Most of the thoughts that go through your head are tinged with the flavor of the ego. This means that even if you are using your utmost intelligence and creativity and your smarts are Mensa-level on the IQ scale, you’re missing out on a key intelligence, and it comes from the heart.
There are numerous studies from both modern neuroscience and also from ancient wisdom from numerous cultures that the heart has its own intelligence. By order of amplitude, the heart’s electromagnetic field is 60 times that of the brain. [1] This creates the strongest rhythmic field created by any organ of the human body.
Using magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) you can even see the heart’s influence over the brain. [2] Some scientists even argue that the heart’s influence over the brain is so strong, that even when we are not “thinking” with the intuitive wisdom of the heart, it still governs every process in our body, including neurohormonal secretions and even brainwave patterns.
Most thinking is also filtered through the subconscious mind while the heart is a repository of your entire past, present, and future. It does not give answers based on the filtered egoic experience, but a neutral intelligence. The heart-centered consciousness will always bring you home, back to who you really are, and what you were meant to do on this planet. It cares not about money, fame, or other egoic desires unless they coincide with your soul’s journey.
The heart is so important on our journey here on Earth in a physical body, that it is the very first organ that forms in a fetus. It starts beating with its own rhythm before the brain even begins to form.
What’s more, the heart is influenced by the geomagnetic fields and the high-density electromagnetic solar rays shooting from our sun, according to research from the HeartMath Institute, so this is a truly cosmic organ. [3]
Yogi Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharishi once said,
“Hridaya is two digits to the right of the center of the chest, shaped like an inverted lily bud. It is not an organ of the body. It is the core of your being, your Heart and yet somehow we are ignorant of it. It is the seat of consciousness, where it rises and sets, as it were, and the source of the ‘I’-thought. ‘But as the ‘I’ rises from the Heart it must sink back and merge there for Self-realization’.” (Day by Day with Bhagavan, 16-6-46).
If you think of what the heart does for most of us in the most elementary sense, it joins us with others. It starts to melt the egoic “I,” to merge it with “we” until neither exists. Like its own rhythm, as blood pumps through our veins to nourish every organ and cell, the heart nourishes our ability to experience the truest Self-realization which eventually is an expansion beyond the Self at all.
Have you also noticed that when you “think” with the heart’s wisdom, thought is often suspended? You don’t have to think something through—you just know. You can make decisions, you recognize a long lost friend or lover even upon seeing them for only a few seconds. You understand that universal connection that goes beyond time and space. This is the intelligence of the heart.
To practice heart-based wisdom, you can practice a simple meditation.
Sit in a quiet, comfortable place, and begin to take a few deep breaths. Allow your attention to rest momentarily on the “I” center or the navel. Observe the breath. Then, slowly, take your awareness up to your heart and imagine that you are breathing through the heart instead of through the lungs. Imagine your body being infused by a loving, warm, golden glow as though you’ve been sitting on a cool day in a patch of sun. Let this glow grow stronger in your heart center until it starts to expand to the outer edges of your skin.
Then allow the heart’s warm light to move past your body and to fill the space immediately around you.
Next, allow this heart-based consciousness to grow until it fills your home, your city, your state or province, your nation, and the entire world. You can even take this heart-based intelligence out to the farthest reaches of space.
Then slowly, and as you breathe deeply, slowly bring all that love and awareness that has expanded out into the world, back into your own heart. Let it rest there, and feel the rhythm of your heart as it beats in your chest.
Express gratitude for the heart’s intelligence. And when you are ready slowly open your eyes. Tapping into this expansive heart-mind will then infuse everything you do for the rest of the day. Allow the heart to “speak” to you, and follow its guidance.