THE YOUNG, THE DEAD AND THE HEART THAT SERVES
Paul Kuhl
To Bob Murray, friend and colleague, who so kindly shared
his heart
What is the heart that serves? First of all what it
isnÕt: it is not the metaphorical heart. This has to be made clear because we
are usually so unclear about it. In our modern consciousness we have moved so
far from living out of direct experience that we less and less even recognize
what direct experience is. We live our lives ever more in abstractions, which
we take as reality. To the extent that we live in abstraction we are
disconnected from our real life, our real body, and our real heart. We have
reached the point of being uncomfortable with reality. So much so that when we
experience what is real we often think something is wrong and move quickly back
into abstraction. In order to separate from our direct experience of heart
reality, heart knowing, heart intelligence, we conceptualize it as metaphor
only.
The heart that serves is not different than the heart
which beats in the breast, but that heart in the breast is not just a pump. To
experience the heart that serves we must not deny or move out of the living
physical body. We know this heart and we even indicate this knowing in our
speech. No one has to define for us, or could define for us, a broken heart. We
have to have the experience of the heart breaking and then we know immediately
for ourselves what it is, and that it is. Similarly we know the heart that
leaps. Science as it is construed these days tells us the heart that is a pump
cannot leap, but we have experienced it for ourselves. We may, however, choose
to not pay attention to that knowing, and/or we may belittle it, saying it is
just a metaphor, denying heart knowing, and moving back into the heart as pump
only. But if we did attend to the truth of the heart leaping what would we
learn? How would our world appear differently? How would we live
differently? Similarly we know
when the heart falls, and we know when it skips a beat. We also know Òheart
rendingÓÉ.we can feel it in our chest; just by repeating and feeling the words
Òheart rendingÓ attentively we can experience something of the reality of it.
And when something Òtouches our heartÓ we know it as direct, unmediated moving
through and into, a touch to the center, as the heart is in the center of the
body. When we say ÒI know it in my heart,Ó we understand that as a deep knowing,
a sure knowing, knowing that cannot easily be taken away even when reason
argues against it.
In addition to ignoring or abstracting immediate,
living, heart knowing, there is something else we do to the heart that is
deadly: we sentimentalize it. Heart knowing is not sentimental. Sentiments can
indicate the presence of heart, but are not the true substance of it. If we are
not discerning around sentiment it can obscure our knowing the knowing of the
heart. Our sentiments are easily manipulated, heart knowing is not. Politicians
and advertisers, promoters of all kinds are ever more sophisticated in
manipulating us by appealing to this sentimentalism. The heart can see through
this, but we have to begin a practice of really listening to the heart in order
to discern its true voice. There are many heart practices/meditations that can
aid in this.
Free of sentimentalism, our hearts know and so we
know, and if we are attentive, we know that we know. DonÕt sell yourself short:
you can do heart research and most likely already do it every day. But also
donÕt kid yourself: you canÕt do it through ego, and you canÕt do it from the
head; that is, you can work from either or both of these and believe you are in
the heart, but you arenÕt. Even so, the point is not to cut off the head or the
ego; they are just attended to differently from within the heart field. The
heart includes and makes whole.
When one enters the heart, being careful not to enter
with the head, but moving with attention until you are within the heart, and
within the sense of the heart as large and encompassing all of you, and yet
larger than that, then you can ÒobserveÓ the workings of that Òrealm.Ó One must
work carefully, selflessly, for it is so easy by force of habit to slip into
the head again, or to try to get something for the ego. What might one feel,
see, experience from the heart? For one thing, love. We recognize it as love
and know immediately and intimately what love is without getting caught up in
definitions or abstractions. Love has long been associated with the heart, and
from inside the heart we now know why, and not sentimentally. Also when one
enters the heart one feels the shifting of time and space; distance, past,
present and future, the measurement of time, all are different than from the
Òoutside.Ó And, thatÕs another thing: there is no longer an outside.
How might it be to be with another person in this way?
Here is one scenario, but it is just one scenario. There are so many different
experiences from within the heart; the heart seems to work with every situation
with uniqueness. It is not a cookie cutter; it sees our particularity. In this
particular case, a young lady, age 14, sits down with you for the first time in
therapy. She has been referred to you because of extreme anger alternating with
crying. And maybe she is having hallucinations. SheÕs not sure she wants to be
there. Pretty soon she tells you that a young family member was murdered a year
ago and that at times she feels him touching her cheek; sometimes she wakes up
with bruises on her body and is quite certain that it is from him. From the
heart you donÕt fall into the usual categories that distance and judge; you do
not limit her by age or gender, in fact you may have intimations of someone
sitting in front of you of great age and wisdom. ItÕs not that you forget her
age, her ethnicity, and all the other markers, but you do not get bound by
them, do not let them convince you they are who she is or all she is. You do
not immediately judge that she needs to be put on medication to stop what must
be hallucinations and mood swings. Instead thereÕs a heart knowing and a sense
of presence. The heart recognizes her heart. This goes beyond what we
ordinarily think of as empathy.
You know, because your heart knows, that she is speaking the truth. And when she tells you that shortly
after his death he appeared to her in a dream and spoke to her, you know she is
speaking the truth and from the heart. And so instead of turning to talk of
hallucination and medication, or even to unresolved grief, you find that
everything in the conversation comes from within that truth she is living. Some
of her anguish and anger reveals itself as ÒideasÓ she has been given by others
from the outside about this dead one: that he is in anguish. But the
conversation asks: what is your experience of him; do you find him in
anguish? She pauses, reaching into herself and into him, and her answer comes
back a clear and unequivocal ÒNo, he is all right.Ó She did not know she knew
that. He does not speak to her of
lack and loss, he does not tell her to do harmful things, he does not command
her; he is a comforting and supportive living presence. The session must end,
but she will come back. There is a bit of a momentary shift when the session
ends; youÕre a bit surprised to reenter a world defined by clocks and walls and
separation.
Now letÕs move into a wider circle, out of the therapy
room and into the streets. If this young lady was the only one reporting those
sorts of things perhaps we could pass it off as idiosyncratic, but she is not.
Many of the young people with whom I work speak of their experience with
ÒbeingsÓ others donÕt see: family members who have died or other normally
not-visible beings in human and non-human form. The most common reports involve
seeing and hearing, but some feel touches, and some hold brief
conversations. Most of the
encounters are not experienced as malevolent, though some are. Mostly the young
people are not frightened by the encounters themselves, but what scares them is
the thought that they are odd balls and going crazy.
Though we want to be able to explore this through the
heart, it would be helpful to first acknowledge what is more likely our initial
response: we rush to explanations before looking carefully what is actually
being presented to us. For
instance in this case we might say, ÒIt is the influence of the moviesÓ, or ÒIt
must be mental illness.Ó Our rush
to explanation is a distancing and disengagement from the phenomena that are
presenting themselves. We have difficulty seeing outside the conceptual boxes
in which we live, the categories that we are used to. Part of this need for explaining is ego protection, another
part is intellectual sloppiness. ItÕs bad science, but in the case before us
today, our science itself refuses to look out of the box. This is not new in
the history of science, of course. When something new comes along, we sometimes
donÕt even see it because we have no intellectual categories for it. In some
cases the eyes actually do not even register it. ThatÕs because part of what we
call seeing requires the intellect. And the intellect most often works within
old categories. Our young are not so wedded to the old categories; they often
see new things more readily than we do.
The heart can see things the intellect canÕt and the
ego wonÕt allow. It works in particulars and presence, not abstract categories.
One must sit in silence with whatever is to be known through the heart; must be
with it heart to heart, that is, directly and intimately, whether it be child,
family, city, nation or planet, whether near or far, now or past or even
future. As we have seen, the heart can do this. This is the heart realm and
heart work. The heart works with sensing and circulation, as it does with the
blood circulating out of the heart and then back in. The circulation of the
heart goes far beyond the blood inside the physical body. You can feel aspects
of this larger circulation when you are attentive to the heart. Slipping past
the sentries of head logic and ego protection, the heart current flows out,
enters, feels, touches, and then flows back ÒknowingÓ that to which it has flowed. Sitting in silence in
the heart you can feel into this living presence the heart has Òbrought backÓ
in its current. DonÕt expect it to be in English though. Perhaps it is an image
or a feeling. It is best to not try to figure it out, but to stay with it in
silence, and then to let it go, waiting still in silence. Eventually a
conceptual understanding may come, which could happen quickly or could take
days or even years. This is heart research and is itself sacred service.
So sitting down within the lives of these young people
there are some phenomena which the intellect may notice on some level but which
the heart highlights and knows what to do with. First, most of the young people
I meet with are inner city and poor and so their lives are less protected and
less hidden than the lives of their more materially comfortable suburban
counterparts. Secondly there is in their lives the pervasive presence of
violence and violent death. I think most of America has very little idea of the
extent of thisÉ.nor do we want to know it. At the drop of a hat most of these
children can recite a litany of relatives and acquaintances killed and close
calls endured by them and their family. This is not to mention the constant
vigilance required when walking down the street even in daylight, the fear of
going out of the house, the fear of staying in the house, and the ever increasing
severe bullying and fights in the schools. It is numbing. Thirdly there is the rapid and extreme
cycling of mood, which is a hallmark of adolescence, but this cycling is
extreme beyond that. In fact a large number of these young people are being
diagnosed with bipolar disorder (with psychotic features) and being
medicated.
We speak of our children as the future, meaning they
will someday be the future. But that is almost stating it backwards: Our
children are from the future already; they are our future coming toward us.
They also reflect our culture back to us and especially whatÕs been lacking,
and out of balance. They are the intersection of our future and past and that
is what they present to us in the now.
So when we hold all this in our hearts and we ask the
question, ÒWhat are hearts of the young bringing to us?Ó the answer becomes
obvious, though our present categories may not immediately allow us to open to
it: They are bringing awareness of
the living dead and beings from the non-visible world. And these are not just
passive dead; they are reaching out to touch us. What does this mean? The fullness of the answer we cannot
immediately grasp; we must stay with it, not rushing to explanations, pondering
it in our heart and with our mind. But there is something of this known
immediately from within the heart: the world is alive. To the heart all is
living presence: buildings and streets speak, trash dances, and the dead are
alive and present. So the dead are not gone; the heart understands this, and
from inside the heart you understand this. And the young person who sits in
front of you understands this, understands by heart, not by head. And now it is
our task as adults to bring this understanding into the world of consciousness,
including the head. As the older generation we are supposed to offer guidance,
are supposed to be able to help our young people at least orient to begin to
negotiate the labyrinthine nature of life. But our advice to them must often
sound like babble, totally missing the point. In the face of their living
reality, we put forth a world image comprised of dead material and corpses, all
held together by abstraction. Is it surprising then that our young lady
alternately rages and cries? Rages at the world we are trying to get her to buy
into, at our failure to respond, our failure to embrace the living her and the
living world; cries that we are so lost and at the lost world into which we are
funneling her, a world more and more devoid of life, a world of categories and
boxes in which we are chained and we would chain her.
And so we find our young people moving more into sex,
as it seems to reflect the heart somehow; toward drugs as it seems to lead to
the spirit world; toward stealing cars
and video games to get the keys to the kingdom, the price of admission to our
material culture; toward cutting themselves in trying to taste the blood of
real, not abstracted life; toward suicide in sacrifice to the dead and violent
world we present; toward violence as both a protest and an attempt to tear down
the walls blocking us from life. Our children play with death because we offer
them only a dead life. And we are dead because we do not acknowledge that the
dead live. We have lost heart connection to our own living hearts, to the
hearts of others, and to the world heart. Our young people know this in their
living hearts.
It becomes clearer now what the hearts of these young
people are doing; what is at the heart of their actions: they are offering
sacred service to us, to the dead, and to the heart of the world. You would
never know this from the outside, but you do know it from the heart. Their task
and our task that follows from it could not be more spiritually significant. Seen this way, our young people are
sacrificing themselves everyday, and the cost to their selves is fearsome.
Though they have the hearts, they donÕt have many of the other tools necessary
for this work. It is our sacred service to supply them with those. And that
service on our part begins in the heart.
Paul Kuhl lives in western New York state where
he works as a therapist mostly with children and youth who are growing up in he
inner city. He completed a schooling in Sacred Service and continues trying to
let it unfold in daily life and work.