The conflict between “mind and heart”

Question from the Internet:

“In what ways can the heart and the mind be in conflict with each other? How can we resolve this conflict and find balance between the two?”

The “heart” represents our emotional side, our constantly awakening desires that seek fulfillment for ourselves. The “mind” represents our intellect, our inner “philosopher” that keeps coming up with different ideas and solutions to problems encountered.

The basis of our conflict between our “heart and mind” is that most people would consider oneself an “intellectual being”. We think we exist and develop through our intellect. Today’s society with its “liberal” thinking and “intellectual elite” is a good example of this. We think we can change, reinvent, destroy and build anything we want based on our intellect and perception of reality.

Actually this unconditional belief in our own intellectual ability is the most dangerous “religion” humanity ever invented!

First of all, we are primarily emotional beings, all of us without exception. We are blindly driven by our basic matter, our all-powerful engine, which is an insatiable and irrepressible desire for existence and self-fulfillment. Everything we do, everything we think about and behind every action stands this overall desire. Then, of course, this desire dresses into different pleasures, deficiencies and expectations. But at the root, it is always the same, insatiable, irrepressible and ever-growing dfesire for existence and selfish fulfillment at all costs.

Our mind, our intellectual faculty is simply an auxillary device to guide our desires and to help their fulfillment. The desires aweaken thoughts, the thoughts activate our personal computer, which makes its 100% egocentric, subjective and individualistic calculations based on selfish “pleasure or pain”.

We can imagine ourselves as the purest thinkers, most intellectual philosophers of life, the basic desires for food, sex, family and the social desires of wealth, power, control, fame and knowledge can take control of us any moment, leading us wherever they want to take us. This is true and inevitable for each and every person, since we are all born with the same “engine” and internal software.

Our desires also lock us into a 100% egocentric, subjective and individualistic perception of reality. Thus we do not and cannot see reality “as it is”. We can only see and access whatevere our personal computer – making the person “pleasure/pain” calculations is interested in. So we can see how false and dangerous is our “religion” with its unconditional belief in the human intellect.

In order to resolve this conflict and misunderstanding about our “mind and heart”, we need to learn about our true desires and intentions, and experience how they influence our lives and the lives of others. Only when we recognize, accept and comprehend how our insatiable desires and their 100% selfish intention cause harm to everything and everybody – including ourselves – and we also generate and sustain a true need to change ourselves can we learn how to use our conscious Human intellect – which we haven’t used much yet – to harness and guide our desires through different, selfless and altruistic intentions for the sake of everybody and the whole system.

This has nothing to do with any of our arbitrary and baseless ideologies, philsophies or religions. This is the fundamental condition for survival in nature’s finely balanced and mutually integrated system.