How we know- PART 2

TOBIN HART is a humanistic transpersonal psychologist, professor in the University of West Georgia’s Humanistic, Transpersonal and Critical Psychology program, and co-founder of the ChildSpirit Institute. In this three-part series, he is interviewed by VICTOR KANNAN, Director of the Heartfulness Institute USA, and in part 2 they focus on Tobin’s book, as well as presence, wisdom and the heart.

- TOBIN HART

Q: So, Tobin, in your book you basically talk about presence, heart, wisdom and creation as four virtues. In each of these, you also add and talk about other things. For example, in presence, you talk about the beautiful, the sensing, the focusing, the witnessing, and the opening.

Can we dig a little bit deeper into this one particular virtue of presence? And then see how that is perhaps the most important starting point in one’s life?

Sure. In the West, the most enduring depiction of the good life is captured with the words “the good, the true and the beautiful.” So, for me, I was surprised to see those tracked with each of these things that you mentioned, and we’ll add another one, too.

Presence, for example, really tracks with beauty. So the extent to which we’re present to another or present to the world, is the extent to which the world opens to us. And in that opening, we find and hear things (and people) as beautiful. To really sit with and see somebody beyond their persona and beyond their actions, we find that they have this incredible quality of luminosity. We get the sense of feeling a soul. What comes out of that is often a sense of love and a sense of beauty.