FIVE

ANCIENT HEART-KNOWLEDGE IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

At our first meeting, Baba Muktananda immediately launched into an explanation of the functions of the heart and its role as the center of a complex cosmology-ontology, as outlined a thousand years earlier by one Abhinavagupta. (An ontology is an explanation of how our reality-experience forms.) This meditating Shaivite sage in Kashmir, India, handed down the theories, descriptions, and practices giving the foundation of Muktananda’s worldview and meditation practice here, ten centuries later.

“There is only one heart,” Baba explained, “the one beating in my chest is essentially the same as the one in you.” Yet, as his theory revealed, the heart has an individual aspect and takes on characteristics of the ego developed in our head. (The word ego is Latin for “I,” which I interpret as me, and is not entirely a bad-boy in my lexicon, as in some current usage.) “Billions of egos in heads up there, only one heart,” was Baba’s comment, in outlining this dual yet singular cosmology he called Kashmir Shaivism.

He further claimed that in the center, or “cave” of the heart, there is a point from which the entire universe arises and radiates outwardly. This locus or central point of reference was called Shiva, and was considered a nonmoving male force, while the radiations outward from it, termed the “wave-forms of Shiva,” were called Shakti, a feminine Sanskrit name. These wave-forms contain the potential of all creation, his theory explained, out of which this Shakti creates and gives birth to the universe. (Thus, the feminine name Shakti, birthing having always been considered a ladies’ prerogative. Wise men were considered the noninterfering, protective witnesses of such, a wisdom lost long ago in the chaos of the muddled-male-meddling which took over.)

Muktananda made a wave of his hand when describing Shakti’s performance, claiming she dances about this nonmoving Shiva in a spiraling gyre that embraces within it the potentials of all conceivable universes. From this plethora, instant by instant, Shakti brings forth a world for Shiva to witness. Without Shakti, he pointed out, there is no Shiva, and vice versa, each giving rise to the other in what I now know as a classic mutual-mirroring, or “strange loop.”

Meditate on the heart long enough, Baba said, and you will begin to sense the presence of these wave-forms enveloping you like a warm cocoon of love and power. And indeed, this slowly became a felt presence for me, while twice in my life I directly experienced, in ordinary wake-state awareness, this embracing “cocoon” of love and power. This is a phenomenon that must be directly experienced, I suppose, to be believed or understood. Once experienced, however, understanding is incidental and the reality of this “heart intelligence” can never be doubted—understood or not. One simply knows that “it” is always “there,” heeded or not.

“The scientific world,” he went on, “will eventually give you all the information you need to explain this Shiva-Shakti creation,” in ways available and reasonable to contemporary audiences. This proposal I found the most improbable of all his explanatory prognoses, yet it proved to be the case as time went on, and in 1981, I gave my first mind-heart talk at the University of Colorado in Boulder, followed by hundreds over the years and over the globe.

Baba Muktananda and the Out-of-Body Experience

In the 1970s, through a chain of classic “paranormal” or “psychic” events, I met one Muktananda, an Indian meditation master or “guru.” this quite esoteric and unusual (to me) meeting with an Indian sage with his ancient legacy had been preceded by taking one of Robert Monroe’s equally esoteric but safely modern “out of body” programs, and the nonordinary adventures therein. Monroe had experienced this out-of-body event many times, exploring, researching, analyzing, and eventually designing a way to induce something similar in others. the institute Monroe established at that time, and the mind-expanding training it fostered, has since grown to serious dimensions. My out-of-body experience induced by the Monroe program had preceded my subsequent meeting and joining forces with Muktananda, a far more esoteric venture, which absorbed me for a number of years, before I got back to the out-of-body Monroe issue.

Through a series of rather odd random-chance events in his early forties, Monroe experienced going “out of his body,” as the phenomenon is called. Fascinated with such a state, he followed through with many experiments and repetitions of the experience until he was finally stuck with the procedure, wherein he couldn’t really sleep normally any more, since at each attempt he simply went out-of-body again. (Muktananda often hinted at such pasttime at night, saying we wasted those sleep hours that were meant for other and greater adventures.)

At any rate Monroe made a thorough analysis of this out-of-body affair, and mapped out the procedures he had used in an analytical and logical fashion, so others might do the same should they be interested, and the Institute carrying those ventures on flourishes today. thousands have taken this training and their accounts are often incredible.

My brief encounter with this “Monroe” venture led, by a roundabout route, to my meeting with Muktananda, whose detailed description of this Shaivite theory of creation struck me as the wildest nonsense at the time. Since I had been led to this meeting with Muktananda by what would surely appear to others as equally wild or even wilder nonsense, I heard him out, to my great gain and benefit.

I had retreated from the social-cultural world of book writing and lecturing some three years before this meeting with Muktananda. Gardening and meditating happily in a remote section of the Blue ridge mountains, no roads in to my place, no power lines or telephones within two or more miles, no newspapers or radio to relate calamities I didn’t need to hear about anyway. I had, accompanied by my wife and daughter, seriously and genuinely renounced the world of folly and avoided it successfully for three wonderful years. (Besides immediate family members, only my publishers had my address, that I might receive any stray royalty checks that might come my way—and those publishers honored my request for privacy, though too seldom sent a royalty check.)

Then came the series of paranormal events (recounted elsewhere) leading to my leaving my haven-hideout to meet with this Baba Muktananda. this meeting, as it turned out, ended with my family and me living for ten winters and one summer on the other side of the world, in Baba’s meditation ashram in Ganeshpuri, India. this world within itself unfolded as an ongoing inner adventure of which I would have been embarrassed to speak about in my earlier academic days, but learned to cherish and speak about continually in many hundreds of talks given over the years on behalf of Muktananda’s “meditation revolution.”

Muktananda had strongly urged me to resume writing and lecturing about children and development, the “worldly task” I had abandoned to that chaotic world I had rejected. “In this Yoga,” Muktananda said, “we don’t meditate in caves, but right out on Main Street, getting our nose bloodied with everyone else. And,” he added, “should you want to stick with me, you will have to go back to writing and lecturing.”

As it turned out, my experiences with Baba and in his ashram were far too powerful and rewarding to leave, and I stuck with him and his far-flung global meditation group for twelve wonderfully rich years, even after his leaving in physical form (wherein I simply switched to his successor, Gurumayi, who carried on the tradition). dutifully going back to writing and lecture travels (which grew more and more frequent), I hung out in this Siddha ashram in India at every opportunity.

I gave my first mind-heart presentation in 1981 at the university of colorado in Boulder, the continually unfolding scientific discoveries I purloined ad lib from a variety of sources displayed in full. In subsequent years I gave over 1,500 such presentations for Siddha Yoga (Muktananda’s international organization) in some twelve countries. Meanwhile I turned out more books while travel-lecturing, with a total since 1971 of nine books and near 2,000 talks to date, which is to say, I was energetic and busy back then.

A major issue of our heart centers around a “frequency field” emanating from it. In the 1970s Karl Pribram, now professor-emeritus from Stanford university, proposed that the brain draws its information needed to create our world-experience from a “frequency spectrum or realm” not in time-space, but, in effect, giving rise to time-space in our experience, all of which proved to arise and radiate from our heart. this was an absurd-sounding notion back then, but fit Baba’s Shaivite theory of heart-brain and was but one of many contributions adding, over the years, to my understanding of the heart’s role in mind’s experience.

Contemporary Echoes of Heart-Knowledge

In the earlier part of the twentieth century, the Austrian philosopher-scientist Rudolf Steiner detailed at length how the universe arises from a point at heart’s center, in a frequency-form that vibrates out-and-in untold myriads of times a second (as do many micro- or “subatomic” events such as neutrinos or microtubules). Steiner claimed that the whole universe was contained in those radiations from our heart, and made the prognosis that the greatest discovery of twentieth-century science would be that the heart is not a pump, but profoundly more. Further, he claimed that our species’ greatest challenge, following our understanding of the actual heart-function, would be to allow the heart to teach us a new way of thinking. Through this new way of thinking, the heart would find its own next step in evolution.

Only in recent years, in looking back, did I realize how fully Steiner had spelled out in clear detail the universe enfolding into that singular point in the heart, to then unfold and expand back out into its full panorama in a kind of oscillatory or vibratory manner. One could have assumed Abhinavagupta had reared his prophetic head somewhere in Steiner’s background. More likely, the two simply shared the same subtle, collective memory-fields, to which Steiner often referred as “higher worlds.” These “memory-records” reportedly contain within them the resonant memory-fields of all human experience, the truth or validity of any item within such “universal library” being a matter of opinion.

Filling in the Gaps

In 1995 I was introduced to the HeartMath Institute, a small research group (long since doubled, if not tripled in size) in the Santa Cruz mountains of California. There I found an impressive body of bona fide scientific research into the heart-brain dialogue, going on in many areas, with visiting neuroscientists and cardiologists of repute (including neurosurgeon Karl Pribram), in and out of that mountain laboratory, building an equally impressive catalog of additional discoveries and information.

By the mid-1990s, HeartMath had compiled most heart research from around the world, including the extraordinary work at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Through new scanning and imaging devices, a raft of scientific materials has given all that is needed to verify, confirm, and even clarify the ancient Shaivite scholars’ explanations of the heart as center of our world. All this evidence indicates that, among a wide range of astonishing capacities, the heart does, indeed, contain a series of large and powerful neural ganglia that function as do the neural-fields of our larger “head-brain,” the relationship of the two being a primal key in our life and creation.

Grand as all this was, some key ingredient was missing for me: I looked within this technical and scientific framework for a niche wherein my personal inner experiences could find room. For at critical periods of my life, events happened to me that fell—and still fall—outside all these neat systems. And I wondered where I might find a place in the scheme of things for my innermost and deepest experiences and convictions.

My encounters with Robert Sardello, Cheryl Sanders-Sardello, and their School for Contemplative and Spiritual Psychology brought together for me missing links in this strange loop phenomenon not found elsewhere. Until then I still did not know the critical role we each play in both our personal life and the life of our good Earth, whose Sophia spirit hangs in the balance with us today. Sardello’s “spiritual psychology” and its heart-orientation proved to be not just another neat synthesis of previous systems, but an opening of the “future flowing into the present” I had but dimly sensed in my early years of reading the action-accounts of Jesus, stripped of the religious trappings of church and dogma.

Tracking the Movements of the Heart

Knowledge of the heart as discussed here concerns a radiating force or electromagnetic field arising from or through our heart (see figures 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4). Offering new perspectives, this heart-field is often called heart “energy,” as though it were of the same nature or makeup as gasoline, nuclear power, or the like, but such terminology doesn’t fit. Alternately, poet Dylan Thomas, speaking of “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower, drives my green age,” expresses this heart issue wondrously well, as do the terms flow and resonance.

This field, emerging out of our heart and surrounding our body, is a spiraling form called a torus (see figure 5.5). This torus the heart flow creates is a stable formation that can arise through, from, or in a wide variety of nonsolid materials, and in the heart’s case, involving electromagnetic properties. The water swirling down in a whirlpool or a lavatory drain creates forms similar to a torus, and the circular rush of blood into the chambers of the heart creates a vortex similar to a torus form. So also does the pulse of blood spiraling through the major blood vessels; these vessels are reportedly “grooved” as in a rifle barrel to assist in the spin of the blood’s spiraling flow.

Figure 5.1. computerized electromagnetic image revealing the forces arising from a living heart. note there are two points from which two currents of force arise. From one point the currents curve down and up again, behind the heart—completing one in an endless array of loops pouring out from the heart. the downward currents and their corresponding upward currents move within a designated frequency range to form the first layer of a field of magnetic force, culminating in nestled torus fields (see figure 5.4). (courtesy SCI Institute)

Figure 5.2. Another “live” computer image of the heart torus field, indicating patterns similar to those in figure 5.1. (Courtesy SCI Institute)

Figure 5.3. This remarkable image of heart torus fields was generated by Augustus Waller in 1887, using rudimentary electromagnetic measuring devices.

Figure 5.4. the threefold torus surrounding the human body. the innermost and possibly most powerful torus, infusing body and brain, is essentially “physical,” registering physical sensations, which directly impact the body-brain. the middle torus field encompasses emotional or relational forces and influences, while the third, outermost field expands to spiritual domains.

Electrocardiograms (the familiar “EKGs” made in medical offices and hospitals) have charted the general nature of this heart-field for years. In the early 1990s, the HeartMath Institute began collecting research on the subject, as well as initiating research of their own. HeartMath’s work eventually attracted neuroscientists and cardiologists from a wide area, and the field of neurocardiology—the study of the neural or “brain” components of the heart—has been growing ever since.

Such electromagnetic configuration as this torus from the heart surrounds and “embraces” our body, and electromagnetic images of this have been revealing. Of particular interest, these individual formations from our heart are essentially of the same makeup as our planetary torus-forms arising from Earth’s core. These planetary flows arc out and back at the magnetic poles, creating the ionosphere embracing the body of Earth, and extending far beyond (see figure 5.6). And here, in this similitude between heart and Earth, another aspect of our heart-story appears.

Figure 5.5. The two torus forms arising from Earth’s magnetic poles, creating the ionosphere and extending indefinitely beyond.

Figure 5.6. NASA electromagnetic satellite image of Earth. note the direct similarity of form with the torus forms of the human heart, as well as the streaming electromagnetic currents branching out from the poles, connecting Earth with similar forces in the Sun and solar system at large. the myriad semi-torus figures creating a potpourri of chaotic e-m fields immediately around the Earth, suggest chaotic patterns—in part human generated—as discussed in the text.

As Earth’s magnetic fields stream out into space, so the heart’s electromagnetic field streams out beyond our body, both for indeterminate distances. Further, these magnetic waves of heart and Earth fuse or merge in varying ways, depending on the “coherence” of our heart’s field. And herein our story takes on deeper implications.

Coherence, in this case, means regularity or orderliness of those wave-frequencies. Given that coherent regularity, heart’s field-frequencies can, and automatically will, mesh or fuse with correspondingly regular frequencies such as those surrounding the Earth—or those of other people in a similar state of coherence (see figure 5.7).

Figure 5.7. Coherent wave frequencies overlap and reinforce each other, thereby gaining strength, and giving strength to other coherent wave-forms. Incoherent wave frequencies not only cannot overlap and reinforce, but clash, confuse, weaken, and even cancel each other out.

Further, as the magnetic fields forming about the Earth radiate outward in ever-expanding wave-forms, the same effect radiates out of and from the Sun, old Sol itself, which constantly produces untold myriads, torrents, and oceans of uniquely coherent torus forms covering the Sun’s surface. At the same time, even more massive radiations from the Sun extend outward in great streams of plasma—electromagnetic rivers of unimaginable density, size, and power—which move into and “embrace” the entire solar system (see figure 5.8).

Coherent heart-fields within us individuals merge into those of Earth’s radiating fields, which, in turn, merge with those of the Sun. Thus, we are incorporated into and reciprocally interact, directly and indirectly, with this whole solar system, to the extent our heart-fields are coherent.

Figure 5.8. Electromagnetic image of the Sun and its incalculable outpouring of torus-like wave-forms. these streaming rivers of e-m power, known as plasma, embrace the entire solar system, meshing with corresponding coherent streams coming from the planets. there is thus an enormous solar exchange and “re-charging” within the solar system, one of the great relational power structures of creation as we currently understand it.

The Map and the Territory

A Cautionary Note

The assumption that the phenomenon viewed in this electromagnetic fashion is itself (just) electromagnetic, is, however, questionable and falls short of any final “truth.” Granted that our images by which we are privy to such otherwise invisible phenomena are labeled electromagnetic, since the devices we have devised to make such imaging are electromagnetic. But to assume that the phenomenon revealed by such means is of the same form or nature as the device revealing it is simply wrong.

Were we to find evidence of some creature who comes out only at night and cannot be “captured” on ordinary film, we might use an infrared camera to photograph its activity. But we would not then assume the creature viewed to be infrared itself, that is, constituted or made of some infrared substance or material. Similarly, our electromagnetic imaging of this heart-flow reveals only a “virtual reality” of what is occurring, not the real thing as itself—the real thing is our self and our heart’s nature. These are not of themselves visible. Self and the nature of heart’s being are resonances found within physical expressions such as electromagnetic fields, but resonance in this case is not of itself a physical—and therefore measureable—substance; rather, it is a felt experience. To equate the two is misplaced concreteness, and leads into error and confusion. The potential for such confusion is high, and should be borne in mind whenever the term “electromagnetic” is used.

The old-line semanticists harped about the map not being the country mapped; or the word for something not being that something as-itself. In the same way, the technical phenomena giving us a “map” of that “flow from the heart” are not identical with that flow, and far from a complete explanation of it. Our logical guidelines concerning real, and facsimiles of the real, can get confused in the deluge of virtual-reality gadgetry we have created. The same error is made concerning mind and brain, which are a strange loop wherein each gives rise to and is necessary to the other—but neither is the other.

The Holonomic Heart in Its Mirroring Loops

The torus organization of heart’s field not only tends toward a self-generative stability; the formation is also holistic, or holonomic. This means any portion or aspect of the field would contain the “information” of the whole form, could such a portion be divided out, which in actuality it cannot be. A whole is just such that any portion or “part” always implicitly replicates that whole. But this holonomic torus is a movement, or flow, with no more “parts” than a breeze. And accordingly, just as a breeze can fly a kite, this flow from the heart can fly any number of miraculous creations.

A workable example-analogy of this holonomic effect is found in holographic photography. Should you make a holographic photograph of a tree using a glass plate rather than celluloid film, and then break that glass plate, each shattered part would contain the whole image of the tree found in the original glass plate, no matter how tiny the fragment. The catch is that the smaller the fragment, the “fuzzier” or less clear the image. Nevertheless, the entire original image would still be “there” in that fragment. The clarity of such fragment can be restored more or less, with the proper instruments and approach.

Such part-whole imagery is a workable analogy of what our life is all about: manifesting the clarity of the whole from our apparently insignificant and currently fuzzy fragment called “self ” is the evolutionary impulse driving us from conception.

The torus from our heart, as well as those from the Earth and the Sun, is an expression of a single unified, resonant nature. The information of that totality, with which our heart’s radiations are designed to fuse, is thus automatically an integral aspect of our own, functionally individual heart, as our heart is of that larger torus. Our individual expression, then, contains the same information as that of the totality. But like the holographic fragment, that totality within us takes quite a bit of time—namely a lifetime of development—to clarify and bring into sharper focus, and thus be apparent to our waking consciousness. This possibility acts as a goad to our life from our beginning, if unbeknownst.

Again, Blake is instructive: “More! More! Is the cry of a mistaken soul, less than All cannot satisfy Man.” That “All” is actually what that very fragment of our original image known as “self ” holds within it, and awaits and expects, even lifelong, as clarification of its own whole image.