Merging Wisdom with Love

I saw this quote at someone’s house recently, from Helen Keller: ‘The best and the most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with heart.’

Then there is this one, from Nisargadatta Maharaj: “Wisdom is knowing I am nothing, love is knowing I am everything, and between the two, my life moves.”

And, finally, this proverb: “The longest journey a man must take is the eighteen inches from his head to his heart.”

So, what do the above quotes have to do with what I want to write about? A new theme, or awareness, or focus of energy, is emerging from the depths of my being, and I got more clarity around it last night, when I attended a satsang, a meeting in truth. The satsang was given by my old friend Krishna, whom I’ve known since the Jean Klein days, when we were both students of his. It was a beautiful gathering of about twenty people, and Krishna was simply present with all of us. The energy of the group was exquisite: relaxed, flowing, deeply harmonious.

Krishna invited people to share. Someone talked about the realization of emptiness as an essential feature of awakening, and someone said how life was fundamentally meaningless. Then someone else said how the only real meaning was love, and that reminded me of the Nisargadatta quote above.

What is emerging from within me is a deeper understanding, a deeper embodiment, of the relationship between emptiness and love—my own journey from my ‘head to my heart,’ you might say!

We have to realize our essential nature as emptiness in order to free ourselves from conflict and suffering, but then the only thing to ‘do’ is to love… to share our love and light with others, and with the world.

This is how the healing of humanity will occur: as each person realizes their natural divinity, the luminous emptiness of their true nature, that realization will move them to take loving action in their daily lives.

The three-step practice of freedom as described in my book, end your story. Begin your life… is a powerful, simple tool for helping with that realization. When we are truly present, with no story or agenda distracting us, then our heart is open, and we can ‘feel with our heart,’ as Helen Keller says. We can feel the pain and unhappiness of others, and we can also feel the love underneath the ‘story’ and the suffering it produces.

That unwavering connection of love is what heals all wounds, brings balm to our suffering, and fresh, new creative energy to our lives.