Quiet Mind, Clear Heart
That's basically all you need.
OK, I already said everything that needs saying: quiet mind, clear heart.
If you think of that as an over arching goal in life you can spend most hours of most days working on it. I have a bit of an advantage at this point because I am getting to be an old guy and my rhythm is slowing down [or everything else is speeding up]. But I have been working on this for a lot of years now.
If you think about it, a quiet mind and a clear heart is an amazingly powerful discipline to work on. But I don’t think most people think about this strategy. Maybe I am wrong, but most of us seem to be constantly chattering to ourselves with endless self talk and endlessly distracting external stimulus. It can get noisy in our minds and then we miss most of what is going on inside and out. We are prone to often indulge in identifying with our emotions and feelings which can often break into full blown and overwhelming storms in our hearts.
“The mind is the surface of the heart, and the heart is the depth of the mind.” Hazrat Inayat Khan
If we think of the mind as the shallow end of consciousness and the heart as the deep end, we can think of these two ends as a continuum so let’s start at the shallow end first: the mind.
If you think of the mind as a surface, as in the surface of a pond that you are looking into, if the surface is choppy, you can’t see below the surface. Let’s say it is a pond full of fish. If the surface is disturbed, you can’t see the fish below the surface except if they jump up to catch an insect flying by. On the other hand if the surface is smooth and still, you can see the movement of fish below the surface.
All of our internal chatter and distracted thinking is like choppy water and, while the surface looks interesting and complex, we are missing the things moving around below the surface. In order to increase our awareness of these deeper things we need to learn how to quiet our mind and make it placid and tranquil.
So how do you do that? The most typical way is to practice some form of meditation or mindfulness. Spending time on a daily basis learning how to meditate can eventually lead to a certain amount of inner peace. But I would say quieting the mind can become a continuous discipline practiced all day. When you think about it, almost all of the activities we engage in from morning till night can be done while inwardly remaining mentally quiet. By quiet, I mostly mean stopping talking to yourself, stop thinking about stuff that is not related directly to the activity you are engaged in. Be focused on exactly what you are doing at any given moment. Be present exactly in the present.
This is not easy to do and takes years of practice. If we watch ourselves, we will often notice that we don’t really stay focused exactly on what we are doing but let our minds wander around thinking about something that happened earlier, kick around ideas about what we are going to do later, complain to ourselves about something or someone, listen in our heads to a song we heard on the radio, etcetera and so forth. That is all noise. If you accept that it is just noise then we can decide to say to ourselves ‘Quiet, focus please.’ and if you can catch yourself over and over again and insist on quiet, you mind will slowly quiet itself.
One aspect of the mind is like a dog who thinks it is always playing fetch. It is constantly bringing you things it thinks you want. Things pop into our mind that our mind thinks we want to think about. If we pat our mind on the head and say, "‘Thanks, but we are not thinking at the moment’ and tell our mind to sit, to be quiet, eventually it will. It is a form of internal training.
In the same way, the heart, which is the depth of the mind, operates in two ways, as intuition and as emotions and feelings.
I think of intuition as light emanating from the heart. The depth of the heart opens out into the infinite and, as such, into omniscience. This very deep place can only be experienced with intuition as knowingness rather than knowledge. Like wave and particle, knowingness is the domain of the heart, knowledge is the domain of the mind.
The heart as a light is often surrounded by clouds which are the emotions and as the radiance of the heart grows the clouds are dispersed or evaporate and what remains is intuitive feeling and if we can peacefully rest in this intuitive feeling, we will always know what to do and exactly when to do it.
If our mind is quiet then our heart can speak and we will hear it and it will guide us on a moment to moment basis because of its quality of knowingness. Getting to this intuitive state that is not covered over by emotional baggage takes as much effort as quieting the mind.
This is done by not becoming identified with the emotional drama which is mostly driven by the idea that we own our emotions and we are our emotions. But this is not really true, that is like thinking we own the clouds that are floating above us up in the sky. If a rain storm is going by it is just a rain storm doing what rain storms do, they are just passing by, some times it is sunny, sometimes windy, sometime night, sometimes day, sometimes hot, sometimes cold. All of it is just a passing condition and so are our emotions unless we try to identify with them and feel justified to hold on to them. Whatever the condition is at any given time we tend to get lost in it and think it will always be like we are feeling at the moment.
But emotions are really just another sense like our seeing or hearing. Just like we are not what we see and not what we hear, we don’t have to identify with emotions as if they are us or we are them. They are not.
So a program for clearing emotion so that we can access intuition is to have the idea that we want to achieve equanimity which is to maintain equilibrium, balance. This means to not be overly attracted nor overly repulsed by anything, to accept things as they are and make the best out of whatever comes our way. Like they say, making lemonade out of lemons.
A quiet mind and a clear heart needs a lot of continuous letting go, not trying to hold onto things that can’t be held. You might think you would become a dullard with a quiet mind and a clear heart but just the opposite, you will become brighter, more astute, more subtle, more responsive and by the way more peaceful, more self-possessed, less stressed and overwhelmed.
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