Question: I was wondering about the relationship between the heart and the mind. How can we integrate the two?¹²¹

Sri Chinmoy: There are two ways. One way is for the heart to enter into the mind. The other way is for the mind to enter into the heart. Let us take the heart as the mother and the mind as the child. The mother is calm, quiet and full of love, whereas the child right now is uncertain, doubtful and restless. Either the child has to go to the mother or the mother has to go to the child.

When the mother comes to the child, the child has to feel that the mother has come with good intentions: to calm the mind, to free the mind, to fulfil the mind in a divine way. If the restless mind is doubtful and suspicious of the heart, then it is lost. If the child feels that the mother has come only to bother him, if he continues to cherish all his bad qualities and feel that they are good, then what can the poor mother do? The heart will come with good intentions, hoping to transform the mind’s doubt into faith and its other undivine qualities into divine qualities. But the mind has to be prepared; it has to feel that the heart has come with the idea of changing it for the better.

The other way comes when the mind has gone through everything negative and destructive — fear, doubt, suspicion, jealousy, impurity and so forth — and finally reaches the point where it feels it is high time to go to someone who can give it something better. Who is this someone? The heart! If the mind is aspiring, it will immediately feel that the heart is like a real mother, and the heart will always feel that the mind is a child who needs instruction.

Both ways are effective. If the mind is ready to learn from the heart, the heart is always eager to teach it. The mother is ready to help and serve the child twenty-four hours a day. It is the child who sometimes becomes irritated, disobedient or obstinate and feels that he knows everything and has nothing to learn from anybody else. But the mind must learn from someone else. Even the mother, the heart, gets knowledge from someone else — from the soul, which is all light. Let us call the soul the grandmother. From the grandmother the mother learns, and from the mother the child has to learn. If we can see the relationship between the heart and the mind as a relationship of mother to child, that is the best way to integrate the two.