Heart Pain and Spiritual Longing This month's eletter is an imagination of the heart as the spiritual organ of the body. If we are to find the way out of the kind of spectator consciousness that makes everything, including persons into things and commodities and open again the space of engagement and mystery, we have to find the way into the heart. In our time we live a split imagination of the heart. On the one hand, the heart is a metaphor without substance...we use the term 'heart' sentimentally to mean feelings, love, intimacy, emotion, courage. On the other hand, the heart is a substance without metaphor...we use the term 'heart' to mean that organ that is a pump that shoves blood around the body. We need a new imagination of the heart. The heart as the organ at the center of our being which is simultaneously our consciousness of the spiritual world as right here. The following short essay suggests that heart pain may well function as the invitation to enter into heart-consciousness. A pain in the heart, the actual heart, signals a call for help in the feminine, receptive areas of our life, occurring on the left side of the body, in the area of the organ of spiritual reception and activity. Such pain need not be serious; or it may be. The sensation is of constriction, and when really serious, it is like an iron fist clenching at the beating heart. The softness of the heart is under pressure. What is most needed at the signal of heart pain, whether it is an actual feeling of suffocation around the region of the physical heart, or a feeling of suffocation that is more like anxiety, felt, though, at the region of the heart, is REST. We are working too hard --- physically, emotionally, psychically, or all three. The heart is not receiving nourishment. We have become caught in the illusion that our efforts alone can make a difference in our lives. When the heart is not nourished, it becomes a hardened heart. Something is blocking the kind of nourishment needed by the heart. At the physical level, what happens is that the sensitive layer of the artery of the heart has been damaged, often due to an abrupt increase in blood pressure; this results in a slight tearing of the inner wall lining of the blood vessels. Deposits of cholesterol accumulate at these tears, and the blood stream can become blocked. Then, blood clots can form, producing coronary thrombosis when the clot is at the site of its formation, and coronary embolism when the clot is deposited at another location. Half of all men over age 45 have plaque in their coronary arteries. Women are largely protected from accumulation of plaque in the arteries by estrogen in the blood. Later in life, women quickly catch up with men. The primary image here, though is narrowing - like becoming narrow, narrow minded, single-minded, completely literal, hard, protected, encased. Therapy of the heart attack in standard medicine often takes the form of immobilizing the patient with drugs such as morphine; this can be heard imaginally as providing peace through external means. Then, rest. This treatment provides the possibility of the person coming to see that concentrating on the region of the heart as the spiritual center of our being is the most important task of life.The heart is the organ of the body that remains open to the spiritual worlds. This openness is expressed in the heart through the spiraling of blood in the inner chamber of the heart. The vortical-like movement of the beating heart in the chest and the vortex movement of the blood within the heart, pictures the manner in which the spiritual worlds are in ongoing connection with the earthly world in a direct manner through the laws of the vortex. A hardness of the heart can be pictured as the heart trying to work without its ongoing connection with the spiritual worlds. Heart difficulties provide an opportunity to turn our heart toward the spiritual worlds. The turning of the heart is something that was recognized even by Aristotle (384-322 B.C.). The ancient Romans revered a spiritual being who is connected with the turning of the heart. They spoke of this being as Venus Verticordia - the goddess who turns the heart. Not only does this being concern the moral qualities of the heart, the turning of the heart from lust to chastity, but she also concerns the kind of imagination needed to keep the connection between heart and heaven conscious. Venus Verticordia is an image of love in the vertical direction, and even of sensuous love in this direction; that is, an imagination of a longing within the heart, emotionally felt, for the spiritual worlds. The hardening of the heart is the symptom indicating that the feeling connection with the spiritual realms is endangered. No blame is being assigned to the individual person for this. And, we are also not saying that a lack of connection with the spiritual realms is the cause of heart attacks; we cannot say such a thing because we would be applying causal thinking that belongs to the material realm to the vertical direction, the relation between the earthly and the spiritual, which operates according to different principles than cause-effect. Rather, the intention here is to take difficulties of the heart not only as expressions of physical problems but also as opportunities for spiritual initiation and renewal. Here is a way to imagine the activity of the heart: The heart receives its impulse to beat from the pulsating blood (a very different imagination than the heart being a pump); in this picture, it is the pulsating blood that brings about the beating of the heart. The vertical nature of the heart, that it is an upturned organ in the chest, allows a hollow center to form in the vortexing blood flowing through the heart. This hollow center is the void which is the abode of the spiritual I and our bodily connection with the spiritual realms. And, in this void, the blood is then permeated with spiritual force. Let us return to the image of Venus Verticordia. The Temple of Venus Verticordia was erected in Rome to promote the purity of the heart of the Vestal Virgins. The vestal virgins were priestesses of the goddess Vesta, the goddess of the hearth, the center of warmth. The goddess was not represented by a statue, but rather by an "eternal fire." All of the fires of all household hearths were considered to be shrines of Vesta, and were ritually ignited by the fire from the Temple of Vesta. In the human being, this eternal fire, this eternal warmth is the human heart. Through the fire in the heart, all of humanity is kept in connection with our spiritual home. There is only one image of Venus Verticardia -- on a coin that was struck in 46 BC. The coin shows Venus Verticordia draped and standing holding a balance in her lowered right hand while holding a long scepter in her left hand. Cupid, or Eros, the servant of Venus, is hovering and looking over her left shoulder. It is an image of Venus, holding the scales of Libra and the scepter of Leo. Here we have an image of the heart forces needed to be in right relation with the spiritual worlds. The goddess, the center of warmth, shows the need for inner balance, the right relation between the efforts we bring to things and simultaneous radical openness to grace from the spiritual worlds. We can find this balance only by realizing, in a feeling as well as cognitive way, that our power of acting comes from the spiritual world. This is the image of the scepter on the coin - an image of authority, not ours, but of the spirit. And, when our actions can be felt as grace, we are being inspired to be servants of love, the image of Eros on the coin.

Copyright © 2002, The School of Spiritual Psychology, All Rights Reserved