To hear with your heart not your ears.
To feel with your heart not your hands.
To see with your heart not your eyes.
To speak with your heart not your mouth.
To think with your heart not your mind.
To be one with all in the heart.
~ Running Elk Woman
At a deeper level, The View tells us that we are subjects with our own locus of awareness. So then, if all beings become aware that they have a choice in all their own attitudes and perceptions, then that may end the intensity of suffering. If we understand that suffering is part of the expression of the Divine Goddess and is therefore also her playful act of love, then as subjects with awareness, we get to choose how we perceive suffering. Layer by layer as one unpacks these lines, we approach this kernel of acceptance of all beings and all happenings as an act of Divine expression. The heart is born knowing this wisdom, and then as we grow we learn to receive the veils of our culture.
The poem To Understand written By Running Elk Woman, a Native American, embodies a subtle version of what I believe The View connotes. Both writings guide us into a knowing that is universal and felt within our core. They equally point us toward the same experience of our own Divine nature, our own essence. In experiencing our own divinity, we experience with our hearts the whole of the NST tradition. This awakening is parallel to a child who experiences the rain with all her senses. She now can clearly remember its essence, hear, see, smell, taste, and touch rain, knowing it within her heart and soul, even during a drought.
To Understand, is how I feel when I wake up and live my life with the knowledge of what The View explains that we are born of. When I experience the Divine reflection of Light that the Goddess expresses, ever changing, I am “one with all in my heart,” as Running Elk Woman writes so beautifully. I am “an incandescent radiance of the complete expansion into perfect wholeness,” as Wallace notes in his description of what one experiences when the all belief in dualism is “annihilated.” Ultimately, whether the poetry of a young Native American or the intricate explanations of a studied seeker illuminate the path for you, the message of the Universal Divine is the same: we are one, born of the same one, made in one consciousness, living in oneness of one love. We are enlightened, the moment we choose to view life from the eye of the Heart. Both The View & To Understand can help us all remember to stay inspired on the path to the remembrance of non-dualism.