Have No Set Heart

"The sage has no set heart. Ordinary people's hearts become the sage's heart."

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Those are the starting lines of chapter 49 of the Tao Te Ching.

Fascinating.

They incorporate many different key elements of our essential work: breaking the obsession with owning one's body, dissolving the separation between me and others, understanding one's heart not as something unchangeable, static, machine-like, but rather flexible.

The heart can therefore not only hold one set of values, is not limited to being good or bad, as if it had a binary state baked in, but it encompasses every possible state that exists at any given moment. It holds any set of values, viewpoints, opinions and emotions that the human experience presents to us.

So what mental game can we play based on this assumption? Maybe that it's okay to feel a certain way, think a certain way, be a certain way. Maybe that we are okay. It removes pressure and judgement. It encourages us to embrace the totality of our existence. It allows us to jump out of our limited individual experience: the short-lived joy, moments of pain, blips of enlightenment.

And all of a sudden, the horizon opens up — we feel the ground under our feet, we see the deep blue sky, smell the air, physical boundaries such as distance collapse, and our mind is able to grasp the lives of billions of other human beings, their moments of joy, pain and blips of enlightenment.

We truly connect.

Having no "set heart" does not imply a life in isolation, dedicated to an endless search for meaning. The opposite is true: Having no set heart renders every moment of our existence limitless and meaningful. We still get to reason. We still get to choose. And we should make good use of the magnificent tools nature has equipped us with (namely body and mind). But we are no longer imprisoned in an identity that is so severely inflated, when in reality it is insignificantly small.