If in our daily life we can smile, if we can be peaceful and happy, not only we, but everyone will profit from it. This is the most basic kind of peace work.

Thich Nhat Hanh

According to Jesus, the most salient features of a human life spring from, or ultimately originate in, the heart or attention of a person. In placing the center of moral transformation in the heart, Jesus inherits and hones a concept native to Hebrew thought. In the Hebrew Bible, the heart (leb, lebab) is what sets humans apart from the beasts and connects them with the divine. The heart was the center of self awareness as a whole. We might call it attention. 

The heart possesses a distinctive capacity of choice. When a person really “shows up” or consciously engages with something (which is not a continuous state for any human being), choice can be exercised through that attention. As such, the heart is the primary site of moral transformation. Perhaps more to point, attention and its various focal points are the raw material out of which human lives are fashioned. 

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Soul Whisperer
Daniel Austin Napier

Art is a silent cry of the human spirit, knocking at the doors of the mind and body in an attempt to break free. Human civilization and all that it has accomplished are byproducts of this inner stirring. There is something inside us, beyond the recognizable physical phenomenon of life, that compels us to be creators and lovers of art. There is a reason why we feel perfectly at home while either creating something or admiring its artistic beauty. Nothing moves the human spirit like melodiously composed music, an intriguing painting, or a beautiful piece of poetry. Human art should be definitive proof that the source of creation is not somewhere out there in heaven, but right here within us.

The rich and myriad forms of human art remind us that we are not an end product of creation, but its continuous living and breathing center. We are the extended limbs of existence, aiding it in its process of creation. That is why we cannot be content without knowing who we are. Our quest for perfection is a calling of our inner creative self to recognize its presence. This is what gives meaning, purpose, and grandness to life. Without this inner center contributing its eternal spiritual qualities, life is nothing more than a play of light and shadows. Everything we recognize as beautiful, both inside and outside ourselves, comes from here. 

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The Greatest Love Story Never Told
Avi Raa

With the singular exception of chronic pain and distress, the content of consciousness is usually fleeting. As anyone who has tried meditation knows all too well, it is surprisingly difficult to hold the mind still. Experiences are short-lived…

William James coined the metaphor ‘stream of consciousness.’ A few decades earlier, before James’s work, Richard Wagner’s heady operas, such as The Valkyrie or Twilight of the Gods, prefigured this metaphor in continuously evolving landscapes — so many voices, leitmotifs, and strains intertwined into a single, vast stream encompassing empathy, lust, love, fear, hate, anger, desire, will to power, regret, and compassion — merging, separating, waxing and waning, rising and falling, flowing on, like life itself. Half a century later, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce would perfect the literary equivalent of the stream of consciousness, the interior monologue of the narrator.

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Then I Am Myself the World
Christof Koch