Rule 2: The Way of the Heart

The Path to the Truth is a labour of the heart, not of the head. Make your heart your primary guide. Not your mind. Meet, challenge, and ultimately prevail over your nafs (false ego) with your heart. Knowing your ego (higher self/soul) will lead you to the knowledge of God.

For many searchers it is clear, that the ultimate truth cannot be found in the mind. This is not what the human mind is made for. It can only create useful ideas inside limited contexts. It easily gets caught up in self mirroring and navel gazing. When we are not able to contain our mind, there is no use in going on a spiritual search. Yet we are only able to limit its influence when we acknowledge its merits and use its strengths in a wise way.


It is more difficult to understand the work of the heart. It should not be mixed up with working on emotions although they are important as well. The heart is symbolically seen as the residence of love, and love is no feeling but an attitude, an inner direction.

We can attain this determination only when we are willing to face our shadow sides, the aspects of our personality which we either deny or adore all too much. They are aspects, which have rooted themselves deeply inside as a consequence of unresolved traumatizations, in the course of our lives or even our anchestors. The work is about replacing the fear which is connected with those unresolved experiences by love. Technically spoken, this happens by reuniting the attention and awareness which has been reduced from the immediate experience in the moment of trauma with this original experience. By this, we can take the power from the ego parts, whcih are based on such experiences and to overcome them.

What guides us in this work is the certainty, which we can feel inside, that we find fulfillment on this way. We connect ourselves with the power of evolution which works inside of us as individuals, in different cultures and in mankind as a whole, and which urges us towards universality, towards God.

The rules are taken from Elif Shafak's novel “The Forty Rules of Love” (Viking 2010). They are inspired by the Sufi tradition and worded by the autor's imagination. http://www.elifshafak.com/