Heart Over Mind - A Manifesto for the Revolution of the Hearts

As I approached the small table I noticed the metal shimmering in the sun, there it was a treasure to me 10 years before it would become a family heirloom. In that plaza in Mexico I wandered into this piece of metallic art, a carving - the symbol of a heart with flames coming out of the top and bottom with the heart shape at the center covered with a mirror. The beauty of this symbol struck me in that moment and made me think instantly of my Mother and the spiritual journeys we both embarked upon near the same age in each of our lives. She loved pictures of Jesus, angels figurines and candles, and while I knew this heart had some connection to Christian history and iconography its deeper reality laid outside the earthly confines of religion for me. I bought it for her and presented it to her on my return home, and there it hung in her living room for nearly ten years. After she suddenly passed from this life years ago now, as we were cleaning out her house there it was the metallic heart still hanging on the wall in her suddenly empty home. I began to stare at the heart shaped mirror and in that time of deep sorrow, pain and longing for my Mother I saw her in me. I saw my father, my grandparents, my sister, my unborn daughters and all that she had touched with her heart of service and love during her life. Looking deeper I saw our layers of ancestors, those that we know about and those we do not, all the way back to our shared ancestors at the beginning of human existence and to our Creator who said BE.

The mirror was dirty with dust over it and some water spots and as I looked into it I began to think about my Mothers heart, her soul now that she was gone, and the mirror as a reflection of my own heart and that which is everlasting that she had passed on to me. Her belief, her love, her joy, and her pain, her suffering and her longing to see a more just world then the one we live in. On top of that lay what Allah had opened and placed into my heart, what I had learned from my teachers and the examples of the Prophets that is alive with us today.

At our core, our beginning and our end, our heart is the single most important thing in this life, and it is for each of us to reflect on what has been placed inside of it and the layers that have been added by our families, and the societies we were born into. This is why I sat out to write this book, as volumes have been written about decolonization, dealing with politics and even with our minds, and while this is all important none of it compares to what we lose if we lose the core of ourselves. Our heart.

Our essence and the only reality that goes with us beyond our bodies and this world is rooted in our heart, yet for Western philosophy the primary focus has been that of thought and the mind with little said contemporarily about the heart, the soul, and experiential reality of spirituality and faith. This divide, that of existence centered in the mind versus existence centered in the heart is one of the greatest divides on this earth. However for the majority of humanity, people of different faith and spiritual backgrounds these divides did not exist traditionally because the soul, the heart, the mind, and the body were all taken into consideration in integrative forms of holistic knowledge systems and being.

The mind only became the center of human existence as Western philosophers placed themselves at the center of the universe literally through forms of egolatry (the ego/ self at the center of one’s world view as a form of idolatry) as they removed revealed texts from discussion because according to them the existence of God could not be proven using empirical rationalistic methods. Descartes “I think, therefore I am” became a clarion call that placed the mind and Western White men on a pedestal with this conception of the rationalistic thinking MAN at the center of our planet, while displacing and putting into question the humanity of non-European, non-American, non-Male beings. Putting man over the human, the mind over the heart and the soul, and ultimately Western White Being as the center of existence while the rest of humanity who did not fit neatly into these categories could easily be placed into a reality where they were seen as and treated as non-human.

These were the categorizations between being and non-being / human and non-human and once you were placed in the category of non-being or non-human then your lack of self worth, knowledge, or “history” could easily be rationalized, justified, and executed. We have seen this play out over and over again, from the mass murder of entire indigenous populations of the America’s, to the enslavement of one-hundred million plus Africans, to the colonization of the entire planet cut into pieces to serve false White masters and White desires, and today a global American military that can easily destroy any group of people that attempt to go too far from the norms of Westernized, neoliberal capitalism's call for humanity to submit to the call of unbridled consumption and the call of the Western worlds unending culture of entertainment and distraction.

This is a global system that has rained death and destruction on this planet like no previous way of being. This is a system rooted in greed, lust for power, racism, sexism, and the an existence based on following only our whims and immediate desires no matter the consequences. We as humans have been called to live as if all life is sacred and as protectors of each other and the planet. Instead we are living into a bestial existence focused only on ourselves, our immediate families, our race and our lowly desires. This is a global system in crisis with humans struggling for meaning at the center of it all. Ours is un mundo invertido (an upside down world) where right is seen to be wrong, where falsehoods become truths, and where lies are told about all peoples who do not fit into the globalized regime of westernization.

The time has come for each of us to begin to ask what is my path towards personal transformation? How do we build collective visions for a future free from racism, war, and gross inequality? How do I free myself from this existence, before I end up wallowing at the closed door of some shopping mall when this is all gone. Do I free myself now or stay shackled to this existence and be remembered in death only as what this world made me? These are questions that we must ask before it is too late for each of us individually, and us as the collectivity of humanity.

This book is a call for us as human beings to answer the call of what we have been called to as sacred beings and protectors of this earth, and to end this living as lowly desire machines who are destroying this earth for all of existence. It is a call to throw off these chains making us lowly beings and it is a call to re-examine our existence with one key difference, that we look at and examine these realities with our hearts and not only our minds.

When we see the symbol of the heart abstract thoughts about love come to mind, or maybe we think of the physical heart and blood beating through it, but what if we began to think of it instead as the center of our being. The center of our perception, the center of who we are in this body, and at its core in its essence as who we are for all of our existence beyond this body as a soul. What if we began to feel with our hearts, people joke about having Jedi type powers, but if you develop your heart this reality of perception is real. Ok maybe you can’t move objects but you can read situations, you can discern the clear differences between right and wrong, you can feel spiritual light as it grows in your heart and you can feel pain in your heart when you do something wrong or you harm someone. Our hearts are powerful vessels at the core of our being and if we use them correctly and understand how to transform and strengthen our hearts, we could change the trajectory of human existence and birth a new age of existence.

In thinking back to that metallic heart on my Mom’s wall, I think of the flames coming out of the heart at the center, what does this heart on fire mean? The allegorical meaning is nothing short of the divine illumination of our hearts, to have our hearts filled with light to be transformative beings and active agents for light and beauty in our world. Each of us can have a heart that glows and is filled with light, this spiritual illumination is possible, even in the darkest of times. Believe me as the mad scientist who has experimented and felt those depths of pain and suffering in my own heart. Pain that in certain ways was central in my own journey for meaning in this life and for spiritual growth and transformation. Perhaps a story from my own life will help to illuminate this point further.

As a young man seeking truth and guidance I was in the desert on the Dine (Navajo) reservation on land that was once an ocean tens of thousands of years ago. I was staying with the Johnson family who have been resisting removal and corporate colonization of their sacred land for the last thirty years. In the evenings the sky above us came out in an otherworldly way being 90 plus miles from the nearest city.

Each night the horizons lit up with the glory of the cosmos and the divinity of our Creator as the sky was filled with continuous shooting stars. One after the other they fell as I slept outside on the red clay that was once the ocean floor, time and space seemed to leave me.

One night as I lay there reflecting on the universe and the divine a piercing bright light lit up the night sky so bright it seemed briefly as if it were the day. It shot into the atmosphere and turned into a ball of fire flying across the horizon, it seemed to land right near me and then the sound of its cosmic boom followed.

Imagine a light like that, and lights like each falling star you have ever seen.

Now imagine those lights falling into your heart and illuminating it. That is the goodness that we put out into the world and gifts of light from the divine that we are blessed to take in. These lights vary in strength and power, but the key for each of us is keeping that light within us.

The opposite of this light, you could imagine a similar pattern in the sky but this time rather than being from the heavens beyond our world imagine a hellfire missile fired from a drone, or some other machine of war. These things shoot into our beings and literally bomb our hearts, create a hole in them and create a spiritual weight that can consume our hearts and our existence. The negative and evil things we put out into the world cover our heart as if a storm cloud were covering them from the light of divine guidance and mercy.

Imagine then each of the chapters in this book as representing pieces of light and darkness all of which merge in us at our literal core based on what we put into our hearts, what we give out, and what we put into the world whether it is goodness or evil. These chapters are diverse in their topics and this is intentional as to begin a process of decolonizing the heart we have to understand the world as it exists around us. This book is broken into three parts and in these parts there are short chapters that are meant to be introductions to these topics with further reading, resources and reflection questions at the end of each chapter for the reader to go deeper on the subjects they are most interested in. The book is outlined as followed:

Book 1 - The Book of Openings

Heart over Mind… Our Roots and Our Essence….

The True Burden of this White Skin… On the Heart … On Decolonizing the Heart… On Life, Existence and Reality… On Being and Death…. On Children & Parents…. On Peace and War… On Civilization’s and Colonization… On Tradition and History… On God, Religion, and Spirituality… On Mercy… On Desire, Addiction and Happiness… On Worldview and Creation Stories (Cosmology)… On Knowledge (Epistemology)… On the Future of Our World…

Book 2 - The Book of Reality as it Is

On the Confusion of Our Times… On Race… On Gender… On Trauma, Pain, and Suffering…On Capitalism and Class… On Nationalism… On Media and the Spectacle of the Lifestyle… On Government and Democracy… On the Intersections of Oppression… On Identity… On Work…

Book 3 - The Book of Transformations

On Nature and the Cosmos… On the Unseen Realm… On Good… On Evil… On Repentance…On the Heart, the Mind, the Body and the Soul…On Shifting Perception, Shifting Existence (On the Experiential Reality of God)… On Prayer… On Spiritual Light… On Love… On Family… On Relationships… On Mutual Cooperation, Interfaith Existence, and Unity…. On a Holistic Epistemology and Existence… On Decolonization… On Islam… Western Modernity's End Game?: Genocide, Ecocide and the Planetary Apocalypse… Gods Dream: Know One Another…. Towards Beauty and Transcendence...

I began this book as an outline more than ten years ago, I have typed some of these words over the years little by little and most of these words over the last few months but what has stayed consistent is the basic outline and chapter headings. Over the last fifteen years I have spent a lot of time in study, in spiritual experimentation, and in life ridding the wave of the divine. These are my reflections on life as I’ve lived it and the outline of these chapters is meant to be an overview to the primary things that I think all of us as human beings should be thinking about to navigate our reality. This book would look different if every person on this earth took this basic outline and reflected on what each of these things mean for them. In many cases like my own experience, my answers and beliefs surrounding each of these chapters would be different over many different stages of my life and they will most likely be different if I were to sit down 20 years from now and take up these questions and topics again. We as humans are evolutionary beings and we change during each stage in our life, with spiritual growth and openings, with growth in knowledge and experience, with love, with children, with sickness, and with death. Today as I write this I am a 43 year old White male, born in the suburbs of Denver, Colorado to loving parents. I have been deeply engaged with community organizing work since I was 21 years old, and I converted to Islam at 22. While my faith, my family, my politics, my country of birth, and my beliefs are central to the story I tell in these pages here, many of the themes I explore are universal to our collective human experience today.

The style of this book is made to be general enough where it is accessible to everyone, while also going deep enough into these topics to give a brief introduction and overview with further reading, viewing and online references to allow you to go deeper with the subjects you are most interested in. This book is part spiritual insight, part philosophizing, and part storytelling with hopes to show each of the topics that I take up in this book from different angles.

Ultimately this book is a prayer for humanity, a prayer for my family, and a prayer for myself to master these realities I have been working on for all of my life, while knowing that although I can write these words to internalize them is a process I know I will be always be working on. In this life we must set our intentions high while knowing the qalb (heart), the term for the heart in Arabic, is that which fluctuates and is in a constant state of change. May we all have consistency and balance in our hearts, clarity and light in the visions of our hearts, and the spiritual strength and the divine assistance to transform ourselves and the world around us.

To answer this call we must each learn how to, “Wage Beauty,” a term borrowed from my dear friend and teacher, Mark Gonzales. Wage beauty against ourselves and the complacency and silence that has grown in our hearts. Wage beauty in our homes and in every aspect of our lives, let our hearts flower and guide our actions as we stand for who we truly are as human beings. As we stand to throw off the shackles of this five hundred year old age of death and be birthed into the age of life, the age of the living and out of our lives as zombies who follow only our lowest desires. Let us wage beauty and paint on the walls of conformity in bright colors as we fill our concrete streets with murals done with side walk chalk and the masterpieces of children. The lines have been broken and we are birthed alive, anew, standing with our backs straight, inhale life, exhale our traumas and let it leave our collective consciousness together as we wage beauty together.