Heart, Consciousness, Group Consciousness, and Paranormal Phenomena

Researchers associated with the Heartmath institute have shown that an individuals heart rate variability becomes more robust when other people are wishing them good feelings.

As beings with bodies and minds, it is an odd thing that we do not recognize the relationship between what we say and do and how we come to perceive and become motivated to act in our relations.

The heart is a very special Human organ. The popular view is that its a pump - and since it beats and functions like a muscle, its a good theory. However, it may be important to widen how we understand the heart, because the hearts other effect besides contracting is its a) electromagnetic pulse, which emits as far out as 3 feet from the human body (as detectable by modern tools) b) its shape.

So much hinges on just what the heart is -- is it a pump, or is it a 'hydraulic ram', as the anthroposophist doctor Thomas Cowan argues? What about the pulsation of the heart? Is it merely generating meaningless noise? Or is its every pulse intimately calibrated to the inside and outside - the "conducting" of the Ego-Self - and the receptivity of the body's sensorial and energetic openness to other biodynamical systems?

Let's say the nervous system is itself a generator of knowledge - energetically and metabolically linked to thresholds in the non-nervous cells of the body, to which the nervous systems electrocmagnetic nature computes solutions to. On the inside, over many many years of chordate and vertebrate evolution, the nervous system sprouts a head, and a tail, a front and a back, and a "proximal" and a "distal" dimension to its structure.

The most amazing thing about this emerging creature is its sheer magnitude: 10 octillion atoms alone make up your body. That is a 10, with 28 zeros behind it. Components wise - the Human body is made up of around 35 trillion cells, which have a hierarchical structure from the metabolic, to the genetic, to the protein, in mutual self-regulation. In relation to these cellular dynamics, the neuron receives chemical signals to either turn on or off.

The neuron, it must be remembered, is not merely a 'mind factory'. It is a cell with unique chemical signatures specifically tuned to the activities of the cells around it; for instance, species of divergent evolutionary lineage cannot share large structures like cells between one another, although they may be able to 'share' genes or proteins. The cell is not compatible, and so is tagged as foreign and eliminated by the bodies defenders - immune cells.

Back to the heart: does it pump, or does it make more sense to think of the cardiovascular system in terms of the xylem of trees. Humans have long wondered, how does a tree feed water from the ground - against the laws of gravity - up the trunk to branches sometimes 100 feet high? The answer comes in the form of xylem, a type of vascular system in plants and trees. The physicist Gerald Pollack, in a series of wondrous experiments at the University of Washington, has shown that the intrinsic properties of water account for the transport of water up the xylem vessel towards the leaves above. The secret lies in how water acts upon hydrophilic (water loving) surfaces, such as xylem (as well as blood vessels). In a situation such as this, the positive charge of the surface draws electrons from oxygen, and in the chaotic remodeling that the surface induces, results in a 5 helical structure of 2 oxygen (-4) and 3 hydrogen (+3) yielding a negative charge of -1, and so a 'structured" phase of water termed "the exclusion zone", because its molecular packing is so tight as to exclude any solutes.

However, in the remodeling process a proton, or hydrogen atom, is released, which then becomes quickly gobbled up by an H20 molecule, to create hydronium H30. This water tends to cluster around the middle of the volume, as the negative charge of the structured water along the surface pushes hydronium atoms to the center. Simple, yes? Just positive and electrical charges, and the dynamical activity it can induce.

Now imagine water in a xylem vessel. The water that touches the cell surface becomes structured and negatively charged, which forces the positively charged hydronium atoms to move upward along the xylem vessel as they try to get away from one another. And since negative charges are attracted to positive charges, the structured water pulls up towards the chaotically pulling force of the positively charged hydronium atoms.

This new way of thinking is revolutionary because it really compels us to reconsider what the heart is - and what it does.

My theory invokes the heart not merely as a "hydraulic ram" that creates vortices in the bodies blood (the main argument of Cowans) but that the heart has served as a satellite, as it were, serving to synchronize affective activity between interacting organisms.

This theory positions the heart and the brain stem as intrinsically interconnected systems: the brainstem regulates the heart, and the heart in turn, regulates the body through its various gating processes. In this scheme, the mental state of the organism 'acts upon' the brainstem, which instantly revises heart activity, which in turn turns upward towards consciousness.

The evolution of consciousness has this sort of feedback and feedforward behavior. As the mind-brain evolved, it always evolved with reference to its last experience - its last moment - and so always operated in terms of a hegelian schema of thesis-antithesis - the world creating problems by its changing, and the organisms computing solutions to the change.

I believe that within social organisms, the heart operated as a core synchronizing signal between that helped keep conspecifics in quantum equilibrium with one another.

This phenomena has truly not been as unpacked as it deserves, because one main may as well wonder: why does a machine care to relate or know other machines? What properties draw out organisms to play with one another, or care for one another, or worship with one another? These phenomena are totally be "evoked" out of an external set of conditions, that generate possibilities that ultimately lead to the formation of a center that engages in selfless behavior with other animals. This amazing, intrinsically mystical phenomenon makes space seem unreal: the systems connect because they ultimately know one another.

So herein lies the "recipe" for the evolution of mind: Suffer - and then solution - love. Some species become 'stuck', while others discover, or become the prototype, of a new, more enhanced and complex form of organization - the point that separates the African apes from the Hominins - which separates from those which are able to accomplish a full 180 inward, to see the self, know the self, but know the self entirely and in terms of its interpersonal dynamics.

The human truly is weaker by itself, because its entirely evolutionary structure - the brain structure it possesses - is meant to be "metabolized" in terms of a sophisticated inner understanding of self-experience, which it most assuredly is not being used for today. This statement is becoming more and more defensible as neuroanatomy and neurodynamics show how the brain evolved, and which structures are most advanced in modern Humans (answer: the brain behind your eye balls). It also makes sense: for evolution to advance and natural selection to maintain a structure, it needs to be stable: stable states, as we

all know, are positive, supportive, and encouraging. In systems terms, these are mutual, bidirectional flows of energy which experience a state of the other as a motivation to assume a particular relation. This state of the other functions as a gestalt structure - a meaning - which in scientific reality, infuses energy into the organization of the body. This desire to help and equilibrate the activity and state of the Other emerges from a direct knowing, "conducted" by a process of recognition, arousal, and action.

In short, and for those obsessed with occultism: the magic which emerges between us may have everything to do with the dynamics that operate between us. There is no outside - the mind is the actuated potential - the potentia made real - incarnated in the bodies we inhabit. This mind moves back and forth, and sometimes, through a collective objectification, we can "incarnate" mind in the physical space between us - a space which may exist, paradoxically, as subject to the way and manner we process the reality between one another.

As such, people of "a like mind" can conduct particularly feelings between them. There is a "quantum superposition" between them because they each possess the inner "sign" (trauma, indoctrination, etc) that metabolizes (makes meaning) of the world (external sign) in the same way.

What exists and is made real is totally and utterly social. It works through the force of shame - and it keeps anyone who has not reflected on shames effect upon them from recognizing how reality really works: we are not "other" from nature, but a part of it. Our nature - more importantly - is a more advanced and complex coherency of the natural world around us, which exists around us literally as the "garden" that makes possible our existence - if it goes down, so do we.

a reply to: Astrocyte

I'm not the most communicative member here, but i would like to let you know that i'm an astute follower of your interesting threads. i often break my brain while reading and comprehending your texts.

so i wish you a very good new year with thousands of blessings. may your ink never dry out

and my the garden around you and all of us be fruitful and prosper and never go down