The heart
There is a sentence you have surely already spoken, or thought: I know it in my head, but not in my heart. One can understand a thing perfectly, demonstrate it, explain it to others — and not for all that be convinced of it. Something resists, beneath the reasons. And one discovers then that the decisions which truly bind a life — to love, to forgive, to leave, to stay — are never taken by reason alone.
Our age, however, has staked everything on the head. It has made of analysis, of calculation, of measurement the only serious roads toward the true. Whatever cannot be counted nor demonstrated, it has relegated to the side of the vague, of opinion, of feeling. And in so doing, it has little by little forgotten that there exists in man another organ of knowledge — one that does not reason, but that sees.
The sages of this path name this organ the heart. It is not the heart of the songs, that seat of tender and somewhat soft feeling. It is something else, far vaster: the place of a direct, immediate knowledge that does not pass through the detour of words. Where reason approaches a truth by concentric circles, the heart, for its part, touches it. It is the eye by which one sees what cannot be proven.
They gave it an image that has not aged: the heart is a mirror. When its surface is polished, clear, it reflects the real as it is, without distorting it. But the mirror tarnishes. Worries, resentments, greeds, the thickness of the ego lay upon it a rust, fine at first, then stubborn — and the real is no longer reflected there but blurred, twisted, in our own likeness. To know, then, is not to acquire more: it is to polish.
And here is the reversal. To know by the heart is never to grasp a thing from afar, as one holds an object at arm's length the better to examine it. It is to let oneself be transformed by what one knows. The head keeps its distance; the heart, for its part, is touched, displaced, remade by what it takes in. One does not come away unharmed from a truth known in this way — and it is by this that one recognises it.
The word carries a whole teaching within it. Qalb: the root means to turn over, to overturn, to turn about-face. The heart is named after its perpetual turning — it does not hold still, it tips over, it changes, unstable by nature. One would readily see in this a flaw. The sages saw the opposite: it is precisely this mobility that allows it to turn toward. A fixed heart could not orient itself. Because it turns over ceaselessly, it can, at every instant, face anew the source, the light.
"Neither My heaven nor My earth contains Me, but the heart of My believing servant contains Me."
Pause on the strangeness of these words. The immensity of the heavens and the earth does not suffice to contain the Infinite — but the heart of a man, that would contain Him. Which is to say that this small organ that turns over ceaselessly is, by its very nature, without bottom: vaster within than all the space without. You carry within you a place greater than the sky. It remains only to polish it enough that something, there, may be reflected in it.
An instant, now: lay a hand upon your chest. Feel what beats there, and never stops — that movement which, at each pulse, turns over. Then ask yourself, gently: toward what is my heart turned, at this very moment?