The world of social media often speaks only of money and notoriety, even though the satisfaction these provide is limited. Money allows us to meet essential and intermediate needs, but beyond a certain point, it is no longer enough. To go further, we must work with our hearts in such a way that they help us see the world in all its beauty. I would even add that we must first work with our hearts, because they allow us to make the right decisions without being deceived by the illusory quests for money or prestige.
The heart is the lens that allows us to see the world
People think that the eyes are the organs that allow us to see, when in reality it is the heart. A pure heart sees the world as it is, free from the prejudices and hatred that darken our vision. Negative emotions are decoys because they divert us from what is obvious and yet right before our eyes. If there were only one task to do in our lives, it would be to work constantly to ennoble our hearts, that is, to rid them of the superfluous—whatever hinders our understanding of others and of our surroundings.
Forget the intellect for a moment, focus on the heart
Modern life is focused on efficiency, which is why it gives credit to intelligence. Intelligence indeed allows us to build many things. However, if only one thing were to be remembered, it would be the soul and therefore the heart, because that is where the soul resides, and it alone allows us to find true happiness. Certainly, you can develop your intelligence, but it must be subordinate to your heart.
To develop the quality of your heart, you must think in terms of virtue
If you feel you have shortcomings regarding the quality of your heart, try to develop a noble quality so as to gradually eliminate that flaw. This improvement will have a positive collateral effect on other qualities. One virtue calls forth another, just as one vice calls forth another. Here is a non-exhaustive list of qualities you could develop:
Patience
A sense of justice
Courage
Kindness
Generosity
Humility
Temperance
Loyalty
Compassion
Gratitude, or even empathy.
Choose one of these virtues for each day of the week, or each week of the month, or even each month of the year, and try as much as possible to illustrate that virtue through your behavior.
Use introspection to improve your heart
You must find a way to encourage yourself to go in the right direction.
Some religions order their adherents to follow a rigorous practice; this is called orthopraxy. Praying then ceases to be a personal choice and becomes an injunction that every believer must fulfill each day in order to be considered as such. This obligation somewhat simplifies matters of spirituality, because an inversion takes place: it is no longer material or social life that takes precedence, but the spiritual. Where people often structure their day around work and professional obligations, orthopraxy emphasizes what is essential and prevents an inversion of values. If you are not already engaged in this kind of good “spiritual rigidity,” you can recreate this type of mental conditioning yourself, particularly by setting up a system of points and rewards.
It is up to you to motivate yourself
If you observe that you struggle to behave well on a daily basis and feel that you are wasting time on useless things or not dedicating enough time to the most important tasks, you need to set up a system that allows you to overcome this problem. The first thing is to realize that the lack of discipline you suffer from is partly a mental conditioning and that to reverse things, it will take some time. Your brain indeed needs time to be rewired. A simple way to motivate yourself is to set up a point system that works somewhat like money: each good action earns you positive points, and each activity you consider negative subtracts points. This system relies above all on your good faith to function, since it is you who will assign points to each activity. Negative points can be seen as a way to reward you for the efforts you have made. For example, you could establish that performing a prayer gives you 5 points and that drinking a soda subtracts 3 points. The goal is that eventually you will consider prayer in an autotelic way, that is, you will appreciate it for its own sake and not for the points it brings you. Generally, a beneficial activity (e.g., exercising) needs extrinsic motivation at the beginning (e.g., becoming more attractive), whereas a harmful activity is rather easy at the beginning (e.g., eating sweets). Furthermore, your personal point system should take into account the qualitative dimension when you perform your tasks. For example, if you perform a prayer and it was beautiful and deep—more than usual—you might give yourself 7 points or even more. Conversely, if you were half-distracted and could not enter deeply into your prayer, you might give yourself only 3 points or less. The main idea of this point system is that you create a scale only for activities that require motivation to be performed or avoided, not for those that are already deeply ingrained in your habits (e.g., brushing your teeth, being polite, etc.). Each person is unique, and therefore each person has their own point system and priorities. If you wish to initiate new spiritual habits, give maximum points to prayer or meditation at first, then gradually lower their coefficient when you feel these practices are sufficiently ingrained. Eventually, you won’t even need such a system once your good habits are consolidated and bad ones prevented. It is possible that from time to time, for example once a month for a week, you reinstate this system to ensure that everything has remained on track.
Bad experiences are there to make your heart work
There are two ways to react to a bad situation: to complain or to use it to become better. Of course, the best attitude in these circumstances is the second, much like an airplane uses air to soar into the sky. How can you turn a setback into wisdom and thereby improve your heart? The simple answer would be to say that you must especially reflect on how to see it as carrying a lesson. If you are experienced, you could almost in real time draw lessons from your bad experiences.
First, you must learn to change your vocabulary. If you speak of a “bad experience,” you will struggle to extract any wisdom from it. Rather, speak of a “challenge” or an “obstacle,” because both can be overcome. Then, reflect on how you can face these challenges in the best possible way. When facing an enemy, you can be overwhelmed by resentment, and resentment is not a good advisor. A better approach is to send love to the situation in order to clarify things and see if something you had ignored could be used to emerge triumphantly from what initially seemed like a dead end.
One important thing to help you resolve challenges is to show compassion toward yourself. Spend time alone every day. Ensure you get good sleep, eat enough, take care of your soul by praying regularly. Once this foundation is guaranteed, you will put all the chances on your side to approach things with calm, concentration, and kindness—all qualities necessary to overcome difficulties in the best possible way.
Make your heart work
What happens nowadays is that we function on autopilot. Efficiency values intellect and will, so we use our reason and strength in every situation to solve our problems. However, intellect and will are only two keys to problem-solving that need a third, and this third is activated by love.
Observe the quality of the emotions that flow through you without necessarily wanting to erase them
Adherents of positive thinking believe that negative emotions are fundamentally bad. This is not the case. Rather, they are clues, traces left by your consciousness precisely so that you become aware of the quality of that consciousness. Emotions are to consciousness what the thermometer is to temperature. It is not by hiding them that you will alter reality.
The thermometer does not make the weather, and emotion does not make the level of consciousness. Instead, use this information to advance your heart. It is above all in a pure heart that an elevated consciousness resides. To make progress in the realm of the heart, it is good to have ongoing feedback. Emotions constitute one of these feedbacks.
Find the hidden reasons behind these negative emotions
Each negative emotion contains a truth, a wisdom to be explored. In itself, this emotion shows that your heart can still make progress so that compassion, kindness, or love replaces that negative emotion.
Do not regret past behavior; rather, draw lessons from it
When contemplating the past, one sometimes finds oneself in a situation where one regrets one’s reaction to events or people. For example, it often happens that one is sad or pained at having become angry about something or someone about which one later learned more, which made one’s reaction futile or even ridiculous. Essentially, bad reactions arising from bad emotions are the fruit of ignorance. That is why a sage is what he is. His love and kindness come from his knowledge (wisdom and knowledge share the same etymology). This explains why it is necessary to have experiences and a love for learning to advance your heart.
The knowledge that matters most is linked to the soul
You are the product of successive incarnations—listen to what I say even if you do not believe in this. You have a form of latent knowledge that is transmitted from incarnation to incarnation. If you focus your learning on wisdom and the progress of your soul, you will potentially be able to draw from the teachings of past incarnations, which will make your progress faster than in other, more recent fields (computing, etc.).
The purpose of life is to be a good person, and that is what makes you happy
Finally, if there were one definitive statement to make, it would be that happiness is lived in the heart and not elsewhere—namely, in the intellect, the body, the senses, etc. To optimize your happiness capital, you must be able to increase your heart’s capacities. An improvement in morality through the practice of virtue necessarily induces a greater potential for happiness. It is a bit like having a very beautiful car, with a beautiful body and a beautiful interior. If happiness in this situation corresponded to speed, it would be useless to devote yourself to anything other than the engine and its power. So I leave you to meditate on this image and see how you can change your life to go faster or live life more deeply through a great heart.
