REFLECT with scientist Gregg Braden
January 7, 2022 – It is again the First Friday of the month. It is the first month of the year. A First Friday is a day traditionally devoted to thinking about the Heart of Jesus.
The patron of our Lay Society, the mathematician-priest Saint Arnold, was a Sacred Heart devotee. Every follower of Saint Arnold Janssen has memorized the line, “May the Heart of Jesus live in the hearts of all.”
This kind of talk tends to be regarded as so much non-scientific piety of the easily breakable plaster type. Why single out “heart” rather than “brain” or “hands” or whatever other part of Jesus for a regular devotion?
Actually, to go back to long times past, our ancestors regarded the human heart as the center of thought, emotion, memory and personality – the true master organ of the body. Traditions to honor the role of the heart were created and passed down through generation after generation.
Ceremonies were performed and teachings developed to utilize the heart as a conduit of intuition and healing. In the Bible, for one, heart is mentioned 830 times, and appears in 59 of its 66 books.
When I earlier said “ancestors” I refer to AMH or Anatomically Modern Humans. The archaeological and DNA evidence tells us that AMH (i.e., us) have been around some 200,000 years now, essentially the same as humans today, both in genetics as well as in psychology.
Through that length of time, how did we survive all kinds of threats to existence? Merely through the smartness of our brain? Not really. This is what Greg Braden and his group of scientists underscore today in one study after another.
The secret of our ancestors’ survival these past thousands upon thousands of years is that they had conscious access to an advanced neural network that gave them the godlike power of intuition, self-healing, super-consciousness, and much more. And the simple organ that was the focus of their teachings for millennia is the human heart.
Last night, F. Sionil Jose, Philippine National Artist, underscored this fact. He was scheduled to undergo an angioplasty procedure today. On the eve of this event, then, he wrote a note of thanks to God as well as to his “brave heart” for “this most precious gift” – his heart – as he waited for his blood vessel procedure.
“Now, that I am here in waiting for an angioplasty,” he wrote to his heart, “I hope that you will survive it and I with it, so that I will be able to continue what I have been doing with so much energy that only you have been able to give.” He was 97 years old when he slept his last on 6th January.
In a prolific writing career spanning seven decades, F. Sionil Jose penned more than a dozen novels, several short story collections, essays and a regular newspaper column. He also owned a bookshop, which, gratefully on my part, sells my latest book, “The Untold Magellan Story.”
Who was Frankie talking to when he addressed his “brave heart?” Isn’t his heart, like yours and mine, merely a muscular pump, plain and simple that keeps blood moving over the course of a lifetime? But it is an amazing pump because it beats an average of 101,000 times a day, circulates approximately 2,000 gallons of blood through 60,000 miles of arteries, capillaries, veins and other blood vessels, day in and day out, non-stop, until it stops or is forced to.
When under attack, stress and duress, the heart shows it, if you look closely enough. It emits out or coughs up a volume of protein that modern scientists have named “HS TROPONIN-I.”
My own heart had been under attack last week. The normal reference range for TROPONIN is 0.0 to 12.0 only. That is all my body should have shown off at the lab. However, my heart showed at first nothing anywhere near the normal range but an elevated 14,150.0 and, later, a much higher 23,150.0
There was no question that a serious attack had occurred and why, though my pain tolerance is normally high, the chest pains I felt on the last night of last year, a few days ago, gave me no choice but to rush to Emergency at nearby Medical City. And sure enough, the lab technicians and the docs asked me to allow them to clean up the tubes to my heart in a procedure they called a triple stent angioplasty. If I did not allow them to do what they did, the risk to me would have been heart failure.
I can empathize with F. Sionil Jose as he felt his failing heart last night. Is this the end? Did he console himself like Horace of old who wrote towards the end, “I have created [with my writings] a monument more lasting than bronze and loftier than the royal pyramids…I shall not wholly die; a greater part of me will evade the goddess of death…?” (Exegi monumentum aere perennius…Non omnis moriar…)
Did he ask his brave heart what for it really was – merely to be a necessary pump? Greg Braden and his group have just established that while the heart does pump blood powerfully and efficiently through the body, pumping may not be its primary or exclusive purpose.
When you look at their studies, you’ll recognize that the heart is more than just a pump. It is an integral source of memories, intuition, and deep wisdom, as well as a biological organ that gives us life.
The two which are one are the heart and the brain. Like the brain, the heart has its own intelligence. They have found that about 40,000 specialized neurons, or sensory neurites, form a communication network within the heart.
So, they now talk of a “heart brain” – an intricate network of nerves, neurotransmitters, proteins and support cells similar to those found in the cranial brain.
The heart brain is also known as heart intelligence. Blaise Pascal famously remarked that the heart has reasons which the mind cannot understand.
photo from https://i-uv.com/the-intelligence-of-the-heart-is-the-heart-another-brain/
With the heart brain, humans have found a mechanism of intentional self-healing, and an awakening of super-learning abilities.
The Coptic Christian saint, St. Makarios, once talked of this ability of our hearts to remember life events – even when the heart is no longer in the body of the person that experienced the events.
This is interesting to discuss at some other time – this matter of memory transference as a side effect of a heart transplant. For now, the main thing to remember is that heart and brain function as an intimately united network to regulate the body. Thus, the challenge for us is to create heart-brain harmony and use this understanding to tap the power of our greatest potentials.
The heart represents the center of love and security. So, I will keep repeating that “my heart beats to the rhythm of love.” And never again, ever, must I allow the squeezing of joy out of the heart in favor of money, position or power. I should rather keep on repeating that “I bring joy back to the center of my heart. I express love to all.”
When Christians therefore pray “Vivat Cor Jesus…” or “May the Heart of Jesus live in the hearts of all” – we are praying for nothing less than a realization of the divine-in-us, enabling us to solve problems in the way we live and love. FINIS.