In her discussion of Buddhism, Godwin suggests that it is not desire per se that is the root of all human suffering. Contemporary spiritual recommendations to meditate and seek stillness recall the creative quietude of wu wei, the “yielding up of our striving conscious wills to the resources of a deeper self in tune with tao,” as recommended in the Tao Te Ching: “ Do you have the patience to wait / Till your mud settles and the water is clear? / Can you remain unmoving / Till the right action arises by itself?” (quoted by Godwin 65). From Godwin’s account it becomes strikingly obvious just how strongly influenced by ancient spiritual traditions contemporary spirituality actually is. In personal and spiritual development today, many teachers point to the importance of resting in and accepting the present moment just as it is. ![]() The main question posed in this survey of major world religions, and certainly a question for further consideration, is whether there is “a wisdom of the heart that all religions share” (319). In the Bible, there are over a thousand references to the heart, with the Book of Psalms, for example, showing an astonishing variety of metaphoric meanings for “heart.” Underlining the centrality of the heart in Christianity, Godwin takes as an example the passage in Matthew in which Jesus argues that washing one’s hands before a meal, the custom according to Jewish purity laws, was less important than having a clean heart, since the kingdom of God was located inside a person. Initially, God had a heart just like that of human beings, and he could have strong feelings: “although the Jews were the first people to arrive at an abstract notion of God and thus forbade images of him, he is represented from the very beginning as having a heart like theirs: a central place in him that can be hurt and angered and softened-and changed” (34). In the Judaic tradition, the heart has always been central, and the Hebrew word for heart, lev, refers to wisdom, emotion, and the right attitude. In other words, there is a vision of an interior place possible to reach though spiritual and physical disciplines “where each of us can meet the ineffable source of being” (44). There is less focus on gods and goddesses and “more on the God to be discovered within the depths of one’s being, as well as the necessary disciplines to approach it” (43-44). The heart was weighed, the result giving access to eternal life with the gods or to the heart being eaten by a monster.Ĭomposed between 600 and 300 BC, the Upanishads “mark a dramatic breakthrough in human consciousness,” writes Godwin, because this is “where the enlightened individual self as container of the cosmic consciousness-God at home in you-begins to play a noticeable role” (43). A deceased person’s heart was examined, then and there, through a “negative” confession of everything he or she had not done. The first stop is ancient Egypt, where the heart played a central role in after-death ceremonies. ![]() Central questions will be: “What have we gained since the cave artist painted a red heart on an elephant? What have we lost since the Industrial Revolution?” (19).ĭeparting from ancient art and myth, such as a mural painting of a mammoth with a heart painted in a Spanish cave about 10000 BC and The Epic of Gilgamesh, Heart embarks on a tour of the human heart and its meanings in different cultures throughout history, exploring the literal, medical, and metaphoric aspects of the heart as both life-sustaining center in our physical bodies and metaphoric site of our emotions. In Heart, Godwin’s first nonfiction book, we enter “the heartscape through recorded time” in order to make reflective stops along the routes of history, philosophy, and literature-and perhaps be able to “pinpoint by comparison our present heart location” (19). She decided to take on the challenge and delve into images and understandings of the heart through time and space, from literary, spiritual, and historical perspectives, while also pumping fresh life-blood into worn and pallid metaphors. Godwin’s consciousness was soon flooded with images of the heart from art, myth, and literature along with a multitude of metaphoric heart-phrases so ingrained in our language as to have become “dead” metaphors. She had been thinking about a new novel regarding “a woman’s journey into a heart of darkness where she would have to confront her shadow” when, with surprising synchronicity, her agent called with a proposal for a nonfictional book about the heart (8). ![]() ![]() Gail Godwin’s Heart: A Natural History of the Heart-Filled Life stems from a moment in time when Godwin had just re-read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
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