Is There Anything Wrong With Having an Empty Heart?

One of my students recently presented me a quote from a Sufi, Hazrat Inayat Khan, which spoke about the need to empty our heart in order to make a vessel suitable for spiritual abundance to enter:

“The one who learns to tread the spiritual path must become as an empty cup in order that the wine of music and harmony may be poured down into his heart.” — Hazrat Inayat Khan

He expressed it well. It is true that if our heart, i.e., our main egoistic vessel, is empty and can be filled with the world’s harmony, then it is positive.

We thus need to empty our heart, which is currently full of selfish desires. We can do so if we accept that our desires are ultimately empty in and of themselves, i.e., they are unable to fulfill us and take us on a path that leads to a true and everlasting form of fulfillment.

It is a complex process to reach this emptying of the heart, but people will eventually come to it because there is no other way. The laws of nature hold us together and develop us to gradually understand who we are, what world we live in, and how we can bring ourselves to a true, eternal and perfect state.

Our perception of suffering and death plays a key role in this process. If we had no feeling of dying, then we would be different. The fact that we die drives us to think in various ways and to reach a certain dead end. However, in principle, we are actually advancing to the understanding that there is no death.

When we reach such an understanding, we will then start relating differently to ourselves, the world and nature. Everything will then change. Life will then become free and simple.