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Sacred Heart Chakra
It has been suggested that the paintings of horses, mammoths, bison, lions, and other animals decorating Ice Age caves in Spain and France were an early manifestation of humans, i.e., Homo sapiens, namely us, stepping outside of Nature. By objectifying the animals they lived among, hunted, and feared, humans would have power over them, and by extension Nature itself. Genesis 2:19–20 recounts that first act of the first mythological man, Adam, was to name the animals. In the beginning was the word. In comparing Hopi with English, anthropologist Benjamin Whorf (1897–1941) showed how our perception of reality is shaped by the language we speak. Gottfried Leibniz (1648–1716), one of the greatest mathematician/philosophers in the Age of Enlightenment, sought the original sacred Adamic language, the perfect language in which the essence and true nature of each substance or being is directly expressed as a portal to ultimate knowledge. But as noted at the beginning of this book, “The given is immune from error but only at the price of being ineffable.” (A. J. Ayer) Austrian logician Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) investigated how one might deconstruct language by crawling inside it. Yet, isn’t using language to get inside language like trying to roll your eyeballs back to see your own optical nerves? Leibnizian and Newtonian calculus can calculate the velocity of a bullet from point A to point B and reduce the distance almost infinitesimally but never quite enough to determine the exact speed of the bullet as it impacts the target. Science is asymmetrical: it approaches but never arrives at the goal of ultimate knowledge. Christian mystics do report union with the ultimate. In order to be ready for such a union, which is rare, occurring sometimes only once in a lifetime and then maybe for only seconds, Meister Eckhart (ca. 1260–1327) insisted that a person’s “heart…must be emptied out to nothingness, the condition of its maximum capacity…and sensitivity.” Elsewhere he writes, “Perfectly to have given up one’s own self is to have merged with God, and then anyone who will touch such a man must first touch God, for he is wholly within God and God is around him, as my hood surrounds my head.” This experience of “a dark luminosity” (John Ruusbroec, ca. 1293–1381) is a window to “divine truth” (Eckhart) and “the key of knowledge” (Marie of the Incarnation, 1599–1672) but only “by certain secret intuitions too strong to be misunderstood…but impossible to describe.” (Teresa of Avila, 1515–1582) Once again we are left on the outside, looking in through a glass darkly at a singular, ineffable experience. In the end we have only a picture. Behold the Sacred Heart of Jesus! “The rest is silence.”
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