Matter of the Heart – Part I
It begins with this: you must die before you die.
Dear Friends,
Today, we begin a subseries inside the series, “Intentional Suffering and the Sacred Heart.” From recent mentoring sessions with some of you, I gather that you are wandering into the heart—the actual physical heart—as a profound organ of perceptivity to guide our way of being. This would be the every hope for this series, that together, you and I come a little closer to awakening the heart.
This subseries, “The Matter of the Heart,” will wend us into the locus of soul, the paradoxes of trying to locate the soul in the body, and how this turn pulled us so far afield from presence to and through the heart.
I only know to begin by telling you a story as I’ve come to understand it. It won’t be told all in one day.
With heartfelt love,
Renée
Here are the links, if you wish to refresh on earlier essays in this series.
~ Standing by the Water Thanking It
~ We Live in an Unfinished World
Matter of the Heart: Part I
Perhaps it’s because Plato said at the birth of reason that the heart is the seat of emotions and not the seat of the soul that the heart was long ago given over to metaphor and cliché. The heart now stands in for a plethora in language and literature, and it is the pinhead on which many a poem comes to be. With the world as it is as I write, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness comes to mind. The young poet John Cornford’s painfully brief poem, penned to his beloved in England shortly before he died in the Spanish Civil War, reads Heart of the heartless world, dear heart. Etched into the tombstone of the great Romantic poet Percy Shelley are the words, COR CORDIUM, heart of hearts.1 You and I know what we mean when we say, the heart of the matter.
But things are forever changing. Intimations of the heart fall away in favor of a language more direct. Here in the ever-hastened (productivity) life in the US, language is less and less about the underworld of feeling and more about getting to the gist of things. We winnow, with every efficiency of word, to the point. In etymological fact, the gist is the point I throw at you. And you, hurrying along, aim to get it and go on.
So, let’s back up, then, arrest the gist mid-air, and begin at the beginning. Or, a beginning.
The preamble is this: the story of philosophy and medicine in the West is an ever-entwining unfolding. The two wrap like caducean serpents around a center staff. This is the staff of Hermes, not Asclepius.
Journey to the Heart
It begins like so: you must die before you die. As soon as we begin this way, it is only a matter of time before we encounter Pythagoras and the ancient Orphic mysteries of initiation. Hermes is there, trickster that he is and shamanic messenger of the gods.2 Staff in hand like Abaris’ arrow,3 he’s forever traveling between worlds, between above and below, divinity and substance, unseen and seen. You might imagine him as a Skywalker, traveling through you from across all time, helping you on your way to the underworld otherworld—the vast unseen, the infinitely unknown, the place you go to die before you die your actual death of body. The place you go to let go of the self that keeps you from the Self that longs for you.
Hermes knows what you and I have forgotten: to die before you die is to journey into the heart. Hermes takes you there. If you read to the very end, you’ll see why it’s so hard to understand why we have forgotten what we have forgotten. To journey into the heart, one must get very still. Bring the fullness of presence into the innermost chambers of the material heart. Feel the eternal silence between two beats. And there, in the stillness, comes an opening into a world unlike any other.4 But do not look for it, for it will elude you.
Pythagorean and Orphic initiation into the underworld was alchemical. It was the art of inner transformation, a passage taken to bring the divine into the human realm and take the human back to the divine.5 At the heart of it all was a belief in the transmigration of the soul, of reincarnation; of the movement of the force of life from one form to another; of the Oneness of being.
For Pythagoras, the soul is the vital principle of life. It animates the body but is not attached. It enters and leaves at birth and death. And in the depths of stillness in between, the soul is free to move.
In Search of the Soul
But Plato, a Pythagorean, veered from the mysteries on the word of a friend. It wasn’t helped by the fact that he already had a tendency to glorify Athenian virtues at the expense of everybody else. Anything not Athenian was barbaric.6
Things changed. Philosophy in the West became less about love of wisdom and the art of inner transformation and more about figuring out what makes the human unique and what pulls us off track from a life of virtue. Virtue was the watchword, and Athens traded mystery for a rational approach to life.
Now the soul would take a seat in the body. Western philosophy set out to find it. In finding it, it teased it apart.
Oneness becomes three: the vegetative, the appetitive, and the rational. The rational soul is what makes you decidedly human. Only the rational is immortal.
Plato placed the rational soul in the head. The head, being a sphere and so, the most perfect of all geometric forms, seemed logical. That the head is the uppermost place of the body and closest to the demiurge—the master craftsman of all that is—it is just as well the natural place for an immortal soul. Plato’s rationale was Pythagorean, but the tenor of mystery was lost.
This brings us to the heart. Plato saw the heart as the seat of the passions: of the appetite and emotions. These were to be mastered and controlled.7
The philosopher could help as the healer of the soul pulled this way and that by the passions of the heart and vicissitudes of the body. Here’s where medicine comes in. The physician would look after the body on behalf of the soul. The philosopher would temper the passions with the help of the rational soul. Together, physician and philosopher would mediate body and soul on behalf of the development of virtue.
It was always about virtue. Gone were the rites of passage through the mysteries of being. The heart was not only not entered into now. It was mastered by the rational mind, silenced and controlled. And the stage was set for Descartes’ mind over matter, 2000 years in the making.
The Matter of the Heart
Here comes Aristotle, pupil of Plato. Saying nature does nothing in vain, Aristotle wondered: where would the craftsman place this purposive principle, the soul that organizes the body and sustains it? The heart seemed to be the natural place because it is centrally located. It is the first to be formed, according to Aristotle, and the “place in life where life fails last.”8 The heart is the archē, the origin of being. All else moves to and fro, in and out.
Aristotle gives us back to the heart, the actual physical heart. He restores it to origin, making of the heart the ground of Origin within us. It could be easy to miss the significance of this. But look at what else happens.
The heart, albeit the locus of soul, has become a pump.
Forthcoming:
Pathless Path Pilgrimage, May 2025
Abbey of Our Lady of Guadalupe Pecos, New Mexico May 20–26, 2025
Guided by archival footage of Thomas Berry, inspired by reflections from Teilhard de Chardin, and giving ourselves over to a Universe- and Earth-specific evolutionary context, fragranced with fiat—with “let it be”—this pilgrimage promises to nourish and sustain the heart through these uniquely uncertain times.
Registration closes April 15.
All are welcome. Space is limited. Email Doreen Tanenbaum, Retreat Coordinator, for more information and to register: tanenbaumd [AT] gmail [DOT] com.
Gatherings in Silence
We now gather twice monthly on the 1st and 3rd Sundays every month. These gatherings are free. All are welcome but space is limited to 12. So, registration is required. DM or email me to register: reneeeli [AT] gmail [DOT] com. 1st Sunday: 1/2-hour meditation followed by reflective conversation | noon–1:30 pm ET 3rd Sunday: 1/2-hour meditation | noon–12:30 pm ET We *will* gather on Eastern Sunday.
Mentoring
I have opened more space in my calendar for one-on-one sessions offered on a sliding scale. This is inner-life inquiry and reflective work at the consciousness level. To inquire, please reply to this email, and we will set a time for a complementary session.
Notes & References
Peter Anderson, “The Heart of the Matter: The Matter of the Heart—The Heart of Art and Literature,” Medicine and the Arts: Humanising Healthcare, correspondence course, University of Capetown, 2015.
Peter Kingsley, “Paths of Ancient Sages: A Pythagorean History,” Lapis.
Peter Kingsley, A Story Waiting to Pierce You: Mongolia, Tibet and the Destiny of the Western World (Point Reyes, CA: Golden Sufi Center, 2000).
Peter Kingsley, In the Dark Places of Wisdom (Point Reyes, CA: Golden Sufi Center, 1999), p. 181.
Kingsley, “Paths.”
Ibid.
David Konstan, “The Concept of ‘Emotion’ from Plato to Cicero,” Méthexis, vol. 19 (2006), pp. 139–151. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43738771 Simo Knuuttila, “Emotions from Plato to the Renaissance,” in S. Knuuttila and S. Sihvola (eds) Sourcebook for the History of Philosophy of Mind: Studies in the History of Philosophy of Mind––Philosophical Psychology from Plato to Kant, vol. 12 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014), pp. 463–497.
Aristotle, Generation of Animals. Loeb Classical Library Series. trans. A. L. Peck. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963).
Here's a poem by Mark Nepo about and from the heart: "You ask, how much can one heart hold, as I lift a rock worn by the stream to its beauty by holding onto nothing. For all the ways we resist, each soul by the weight of its fundamental being, brings us to the bottom of things, where we are worn smooth. I think this abrasion of life force is a form of inner erosion that each person experiences here on earth. Finally it's letting go that lets us rest on the bottom. You ask, and all I can say, is that teachers wait in the center of every moment to show us that though there are many places to go, they all lead to the same ground of being we all share. In this way, we run through the world, only to be worn to a common center, in which we recognize each other at last." Actually, I think this poem speaks to both the heart and the soul; that they both are the "common center" that allows us to "recognize each other at last." They are the essential elements of our humanity that binds us irrevocably to each other and to all sentient beings.
Dear Renée,
Another long comment from me. Your posts fill me with "seeing" on these Sunday mornings we spend together:). And now if only I could live into it!
I feel my breath, and my heart, soften reading this—like you’ve placed a hand on the doorframe of the temple and are gently inviting us in. There’s something in your writing that invites not only reflection but an embodied stillness—a pause where I notice sensation as well as thought.
Your words reminded me of that old Taoist text (which you likely pointed me to in another of your writings), The Secret of the Golden Flower, and its simple yet potent teaching: turn the light around. Not as effort, but as a returning—of attention, of spirit, of presence. To dwell within the “eternal silence between two beats” is to feel what that text describes as the movement of light returning to its source, the soul circling home. It’s not hard to imagine Hermes standing right there, just beyond the threshold, smiling.
And then Wordsworth’s lines lit up in me:
“Trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!”
There’s something in what you’re writing that brings these ancient voices together. You’re helping us remember not only what we’ve forgotten, but why we forgot. The turning away from the heart wasn’t a simple mistake of philosophy—it was a movement of culture, of fear, of fragmentation, of trauma. Perhaps, even, the cost of the Mental Structure of consciousness? But now, we are being called to turn back—not as children, but as conscious stewards of the heart. No easy feat! Perhaps to be a steward of the heart means learning to abide in its rhythms, to attune to what is subtle and alive, to feel and follow its coherence even when the world pulls us elsewhere. It is so good to have you, all of us, as companions along the way.
Your image of the philosopher and the physician once intertwined—like serpents on Hermes’ staff—is one I will carry. It seems to me to be the perfect image of the "wisdom way of knowing." It speaks to the deep integration we are longing for. Not just wisdom about the heart, but the felt wisdom within it. I sense that this is the work of what I call Advocacy of the Heart too: to live in the unseen chamber, where light circulates and silence speaks—to open to presence as teacher, to let the intelligence of the heart guide the whole.
With gratitude for your leading,
Toni