Most of us consider our emotions essentially identical to our personal authenticity, and the more freely we let them flow, the more honest we are.
Wisdom tradition teaches that emotions are in fact the primary culprits that obscure and confuse. The real mark of personal authenticity is not how intensely we express our feelings but how honestly we look at where they are coming from and spot the elements of clinging, manipulation, and personal agendas that make up what we experience as our emotional life.
In the teachings of ancient sacred traditions, these intense feelings are “passions,” and most of the spiritual training then had to do with learning to spot these land mines and be free of them before they did serious psychic damage.
Our contemporary usage, however, sees passion as a good thing, indicating that one is fully alive and engaged. Our spiritual ancestors, on the other hand, saw passion as a diminishment of being. According to them, instead of enlivening the heart, the real damage inflicted by passions is that “they divide our heart.”
The heart, in ancient sacred traditions, has a very specific and perhaps surprising meaning. It is not the seat of our personal affective life—or even, ultimately, of our personal identity—but an organ for the perception of divine purpose and beauty.
Jeremiah 17:9 “The human heart is the most deceitful of all things, and desperately wicked. Who really knows how bad it is?”
