The Heart- An Organ of Perception

The Heart

The darkness of night is coming on fast, and

The shadows of love close in the body and in the mind.

Open the window to the west and disappear into the air inside you.

Near your breastbone there is an open flower.

Drink the honey that is all around that flower.

Waves are coming in; there is so much magnificence near the ocean.

Listen! Sound of big seashells, sound of bells!

Kabir says: Friend, listen, this is what I have to say:

The Guest I love is inside me!

 

 

Research on the heart has expanded tremendously in the last several years.

All around us we see evidence of our ability to receive perceptions and impressions from beyond hearing, tasting, touching, smelling and seeing. Some people call this our 6^th sense.  What I would like to offer here is a brief sampling of some of the science around this kind of perception and the studies around “the field” and communication.

I am not claiming this to be the truth of how things work.  It is how I lean in my own understanding  and at the very least, although there is not necessarily the science community in agreement about this work, there is ample phenomenological evidence spanning several decades of study and testing  that point in the directions I am suggesting below.

 

The Sixth Sense

The sixth sense might be thought of as intuition. It is our ability to see the elusive signals that are beyond the range of the physical senses.  It helps us to discern what is behind the masks we have learned to wear.  In relationship and conflict the sixth sense allows you to see intent, which in threatening situations helps us to see the action forming in the body before any move is made.

 

 

Surprising Heart Facts:

 

• The most powerful force from the heart would be enough to shoot water six feet into the air.  The amount of force that is actually needed to move the blood through the entire length of the body’s blood vessels would lift a one hundred pound weight one mile high. 

 

• Approximately two gallons of blood move through 60,000 miles of vessels in each of our bodies.

 

• Contrary to popular belief, the heart does not pump blood through the whole body; the whole body, including the blood, pumps and moves the blood through the whole body, in unison.

 

• Between 60 to 65 % of heart cells are neural cells (brain cells).

 

• The heart and the brain are inextricably linked and the heart possesses its own nervous system and could be considered as a specialized part of the brain.

 

• The heart has its own stored memories and processes meaning within a variety of emotional experiences.

 

 

• The heart is vastly more than a muscular pump. It is one of the most powerful electromagnetic generators and receivers known.  It is, in fact, a highly sensitive organ of perception and communication.

 

• The oscillating electromagnetic waves of the heart emit waves 5000 times more powerful than the brain.  This is measureable by modern instruments up to 10 feet from the body.

 

 

 

The Electromagnetic Heart

Blood carries signals and pulse waves. It is a powerful electric conductor, as well as being extremely complex.  The heart’s energy field that it creates, emits and uses to communicate with other energy systems (the rest of the body or other organisms) is extremely varied and complex as well.

We have heard of the mechanical pacemakers that people use to stimulate their hearts to beat.  The original pacemakers have been around since before humans.  These natural pacemakers are large groupings of cells, millions of them that have entrained to one another, like synchronized swimmers or tuning forks resonating together. It begins early on with the initial pacemaker cells emitting an oscillating rhythmic beat and, as new cells emerge, they begin to oscillate in unison with them. Millions and millions of cells, oscillating in unison, send out stronger and more powerful electromagnetic pulses as they accumulate and synchronize.

Our heart sends out organized patterns of energy and this has been shown to directly affect the functioning of other organs and organisms outside the heart.  The merging and entrainment of our hearts with other electromagnetic fields encountered is very natural to us because we have experienced this since early on.  This entrainment first occurs before birth.  We are immersed and grow in our mother’s electromagnetic fields in-utero.   Electroencephalogram and electromagnetogram readings have shown us visually that the fields of the mother and child naturally entrain.

 

“ The mother’s developed heart furnishes the model frequencies that the infants heart must have for its own development in the critical first months after birth.”

Joseph Chilton Pearce

 

At the most basic levels, the mother’s feelings toward the child about whether the child is welcomed or loved, is communicated within the mother’s electromagnetic field to the growing embryo.   The embryo receives and deciphers specific, embedded and encoded information – just as a radio receiver can decode radio waves and its multitude of stations. Children are born into this way of communication. We are born intimately involved in the information coming from others’ electromagnetic fields.  You might say that it is our birth tongue.

The heart, like a radar tower, continually scans for communications and information.  When it hits other biological oscillators and their accompanying electromagnetic fields, as with all fields that come in contact with each other, the heart experiences alterations in its own electromagnetic spectrum.

The way the field is altered conveys information. When two or more fields synchronize, information is conveyed.  The way these oscillating fields of energy patterns meet and perturb one another and experienced in human beings is unique.   They are experienced as emotions.  Like notes on a piano, these encounters might enhance one another by creating harmonies or various intriguing combinations or they might create dissonance and noise that are difficult to listen to and disturbing.

The slightest emotional change, due either to internal or external factors, quickly manifest as a change in the heart rate and the field it generates. The heart is an extremely sensitive sensory organ of perception whose domain is that of feelings. 

Within our bodies we have many biological oscillators that weave and dance together to manage our selves.  The three most powerful are heart, gut (GI Tract) and brain. When the electromagnetic field from our heart meets another electromagnetic field, we feel a range of emotional impressions.  Our emotions are, in part, our experience of the information encoded within those electromagnetic fields in combination with the changes that have occurred in our own field as we encounter them.

 

 

Heart Coherence

There have been many studies showing the heart as an organ of perception.  The studies have focused on what happens when the heart’s electromagnetic field is intentionally changed as a person shifts his/her attention from thoughts (what will I do today, calculations, etc), to sensory stimuli and feelings. IE. Internal (listening to the heartbeat) or external (noticing how something looks sounds, feels, or smells)

Researchers John and Beatrice Lucy explain,

 

“ The intention to note and detect external stimuli results in slowing of the heart.”

 

Try this:

Moving your attention away from thinking and placing it on external stimuli or on your heart, slows the heart, and begins a transformational cascade that alters your physiological, emotional and cognitive processes.  The heartbeat does not slow down when thinking processes are linear, such as math or planning your day.

It is interesting to consider that heart focused perception does not habituate. Another way of saying this is that, perception through the heart remains new through each experience.

Focusing your attention externally produces dilation and soft focused eyes, instead of pinpoint focus (this is an activity of the sympathetic nervous system), while increasing peripheral vision, at the same time that the heart slows. (An activity of the parasympathetic nervous system).  To over simplify, the sympathetic part of the nervous system is connected with flight or fight, the parasympathetic, with rest and ease.  Placing your attention in external stimuli or in the heart, in this way brings both these systems online in a balanced manner! The more meaning and interest found in what you see the greater the number of physiological changes that occur. Again, you can recognize this state as softer focused eyes, slowing of the heartbeat and the body relaxing.

Linear thinking breaks the calm state. Linear thinking, such as, internally using words and thoughts, increases the heart-beat rate and the sympathetic nervous system activity. The same thing happens when we speak, store, use and retrieve words or symbolic information. Heart-centered processes initiate coherence. The rhythm of the heart sets the rhythm for our entire system.  The hearts rhythmic beat influences the brain’s functions that control the autonomic nervous system, cognitive functioning and hormones.

Coherence is the harmonious cooperation, and order among the subsystems of a larger system that allows for the emergence of more complex functions. 

Steven Buhner

 

Coherence includes synchronization, entrainment and resonance.

Our heart’s rhythms reflect our emotions and our emotions reflect our heart rhythms.  These changing rhythms appear to modulate the field generated by the heart, resembling how a radio wave can broadcast music by modulating the waves. Heart researchers say that emotions go with every experience and every emotion modulates and restructures the field.

Heart coherence is initiated as we move our attention from the brain to the heart. This is done by bringing our attention to our heart or by focusing our attention on external sensory cues and what we are feeling.

The mind, heart, belly entrain during coherence and their oscillations synchronize with one another.  When our thinking/linear process take lead of the other (nonlinear systems) the resulting mixture of wave patterns show up as different systems.   When nonlinear systems lead (the heart and unconscious cognitive activities including those of the brain that are nonlinear ), they synchronize to a common frequency.   The combined system combines within a single oscillation. With the coherence of non-linear oscillators, the amplitude of the combined waveform is much larger than any one alone.  There is more depth and power to these coherent signals.

Aikido focuses on the gut as the primary center of consciousness, the main oscillator.  The gut has its own extensive, elegant and separate nervous system and neural cells.   Whatever oscillator becomes the focus, the other systems begin to entrain and boost its power.

 

Heart Oriented Cognition

When the brain entrains to the heart, the brain becomes more in tune and connected with the body.  Conversely, when the brain leads, there is less connection between body and brain.  Shifting attention to heart oriented perception, mental chatter is reduced and the sympathetic and parasympathetic and blood pressure systems become more balanced directly linking the heart and brain, allowing communication and information to flow freely.

When the heart leads, the brain shifts to coherence.  The brain’s functioning affects the cortex, which directly works with perception and learning.

 

“The major centers of the body containing biological oscillators can act as coupled electrical oscillators.  These oscillators can be brought to synchronized modes of operation through mental and emotional self-control and the effects on the body of such synchronization are correlated with significant shifts in perception”

William Tiller

 

Leading with the heart improves the self-organizing abilities and collaboration of ones mental and emotional states. This creates a more highly ordered physiological state that effects the functioning of the whole body, including the brain. This state enhances intuitive awareness and a more effective decision-making capability that is beyond the normal capacity of the mind and brain alone.

During heart to brain entrainment, the brain and heart waves oscillate together. When this occurs the brain’s wave patterns work embedded within the stronger field of the heart.

Hippocampus activity increases when attention and cognition are shifted to the heart and the brain entrains to the heart.  All of our sensory systems converge in the hippocampus. The increased activity of the hippocampus region stimulates the stem cells there and begins to form new stem cells.  During heart coherence there is a reduction in cortisol (hormone produced by stress) production.  This directly improves hippocampus activity as well.  The hippocampus receives and sifts through the patterns of information, taking in meaning from information within the signals. From there this information about meaning is sent to the neocortex where it is entered as memories.

“Shifting attention to any particular organ, in this case, the heart increases registration of the feedback from that organ in the brain.   The shift to heart awareness initiates an alteration in body functioning via physiological mechanisms that operates through neural registration of organ feedback. “   Stephen Buhner

We have been habituated to the thinking/analytical modes through our schooling and culture where we are taught to locate our selves in the brain and not the heart.  Over time the heart begins to lose coherence when the heart synchronizes to the brain’s oscillating wave patterns. It starts to relate to a linear rather that a nonlinear waveform.

With this in mind it begins to make more sense that in a culture where schools are oriented to favor the brain almost exclusively over the heart, rewarding thinking over feeling, detachment over empathy, that heart disease is the number one killer in the US.

We have learned that an even heartbeat is a healthy heart.  Newer studies show how the more predictable and regular (linear) the heartbeat becomes, the more dis-eased it actually is. This same phenomenon shows up in other diseases like heart disease, aging, fetal distress, MS, depressions, panic disorders to name a few. Emotions come, in part from the EM field that the heart receives and generates. A disorder, non- diverse, narrow, noncomplex EM field will produce emotional experiences, like depression and panic attacks, that are themselves disordered narrow and restricted in scope.

 

To be healthy, the “heart must remain in a highly unstable state of dynamic equilibrium.” Steven Buhner

 

Increasing heart coherence and heart/brain entrainment boosts production of immunoglobulin, preventing infection and leads to improvements in disorders like heart congestion, asthma, diabetes, fatigue, auto immune conditions, depression, AIDs, post stress disorder, and more.

 

Ecosomatics

As we take a new look at the heart, far from being only a powerful pump, we can understand it as an organ that catches information not only from within, but also from the world around us.  Here we begin to not only talk about the cells and organs within our bodies communicating, we begin to explore our interdependence within the greater ecosystem.  Our bodies and Nature are in a constant and dynamic collaboration.  To begin to understand this one only needs to notice the deep feelings that come up when we spend time in wild landscapes or when we see the vast ocean or Niagara Falls, for instance.  Those externally generated feelings are a valuable and essential source of emotions for humanity, because we were born not only from our mother’s wombs, but also from the wilderness of the world.  We evolve and develop surrounded in our mother’s electrometric fields, as well as within the greater EM field of the Earth.  In this way we are a part of the ecosystem and the womb. This relationship and information exchange is deep within our cellular memories.

 

The heart takes in this information and processes the external events encountered. In response it changes its patterns, rate of beats, pulses waves, electrical output, hormonal production and neurochemical releases. 

 The heart works as a conductor/receiver of depth information from the outside world and communicates to the central nervous system (CNS) and brain.

Studies show that these responses in heart function to external phenomena have a similar impact on brain function, as when we take in information through our five senses.

EM signals received and experienced as emotions by the heart also have embedded meaning and this meaning can be drawn from the emotions just as meaning can be drawn from the visual and audio signals we receive. Most of us have been raised in ways where we have learned to ignore these subtle messages received from the heart and have blinded ourselves to the resource of the heart as an organ of perception.  Recognition that our electromagnetic fields having a natural capacity to interact and synchronize with multitudes of other types of electromagnetic fields, that is, with ecosystems and members of those ecosystems – is nearly atrophied.

Our language like all languages carries the wisdom of the heart—

Big hearted, Heartfelt, Hearty, Hearts desire, Kind Hearted, Courage of Heart and so on.  If we are having a difficult time or not feeling connected from the hearts messages we become Heartsick, Heart Broken and have Heartache. Someone disconnected to the heart’s connective messages are heartless.

 

“Our body and brain form an intricate web of coherent frequencies organized to translate other frequencies and nestled within a nested hierarchy of universal frequencies”.  Joseph Chilton Pearce

 

All living organisms, exchange EM energy through contact and between fields.  In humans, 18 inches away up to touch is the most powerful. These waves carry encoded information in similar ways that radios and receivers carry music.

Not only does a coherent heart affect our own brain wave patterns it affects those around us as well.  A coherent heart field is measurable by instruments up to 10 feet away.

Different individual’s fields can entrain with one another’s.  With entrainment between individuals a wave is created by a combination of the original waves increasing their power and depth.  When we send out a heart coherent field filled with compassion, love and attention, other living beings respond to us by becoming more compassionate, loving, interested and connected.

 

The Intuitive Healing Arts and Empathy

When a loving practitioners’ generated fields are detected and (naturally) amplified by ill people, healing rates increase, pain decreases, hemoglobin levels shift and new mental states occur. The receiver’s receptivity also plays a part in the outcome in that the more open he or she is to the caring that is offered the more he or she will entrain with an external electromagnetic field of the practitioner.  The practitioner continually adjusts with the client.  Our heart fields are nonlinear and as the healer shifts toward coherence, there is an alteration within him/her.  By paying a close and practiced attention to internal changes and perceptions, the practitoner can extract information and meaning from the patient’s interior world.

Through inner reflection the patterns of the patients dis-ease will show up and by noticing and changing their own patterns back to health; the practitioner can become aware of the processes and the road to health.

Beyond this, the patient, in a state of entrainment within the practitioner’s field will move toward greater health.

 

Over time and evolution all living organisms, have learned to use these fields as a medium to communicate. There is a constant mix and blending flow of information-loaded EM fields. It is part of the communication dynamic of living organisms within ecosystems, an aspect of their co-evolutionary interdependence.

Electromagnetic fields support the integrity of organisms for strengthening physical structure and healing when injured, as well as for protection against hostile organisms.   These fields are primarily used to strengthen cooperative interactions among organisms within ecosystems.

Take a walk sometime, and with this information in mind, pay attention to your internal state of being and how it feels while walking in the depths of Nature to explore and better understand this interconnectedness and your own perceptions.