"the heart is treacherous, who can know it"? What do you think "listening to your heart" entails?

darth frosty

I great book on the importance of listening to your heart is the alchemist by paulo coelo.

Narkissos

First, a school case of misleading "literal" translation (perhaps slightly less to English than to French, but I'm not sure about that).

In Biblical Hebrew, "heart" is never opposed to "head," "brain," "mind" or "reason". It is the metaphorical "seat" of the "inner" conversation ("council/counsel") of self, which implies both rational thinking and feelings/emotions. People, good or bad, think "in their hearts" (for the better or worse) just as they are happy or sad, love or hate "in their hearts". Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît pas (the heart has its reasons that reason do not know) cannot be retrojected from Pascal to the Bible.

Because of this semantic dislocation a text which originally meant something like "beware of yourself" (compare v. 5 and 9 of Jeremiah 17) is often reduced to "beware of your feelings" which is not quite the same.

No what to make of this saying (whether in its original broad sense of in its later narrower reading) is another matter. Ecclesiastes style, there may be a time to beware of oneself and another to trust oneself, a time to beware of one's feelings and another to trust one's feelings... but since it is the same "heart" that bewares or trust, I'm afraid that doesn't lead us very far except into the endless spiral of introspection. :)

reniaa

The world is full of people now doing personal inclination which is fine until you are a victim of someone else 'Personal inclination'! My Childs school recently announced they will no longer be doing father's day cards because not enough of the children have 'Fathers' that they can send cards too and they might get upset about the ones who do make the cards.

lurk3r

Nark- I appreciate the effort in commenting and trying to make sense of such things. I am beating around the bush a little bit with my question, and I never meant it to be in a metaphorical way whatsover.

Have you ever heard of a "state" in which one can "communicate" with ones heart directly? Would it be enlightenment which could produce such an effect, if at all possible?

lurk3r

Narkissos

lurk3r,

If you really meant it non-metaphorically, ask the cardiologist. :)

My point was that the figurative uses of "heart" (which may be more or less connected to the organ in imagination, as a rather dead or living metaphor) vary a lot according to languages and cultures; that the Hebrew usage of lb(b) does not exactly correspond to our use of "heart".

So perhaps the first question would be: what do you mean by "heart"? Feelings? Emotions? Something else?

quietlyleaving

Hume noted the importance of memories in thinking and in fact felt that all thinking was formed from sensory input to memory. Linear memory and non linear memory together with the emotions we attach/have attached to them. Perhaps this is what we mean when we speak of the heart - memories that have more emotion and less reason and arranged according to the judgement we then attach to them (perhaps mostly bad) and so on according to our societal influences etc, for example. And these then interact with the ones we have stored according to more reason than emotion and that we have perhaps judged to be good and beneficial and therefore more worthy of remembering vividly and that make us feel . So for simplicity's sake we then have a twofold conversation going on that can be represented as a conversation taking place in the heart.

slimboyfat

I don't see any message in the first post of this thread. But other people seem to it. Is that right? It's just a big blank space to me. A bit confused.

Is that another glitch or a mental block on my part?

quietlyleaving

slim its a blank space for me too - I took it that the question contained everything lur3r wanted to discuss.

Just to add to my previous post as I had to rush out -

Nark- I appreciate the effort in commenting and trying to make sense of such things. I am beating around the bush a little bit with my question, and I never meant it to be in a metaphorical way whatsover.

Have you ever heard of a "state" in which one can "communicate" with ones heart directly? Would it be enlightenment which could produce such an effect, if at all possible?

lurk3r

I think thats a good question - a metaphor does tell us about what is real but that is still imaginative.

slimboyfat

Oh I see.

"the heart is treacherous, who can know it"? What do you think "listening to your heart" entails?

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