoughts with logic, we would really not be able ever to know whether something is true or not We would be in the state that modern philosophy says we are in. With logic we can state almost everything and with an intellectual possibility to handle our concepts in a logical way we also can give a temporary validity to it'. It is appropriate to call such thinking 'abstract', because the thoughts are not formed by reality; they are formed by logical laws. We can think in a right way logically and still be missing the truth. As a medical doctor I often experienced this when talking with couples in relation-troubles. The female part of the couple mostly has strong feelings and lives with these feelings - that can be fully subjective of course - about all the persons and facts in life. I don't want to say that they don't think, but thinking is guided also by feeling life and that makes it seem illogical once in a while. The male part has the rational part and I have experienced how rational thinking can be used to prove in a logical way what is not true. The man says in a rational logic way what he finds, and seems to convince his partner for the time being - till she discovers that this rational truth isn't true at all. In politics we can also see this phenomenon. One can always formulate the political principles in such a way (women can also do this very well) that they sound true and right. In thinking we have the possibility to think in lines, to reason on and on along these lines, while forgetting all other possibilities that lie between this line and other thought lines. A rounded, comprehensive thinking is lost, a thinking that in German is called 'Vernunft', in English maybe it is called 'Reason'.

But what is the difference between this abstract rational logic and what we will call Reason?
In the interesting lecture of Benjamin Zander on you tube, that was given in a link last week, we can see how the speaker tries to bring proof that everyone has a musical hearing, that no hearing person ever can be tone-deaf. Even if we are not trained musicians, nor lovers of music, we still have the disposition to hear if a tone is pure or false. We would never say that this tone-hearing is something that is guided by thinking. It is an immediate experience, but we have to pay attention. When we perceive our own activity in hearing and perceiving, interpreting the pureness or falseness, we can learn to experience that is the feeling life that shows us whether the tone is pure or false. The ear hears, but the heart knows. The brain is no intermediary, it comes in afterwards, in becoming conscious that the knowing is there.
Here is an analogy with perceiving truth. Thinking concepts and combining or analyzing in a logical way could be compared to hearing tones and melodies, without paying attention to pure or false - just hearing, that's it. There is no organ active to know if thinking is true or not. There is just the thinking law of logic.

To 'hear' the pureness or falseness of thinking, the heart must come in. This also is a kind of sense, it is the organ of feeling life, together with respiration. Feeling only can give us the truth, it is the heart that has to sense it.

But feeling is subjective, the heart is not pure itself. That is why truth is such a difficult thing to perceive. We can only find it by educating the soul to pureness, so that it accords with truth.

In the Bhagavad Gita this kind of truth is sung. This kind of truth that can be reached by one person alone is based on the self-educated soul. Therefore it is always at the same time spiritual truth. Here thinking becomes spiritualized, by sensing it with a pure heart. In our modern times very much has changed, also the spiritual pathways we have to wander. But the purification of the heart is and always will be the prominent grade to reach.


Krishna and Arjuna.The heart as a sense by Mieke Mosmuller