17 August 2005

Heart World

The thinking mind finds it difficult to concentrate on more than one thing at once. So we often have a dilemma: where do we place our attention? Me or you? This or that? Here or there? Now or then? Do I talk or listen?

The heart is the part of you that brings things together into one living mass. When it opens things rush in and mix. The mixing and joining produces energy that nourishes both you and those connected to you. This is love.
An open heart produces life: the coming together of things that would normally remain separate. The heart swallows and the resultant energy produces new things. This is the creative process.

When we do our Tai Chi Form we usually concentrate on one thing at a time in order to gradually solve various technical problems. This is the work of your own private practice.
My teacher suggests that when doing Form together, you forget these technical concerns, open your heart, connect to the others in the room and just do the Tai Chi. Sticking. Your heart opens and swallows the others, but so does each heart in the room, so, in a sense, there is a large collective heart at work which is swallowing all of you, giving you all good energy from the source of Tai Chi. This is why, even when Tai Chi is badly taught, the class can often touch perfection when they practice together.

You have a heart that is constantly opening and swallowing. But you are constantly being swallowed as well, not only by other peoples hearts, but by a higher aspect of your own heart. The nesting goes both ways. When you relax and settle sufficiently to feel this, then you've accepted your destiny, because in the reality of heart world one thing does not follow another: it swallows and is swallowed, and so time does not exist.

And neither does space. You don't stop loving someone because they move away. You may forget them but that's because your heart has closed off. If it ever opens again you'll be suprised how much has gone on in the meantime.

1 comment

taiji heartwork said...

Just read this - part of a longer poem by Clayton Eshleman - on Ron Silliman's blog.

Imagination has never met
a non-love it did not love, or
a wall with which it did not become engaged.
I am a convict of light
in the suction panic of the sun.
The range is eternity,
the focus? The halter of time —
a babe in halter we spring up and down,
restrained, eternity invades our dreams,
spreads across the stone,
form trancing form. What is
is inherent in what is not.
Only in the abyss do time and eternity
dissolve into a sinless
source of origin. The first image was
a prompter box, gesturing to
an us spread out like bat wings on
a stone relief. Each second is
vertical with middened hives,
I fish for bait trapped in my own line.