In today’s psychological climate, our emotions are considered identical with our authenticity. The more freely we let them flow, the more honest and “in touch” we are.
True personal authenticity is not in how intensely we can express our feelings but in our ability to know what triggers our emotions and see elements of clinging, manipulation, and personal agendas that make up so much of our emotional life today.
The early monastic spiritual training had to do with learning to spot emotional “land mines” and get free of them before they did serious psychic damage. It meant learning to be passive, unaffected (which is what the Latin passio actually means), rather than clear and conscious engagement. Instead of enlivening the heart, the real damage inflicted by the passions is that “they divide our heart into two.”
In the ancient sacred traditions the heart is not the seat of our personal affective life and personal identity, but an organ for the perception of divine purpose and beauty.
The great journey of our spiritual life is finding the way to where our true heart lies. Contemplation and surrender help us return to the heart’s wholeness, and by then we would finally and truly see. God’s very first utterance would come to pass: “Let there be light.”
Genesis 1:1-3 “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and empty, and darkness covered the deep waters. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light,”
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