Project Description
Reclaiming the Heart
by Angela Fischer, December 2013
“The heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe.”
― Joanna Macy
What is it that happened to our hearts? It seems we have sold them. We have sold them for so little. We as humanity have created the current devastation; and now we refuse to take it back – to take the destruction and the suffering and the pain back to our hearts. We do not want to feel the pain. But if we do not witness what is happening to the world, if we do not feel the pain, we are not able to feel love, either. And the earth needs our love desperately.
Instead we try to bypass the suffering, and to love from somewhere outside of ourselves, not grounded, not rooted in our heart. But what does not come from the heart can never be real love and will therefore never have the transformational power which – as we know – is coming from love alone. We close our hearts from feeling what we can see everywhere in the world: the tremendous tragedy of what our forgetfulness, our disconnection from the divine has caused in the world, what it has done to the earth and to the whole of creation.
Eight months ago I was given a deam experience that engraved itself deeply into my heart. I will never ever forget this. A woman was lying on the ground, hurt, fragile, almost dying, suffering tremendously. I knew it was „the Mother of All“, the Earth. People, half asleep, were stepping over her with heavy boots, not even noticing what they were doing. I sat beside her; I felt her pain, excruciating pain, unbearable pain. It took a long time until she was strong enough to communicate with me. I asked her what we could do, and she said, „You need to feel.“ YOU NEED TO FEEL. There was more to this experience, but this was one of the most important messages. Feeling is what is so deeply needed, what is asked of us.
I shared this experience with others. And ist essence, beyond the individual perception of the person who had the vision, touched the hearts; but not everybody was interested. It has an effect on the heart. It shows us the darkness, and we are spiritually conditioned to look to the light. There are lots of spiritual concepts we can use as an excuse for not bothering at all. Of course, it is only human that we try to avoid suffering. But anyone who has gone through an individual transformational process knows that love cannot work as transformative energy, if we try to exclude what belongs to love: witnessing the truth, accepting it – which means taking it into the heart – and feeling the pain.
To be happy in the ‘love and light’ that our spiritually focussed imagination tends to invent, whenever reality is too painful and responsibility seems such a heavy burden, is not only spiritual self-indulgence but also a state of infertility. Self fabricated love is not real, because the depth and the vulnerability of the heart are not involved. We could also say, it is an illusion; there is no truth involved and so it has no real power or energy. It does not burn.
We cannot avoid the fire in our hearts. But we try to. We rarely listen to those who hold up the mirror. We rather like to soothe ourselves with spiritual fairy tales. Yes, this world is a wonderful, miraculous being. It is made from love, full of light. And at the same time we have created such a mess and made it a terrible, awful, desecrated place in the universe. So unless we take responsibility, unless we dare to walk all the way through the fire, witness the darkness and feel the pain, we can never really access the light of love in our hearts. And only love can transform.
If ever another world is possible – a world every human being undoubtedly wishes to see for our children – it cannot be given to us without the participation of our heart, our feeling. I am convinced that only through love can we retrace the path to the sacredness of creation. Only through loving from the depth of our hearts which include the sorrow of longing, the pain of being a witness, the suffering of taking responsibility, can the world and human consciousness ever be transformed.
„There is a spiritual tradition of watching and witnessing: that events in the inner and outer world need to be witnessed. (…) Your heart is just crying out to God, ‚Remember the earth, remember the earth.‘ We have chosen not to listen to the cry of life itself, even as we poison its waters and bring its species to extinction. The outer is just a reflection of what is happening in the inner. Humanity’s soul is starving… We need to stay attuned to the heart of the world and life’s essential message of love.“
— Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Quote from the Book trailer: Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, Darkening of the Light. Witnessing the End of an Era.
Image: Carved woman by Ahmad Nadalian, environmental artist, with kind permission.