And since there's so many nerves in the heart such as the sinuatrial node, the heart nerves also need to be given the task of sensing the witness, to let go of the images which keep boiling up and disturbing the silence. Receiving these images often gives the impression that they have been given to us telepathically. And wee might just have received them telepathically, and that's very cool. But if we don't check them with the Witness, then what will happen is the code will force us into just repeating stuff that we learned fifteen years ago about what we thought was telepathic. This is a holding pattern in which our capacity does not grow. If our capacity doesn't grow, telepathy will be there, but our moral structure will suffer. We run the risk of getting caught up in power games, or making a career out of seeing people's diseased organs. To have these gifts and to serve others with them by getting out of the way of the healing is one thing. To make a bundle on them is another. If we look at what happens to people who cannot get to the Witness level with their gifts, they pay the price with their emotional well-being. The bookstores are filled with those stories. The seers or trance channelers rise on a wave of seeing for four or five years and then you never hear of them again, because they just get burned out and tossed overboard by a fickle world. And life's too short for that, especially if you have gifts desperately needed to heal a sick world. The modern path for the seer is to give away the gifts so that capacity can be developed. The capacity is the gift transformed in the seer by the deed of giving it away. A gift usually operates in the dynamic between the subconscious, filled with personality fragments and the day-awake state of daily life. A capacity has cognitive elements which operate between the day awake state and the superconscious, the realm of higher soul states such as the creative state of Imagination.
So if we wish to be creative as we get older and we want to be creative for most of our life then feeding the heart clear objective pictures of processes that are unfolding forwards and backwards, gives the heart some wiggle room. The inner pictures which we work with have to go through reversals, from this to that, from up here, to down there. Here it's on the right, here it's on the left. It used to be on the left, now it's on the right. The blood used to be in the center, now it's on the outside. Now it's back in the center. That's the world the heart lives in. And the thinking of the heart has to deal with constant reversal, which means, the problem comes into being and forms, and then it has to dissolve and go away again, just in the exactly opposite way that it came into being.
Since that is the essence of the way in which the heart moves if we can manage to do that kind of thinking and picturing inwardly, again and again without wanting an answer to fall out of the process, then the heart goes, oh, yeah, I recognize this. You're doing my thing here. Yeah, I can get with this. Now what was that you said? Oh, I'll get back to you tomorrow. I'll work on it during the day. How is this? How is this? At night the heart goes with the Witness to check out Saturn, and then maybe over to Antares, and then they check in with the Kyriotetes, or Cherubim, and then they come back. And they say, you know the Cherubim loved what you thought backwards right before you went to sleep, but the Dynamis didn't think it was moving quite in the right way. Can you work on that again? Okay. Yeah. We'll send that back to you again. And then it comes to you in a dream. And the next night you do it backwards again, but this time adding what you learned from the Dynamis, and it goes out again. And then after three or four days it comes back from the Cherubim through the Dynamis, and the Angel goes to the Witness, "They said yeah." And then the heart gets it. Then what happens I'll illustrate with this diagram from Jacob Boehme. The heart is deep and totally mysterious. So Jacob Boehme has a diagram to depict this state.
This picture is a little meditative device. It has many meanings, but as I understand it, this is the heart of the person working on themselves that has been turned upside down, and the eye of the heart opens, but it opens in lagrima -- through suffering, through travail and sorrow. And so this is the tear of the eye of the heart. It is the tear of empathy with all being. And when that tear forms in the eye of the heart, the heart that is now reversed flames up with enthusiasm.
[Question]: Would you say that again?
[Response]: When the heart reverses and the eye of the heart opens and the tear of compassion forms in the eye of the heart, then the flame comes up out of the reversed heart as a consuming flame of enthusiasm for being -- for just being. Not being anything, but just being. Enthusiasm for being. What Rudolf Steiner calls trust in life. And trust in life is what the heart can give us when we stop wanting answers. It's okay to get answers in the realm of the IRS or in mathematics, because we must render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar. But when you want to get answers about deep destiny problems, you can't apply that same logic to life, because life is not perfect in that analytical way. But life's more perfect than we can imagine because it includes all imperfection. Imperfection is an integral part of the process towards universal perfection. The heart is in touch with the necessity for imperfection to exist as a path towards perfection, but it has to be turned away from the power of owning the answer in order for the eye of compassion to open in the heart. On the other hand the heart must be given clear thoughts and very precise images -- that's what the little hands in the diagram represent, the work we must do in order to form exact images. We form exact images with the arms of the heart. You can actually imagine there are little arms from your heart that go out, and you actually sculpt the little Rembrandt figures in the 100 Guilder print with the arms of the heart. Then you look at them with the eye of the heart. And you try to ask yourself, what was this person feeling, standing there when Christ was gesturing like he is in this print? What was that person who Rembrandt depicted feeling about themselves? And Rembrandt can help you do that, because his heart eye was open to see into other souls and as an artist he put that insight in the picture through the limbs of his heart. So when you touch in with that level of the image and you enter into that in your own feelings, Rembrandt is present as a soul across the threshold who can help you in a lawful way. With his help you can think all the way into another and trust all the way through the process, so that the heart can expand into the becoming of that person in the print. And each one of those little people in that picture is you in a different soul gesture, or else you couldn't recognize them. And they're you in different flavors, and different colors, and different moods, and different times, with different people.
So with your heart eye open you can surf through all that human astrality. And if you protect the forming of the heart eye, you can eventually try to picture the picture forming process as it happened in the artist. Try to picture the Rembrandt print being made. One time in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, after I'd been working with Rembrandt for a long while, copying drawings, doing etchings and stuff -- and I walked into the Metropolitan, there was this really big picture by Rembrandt (it was "The Nightwatch") and I had been practicing living into the mind of the artist. I sat down in a little chair and I was looking at the painting, and suddenly I had the experience that Rembrandt was standing there putting that paint on. I walked up to the painting and looked at the paint and I was like, whoa! There's something still present there in this paint that was present at the time when this man was there making this painting. And I could stand there and feel his presence.
More recently I was in the Met again. I was looking for a particular Cézanne which I did not know was not in that museum, I was just sort of wandering around among the paintings and I felt a bit disembodied so I decided to do a scan of the pictures walking through the galleries with my heart eye open. As I was walking through the museum I didn't know it but I was moving toward a particular picture. I walked through a door between rooms and something went out into the space near one small picture. It was hung badly near to a doorway in bad lighting. It was a picture of "Saskia" his wife (it's only about this big, 2.5' x 2.5'). The painting looked kind of dark. But I stopped and just looked at it softly with not much of an identification process going on. I thought that I had 'seen' the painting and the impulse to keep walking on arose there in the dark corner when suddenly I looked into her eye and oooooohhh just happened and everything inside me melted. I spent two hours standing there looking in her eye. Then I went back to where I was staying. I was fried. I had to take a nap. But later that afternoon I was drawn back to the museum by that magic in her eye and I spent two more hours standing there looking through her eye into a whole universe of warmth, tenderness and compassion. Hello out there! Either I'm totally nuts or there was something incredible in that eye. Both may be true. My heart eye found that there was something in that picture that was deep food for the soul that went beyond anything I could really understand with my reasoning processes in my nerves. But these things can definitely be understood with our blood flowing through our heart. The problem is we have to train our hearts to think.