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Love is the activity of evoking being, of enhancing life.

  -- Brian Swimme, The Universe is a Green Dragon

We have only the world that we bring forth with others,
and only love helps us bring it forth.

-- Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. The Tree of Knowledge

We don’t need anybody else
To tell us what is real
Inside each one of us is love
And we know how it feels

                               -- Paul McCartney, from Somedays in Flaming Pie

The conscious, intelligent, responsive universe that interacts continuously with all beings is responsible for creative inspiration. And its driving force is love. Whenever we create, we are expressing the universe’s love. And whenever we express love, we are making manifest the cosmos’s creative power.

In acting as a conduit for the universe’s love, human creation ultimately creates love. As author Maxine Greene puts it, “Imagination is what, above all, makes empathy possible. It is what enables us to cross the empty spaces between ourselves and those . . . we have called ‘other’ over the years.”

When Wassily Kandinsky lamented that “art has lost her soul,”  [Concerning the Spiritual in Art] he might well have been referring the loss of our ability to love our world. Now that we’re in danger of losing our only home, we’re realizing that every being in it has the ability to manifest the loving power of the universe: each of us is a creator, and each of us must contribute our love and our creations if life on our planet is to survive.

Seeing with Our Hearts

Look around. Better yet, let your heart look around. Are we happy with the way we interact with one another? Are we creating or destroying the world given to us? I suspect our hearts may hold some of the answers.

-- Renee A. Levi

Certainly we are not taught to see with the heart, and yet the instinct is there. Ask anyone quickly to identify himself, and he will point to his heart, not to his head.

-- Alice O. Howell, Jungian Symbolism

It is only with the heart that we can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

-- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

The eyes of love are the eyes of the heart. They offer a secret escape route from the prison of our brain-boxes—a way to connect directly with the essence of everything, with no interference from our so very limited “rational” vision.

For most of us, the eyes of the heart offer a new way of seeing—the expanded perception that our ancestors used.

As John Perkins recalls, Shuar elder and shaman Tampur told him the following:

“Do as your spirit, your heart, directs. Don’t think too much, the way my grandchildren are taught to do in the mission schools.

“Thinking is fine when we have to figure something out, like how to place a pole to help us get fruit from the spiny chonta tree that is impossible to climb. But when it comes to most things in life, the heart has the voice to listen to, because the heart knows how to follow the advice of the spirits. So I listen to my heart a lot. . . .

“Your heart is part of the universe. If you listen to your heart, you hear the Voice of the Universe. . . . Great wisdom is spoken every moment by the Voice of the Universe. You only need to listen. Your heart is always listening.

“Crossing your hands over your heart may help you to remember.” Slowly he raised his hands and laid them across his heart. Do this sometimes. [John Perkins, Shapeshifting]

Sioux holy man Fools Crow explains:

If I decide with my mind I am influenced by all kinds of thoughts that fight against one another. If I try to decide with my eyes, even though I see with love, it is hard not to be influenced by what I actually see—how people look, react, and what they are doing.

If I decide with my heart, my judgments are never harsh. My heart takes into account the things that have hurt people—what they have had to deal with just to stay sane and alive. I guess this can be applied to most of the people in the world.

My heart thinks about fairness, comfort and hope. [Thomas E. Mails, Fools Crow]

Renee A. Levi maintains that the intelligence of the heart brings in messages of empathy, connection, and love from both local and nonlocal energy fields and communicates with other hearts through entrainment.

“Perhaps . . . the individual human heart or the amplified heart resonance in groups can entrain with yet greater energetic forces in the universe, listening for messages that might help us live together more effectively than we seem to have been able to do with our brains solely in charge,” she suggests.

Interestingly, a 2013 study by Sweden’s University of Gothenburg published in Frontiers in Neuroscience revealed that when people sing in unison, their heartbeats automatically synchronize, reminding us of the way our ancestors used chanting and drumming in their spiritual practices.

Stephen Harrod Buhner claims that the kind of imagination that allows humans to comprehend and communicate with their environment “occurs not through or in the brain but through and in the heart.” [Stephen Harrod Buhner, Plant Intelligence]

Citing numerous recent studies of the heart’s hitherto-unsuspected role in perception, Joseph Chilton Pearce points out that “the heart, earth and sun furnish us the fundamental materials for our reality-­making. . . . Heart radiation saturates every cell, DNA molecule, glia, and so on, and helps determine their function and destiny,” he explains. “From this viewpoint the heart seems a frequency generator, creating the fields of information out of which we build our experience of ourselves and the world.”

It is the heart, he says, entraining with the brain, that will enable us to see again—to “see all things as ‘holy’ or whole, as William Blake did, or ‘see God in each other,’ as Muktananda did, or find God in the ‘least of these our brothers,’ as Jesus did,” and which “offers us a dominion over our world that we have not yet accepted or exercised”—the same dominion, born of love, that may have permitted our remote ancestors to move gigantic stones.[Joseph Chilton Pearce, The Biology of Transcendence]

The eyes of the heart see the big picture, helping us understand that every one of us is a victim of humanity’s mistakes, and love is our only hope of dissolving the fear that drives collective stupidity.

Robert Wolff gives us a dramatic description of the way he learned to use the eyes of the heart. He had been hiking in the Malaysian jungle with Ahmeed, his Sng’oi shaman teacher, and was getting thirsty. Finally he decided to try to find some water.

“Do not talk,” Ahmeed said—I knew he meant do not think. “Water inside heart,” he said next, with a gesture of his hand on his heart. I knew he meant I should sense inside—not with my mind, but from the inside. . . .

As soon as I stopped thinking, planning, deciding, analyzing—using my mind, in short—I felt as if I was pushed in a certain direction. I walked a few steps and immediately saw a big leaf with perhaps half a cup of water in it. . . .

My perception opened further. I no longer saw water—what I felt with my whole being was a leaf-with-water-in-it, attached to a plant that grew in soil surrounded by uncounted other plants, all part of the same blanket of living things covering the soil, which was also part of a larger living skin around the earth.

And nothing was separate; all was one, the same thing: water—leaf—plant—trees—soil—animals—earth—air—sunlight and little wisps of wind. The all-ness was everywhere, and I was part of it. . . .

Standing over a leaf with a little water in it, somewhere in the jungles of Malaysia, I did not think in words. I did not think. I bathed in that overwhelming sense of oneness. I felt as if a light was lit deep inside me. I knew I was radiating something—love, ­perhaps—for this incredible world, this rich, varied, and totally interconnected world of creations that, at the same time, gave love to me.

And with the love, I also felt a very deep sense of belonging. [Robert Wolff, Original Wisdom: Stories of an Ancient Way of Knowing]

An Uncommon Love Story

In a cave in Borneo, a love story unfolds every day. The BBC’s Planet Earth documentary series has captured a horrifically creepy sequence: thousands of bats roosting inside a huge cave have produced a mountain of dung, upon which a living carpet of cockroaches feeds continuously, in a crawling, gobbling frenzy.

A love story???

When seen from our usual modern human perspective, this nightmarish scene undoubtedly elicits instant fear and loathing. But what if we were to view it as a living system, whose components are working together in perfect, harmonious cooperation and reciprocity? What if we were to imagine what the bats and cockroaches might be experiencing? What if, instead of automatically recoiling with repulsion, we paused for a moment and tried to see the scene with the eyes of the heart—the loving eyes of Mother Earth?

Here’s what we might see: The bats, flocking together in synchronized flight, soar out of the cave each evening to feed—and occasionally, to offer themselves as food for waiting birds of prey. When the survivors return to roost and deposit their droppings, they bring the cockroaches food that the cave-dwelling bugs could never otherwise obtain.

In exchange, the cockroaches, also swarming in unison, clean the bats’ home, recycling their waste. Each species, and each individual being, is in service to another; all are acting together for the good of the whole.

Who can say what kind of love binds this cave’s creatures? What allurement brought them together in the first place?

Viewed archetypically, this love story has a message for us. A cave is a womb, a place of gestation and transformation “where the germinating powers of the earth are concentrated, where oracles speak, where initiates are reborn in spiritual understanding, and where souls ascend to celestial light.”

The bats, symbols of shamanic death and rebirth, roost head-down, resembling fetuses preparing to be born. In the Tarot, the Hanged Man is suspended head-down, representing the mystic who serves by placing heart above head.

The bats venture forth on their perilous journey and then return to the womb, enacting the hero’s transformational quest and life’s eternal cycles.

The dung is hucha, the heavy energy we must release and offer as food to Pachamama for recycling; the cockroaches are a manifestation of Mother Earth’s generosity in helpfully digesting that which we don’t need.

Love stories are happening all around us, all the time. Imagination can help us expand our limited vision and start seeing all of them as part of the big picture.

We can reframe our reality—sometimes even transform what we once viewed with horror into something necessary and beautiful—­simply by looking at it with the eyes of the heart.

Loving as One

The universe would never bother to create two Shakespeares. That would only reveal limited creativity. The Ultimate Mystery from which all beings emerge prefers Ultimate Extravagance, each being glistening with freshness, ontologically unique, never to be repeated. Each being is required. None can be eliminated or ignored, for not one is redundant. -- Brian Swimme, The Universe is a Green Dragon

People come to see each other in a very different way, with different eyes. . . . They find themselves able to look beyond appearances—dress, stature, skin color—to see a deeper reflection in, and connection with, one another. They begin to notice the myriad forms in which people offer their gifts.  -- Alan Briskin, et al. Centered on the Edge

When we relearn how to “think as one,” we rediscover how to love as one. Group magic gives us a way to plug into the loving, creative energy of the cosmos.

This process needs every single one of us, with our unique ­configuration of energies, stories, and gifts, each one channeling cosmic energy in a way that has never been done before and will never be done again. It asks us to see, hear, and accept each other in all our glorious diversity.

For Maxine Greene, telling our stories—as she puts it, “naming our lived worlds,” as art does, as literature does—is a powerful way to bring our worlds, and our hearts, together, forming “an expanding community that takes shape when diverse people, speaking as who and not what they are, come together in both speech and action to constitute something in common among themselves.”

She adds, “We are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.” She quotes Hannah Arendt, who noted that “even though we are on a common ground, we have different locations on that ground, and ‘each one sees or hears from a different position.’” [Maxine Green, Releasing the Imagination]

Each of our viewpoints, shaped by our personal joys and heartbreaks, is necessary to create a truly new vision—and from it, a new world. This is the creative power of the group. Together, we create a new configuration—a new, unique channel for the endless outpouring of energy from the field.

“If we [like the Tibetans and Navajos] can awaken to the profound reality of our sacred world and develop a responsible relationship with it, we, too, may realize our connection with this living, pulsating universe of totally interconnected forms, energies, and ideas,” writes Peter Gold. “Knowing this, how can one help but develop a sense of wonder, comfort, responsibility, and—in its purest expression—compassion for all beings and objects with which we coexist and interpenetrate in this amazing reality? Is not this awareness true love?” [Peter Gold, Navajo and Tibetan Sacred Wisdom]

©2020 by Dery Dyer. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpted with permission.
Publisher: Bear and Co, a divn of Inner Traditions Intl
BearandCompanyBooks.com and InnerTraditions.com.

Article Source

The Return of Collective Intelligence: Ancient Wisdom for a World out of Balance
by Dery Dyer

Drawing on recent findings in New Paradigm science, traditional teachings from indigenous groups, as well as sacred geometry, deep ecology, and expanded states of consciousness, the author shows how the ability to think and act collectively for the highest good is hardwired in all living beings. She explains how to release ourselves from enslavement by technology and use it more wisely toward the betterment of all life. Underscoring the vital importance of ceremony, pilgrimage, and initiation, she offers ways for us to reconnect to the infinite source of wisdom that fuels collective intelligence and which manifests everywhere in the natural world.

For more info, or to order this book, click here. (Also available as a Kindle edition and as an Audiobook.)

About the Author

Dery Dyer is former editor and publisher of Costa Rica’s award-winning English-language newspaper, The Tico Times, where she worked for over 40 years. She holds degrees in literature and journalism from U.S. and Costa Rican universities and has studied indigenous spirituality in many different parts of the world. She lives in Costa Rica.