<ibshambat@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:1e5c0335-3352-4139-aa2e-06466e1d2b66@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>A Russian writer stated, "In Russia, there are two kinds of people:
> Smart and mean, and stupid and kind." In America, the mind and heart
> can be seen arranged in two significant misdirections, and with other
> more positive possibilities.
>
> One common American misdirection is the Midwestern-style anti-
> intellectual "hey-mr-smartie-pants-who-do-you-think-you-are" crowd.
> These compensate for their intellectual inferiority by claiming that
> someone who has a mind can't also have a heart. The other is the
> emotionally repressive rationalists, reductionists, logical
> positivists, behaviorists, "skeptics," eliminativists, and others who
> want to deny the validity of anything intuitive or heart-involving.
> These compensate for their emotional inferiority by claiming that
> those who have a heart can't also have a mind. Both are in grave
> error.
>
> In effect, there are good hearts and bad hearts at every level of
> intellect. There are brilliant jerks like Freud, Hitler or J. Edgar
> Hoover and brilliant great men like Jefferson, Franklin, Gandhi or
> Martin Luther King. There are good-hearted dumb Forrest Gump types and
> there are stupid creeps who rape 9-year-old black girls and think that
> they are doing their country a favor. The dogma on both sides of this
> is not in tune with reality, and to be able to see things for what
> they are it becomes necessary to be free of that dogma.
>
> The heart can in fact produce insight and wisdom; and there are people
> of all intellectual levels who found, from going to significant
> lengths to develop the heart, that they came in possession of insight
> and understanding that they had not possessed previously. It is aso
> possible through development of the mind to come to the place of the
> heart - to the place of appreciation and wonder before the universe as
> its mysteries are deeper and deeper fathomed - to the place of respect
> for what has such intricacy, complexity and beauty; to the place of
> seeing the
> next person enough to empathize with them; to the place of fathoming
> the magnificence of the world enough to love it. Where both mind and
> heart merge into insight, compassion, understanding and love, is the
> place of wisdom. Which, like light that is both energy and matter
> (both wave and particle), becomes the point of intersection of mind
> and heart, where they exist together as one at the place of embodied
> infinity.
>
> Many genuine scientists and mathematicians (as opposed to "skeptics"
> and "rationalists" and others of similar persuasion) develop kind
> hearts, as that is the appropriate logical reaction to genuinely
> beholding magnificence of the Universe. Many people who work with the
> matters of heart develop very sharp minds, as that is what it takes to
> adequately fathom, nurture and resolve matters of human experience for
> existent and long-term benefit.
>
> The mind can therefore be a valid path to the heart, and the heart to
> the mind.
>
> It therefore follows that an effective path to take is the integrative
> one of mind and heart feeding into each other and growing each other
> as well as themselves into both mentally fathomed and emotionally
> experienced universe-attuned wisdom.
>
> Ilya Shambat
> http://www.myspace.com/ibshambat
Nice piece. I would make just one comment. People are born with kind
hearts.
Not genetically observable of course, but nor is love.
BOfL
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