This is part of Chapter Eight from the book
The Silent Gospel
Heart Intelligence
"The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of." -Blaise Pascal
“Blessed are the pure in Heart for they shall see God.” (St Mathew 5:8)
“The body is the instrument of the mind.”
&
“The mind is an instrument of the heart.”
“That we are at all is the great mystery. The unknown force animating us, present in all that is blooming and fading, is our deepest felt sense, and, strangely, the feeling we most often overlook. Like breathing, this aliveness—this passionate presence—is taken for granted, and we pay attention instead to an endless stream of thoughts.
“Yet, as our attention comes to rest more in pure presence, a natural intelligence emerges. This intelligence bypasses our genetic gifts, IQ, age, cultural conditioning, and education. We might call it an intelligence of the heart.”
Catherine Ingram
The idea of intelligence that is innate to the heart goes back in time to the first written histories of man. Poets, bards, sages, shamans and mystics have spoken plainly about the intelligence of the heart throughout the reaches of time. You find the heart’s attributes in poem, song, and when reading the sacred text of those uniquely experienced illuminated souls. Hinduism, Sufism, Buddhism, Kashmeerian Shivaism, and the teachings of Jesus all hint that the heart is the House of Eternal knowledge or the place of real knowing and this knowledge reveals itself in the words of Mohamed as faith and divinity. But words do little good in the search for truth, for the mind is unable to grasp these words with any real meaning until a direct experience illuminates their wisdom and ultimate truth.
Zen Buddhism uses the metaphor of a finger pointing to the moon: although the finger points to the moon, the finger and the moon belong to two different worlds.
We will once again refer back to the scientific view of heart science to see if there is a thread to support Mohamed or Catherine Ingram’s quotes.
All the great religions point the to human heart as the seat or portal to the divine. The purified, sacred or immaculate heart is one awakened, illuminated, enlightened, some say self-realized.
Science of the Heart
A traditional medical view describes the heart as a hollow muscular organ of vertebrate animals operating as a mechanical pumps nutrient rich blood throughout the cardiovascular system via rhythmic contraction.
A small bit of specialized tissue called the Sinoauricular node, embedded in the wall of the right auricle, is responsible for initiating the heartbeat via pace maker cells. In an average adult the heart pumps 4.7 to 5.7 liters of blood. Blood is considered a liquid organ. It can circulate three times per minute. The heart beats billions of times in a lifetime, averaging 100,000 in a single day. It feeds nutrient through more then 60,000 miles of circulatory network - to over a 100 trillions cells.
Nerve messages travel as electrical impulses at up to speeds of 248 miles per hour.
The electrochemical cascade produced be the hearts beat comprises of a vast range of frequencies. These radiating energies producing a geometric toroidal shape that expands out many feet past the edge of the physical body.
At the close of the last millennium new technologies and devises allowed medical sciences to focus on bio-energy research with greater detail. Because heart disease is such a large cash cow, funding was channeled to the support of individuals and institutions that focused in on the core of psychophysiology of the cardiac matrix.
The new devices allowed the study in finer specificity to be conducted on this massive electromagnetic waveform. Large streams of studies and data flowed into academia creating diversity of disciplines. Somewhere out of these new disciplines came a term that was new for the scientific community; it was called Heart Intelligence. Like all new ideas, it evolved rapidly from simple origins.
In those early days, Heart Intelligence referred to an independent wisdom inherent to the heart. The support for this idea came originally from the deduction of two core facts: (1) the first fact is that up to 65 percent of heart muscle tissue is embedded with neural cells similar to those found in the brain; (2) the second is the autogenic nature of the heart. Autogenic means it does not require a signal from the brain or any other external source to beat. Simply, the impulse for contraction is not dependent on external nervous stimuli, but arises in the heart muscle itself. That no other part of the physical body controls this function is hard to grasp and intuitively this fact alone immediately places it at the core of the physical matrix. Please understand, this does not mean that other outside forces do not affect it, for they do, it simply means that no external source provides the trigger that initiates all its many functions.
Later we discovered that it produced hormones (chemicals) thus acting like a gland. We also learned that it produces sound pressure waves that wash every cell, affecting piezoelectric activity in the liquid crystal matrix of the cell. It also initiates and organizes neural activity and is the master oscillator for the entire physical body. When we take all these facts into account, the heart is seen as a master conductor and dynamo for information/energy communications regulating the functions of the physical structure. So the natural question that arises is; what is the intelligence that is operating here? for if it needs no outside source to operate, the intelligence must be innate.
Because of these bare facts, as well as a litany of others that I have discussed in Chapter 6 of my book The Silent Gospel (see Have Heart), researchers in the cardio/bio-energetic sciences began to ask unique questions. As the tools and computers evolved, so did the quality and diversity of the research. One of the new areas of research was termed Heart Rate Variability (HRV). (I go into this subject in great depth in the book and dedicated whole chapter to this subject due to its value.) This one area of research alone gave us a completely new vision of the function of physical rhythms and their importance in wellness. For now, however, HRV refers to the magnitude of the fluctuation in the number of times your heart beats per minute in conjunction with respiration. HRV became the grail in heart medicine and with good reason for it was a statistical solution to virtually all chronic disease, including aging. This field was so rich with information and potential that it fractured into smaller specialized areas researching the flood of new global data much too soon. Out of these new fields of study came a new definition for Heart Intelligence.
Wave Theory
Dr. Irving Dardik, a vascular surgeon and Founding Chairman of the United States Olympic Sports Medicine Council, wrote an article in “Cycles Magazine” (CYCLES Vol.46, No 3,1996) “UNIVERSAL CYCLES: The Origin of Disease and Health Heart Waves; The Single Solution to Heart Rate Variability and Ischemic Preconditioning”. As a vascular surgeon and the founding Chairman of the United States Olympic Sports Medicine Council, Dardik had the unique opportunity to consider the behavior of the heart in both worst-case circumstances of acute distress and intervention in the operating room and in best-case circumstances of sports performance and fitness training on the playing field. By stepping outside of the constraints of each specialty, he was able to discover “a completely new understanding of how the heart behaves as a wave”.
This new perspective on the heart’s functioning explained how the seemingly complex, disparate information of the body's behaviors, molecular biology, and genes is organized into a single coherent picture. He called this the “Wave Theory”. The theory's implications were vast. It solved conceptually a few medical mysteries, as well as explaining the underlying origin of chronic disease. Interestingly, at the same time it provided for the means of prevention and reversal of those diseases. Dardik’s Wave Theory provided the means for optimizing health, performance, and longevity.
Dr. Dardik wrote in that same article that the, “Heart Wave is the body's master wave” and that “it reflects and organizes the degree of synchronization of all behavioral waves from those of the whole organism through molecular biological and genetic oscillations. As all hierarchical levels wave within one another as a continuum (super-loop), the organization of the organism as a whole is simultaneously a top/down (outside/in), bottom/up (inside/out) phenomenon.”
This information was revolutionary on every level. A super-looping, recursive, self-referencing organism is an organism with intelligence and consciousness. Add to this the Autogenic nature of the heart and you get a picture that is hard to ignore. Maybe the brain was not the most important organ after all!
Not to delve too deeply into this discussion at this point, it is enough here to say that researchers studying the frequency components of the cardiac waveform started to see that slices of the frequency components related to other functions going on in the body, or that those same external functions were somehow reflected in and or modulating the cardiac waveform. These researchers began to attribute specific ranges of the cardiac waveform with other functions or systems of the body.
Researchers began to notice that the waveform of the heart developed a harmonious coherency when sustained ordered breath and/or deeply felt positive emotions were present. They noticed phased harmony present in the two major branches of the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS). Correlations were seen with relaxed ordered breath, positively felt emotions and neural balancing, with coherency within the cardiac energetic frequency signature. This coherent signature was tagged with the term Heart Intelligence. Money for training became available to qualified people who would develop the skills for creating this coherent signature. The reasons were clear and well grounded in medical science: learn the skill to create the signature, and wellness-immune functions will be optimized.
Heart Intelligence was rationalized as being a synergy of intellectual (rational thought), intuitive, and emotional components. In short, Heart Intelligence was a reflective signature of some “internal agreement” that produced coherent harmony in the music playing within the body as seen from the heart’s perspective.
This synergy of physical function reflected in the heart did not tell us anything about its intelligence, it simply pointed to the reality of the intelligence existing. If this energetic agreement was between the intellectual, intuitive and emotional components, there must be another component organizing it all. Since the heart was now thought of as the master regulator, the intelligence governing the organizing was termed Heart Intelligence. A characteristic of this Heart Intelligence is its spontaneous and non-localized quantum nature. Spiritual teachers call this organizing synergy the ‘witnessing aspect’, others naming it the soul, while the Greeks have called it the psyche. This aspect of the Heart Intelligence is the root of psychology -- the study of why we do the things we do.
Synergy
Coherent Synergy reflects a balance between these two powerful forces of spirit and the world. It manifests when the informational connected synergy between the trinity aspects of self is present. It also reflects harmonious connectedness and communication for the organism as a whole; in HRV research it is phased-harmony between the big players operating in the body. From my research into this subject, I discovered that specific internal cardiac-coherent synergy reflects the informational connection to soul or non-local self-wisdom. These open connective mirror-like communications are self-referencing and recursive in a fractal environment. The result, Dr. Dardik explains as, “…all hierarchical levels wave within one another as a continuum (super-loop), the organization of the organism as a whole is simultaneously a top/down (outside/in), bottom/up (inside/out) phenomenon.”
The Heart Intelligence signature can be produced artificially through creating and or recalling positive emotions and sustaining specific regulated breath. It is produced naturally via a genuine state of being with truth. Over and over again I’ve witnessed this signature of Heart Intelligence when the individual is simply being honest with him or herself in a genuine heartfelt way. "I must call my daughter to let her know I’m coming." The individual would at that moment for the first time in an hour suddenly produce scale invariant internal cardiac coherency. This connective knowing can manifest through intuition, knowing and yearning, or all three, producing a synergy of the intellect, intuition and emotions. As in the example above the individual knew even while engaged in this other very personal activity that he-she should all of a sudden call/connect with a loved one. This suggests the value of aligning these functions with Heart wisdom rather than bringing them together in some artificial form of synergy.
Another clue to Heart Intelligence points to the knowledge derived from the electrical information being broadcast from the heart and picked up as voltage on the surface of the skin. The coherent signature is an electrical signature reflecting harmonious (coherent) activity between various systems and their functions. It’s a phase synergy that is reflected within the electromagnetic harmonic within the spectral signature.
Coherency is the inverse of dissonance and highly chaotic activity. This chaotic activity is a normal feature called variability and is a feature of mind creating disturbances in the field. Mind, as we recall, originates all emotional neurochemistry and the cascade to balance and normalize. Electrical coherency reflects phased harmony, in this case between the mind, intuition and emotional components. Aligning with the knowing of the heart wisdom can produce very powerful synergy in these functions. In other words, functions in synergy reflect a communication that has already occurred at a quantum level. It may seem very subtle but it is critical to a full understanding of the data to which this research is pointing.
Heart Intelligence is a system synergistic balance that commenced spontaneously via virtual modes of communication transference. Understanding this makes real the mystical realm. In a very uncomfortable way it merges soul, biology, spirituality and science. It points to a science that the ancient and current mystics understood and used. It is the path of the ‘one heart’, and it is the key to longevity and well being.
"Man’s word is Spirit in man. Spoken words are sounds occasioned by the vibrations of thought; thoughts are vibrations sent forth by the ego or by the soul. Every word you utter should be potent with soul vibration." (Yogananda Scientific Healing Affirmations)
Soul-infused words are recognized as truth, honesty and integrity; they are authentic and have the power to move mountains when spoken with genuine loving-kindness.
As this music of truth develops and anchors in your heart, love expands the “I” of mine to be more inclusive and receptive. Kindness opens to a real appreciation and a deep gratitude for life and “what is” and the voice of your heart is heard a little clearer. This is the opening the heart.
Listening to the inner whispered “Yes” is the beginning to allowing the aims of the heart to become clear and perspective to shift more toward the soul and its desirer for this gift we call life.
The geometry of the waveform at the time allows the heart energies to expand in a constructive connective mode, thus enabling one’s awareness to contain a larger view of the whole.
The Heart Intelligence is a real aspect of the many facets of Mind. It is one that only operates in the Now.
Egoic self operates in past–future or better said , “in time” the soul or atman operates in “No-time/timeless / eternal domain, and each impulse the heart for the creation of “experiential realty”. The shift to the Heart Intelligence shift radically one perceptive and this changes the world one experiences day to day in time.
With this shift in the primary location awareness flows, Awareness anchored in the present now… comes motivation not only to do what makes us feel good, but also what makes others feel good. In this way empathy becomes the force manifesting the Golden Rule: ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’.
Developing a strong connection to Heart Intelligence requires a true discernment of integrity and awareness in the feedback loop we call self. This means bringing attention to the voices and desires spoken in your heart. This is not as difficult as it might appear. If the voice has to do with something from the past of for something in the future , it is the egoic self speaking out of an intent modulated in waves by the qualitative aspect of fear. Generally in the early stages when it requires courage and selflessness and the little “yes” is present then that is the heart.
When you listen to this gentle voice (more actually is a sense) you generate a truthful harmonic phase resonant alignment of intention, words and behavior with the emotional state called often compassion.
“The body does not die because you believe in death. The body exists, or seems to, because you believe in death. Body and death are part of the same illusion, created by the egoic mode of consciousness, which has no awareness of the Source of life and sees itself as separate and constantly under treat. So it creates the illusion that you are a body, a dense, physical vehicle that is constantly under treat. To perceive your self as a vulnerable body that was born and a little later dies – that’s the illusion. You want to keep one side of the illusion and get rid of the other, but that is impossible. Either you keep all of it or you relinquish all of it.
"However you cannot escape from the body, nor do you have to. The body is an incredible misperception of your true nature. But your true nature is concealed somewhere within that illusion, not outside it, so the body is still the only point of access to it."
By permission: The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle
For more on this please see
The Silent Gospel
All Material Reserved- Copyrighted 2006- 2007-2008-2009 -2010- 2011 -2012 -2013 -2014
James Andrew Barrett - Silent Gospel Publishing