The conversation started from this phrase found in Vadan Talas : Love that endureth not is heart’s illusion. The use of ‘endureth,’ the old, poetic form of the word, invites us to reach upward, beyond the mundane toward the subtle and the transcendent, but the faces of the circle of friends were almost all rather glum. It was evident that all had experienced love as something fleeting or fallible, and the memories were not up-lifting or comfortable.

The general feeling was shown by a question that was expressed in several different forms. One person asked, “Why do we keep doing that?” In other words, why do we keep falling in love in spite of the disappointments and frustrations? Another approached the same question in a more fundamental way : “How can we say that the heart has illusion?” After all, the walls of our social media world echo with memes and messages like ‘follow your heart,’ ‘your heart knows’, ‘trust your heart,’ and so on. If the heart can suffer from illusion, then are we fooling ourselves? And if we can’t trust our heart, where shall we turn for guidance?

To understand this better, we should think about what is meant by ‘heart.’ In popular culture it is a sort of standard unit, as if produced in an anonymous factory somewhere and installed at birth. In this view, each one has a heart and they are indistinguishable. From the Sufi point of view, though, the heart is a capacity, a space where feeling and beauty can resonate – but the capacity can be neglected or misused. A useful image here is in the construction of a musical instrument. An enclosed space, a capacity, will amplify the sound of a vibrating string, and one might choose a gourd for this purpose, but a gourd growing on the vine will not serve. It must ripen and then be emptied and dried first. Thus we could say that all of us have something growing within, but it may not yet be fit for this duty. And indeed, if we look carefully at those around us, and at ourselves if we can be sufficiently honest, we will see that no two hearts are the same. Some are like untilled ground, some are frozen, some are warmer but producing a crop of weeds and thorns, some are very small, some larger, others have been invaded by disease or parasites that leave them mis-shapen; there is an endless variety, but rarely do we find a heart that is bright and open and scraped free from the heavy matter of self-absorption so that it can resonate with the divine power of love. That would indeed be a heart one could trust, that one could follow, for it would be free from illusion.

And from here, we can turn to the related question, ‘Why do we keep doing this?’ In the Aphorisms Hazrat Inayat Khan puts it quite plainly : “You are love. You come from love. You are made by love. You cannot cease to love.” This may reassure us, but our first experiments in loving are here on earth and they must therefore show imperfections. Those we love will inevitably have feet of clay – and our own feet will be no better, no matter how we try to pretend otherwise. When we love and experience disappointment and then give up, we will go no further, and we must live with disappointment all our life. But the power of love is great and so we find ourselves thrown repeatedly into the ferment. If by Grace and good counsel we learn from our disappointments, we may start the work of emptying our heart of all that need not be there. One simple test we can apply in this process is, do we love without expectations? Is our love about ourselves? Or about the happiness of the one we love?

This cleaning out of the heart in time allows us to recognize that there is indeed one love that endures, a love that may be reflected in our love for those in our lives, but which is founded in the love for the Source and Origin of love, the Divine Presence that smiles in the heart that has truly surrendered. We find this blessed recognition confirmed in this saying from Gayan Boulas : Love of form, progressing, culminates in love of the formless.