Where Is Your Heart, and Where Is Your Mind?

That sounds like a simple question, doesn’t it? The easy answer is that your heart is in your chest, and your mind is in your head. After all, when you feel deep alignment with something, you often sense it in your chest, because that’s where you’re experiencing that deeper feeling. And when you are thinking, you probably sense your consciousness in your head, because that area seems to be the source of your thoughts.

Heart in chest, and mind in head, and that’s that. These seemingly obvious facts would be all you need to know about this topic, but reality has some deeper surprises for you. This is because heart and mind are actually energies, and that opens a fascinating doorway of possibilities.

Here’s something intriguing about energies — they don’t have to have a specific location — energies could exist anywhere. Could this mean that you can access the energies of heart and mind anywhere and everywhere?

What is the nature of energy?

Let’s explore this idea of energies, or qualities, as compared to things. An energy or quality is something that you can sense anywhere — it is a condition or characteristic, rather than the thing itself. For example, a specific apple is red, but the color red could exist anywhere. Red is the quality, but an apple is in one location — it is a thing. But what does this have to do with you?

Your physical heart exists in one place, just as your physical brain exists in one place. But the energetic qualities of heart and mind are vibrations — not objects. You know that energy qualities are not limited to one location. Could it be that the qualities of heart and mind live within every cell of your body? Could each atom of your aura carry the inner resonance of love and wisdom?

You can find the answers to these questions only through your own inner spiritual experiences. I can tell you about it, but you can only really prove it to yourself through your own personal experience. But that’s how it is with spiritual reality — no matter how many people insist that something is true, you can only verify it through your inner realizations.

Beyond thinking and feeling

Heart and mind are more than just feeling and thinking. They have deep mysterious essences that exist within you, as living consciousness vibrating within you. Your own body is a sacred temple for your soul, and your soul is made of divine substance. Your divine soul contains the energies of cosmic love and cosmic wisdom, in every particle of itself.

When you recognize that the energies or qualities of love and wisdom can be felt or sensed in every part of your body, you understand the famous statement that you are a spiritual being having a human experience.

Your body is a living tuning fork that is sensitive to divine truth. This is the reason for the ancient advice to find the truth within you. Your inner tuning fork is tuning into the deepest essence of your soul; what many people call their higher self.

Multidimensional heart: cosmic truth — or merely emotional

Your universal heart — the essential qualities you associate with Divine Heart — exist within every part of you; it is not just your heart that feels the truth of something, but a heart-like knowing that can be felt within every part of you.

Heart, in its deepest essence, knows the highest truth of everything it encounters. The deeper heart — that quality of divine heart that exists throughout your being — knows this without analyzing, and without thinking. However, this is only true for the deeper essence of heart.

The superficial aspects of heart can be fooled by an appeal to the emotions. Only the deeper essence of heart can’t be fooled. This is why politicians know how to repeat simple slogans that touch the emotions of the surface heart. They generate vague pictures of hopeful fantasy, rather than offering actual policy plans grounded in reality. Advertising and media often generate deceptive fantasies as well.

Multidimensional mind: cosmic truth — or merely logical

Your universal mind — the qualities that you associate with Divine Mind — exist within every part of you; it is not just your brain that is capable of knowing. It is the cosmic intuition — the deeper recognition of truth — that can be known within every part of your being.

Mind, in its deepest essence, resonates with the highest truth of whatever it encounters. The deeper mind knows this without analyzing, and without thinking. It does this by accessing oneness with the universal spark within whatever it encounters. However, this is only true for the deeper essence of mind.

The superficial aspects of mind can be fooled by data that seems to be logical in its conclusions, but is based on false or misleading information. Advertising and media often provide questionable details that seem to prove their point, so that the lesser aspects of mind can be guided to the seemingly logical conclusion, and have desire for the product, or to agree with a particular belief.

Two sides of the same coin

Have you noticed the curious similarity between deep heart and deep mind? It is this:

– The deep heart knowing can detect truth by deeply feeling into the essence of things.

– The deep mind knowing can detect truth by deeply knowing into the essence of things.

Well, that almost sounds the same — and this gives you a hint that at the deepest level, heart and mind are both two aspects of one deeper reality — your capacity to know reality directly.

This surprising recognition about heart and mind frees you to seek the deeper levels of heart and mind that live deep in the core of your being, far below the surface levels that can be easily manipulated. Knowing this frees you to release limited stereotypes about heart and mind.

The stereotypes that keep you from knowing the truth

You’ve noticed that many spiritual teachings advise you to feel the truth in your heart, but suggest that you avoid accessing truth through your head. This may seem to be harmless new age tendency, but it can create problems for those who take the advice literally, without seeking deeper understanding.

There is a vast difference between deep heart essence wisdom, compared to emotionally influenced heart enthusiasm. If you don’t know the difference, you are being asked to perceive everything in a childlike and naive way, without using your deeper discernment.

It’s appropriate to wonder whether this simplistic notion of always following your heart serves certain teachers and organizations, because then the students sheepishly follow along with the program, without asking questions. And if you ask questions, or if your intuition guides you differently than the teachers, then you are told that you lack faith, or it is implied that you are less spiritual.

That brings us back to the understanding that deep heart — and deep mind — both access truth in their own special ways. And it brings up the possibility that you can find deep truth in your heart and mind — assuming you’re going deep enough to transcend the surface illusions of heart and mind.

Going deep within

What about deep mind? How do you open the door to its secrets? And anyway, isn’t mind supposed to be the perpetual problem — the realm for spiritual seekers to avoid? Well, did the creator give you a mind just so you could avoid it? Or is mind, like heart, a realm that offers you infinite positive potential, assuming you learn to work with it?

Deep mind, like deep heart, lives in a world beyond words. And deep mind, like deep heart, experiences a kind of oneness or resonance with that which it encounters; it knows the essential nature of things. Here is the clue to knowing the difference between deep knowing, compared to superficial knowing:

Deeper truth resonance gives you a sense of peace, rather than excitement.

This is because excitement exists on the surface of life, where the lesser aspects of heart and mind dwell. This surface excitement is an emotional reaction to situations that seem to give the ego what it wants, or seem to provide magical simplistic answers. The ego reaction creates a kind of nervous friction that is often mistaken for truth. When something is truly in higher alignment, there is no friction, and that is why you’ve heard of the still small voice of truth. Otherwise, it would be the excitable, noisy voice of supposed truth.

A sense of gentle discovery

Your subtle recognition of deeper realities happens more easily when you approach your spiritual explorations with a sense of gentle discovery. That way, your wishes, expectations, and enthusiasms don’t interfere with your deepest discoveries. And the profound delights that result from your quiet discoveries transcend the mere excitements of the usual enthusiasm-based spiritual experiences.

Superficial enthusiasm, easily generated, can seem to the surface heart aspect to be a kind of truth. However, excitement and enthusiasm can mask the deeper ability within the heart to discern deepest truth.

The mind is affected by excitements as well. Superficial chains of logical thought, so appealing to the mind, seem to point to truth. However, these seemingly logical thoughts can be manipulated, and can obscure the deeper mind’s ability to discern the real essence of a situation. This is why seemingly intelligent people can miss subtle cues; they were so caught up in the story woven by the chain of logic that they missed, as the saying goes, the forest for the trees.

However, deep essence doesn’t get excited, because it is beyond emotional reactions, and is comfortable knowing what it knows. In fact, it doesn’t need excitement, because it just resonates with the truth of things, and that is pleasing for deep heart and deep mind. It feels a joyous unity with truth, and is content. At the core level of reality, heart and mind are one, because of these two curious qualities of heart and mind:

1. Within the love essence of the heart is divine wisdom.

2. Within the wisdom essence of the mind is divine love.

Beyond emotion and logic

If you wish to contact your essential heart and mind, choose to make personal mystical inner contact with your own deep heart and mind. Just reading about it isn’t enough. Nor can you receive the real experience if you merely hear a spiritual teacher, however inspiring, tell you about it. Such inner realizations can’t be taught through appeals to either emotion or logic, as useful as these ways of learning may be in other areas of life.

Logic and emotion cannot touch the deepest essence of heart and mind. This is because logic and emotion lead you in the general direction of a solution, but don’t directly resonate with the highest quality solutions. Essential heart and mind use resonance, and resonance exists at a refined level beyond the earthly worlds of logic and emotion.

You’ve seen resonance demonstrated, because you know that if you place a vibrating tuning fork near another tuning fork of the same size, the first vibrating fork causes the second fork to vibrate. The first fork doesn’t have to prove anything to the second fork. The first fork doesn’t have to make the second fork inspired. The resonance happens because of their similar capacities to resonate together.

Degrees of truth

The essential knowing in your heart and mind resonates with truth in much the same way that the two tuning forks do. But you may be more familiar with the earthier forms of resonance — basic emotional energy, or basic logical claims — and you might mistake this for deeper heart or mind knowing. This is because the superficial resonance fools you with its noisy excitement, emotionality, and enthusiastic beliefs.

For example, emotional reactions are a much-used lower quality resonance utilized in the media. This is how movies, for example, make you cry, even though you know it’s just a story. You are immersed in the story, you identify with the scenario, the music and lighting amplifies everything, and you have the automatic emotional response. This is not necessarily deep truth resonance. But, it does show you how heart can be easily moved.

At the center of heart and mind, there is a clear, sacred space, and it is beyond logic and emotions. You could say that it is a sacred space that just is. In that space, you find a paradox — mind is heart, and heart is mind — they are recognized as aspects of each other. Your goal is to access these deep places within your being, so that you can know your essential nature, and so that you have a means of discerning truth from falsehood in the world.

A mysterious contradiction in spiritual teachings

1. Those who favor heart-focused spirituality tend to emphasize emotionalism and blind faith — they downplay thinking and questioning.

2. Those who favor mind-focused spirituality tend to emphasize logic and mental control — they downplay feeling and subtlety.

3. These contradictions lead you to favor one imbalance over the other. Often, when two seemingly opposite paths are presented, you get swept into the confusion, and you believe that you have to choose only one path. But what if both paths presented to you are imbalanced?

The healthier third alternative that gives you deep understanding and compassion

When you experience the essence of a person or a situation with your deep heart, and when you intuitively know the deeper meaning of what is happening with your deep mind, you experience compassion. This is different than feeling sympathy, pity, or concern. And it is different than trying to immediately fix the problem. It is deep recognition and understanding, and that kind of compassionate wisdom leads to empowering solutions, rather than quick-fix reactions.

Here are ways for your heart and mind to have higher love and higher knowing regarding someone or something:

How to access your compassionate loving mind:

Deep mind wisdom is a deep love for the essential nature of what you are contemplating. This is different from simply having affection for someone. You access mind love by gently finding that sacred space in your head that transcends ordinary thinking. Use your imagination to do this…

1.  Go deep to the center of your head.

2.  Go deeper, and find the level beyond logical thought.

3.  Go deeper, and find the level that just is.

4.  At that level, you can resonate with the pure divine essence within a person or situation.

How to access your compassionate wise heart:

The essence of heart love is a deep wisdom about what you are contemplating. You access heart wisdom by gently finding that sacred space in your heart that transcends ordinary emotions. Use your imagination to do this…

1.  Go deep to the center of your heart.

2.  Go deeper, and find the level beyond emotional love.

3.  Go deeper, and find the level that just is.

4.  At that level, you can resonate with the pure essence of a person or situation.

How to go deep within your soul for profound compassionate knowing:

1. Bring your attention quietly within, as if you are stepping into your inner light — just imagine this.

2. Imagine that you are stepping even deeper into this inner light.

3. Remember – your inner light is located throughout your body — every part of you has the light of your divine soul.

4. Relax into the light, gently breathe, and let the light circulate comfortably throughout your body.

5. Let yourself do this without judging your self, or judging the process, or having expectations about how it is supposed to be.

6. And each time you think you’ve arrived at something meaningful within yourself, just quietly go deeper, because deep heart and deep mind are infinite.

The gentle path to inner peace, compassion, and knowing

You might still be wondering whether you should choose to go deeper within your heart, or deeper within your head, because the argument about heart versus head is an old pattern. As you are now realizing, there are infinitely deep levels of truth within your heart and within your head. You have the means to access them.

Deep truth discovery has little to do with excitement, enthusiasm, positive thinking, or drama and intensity. It is, rather, a quiet deliberate choice to gradually move your attention inwards, so that you can access the sublime infinite levels of cosmic self. Realize that excitement and enthusiasm can be enjoyable, but their noise obscures your search for deeper truth, so be aware of this limitation.

Inspiring mystical poetry has been written about these transcendental states of love and wisdom, but as moving and beautiful as it is, you need to access these inner places yourself.

The divine Creator that created you exists deep within all of its creations.

Being infinite, divine essence has no definite form or fixed nature. So to simplistically say that heart is love is a limited understanding. In the same way, to say that mind is wisdom is a limited understanding. Beyond wisdom, there is wisdom-love, and beyond love, there is love-wisdom. Love and wisdom are not in conflict. And when they seem to be, then you haven’t yet accessed your deeper levels of perception for the particular situation where the conflict seems to exist.

And beyond these labels of love, compassion, and wisdom, there is the quiet space where you just know that you know. The simple truth, beyond words, beyond logic, and beyond emotions, is always deep within you. But it’s not what you expect, and not as spiritually grand or exciting as you would suppose. But as you may have realized, it’s quietly sublime, rather than dramatically grand; it is balanced cosmic simplicity.

May your explorations into deep heart and deep mind bring you serene inner delight. As you gently explore the deeper truths, you resonate with the divine center of the cosmos, and the universal radiance shines forth within your infinite heart and mind. Beyond love, beyond logic, and beyond poetry — your deep center is the cosmic source of love and wisdom.

Many Blessings,

Joel Bruce Wallach 

Founder, Cosmic-Living for spiritual empowerment, tele-classes and self-paced mp3’s