The powers of freedom lie in the heart. They lie in its very beating. They lie in the surges of energy which, like thunder and lightning, flow through it. No ordinary organ, the heart. How is it so? Because the heart is the magic labyrinth which opens into the primeval world of beginnings – the place where our journey on earth began and where we still find the springs and motives for our actions. This world is the sacred ground – pagan, polytheistic and monotheistic at once – of our impulses. And it is so, so forgotten. Our heart remembers, because its construction is a mirror of that world. But the rest of us has become so entranced with the mineral-crystal world – with its life and its appetites – that we’ve mostly forgotten the pristine springs of our origins. And in those springs lie the truest impulses for our actions which, if we could only find them, would give us the real measure of freedom. This is why the head is always raiding the heart for understanding: ‘What do I feel? What do I feel?’ The knowledge we seek is always denied by the brain itself. The heart understands, because down its passageways lie the many meeting we’ve had with each other, and with the world, through the course of time. Love is a recognition as well as an original impulse.
Here’s another metaphor: I am swimming in the waters of forgetfulness. There is a large shore ahead of me, which is Fate. There is a vast, dark shore behind me, which I can’t place. I’m scared of drowning but my head keeps bobbing up. Each stroke is life itself. It is also freedom – if I wished I could stop swimming; I could swim more in one direction or in another. And yet each stroke takes me towards the shore I am destined to reach: Fate. How can this be, that freedom and the desire for life take me towards a destined point? It has to do with the dark shore behind, which I have largely forgotten. That shore is also ‘me’, just as the shore ahead is ‘I’. My existence is not confined to the being who finds himself swimming in the waters of forgetfulness. If both shores could be raised vertically, they would make a line – one line. Symbolically this line appears in the very symbol of the word ‘I’. Of course, the shore behind me contains everything I have been and done, every place I have been to, in the past. By this I mean the ‘Beforelife’, which we tend not to think about as much as the ‘Afterlife’. You can conceive of the Beforelife as containing whatever your particular beliefs give you: past lives, a heavenly world and so on. But I believe that most importantly it contains what I was writing about above: the pristine world of origins. Not until we can bring back to our memories a true sense of that dark land behind will we know why our free actions always take us towards a destined point. After all when you examine life you will always have to say to yourself: ‘If I had not done such-and-such I would not have met so-and-so or arrived in that particular place which has been so important for me.’ Everyone has to admit that the most significant things in their lives would not have happened without a chain of free actions. And yet, as I said above, love is also a recognition. I reached the loved one by my free actions and yet I also recognize him or her. This is a proof of the existence of the two shores and a fact we have to take very seriously.
It also indicates that I will never attain freedom in the truest sense until I am able to keep my head above the water all the time:
Then in the silent daylight I may see
the causes of both happiness and tears.
Jay
©landar 2011. All rights reserved
(The picture shows the Labyrinth in Budapest Castle)
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