One of the gravest threats to the integrity and development of human intelligence today is the pervasively mechanistic nature of modern, industrial society. Here I'll use "mechanistic" as shorthand to reference all manner of specific features of a social world utterly dominated by machines, digital and computer technologies, personal devices,...
A periodic blog about living intelligence, holistic cognition, yin, biotensegrity, social mind, poetry, science, and mystery.
~~~
The
heart is the smaller cousin of the sun.
It sees and knows everything. …
The door to the mind should only open from the heart.
~~~
This blog is an ongoing exploration of the many dynamic dimensions of Living Heart Intelligence (LHI, or living intelligence for short), embodied/holistic cognition, yin, social-relational cognition, and the best and most interesting science investigating these and related phenomena. While I provide an overview of living intelligence on the "About" page, living intelligence deserves a wide-ranging, long form, real-time dialogue with the rough and tumble of life and cannot be simplistically reduced to pithy sayings, contrived formulae, or linear bullet points. Heart-based intelligence is ultimately a paradox, in that the heart simultaneously feels/knows the core truths of life while remaining open to -- and fearlessly embracing -- complexity and contingency, adapting to meet the unique needs of every new day and even the newness of every fresh moment.
In and through the heart is where we alchemize conflict and contradiction into complementarity and congruence. It is the room in the house of our being where the most diverse guests meet for coffee and share their stories: simplicity meets complexity; joy meets sorrow; fear meets hope; mastery meets humility; knowledge meets mystery; power meets surrender; routine meets experimentation; imagination meets memory; self meets other…and the sparks generated by these tensional encounters ignite fields of vision fertilized by a composting of the old that nourishes growth of the new. To choose any one of these and countless other qualities – absolutely, over against the other, as if they are mutually exclusive – is to limit ourselves, to resign ourselves to a mechanical necessity that seeks to impose a select order onto all other possibilities of experience, engagement, and action. There may be comfort in absolutism, but it is an artificial and fragile comfort. It is ultimately rigid, and "rigidity in the face of complexity is toxic," as psychologist Susan David explains. To live through the heart is to embody, energetically, the dynamic strength of a bristlecone pine growing exposed on a wind-whipped mountainside ridge: the noble tree twists 'round its trunk with the wind, accommodating the force without breaking, then unwinding when the pressure subsides. Dynamic, fluid, flexible – yet strong and resilient.
This blog is a literary walk through the thick forest of the heart's ecology. Thousands of species of experience live here, in an ever-moving, ever-changing, fluid harmony of thoughts, emotions, intuitions, sensations, imaginations, dreams, visions, perceptions, speakings, and listenings. These are the currencies of living intelligence, traded endlessly in the economy of the heart. "Economy," after all, derives from the Greek oikos meaning "house, adobe, dwelling." The dwelling place of human intelligence is not primarily in the head, but in the heart. All aspects of our cognition have a place in this bodily house, but the heart is the very center of the home. This is the real meaning of the aphorism "home is where the heart is." It's a clunky phrase, really; more simply, it means "we feel at home when we live from and within the heart."
This introductory post is the trailhead to this path through an ecology of the heart, but there is no destination, no fixed goal. This is a place to simply wander, and dwell for however long your heart-mind-body desires. In this forest of the heart is where we sense the deep truths passed down through the ages, those timeless insights offered by sages, mystics, visionaries, scientists, and common folk the world over...
"It is all
simpler than you think, while more complex than you can understand."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
~~~
"The heart
has its reasons, which reason knows nothing of."
Blaise Pascal
~~~
"The very center of your heart
is where life begins.
The most beautiful place on earth."
Rumi
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"If the human
brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we
couldn't."
Emerson Pugh, PhD
(IBM research scientist and computer engineer)
~~~
"Science is
beginning to provide evidence that balance between the wisdom of the heart
(feminine) and rational thought (masculine) is essential to our overall
well-being. We used to believe that all thinking was done in the brain, and
that this was the exclusive domain of our intelligence. We now know better. …The
heart sends more information to the brain than the brain sends to the heart.
The heart informs the brain how to take action that manifests in our physical
body, just like the heart-based wisdom of the divine feminine is meant to
inform the divine masculine how to act out in the world. This is the balance
that we all need."
Sherri Mitchell, Sacred Instructions: Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit-Based Change
~~~
Nov 03
Soul Questions
Humans generally don't like uncertainty. Most people, when faced with the unknown, grasp for anything and everything that might give them an "answer" to whatever questions might arise within the space created by a lack of explicit knowledge or understanding. In the current world moment, people are asking all sorts of questions -- and, of course,...
May 12
Breathing With Your Feet
Have you ever breathed with your feet?
"The heart is the smaller cousin of the sun.
It sees and knows everything. …
The door to the mind should only open from the heart."
For hundreds of years, the mainstream (read: financially and socio-politically privileged) of modern science has assumed that "the mind" and its cognates – cognition, thought, mental activity, consciousness, etc. – is inside the head. That the mind, in short, is the brain. So, if we understand neural activity in the brain, we understand mind. There...
Mar 14
A Psychology of Anomaly
Living Heart Intelligence incorporates what could be called a psychology of anomalies. Science in the modern period, in pursuit of the illusory dream of a purely "objective" analysis of reality, has developed a debilitating allergy to anomalies. While this makes sense in some contexts (namely, research concerned solely with inanimate systems such...