“The longest journey you’ll ever take is the eighteen inches from your head to your heart.” This celebrated adage refers to the profound shift from a purely intellectual, mental-based way of interacting with life to an experiential, intuitive, and feeling-based way of being. It is a transition from observing life through a lens to feeling life through the soul.
From the perspective of the "head," truth is a puzzle to be solved through empirical data, science, and provable facts. This is the hallmark of rationalism—the narrative upon which Western society has "bet the farm." In this paradigm, truth is viewed as a singular, external monolith, separate from the observer and governed by rigid laws.
However, from the perspective of the "heart," truth is subjective and internal. It is a personal wisdom that synthesizes our senses, intuition, and emotional knowing. As Blaise Pascal famously wrote:
“The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.”
As a culture, we have yet to complete this journey; in many ways, we appear to be walking backward, retreating further into the safety of data at the expense of depth.
The Throne of Reason
Rooted in the Western intellectual tradition, our society prizes the factual, science-based approach to existence. We are taught that all truths can be deciphered using the deductive and analytical mind. While many non-Western traditions honor the heart and body as vital centers of intelligence, the rationalist narrative places all its eggs in the intellectual basket. In this world, reason is king.
What this narrative overlooks, however, is that reason never exists in a vacuum. Logic is always filtered through the messy reality of human experience. As Anaïs Nin aptly noted:
“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
Our "pure" reasoning is constantly subverted by our emotions, language, power structures, and cultural conditioning. The person applying the logic is inseparable from the logic itself.
The Myth of the Singular Truth
The rational narrative assumes a singular, universal truth. Consequently, when we argue for the validity of our personal experience, we often mistakenly believe we are arguing for the only real truth. It is difficult for the ego to accept that what we perceive is merely a byproduct of our conditioning. To accept our truth as relative would mean accepting that someone else’s conflicting experience could be equally valid.
Yet, realizing that infinite truths can coexist is the key to liberation. As the poet Walt Whitman declared:
“Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
When we stop believing that our story is the "one true reality" and that dissenters must be converted, we find true freedom. We no longer need the world to agree with us to feel validated. We can let others’ realities exist alongside our own, accepting their experience as real for them. Our truth becomes just one thread in an infinite tapestry, allowing us to wear our own stories with a newfound lightness.
The Fear of the Unknown
Our cultural conditioning has taught us that the unknown is a threat. If the mind cannot "figure it out," we feel vulnerable and out of control. We are raised to believe that "I don’t know" is a failure rather than a doorway.
“Be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue.”
The rational narrative insists we should understand everything. If we can’t, we feel we have failed. Our inner narrator is so uncomfortable with uncertainty that she will finagle facts and invent "why-stories" just to provide a sense of cohesion. We would often rather cling to a painful explanation than face the void of no explanation at all.
Waking from the Narrative Trance
The reality is that much of life—especially the complexity of human behavior—is unexplainable. Life is infinitely vaster and more mysterious than the intellect can decipher. By hanging onto the belief that everything has a rational "why," we grant our inner narrator permanent tenure over our lives.
Waking up from this "narrative trance" is about more than just noticing our personal stories; it is about examining the soil in which those stories grew. It is about recognizing the paradigms we’ve been fed and how they have shaped our definition of "truth."
As Carl Jung suggested:
“Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”
When we finally accept that reality is a changing perception filtered through lived experience, our entire system relaxes. The struggle to be "right" evaporates. We open ourselves to radically different, more fulfilling connections and, ultimately, to a profound sense of peace. At last, the struggle is over—everyone can be right, because everyone is living their own truth.
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Note: This is NOT about religious and spiritual relativism. We believe באמונה שלימה that there is one truth and one truth alone - that השם אחד ושמו אחד, Torah Mi-Sinai etc. etc. All other religions and belief systems are unequivocally false [to varying degrees. Pure paganism is more false than Christianity and different streams of Christianity are more or less false].
This is about our own personal stories that we are constantly telling ourselves about everything we see and experience which most people conflate with Absolute Truth. It is not. It is just a story. Your story. One story among many. This doesn't mean that you have to negate your story. Just that we should all make room for alternative stories. This would solve must tension in both our personal lives and in Jewish society at large.
