EBS5: The Wisdom To Believe the Heart

On Mother’s Day we look back with nostalgia and honor our mothers with a greeting card and perhaps with the wearing of a red or white carnation. However, the finest way to honor mother is to open the heart to a new birth of love and peace. If we can acknowledge that logic and reason have often brought us into crises that only the transcendent flow of intuition can resolve, then we earn the right to wear a red carnation, for the mothering influence is alive in us. But, if we insist on a rigid view toward life and people, then our mothering love is dead, and we should wear the white carnation.

“Man’s not all included between his hat and his boots.” There is more to a person than a body and a mind. There is more to education than developing the intellect. We indulge in a lot of flattery over the wonders of modern science and technology; we say, “If we can put a man on the moon we should be able to solve the problems of war and poverty and pollution.” But the fact is, the more we have applied our intellect to solving these problems, the more confused we become. One may know all the facts about a thing and still not know it. There is always an “unanalyzable residuum” beyond the perception of the intellect.

In Genesis we read, “And God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness...’ and God created man in his own image, male and female created he them.” Thus man, created in the likeness of God, must have the essence of father-mother and male-female in him. Love in man is essentially a feminine attribute, and wisdom is a masculine attribute. This masculine-feminine make-up is essential to healthy mindedness.

When God said, “It is not good that man should be alone...” it means that it is not good for wisdom to act alone. We need also the wisdom to believe the heart and to balance and say and do everything with love and intuition.

Future historians may characterize this as the age of intellectualism because of the emphasis on facts and computers. They may also note that the age was shortlived, for there is an alarming break-up of things. We may be on the verge of a great breakthough that could lead to a 20th Century spiritual renaissance. The dawn of transcendence, of intuition, of the wisdom to believe the heart, may be upon us.

One symptom of the break-up is the Feminist Movement. Certainly there is much social inequity between the sexes, and I have great empathy with the cause for liberation. However, this cause sometimes obscures a more important need of our day: the liberation of the divine feminine in all persons, both men and women. A woman president or women ministers will not change much if women are as male-dominated in their consciousness as men are. By this I refer to the tendency to rule out love and the wisdom of the heart.

In the field of institutional religion, the big news today is the trial of a clergyman who permitted women priests to give sacraments in his church. But even more shocking is the sad neglect of the mystical and transcendent in the teachings of these same institutions. The tragic fact is that ministers, even if they include women, are often recruited, trained, ordained, and placed without even having been introduced to, let alone challenged to explore, the depths of the cosmic dimension of life.

Emerson said, “There is one mind common to all individual men, and by lowly listening we shall hear the right word.” The great need of our day is for more training in the art of “lowly listening”. This has been a no-no in education because it sounds like religion, and thus poses a threat to the principle of church and state. But we can’t go on perpetuating the delusion that everything transcendent to the five senses is off-limits to the academic process.

It is time to acknowledge that reasoning power alone has never solved human problems. The more we think about a problem, the more complex it becomes—unless, that is, the light comes. And the question is rarely asked, “Where does the light come from?” Einstein said that all his work was the result of intuition and not of logic and reason. He was a wearer of the red carnation.

H.G. Wells envisioned a time when schools and teachers would no longer be necessary except to show us how to get in touch with the Infinite Knowledge that dwells within us. This doesn’t mean submission to an anemic concept of faith. Faith should not be a rejection of the intellect. It should build on the “stuff of the mind” and use it without the limitation of what the philosopher calls “a priori logic”. It is the wisdom to believe the heart.

Mother’s Day is a good time to herald the importance of the divine feminine... the need to explore and harness our inner depths. When the intellect is unified with the superconscious flow, there is a balance of the male and the female. Then only is there hope of creating a world order of peace and good will. One is simply not qualified for life in modern times without a sense of the transcendent, the free flow of understanding love, and the wisdom to believe the heart.

Paul could have been speaking to our day when he said, “Don’t let the world around you force you into its own mold, but let God remold your mind from within.” This is to awaken the divine feminine, the wisdom to believe the heart. You are intended to be, not just a reflector, but an innovator. You are not just a mind-computer to be programmed with facts, but a creative imagination to give birth to them.

The frustration of the potential of modern man may be traceable to the absence of meditation or inner prayer in our way of life. There are many religions in Western society, but few that deal with inner oneness with the Divine Flow. Prayer, worship, and communion have been primarily centered in externals. Ritualized prayer and “statements of belief” are a masculinization of the religious experience.

Fundamental to this new insight in Truth is the emphasis on the innateness of man. You have a continuing need to turn within, to be still and know, to remember, “male and female created he you...”. In the silence you may find the balance of mind and heart, of wisdom and intuition, and then you may live with what Emerson calls “the privilege of immeasurable mind.”

Of course, you may have to deal with the male-domination of consciousness: “Look, there is work to be done, I can’t just sit and meditate. There is nothing I can’t solve through reason.” At such times we should recall “Lao-Tze: “The best way to do is to be.”

No one is a whole person, fully able to govern himself or others, until he finds the balance of mind and the wisdom to believe the heart, and the balance of power and the influence of transcendental love. Open your heart to a rebirth of the mothering influence of your own innateness...and wear the red carnation.