Seeing Through the Lens of the Heart: The Case for Heart Centric Intelligence/A Series/Blog.2/Two Ways of Seeing

By John Davidson
Published Sunday, 6 June 2010, viewed 161 times

[This is the second installment in a series of blogs on the theme of Heart Centric Intelligence.  Although each blog is a stand-alone piece, there is more value in beginning at the beginning.]

Malidoma Some was four years old when a French priest kid-napped him from his West African village.  For the next fifteen years, he was heal captive in a Catholic seminary where he was forced to learn French and prepare for the priesthood.  During this ordeal, he came to experience a Western way of seeing the world through written language and a linear, rational mode of thinking, while forgetting much of the experience of a childhood growing up in an indigenous, shamanic culture.

At age nineteen, he struck one of his teachers in an explosion of anger, ran away from the seminary, and found his way back to his village.  Having long forgotten his childhood language, he struggled to adapt his Western mind to what was now an alien world. 

After a time, the village elders asked him to undergo the dangerous initiation that was the rite of passage for all men of his tribe – one customarily done at fourteen years of age.  Survival of this experience would require that he push beyond the limitations of his linear mind and access perceptual abilities not previously known to him.  Some of his companions did not survive the initiation.  Malidoma did survive.  What he experienced was that his larger consciousness contained modalities of perception other than the Western mind activated by the priests – one that had to be set aside temporarily in order for the others to come forward.

“Being a man of two worlds,” he later wrote,^[i] “is not easy.”  He was carrying within him both the perceptual skills of his ancestors and the Western way of seeing the world that his ancestors never knew.  Conversely, his ancestral skill was unknown to the Western mind.

Accessing their own ways of knowing, the elders told Malidoma “that the West is as endangered as the indigenous cultures it has decimated in the name of colonialism.” ^[ii] The elders saw Malidoma’s dual way of seeing as a special gift – despite its painful nature – and asked him to leave the village to investigate the world of the Western mind.

When Malidoma later wrote of his experience of the West, he spoke very directly. “Western civilization is suffering,” he said, “from a great sickness of the soul.”^[iii]

In virtually every indigenous shamanic tradition, there is a perspective that illness – physical, emotional and mental – is a function of an absence of the governing influence of the soul.  In these cultures, the soul is seen as the organizing force and pattern that defines individual purpose in the world, and the means of maintaining the health that helps an individual to maintain balance within a chaotic and multidimensional cosmos.

Consequently, shamanic healing is largely focused on restoring the soul’s relationship with the body.  Soul is our optimal design, and its presence is essential to optimal functioning.

From the more agnostic perspective of conventional Western psychology, we might observe that, when lose the ability to pay attention to what is before and in us, emotion and mental imbalance takes us away from ordinary reality. We call this state  disassociation.  

In a culture where television, consumer marketing, work, and technology have so captured our attention that we cannot control it, it is not a stretch to say that most of us have disassociated to one degree or another.  This same state of disassociation describes a central feature of the epidemics of learning and autism spectrum disorders that now affect so many children – reflected in the relative inability to connect to the people and events of their lives.  Similarly, disassociation underlies the growing health crisis among adults who cannot bring attention to the state of their own bodies.  Increasingly, people in our culture simply cannot pay attention. 

This pervasive disassociation testifies eloquently to the truth of Malidoma’s diagnosis our soul sickness.  Attention – central to our ability to focus upon the subtle but inherent design of our own soul nature – has escaped our control.

In the West, there is no ritual initiation that awakens our perceptual senses to the ways of seeing opens the door for the return of the soul to its home in the body.  For an American to seek out this ritual experience from its remnants within the remaining indigenous cultures – as I have – is a relatively radical step.  Embracing vision quests, medicine ceremonies with Amazonian shamans, and learning to cultivate awareness of subtle energies is itself a protest against mainstream American culture, as well as an invitation to the challenge of living in two worlds.

On the other hand, our own spiritual tradition identifies the human heart as the seat of the soul, in contrast to the crushingly reductionist view of conventional medical science, which sees the heart simply as a pump and the soul as irrelevant myth.  Despite that medical view, many, if not most of us, commonly refer to our own hearts as having capacities quite beyond that of a simple mechanical device, just as we intuit that each of us carries an essential core quality that defines our own uniqueness.

How often do we say something along the lines of  “I know in my heart of hearts that . . .”, or “It touched my soul.”?

Fortunately, there are some scientists who are paying attention to the heart with a more open mind.  Among those are Rollin McCraty and his research team at the Institute of HeartMath in Boulder Creek, California (HeartMath®).           

What becomes entirely clear from the research conducted and compiled by HeartMath is that the heart is intelligent – that it receives, processes and communicates information.  Beyond that, solid and rigorous research now suggests that the heart – standing above all the other physical expressions of intelligence in the body – is “the most powerful generator of rhythmic information patterns in the body” and “acts effectively as the global conductor in the body’s symphony to bind and synchronize the entire system.”^[iv]

Consider these facts.

• The heart has an intrinsic nervous system made up of neurons capable of processing information independent of the brain.^[v]
• The heart has an electomagnetic field, as does the brain.  The heart’s electrical field is about 60 times greater in amplitude than the electrical field of the brain, while the heart’s magnetic field is approximately 5,000 times stronger than the magnetic field produced by the brain.  In this way, the electrical field of the heart can be traced in every cell of the body, and the magnetic field extends not only through the body but can be measured several feet away from the body.^[vi]
• The heart produces nearly all of the major hormones that are also produced elsewhere in the body and were previously thought to originate elsewhere in the body. These hormones are sent by the heart throughout the body in a pattern that is synchronous with the rhythmic contractions of the heart, including a hormone that inhibits the release of stress hormones.^[vii]
• The heart also appears to communicate information throughout the body by the rhythm of the pressure waves that we know as the pulse.^[viii]
• Because the heart generates the strongest energy field in the body, its waves interact with all of the information processes in the body, encoding the information contained in these various fields, and distributing this information throughout the body.^[ix]
• In a remarkable study, HeartMath suggests that the heart “is coupled to a field of information that is not bound by the limits of time and space.”  The study provides data that shows that “both the heart and brain appear to receive and respond to information about a future event. . ..” and that “the heart appears to receive intuitive information before the brain.”^[x]

However, the most critical research data generated by HeartMath demonstrates that we can consciously control the heart function that facilitates its positive benefits for the functioning of the body’s intelligence.  HeartMath has developed a simple protocol consisting of an intentional focus of attention in the heart, combined with a specific pattern of deep breathing and the experience of positive emotions such as appreciation, care, compassion and love.  This practice brings about a state a stable pattern of heart rhythm – called coherence – that provides the basis for synchronizing the body’s rhythms as a whole.  “This, in turn,” suggests HeartMath, “produces optimal states of health, physical activity, and cognitive performance.”  It is the coherent heart that “acts as the conductor in the human symphony, setting the beat that binds and synchronizes the entire system.”^[xi]

In other words, it is the rhythm associated with the “emotional states” such as compassion that convey the information that codes meaning for the entire body which results in a positive response throughout the rest of the human system.

 **********************************************************

As Malidoma Some was conditioned by Catholic priests to forget his village and learn the language of the West – a brain centered, linear thinking mode – he felt that he lost his soul.  Malidoma says that his people “understood literacy as an eviction of a soul from its body . . ..”,^[xii]“that it occupies a space within the psyche that is reserved for something else.”^[xiii]

Undergoing an initiation into the larger ways of seeing, he concluded that being able to perceive more didn’t cause him to lose the “logical, common sense part of my mind.  Rather, it operated as an alternative way of being in the world . . ..”^[xiv] While the mind entertains questions, it is the heart that “dances” with the answer, he says.^[xv]

The loss of our own souls has occurred by a seduction of our attention from its home in the heart to places elsewhere, including the incessantly thinking mind, and to places beyond, such as the screen of our televisions and the emotions created in that such ways that are not our own.  For some of us, the disassociation is characterized by fantasy, or by drifting  into other real realms of consciousness literally outside of the space of the physical body.  In one sense, it matters only that the attention is not in the body, where its presence is critical to the optimal operation of the human system. Without that presence, health deteriorates and life direction dissipates.

This is one particular value of an indigenous shamanic perspective.  It is possible to step back and look at Western illness across the board as a function of the degree to which we are able to control attention and the degree to which the body is able to accommodate and process it.  A second value of the shamanic perspective is that it reminds us that there are much larger perceptual modes of which humans are capable than that provided by the linear mind.

The Institute of HeartMath’s incredible insight that we may bring a positive order to the information laden multitude of rhythms of the body, including the rhythms of our own brains, by the recovery of our attention to a place in the heart, is no less than an in-sight into who we are and a roadmap to the recovery of our own birthright of knowing.  It is a prescription for discovering the skill of balancing in a chaotic world and, on the way, recovering our health, our purpose and our sanity.

The prescription relies on a simple distinction. There is an all important difference between the knowings that arises from the heart – and, as I will discuss in later installments of this blog, other densities of intelligence in the body –  and the information that the brain is able to process into some understanding.  That distinction makes all the difference.

[i].  Of Water and Spirit: Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman, Penguin Group 2004, page 1.

[ii].  Id.

[iii].  Id.

[iv].  Rollin McCraty, Mike Atkinson, Dana Tomasino, Raymond Trevor Bradley, The Coherent Heart: Heart-Brain Interactions, Psychophysiological Coherence, and the Emergence of System-Wide Order.  HeartMath Research Center, Institute of HeartMath, 2006, page 3.

[v].  Andrew Armour, M.D., Neurocardiology: Anatomical and Functional Principles, Institute of HeartMath 2003.

[vi].  McCraty, et al., page 50.

[vii].  Id., page 48.

[viii].  Id., page 50.

[ix].  Id., page 55.

[x].  Id., pages 55-56.

[xi].  Id. 7, 57-58

[xii].  Some, page 167. 

[xiii].  Id., page 179. 

[xiv].  Id., page 225.

[xv].  Id., page 225. 

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