“The mind creates attachment to the body and the things of this world. Thus it binds a man, as a beast is tied by a rope. But it is also the mind which creates in a man an utter distaste for sense-objects, as if for poison. Thus it frees him from his bondage.”
— Sankaracharya: The Crest-Jewel of Discrimination
“. . . and all else but the heart.”
— Hart Crane
“In what resides the most characteristic virtue of humanity? In good works? Possibly. In the creation of beautiful objects? Perhaps. But some would look in a different direction, and find it in detachment.”
— Lytton Strachey
Witty and tart, Lytton Strachey emphasized in his essays that quality of the 18th century on which he based his style: common sense. Detached observation, criticism of the most subtle kind, and a love of life were the point from which he viewed the minds, the manias, and the extremes of those in power.
At the center of his work is Voltaire, that model of reason’s cold eye, for whom the apparent was the best of all worlds. As Strachey described Lady Montagu, and by extension the 18th century, “She was, like her age, cold and hard; she was infinitely unromantic; she was often cynical, and sometimes gross.” Voltaire, embodying the right of reason in an age of thought, came at a time when Western consciousness was emerging from under the superstition and darkness of the Middle Ages, and just as every generation corrects the foibles of its antecedent, so the intellect of the 18th century rectified the disorder into which it had been born.
If Shakespeare incorporated witches into Macbeth and fairies into The Tempest, appealing to an audience who believed in the possibility of such things, then, according to the intellectual currency of the new classicism, the playwright had not used right reason. He was foolish and not at all modern. What was important was what was obvious to the mind alone. The artist, the dreamer, the madman, and those who believed in something more than the immediate were relegated to the slot of innecessity. Yet Shakespeare embodied the creative wisdom of the heart, and, as though in Divine balance, the next century, the 19th, brought with it an awakening of a different kind. Romanticism swept in like a breeze through a just-opened window. Instead of reason and order, the emotions and the passions were extolled. Instead of individual-in-society, it was individual-of-himself. The interior of man was to be examined, not the trappings. The rhythm of God was swinging once again to balance the mind with the heart. Enthusiasm, that feeling so suspect in the 18th century, became in the early 19th the true measure of man.
II
In Islamic legend the bridge on which one passes to heaven is narrow and bounded on one side by the abyss of logic and on the other by the abyss of gullibility. To live by the mind is the old Greek ideal of the Apollonian, the pure idea, to live in stasis. To live by the heart alone is to impose no order on one’s world, to burn out in a frenzy. If one does not temper one’s experience with both logic and feeling, both discernment and love, then one is treading close to the edge of the abyss. The unquestioned heart is as extreme as the unquestioned mind. Both are polarities between which the spirit is pitched like a ball to create synthesis and transcendence.
III
The age of Atlantis was one of psychic warfare, especially toward the verge of the cataclysm that sent the continent under. Man was given a tool of realization which he used to destroy himself. Our own age has been an age of reason, of the rational mind, to 1) balance out that former age of psychism, and 2) make man whole, to give him unity of heart and mind. If man misused his feeling nature on Atlantis and Lemuria, then he has come back to learn the balance of that, the leveling of fear and anger with reason.
This is not meant to be unfair to the heart, that subtle touch of the infinite within each of us, but simply to put excess in perspective. Just as Atlantean misuse of psychic energy can be paired with this civilization’s excesses of the mind (as in technology), both can be seen as essential to the ultimate growth and balance of the soul of man. In a similar way, Eastern dispassion can be paired with Western passion; classical restraint with Romantic effusion; the emotional sixties with the reflective seventies; night with day. Everything in the cosmos is a balancing of its equal and opposite; unity is the result on each plane reached, after which there is a further unity to be achieved, ad infinitum. The heart and mind will balance to form a great and intelligent love, which is Divine and the source of all creation. From creation we move to separation to become whole again, and then separate again on an even higher plane, to then become whole again. The process incorporates the deep mysteries of the Universe, where all is one and yet constantly forming and reforming like a galaxy collapsing to form a black hole and the hole to a galaxy again, deep in the mystery of Love.
