If you don’t have a temple in your heart you will never find your heart in the temple

Photo by Michael Xu on Unsplash

This Rumi quote vividly paints a picture of where the real work is. It pinpoints where our real work is. It locates exactly where the workshop is located. It locates where the inner workshop is held.

 

Rumi of course does not mean the heart where blood is pumped in and out. Rumi refers to our mind when he says “heart”. Like all Eastern people when they talk about the heart, they mean the mind.

 

It’s not the brain either. Although the brain has something to do with it, but the mind is not the brain.

 

Our heart, or our mind, is the sum total of all the components of a continuous stream of our mental consciousness.

 

This is where we build our temple first by doing our inner work. It’s where we discriminate the different components of what comes in and out of our mind. It’s where we tend to the garden of our mind, nurturing the flowers and removing the weeds. Where we selectively water more the positive seeds and be careful not to water the negative seeds.  

 

When we fully accept that we create our thoughts, and we have choice in every thought that we create, and that we are building our own temple stone by stone in our mind, we will not waste time looking outside for the temple outside.

 

We begin to realise that building our temple in our heart will necessarily be able to find our heart in every temple in the outside world.

 

If we realise where our real work is, would we not have the courage to take on the real work of doing the inner workshop, one step at a time?