Head and Heart

There's two ways you can get blinded. Firstly, when there's no light at all and secondly when there is too much light! Have you ever tried looking into the sun? Everything ends up blurry! There is something to learn from this. If you don't have any wisdom in your life you are blinded, but if you have an overload of information without contextualising, digesting and applying, you may remain blinded. If you don't embed that information in a deep space within your consciousness, you can actually drown in it.

That's exactly why I emphasise ‘wisdom that breathes’ – we are not here just to be repositories of information, where we memorise lots of facts and figures and stories, accounts and passages of scripture. We have to deeply absorb that wisdom, observe it playing out around us, apply it in our lives and the way we function. We have to let that wisdom touch our heart and transform our consciousness. We have to see Divinity speaking to us through that wisdom.

When we interact with wisdom in that way then we’ll never be overloaded and it will always feel nourishing to the heart. The purpose of studying this deep wisdom is not to know God, but rather to love God. We are not in the business of trying to know the entirety of Divinity, but we're in the business of trying to become captured in heart, mind and soul in a beautiful relationship with Divinity. Wisdom must be couched within a very reflective, sincere spiritual heart that tries to bring it alive. Otherwise, it can just feel very intellectual and dry and make you proud and insensitive. Knowledge can be misused and misapplied.

Our monastery is known as Bhaktivedanta Manor. When new people come, I ask them: “are you a person of the head or the heart?” They all give different answers. I tell them that bhakti means devotion (or the heart) and vedanta means knowledge (of the head) – so the Bhaktivedanta Manor is where the head and heart meet.

Excerpt from “Tattva2: Old Words Open New Worlds”, available on: books.keshavaswami.com/tattva2