Try This

...a meditation on Heart...

Photo Cliff Scholz

Over my years looking into this and that, I’ve heard from multiple sources that Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian mystic, visionary and founder of both Waldorf education and Biodynamic Agriculture plus much else, is known to have taught that in the next stage of human evolution the heart will be understood and experienced as an organ of perception. This kind of flies in the face of modern conceptions of the heart as basically a meat pump beating away, deaf dumb and blind, a lump of muscle and fat known mainly for its unfortunate tendency to get clogged and fail in a host of unpleasant and sometimes deadly ways. 

Problem is, conceiving of the heart as a thing made of meat isn’t necessarily more enlightening than thinking of a whole person the same way. And please, I’m not saying there isn’t a kind of profound mystery and poetry in the nature of the human anatomical form and in the physical heart as part of that. For example, I was interested the first time I heard that a large percentage of the cells in the heart have been found to be neurons. There is plenty worth learning about on that level. But at the same time, if that’s all we’re seeing, looking at everything from the outside-in as modern science tends to do, that can be pretty limiting.

If we want to know people, we don’t treat them like bags of meat, and if we really want to understand them, we don’t separate people from the social and environmental contexts in which they are living. To do so is a faulty approach, prone to misunderstanding and error, and a destructive approach with a tendency to damage the very thing we’re trying to understand. Likewise, it’s probably not entirely inaccurate to say that the modern conception of the heart and its functions is in some ways pretty heartless. I find myself unsurprised that hearts so often fail in a society where material reductionism is held as bottom-line truth. In the end, I don’t think the percentage of neurons in the heart matters to most of us very much. Much more important is whether or not we experience a sense of connection there.

As a child, I hadn’t heard about Rudolf Steiner. However, I had read a children’s biography of George Washington Carver, part of a set of biographies of famous black Americans in my beloved 4th-grade teacher Mrs. Johnson’s classroom at Ann Arbor’s Dicken School. After I read it, George Washington Carver became something of a hero of mine — mainly because he loved plants, which was something I could identify and relate with, even then. But I also admired his courage.

One of the things he said was this:

Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough.

It’s a pithy and provocative quote, but today Carver is chiefly remembered for the hundreds of uses he found for peanuts. Not to diminish Carver’s many amazing achievements, but thinking of his contribution in terms of his material output is in a way not too different from thinking of the heart as a piece of meat that merely exists to push blood around the body.

The alternative approach to find value in Carver’s story might be to feel into and try out Carver’s way of being in the world. Remember this is the story of a former slave navigating from total obscurity to national prominence in post-Civil War USA. How’d he do that? In recent years I came across a pretty good adult biography that included a lot of original source materials such as Carver’s letters and recorded accounts of his own life. His story remains instructive on many levels.  

Here’s a somewhat extended version of the quote cited earlier:  

“Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough. Not only have I found that when I talk to the little flower or to the little peanut they will give up their secrets, but I have found that when I silently commune with people, they give up their secrets also - if you love them enough.” 

I didn’t come across that quote until long after I first learned about Carver and his life and work. But to me it sounds a lot like Steiner’s “the heart is an organ of perception” idea. It also resonates because it seems clear that love is the heart’s native language and preferred medium of expression. I would even say — and I’m sure I’m not the first, by any means — that love is to the heart what light is to the eye. Given how fundamental such a shift of understanding could be, Carver’s enormous number of inventions and scientific findings may be less significant than how he arrived at them. 

In practical terms, what besides love will move the heart to speak? 

I encourage you to feel into the ramifications of Carver’s observation: “Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough.”

That’s a total game-changer, an eleven-word revolution. Especially now, in a society where so many people have been frightened, traumatized, socialized, or tricked into shutting down their hearts. Such a society forecloses its capacity for the kind of multidimensional perception that the heart specializes in, and thus damages our ability to know what’s what, to course correct, and to connect with larger spheres of intelligence and then imagine and navigate in practical ways toward a livable future. Yep, that’s heart’s job as an organ of perception.

Bottom line, the closing of so many hearts is not irreversible, and the opening of even one can make a difference. 

Our hearts want to speak — of that I am certain. And we can start the conversation so simply: Just place your hands on your heart, close your eyes if you like, and breathe in: 

“Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough.”

We can start right here.