We in the southern suburbs of Chicago have a newspaper dedicated to our communities. The ad that everyone here knows is…The folks up North just don’t get it.
Contemplating that word play for a moment this week reminded me of the heart- brain connection. The mind just doesn’t get it. Let’s illustrate this with a couple or three stories.
The first one comes from the account of a naturalist who was writing about what looked like intuition in animals. He had been observing daily a vixen and her little family of fox kits. She had a deep den several feet up the bank of a mountain stream.
On the day of his surprise, a calm and pleasant day, she suddenly came out of the den, scrambled several yards up the bank and began digging like crazy. Pretty soon she had disappeared though dirt was still flying out of the entrance of the hole. Then she reappeared and with great effort carried each kit into the new den.
The naturalist had never seen anything like this before, and couldn’t understand what was going on. Just a few minutes later a flash flood came down the stream and the debris formed a dam that held back the water until it was high up the bank and flooded the original den completely, and for a long time until the weight of water pushed the debris dam down stream.
He later found out that there had been a severe cloudburst further up stream. He had no warning about it, but the vixen obviously had.
Remember the never to be forgotten tsunami in 2004. There were many stories of people who took their cue from animals and survived. One of the most publicized was from a beach in Malaysia. The luxury hotel there had a group of elephants that they hired out to tourists for rides. The elephants were kept tethered close to the hotel and were chained to strong posts driven deeply into the ground.
Several minutes before there was any visible sign of the tsunami one of the elephants was taking passengers along the tour and suddenly swung round, began trumpeting furiously and galloped back to the enclosure. Passengers and mahout were very upset. The elephant then began helping the others to free themselves from the posts and the whole group charged uphill to higher ground, accompanied by those humans with enough sense to take notice, instead of complaining to the manager. Shortly after that the tsunami struck.
In some of the other islands there were stories of how the tamed elephants rescued humans from desperate situations, carrying adults and children to safety from their perches in trees.
The highly developed minds of the humans concerned did not receive the messages that were obviously available to the animals in both these stories.
Rupert Sheldrake has made a study of this very matter, and has accumulated many documented stories related to this. He has written two well known books about it:
Dogs That Know When Their Masters Are Coming Home, and The Sense of Being Stared At. He explains such happenings by the theory of the morpho-genetic field and has linked them to the neural system of the heart. The heart brain as some people call it.
White people who have encountered the Australian Aborigines or the !Kung tribe of the Kalahari desert have reported how such people often display the same foreknowledge as the animals. Laurens van der Post, the famous explorer tells how his guide in the Kalahari desert told him that he could hear five people crying for help. He told Post that they had had no food or water for days and were in bad shape.
The guide said that the party must wait for them. Post climbed up a nearby hill and surveyed the surrounding area with binoculars. He couldn’t see anything. The guide said, “They are getting closer, there are five of them. Can’t you hear them?”
Shortly after that the five wasted survivors tottered into view. Post asked the guide how he knew so far in advance. “I heard them,” was the answer. “Why couldn’t I hear them?” asked the great explorer. “I heard them from my heart,” was the reply.
It looks like the mind is the last to know, and sometimes never does. The rest of the body gets the message. The disconnect causes stress.
The way in which the heart and brain send messages to each other that are not picked up by the Oh so clever mind is well documented and researched scientifically in the book The HeartMath Solution by Childre and Martin. They have shown beyond doubt that the heart has its own particular intelligence that can be tapped into with practice. Doing so relieves a great deal of the stress of modern living that seems to stem from the fact that the mind doesn’t listen to the body messages any more, let alone act on them as the animals in the stories did.
An experimental clincher to this concept was demonstrated in public at a conference in Hawaii, attended by teen agers who had won essay contests. Someone was there from the HeartMath Institute with their brain-heart feedback apparatus, an EEG and an ECG.
A teen age volunteer sat on the stage, wired up to the apparatus, while one of the HeartMath people talked and joked with him until the projected readings on the screen behind him showed that the heart and brain wavelengths were synchronous. This is usually termed entrainment, a condition of optimum efficiency and calmness.
The teen-ager was turned around to see his own screen and the HeartMath specialist explained to him that he had achieved something quite difficult to do and that he was therefore not only smart but well balanced.
The teen-ager was turned again to face the audience and the specialist said that the student was obviously in exactly the right frame of mind to answer some of the new verbal quizzes in mathematics that were being used in England.
Immediately the beautiful, coherent, connected patterns between the heart and brain became chaotic and unrelated to each other…the pattern of a flight or fight state. The audience burst into laughter at the sudden change. The teen-ager asked what was going on because he hadn’t felt any change. He was shown the new readings. Everyone realized that a very significant shift in his heart-brain communication had occurred, but his mind was totally unaware of it.
This same unawareness was a major part of the research work done at the HeartMath Institute. The results, which you can read about in the book mentioned are of vital importance to those of us who occasionally or frequently do find our mind actually taking part in the heart-brain discussions.
It looks as though animals are aware AS their brain, rather than as a mind with a brain, like most of us. Mind with a brain can find itself cut out of the communication loop of the heart brain circuits.
Another very important point is that when that teen ager registered alarm at the possibility of humiliation via a mathematics test, the bulk of his brain energy moved from the front to the back. Yet it is the forebrain that contains the tool kit for advanced evolutionary matters such as intellect and imagination, the very things he needed.
The hind brain is involved with matters of survival by instant reaction to danger. When HeartMath subjects were talked into coherent heart-brain patterns, in a very important experiment, they were shown on a screen a series of randomized pictures. Nobody knew the order in which they were to come on the screen. Some of them were very graphically negative and unpleasant. It was found that the heart-brain synchronicities “knew” when the unpleasant ones were about to show some four to seven seconds before the subject became aware of actually seeing them.
With the vixen, the elephants and the !Kung (the ! is a clicking sound) there was no four to seven seconds delay. With overdeveloped left brain habits like most Westerners there is either a delay or a blank. The acute left brainer jeers at the right brainer who knows without learning. One such explained what we have probably all felt, that subtle sensation that we are being looked at. Obviously a very pro survival factor for animals that could easily be the lunch of some other animal. He ‘explained’ it like this. “Of course if you suddenly spin round and look at somebody, they are going to look at you. Then you make the mistake of thinking it was their looking that made you uneasy.” Anyone who believes that deserves to. It’s a comfort zone explanation. No doubt he was sincere.
One major book about this matter of evolution of the way we view our world, or miss out on much of it, is by a master of the study of the way humans develop from foetus to elder, and of the way the evolution of the brain is still continuing.
This man is Joseph Chilton Pearce. His Magical Child series has extended through several amazing books and is currently available in his latest work The Death of Religion and the Rebirth of Spirit. This is a book of great importance to those of us who are hoping that ignorance and dogma finally kills religion itself, and stops the killing that goes on in its name, and that spirit, not man-made and enforced rules becomes the scientific basis of the metaphysical life.
