Arunachala Heart

Talk 402.
While speaking of the Brain and the Heart Sri Bhagavan recalled an
incident of old days as follows:-
Kavyakantha Ganapati Muni once argued that the brain was the most
important centre and Sri Bhagavan maintained that the Heart was even
more so. There were others watching the discourse. A few days after
Sri Bhagavan received a letter containing a short poem in English on
that discourse from a young boy, N. S. Arunachalam, who had not
yet matriculated.

That poem is remarkable for its poetic imagination. Sri Bhagavan,
Kavyakantha, and the assemblage of other persons are represented
as the Heart, the brain and the body respectively, and again as the
sun, the moon and the earth also. The light from the sun is reflected
on the moon and the earth is illumined. Similarly the brain acts by
consciousness derived from the Heart and the body is thus protected.
This teaching of Sri Bhagavan is found in Ramana Gita also. The
Heart is the most important centre from which vitality and light radiate
to the brain, thus enabling it to function. The vasanas are enclosed
in the Heart in their subtlest form, later flowing to the brain which
reflects them highly magnified corresponding to a cinema-show at
every stage. That is how the world is said to be nothing more than a
cinema-show.
Sri Bhagavan also added:- Were the vasanas in the brain instead of
in the Heart they must be extinguished if the head is cut off so that
reincarnations will be at an end. But it is not so. The Self obviously
safeguards the vasanas in its closest proximity, i.e. within itself in the
Heart, just as a miser keeps his most valued possessions (treasure) with
himself and never out of contact. Hence the place where the vasanas are,
is the Self, i.e., the Heart, and not the brain (which is only the theatre
for the play of the vasanas from the greenhouse of the Heart.)