Metaphor example of the heart awakening

For example: You are walking up a path through the forest, and suddenly you come to a clearing exposing an unexpected meadow of brilliant flowers. Your mind is so clear and your heart is so open that you instantly begin to run ecstatically through them, without thought, without hesitation. You can do no other. You are incorrigibly drawn to partake in the splendor of the miracle of creation- it has determined that you frolic with wild abandon upon the field. And yet you do this with absolute freedom. In fact, at this moment, you could not imagine doing anything other than this; were it possible for you to not do it, you would do it anyway. There is a gravity pulling you, and an affinity pushing you. For your heart knows what nourishes and exalts it. And that is ...life! Thus by living from the heart, the duality of free-will and determinism ends, and participation in the beauty of being returns again to our lives.

Now, describing the unfortunate, current predicament (or devolution, as it were) of our beings, Stepan Stulginsky admonishes:

"The basic qualities of the human consciousness have remained unchanged over a period of the last thousands of years. The mind has gone forward. It created the miracles of engineering and technology, but the human heart froze on the level of the stone age- it remained stony. ...[for man] encased himself in spiritual inertia. And the clatter of the machine drowned the voice of the spirit and the last wail of the heart. ...One can think by the heart or brain. Now is the time of the heart. ...For the heart is the microcosm of the existing. ...Not brain but heart can remember about the Infinity. The great discord set in between heart and mind is the calamity of our time. Modern disastrous conditions have been created by the perverted intention of the brain. One needs [now] to accept the heart as the guide of one's life. ...The further progress of humanity depends on the heart..." (Cosmic Legends of the East, p89,171)

The thinking mind is fully deluded, and that is why only a 'feeling' body can lead us back to the Source. I call that feeling body the heart.

"Mind creates the abyss," declares Sri Nisagardatta Maharaj, "the heart crosses it." (I AM THAT, p8)

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These excerpts on following the heart and aimless wandering are taken from unpublished chapters of

THE WAY OF WONDER, by Jack Haas