INTELLIGENCE OF THE HEART

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I was always amused by the stories of doctors and philosophers who during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance would cut open a person’s corpse to try to locate where the soul resided. Was it in the spleen? Or the gall bladder?

Have things changed much? Not really. It’s just that nowadays our current scientific community has pretty much decided that our soul – or ‘intelligence’ – resides in our brain. It’s as though neuroscience is the religion of the times. Recent “studies” have even “proven” that the source of “love” is the brain. By studying rats, these priests of our modern-day society have been able to conclude that there are four tiny areas of the brain that form a circuit of love: the ventral tegmental area, the nucleus accumbens, the ventral pallidum, and raphe nucleus. So, that’s that.

Or is it?

The Ancient Egyptians mummified every organ, believing that all of them were extremely valuable in the afterlife. Except for one. They tossed the brain away as useless. Like a simple limb or other tool, it had served its purpose during life, which was a purely physical purpose. And yet we westerners tend to imagine our brains and our minds as being the same as ‘us’ – our natures, our beings, even our ‘souls.’

I have been thinking about this a lot recently, as my mother’s memory becomes increasingly a thing of the past. Without her ‘brain’ functioning as a memory device, who is she? She still has the personality, the physicality, the beauty, the generosity, the warmth, of the woman I have known all my life. Where does that ‘person’ reside? Where does our love for each other reside? I know this for a fact: it’s not in her brain!

So here’s another possibility: that our heart has an intelligence and spirit of its own. The idea of intelligence of the heart is described by artists and mystics of every culture who seek the meaning of life. As teachers, they can point the way for us, and be our guides, but our brain-intelligence is unable to ‘know’ what they teach without our own direct human experience. We can learn facts and figures with our brains, but ultimately our brains are like computers, and we need people and art and experience to bring that knowledge to life, to bring spirit and love and conversation and relationships to all the facts that our brains collect. We need an intelligence of the heart in order to make sense of it all.

This may be why I’ve always loved reading and writing romantic novels. For me, the engagement between people, their emotional intensity, their loss and suffering and overcoming obstacles, their striving, the joy and satisfaction that follows the struggle, the tangled web that weaves a good story, can become as dear to me as real-life relationships.

And for those who really enjoy the language of science: even scientists have ‘proved’ what they refer to as Heart Intelligence – a sort of independent wisdom inherent to the heart. The support for this idea came when it was discovered (after several mysterious personality changes occurred in recipients of heart transplants) that over half of our heart muscle tissue is embedded with neural cells similar to those found in our brain. Not only that, but our heart is autogenic, meaning it is the only part of our body that does not need our brain or nerves or anything else to make it function; all it needs in order to ‘come alive’ is the small bit of tissue that’s embedded in the wall of our right auricle. There’s no external trigger for making it live. The heart may seem to be a hollow muscular organ that operates as a pump to circulate blood, but it’s more than that. It has a life of its own.

The mysterious force that brings us to life, and really makes us feel alive, is taken for granted by the brain, which tends to enjoy listening to the endless babble of its own blog-like thoughts. But when our attention is focused on something other than that, like a work of art or an experience in nature, a peace and inner stillness emerges, and we have a different kind of understanding about life, one that has nothing to do with IQ, education, or age. It’s heart-understanding, or heart-intelligence.

In this often-told story, Jung relates a conversation he had with a Hopi elder. To the Hopis, Mountain Lake told Jung, white people seem always uneasy and restless: "We do not understand them. We think that they are mad."

Jung asked him why he thought whites were mad.

“They think with their heads,” Mountain Lake replied.

“What do the Hopis think with?” Jung asked.

Mountain Lake pointed to his heart.