“Highly evolved people have their own conscience as pure law.” ~Lao Tzu

If we heed these wise words by Lao Tzu, then it stands to reason that we focus more on developing highly evolved people capable of honoring universal laws, rather than waste our energy bludgeoning people with invalid laws that violate the golden rule, the nonaggression principle, and the universal laws that dictate health.

But what constitutes a highly evolved person? What might a highly evolved person’s character look like? How do we define such a broad concept? In Five Counterintuitive Traits of Highly Evolved Humans, I broke down the emotional disposition of highly evolved people. In this article we’ll break down the political disposition of highly evolved people.

Choose a courage-based lifestyle over a fear-based lifestyle:

“A government which will turn its tanks upon its people, for any reason, is a government with the taste of blood and a thirst for power and must either be smartly rebuked or blindly obeyed in deadly fear.” ~John Salter

Does your government have a taste for blood and a thirst for power? A highly evolved person, with their own conscience as pure law, would choose smart rebuking over fearful obsequiousness.

Don’t allow such a government to have its way. Question its authority. Practice strategic civil disobedience. Count coup on overreaching power constructs. Challenge outdated, immoral, and unjust laws. Be the personification of checks and balances. Dare to be a courageous David facing down the Goliath of the state.

We don’t need more people who blindly obey in deadly fear. That’s already the vast majority of people. We need more people who are highly evolved enough to smartly rebuke any and all governments that use violence to “solve” problems.

Choosing a courage-based lifestyle over a fear-based lifestyle is choosing to no longer be a victim. It’s choosing, instead, to become a hero. It’s choosing courage over fear, self-sacrifice over comfort and security, adventure over banality, fierceness over obsequiousness, and ruthless skepticism over blind faith.

Understand that the vast majority of people are still willing to live fear-based lifestyles. Sympathize with them for having not woken up yet, but do not pity them. It’s not their fault they were brainwashed, conditioned and indoctrinated into living fear-based lifestyles, but it is their responsibility to educate themselves and to break themselves of their conditioning.

You can lead people to knowledge, but you can’t make them think. You can, however, remain ruthless with your courage-based lifestyle. Become a beacon of courageous hope. Especially for those who are still living fear-based lifestyles. Call it tough love. As Derrick Jensen said, “Love does not imply pacifism.”

Choose heart-centeredness over political divisiveness:

“We want to abolish the state and create a world free of oppression and suffering, but we must not lose sight of ourselves in the pursuit of this goal. Remain heart-centered no matter how violent the state becomes or how divisive the political climate. Every revolutionary through history who chose violence became a monster and a shadow of what they pursued. Remember, we are after an evolution of hearts and minds.” ~Derrick Broze & John Vibes

Bipartisan politics is old hat. It’s high time you toss that hat in the fire. Highly evolved people have already done so. They have gone Meta with politics. They’ve gone beyond the outdated, codependent divisiveness of bipartisanism and graduated into an updated, interdependent metamorality.

Metamorality, coined by Joshua Greene, is based on a common ground that all humans can agree upon while proposing a utilitarian deep pragmatism that empathically broadens the mind and compassionately opens the heart to the plight of us all as interdependent beings on an interconnected planet. Highly evolved humans use this strategy, along with the Astronaut Overview Effect, to go big-picture.

Going big-picture helps us change our minds. Or, at least be more flexible and open in our thinking. It puts things into proper perspective. It helps us feel more empathic and less psychopathic toward each other. We’re better able to see the world as one, without borders.

We’re better able to narrow our highfalutin politics down to a single concept we can all agree on: freedom. We’re better able to see through all the red herring cognitive biases of the climate debate and realize that our problem is a single problem we can all agree on: pollution. We’re better able to cut straight through the divisiveness of religion and narrow it down to a single concept that we can all agree on: love. Especially love for our children, and creating a healthy environment for them to grow up in. And suddenly there are not so many differences between us.

Choosing heart-centeredness over political divisiveness puts a compassionate spin on our conscience. Indeed, it puts the “conscience” in having our own conscience as pure law. For pure law is universal law, based upon the healthy interconnectedness of all things.

Choose self-improvement over self-preservation and create a better world:

“You are personally responsible for becoming more ethical than the society you grew up in.” ~Eliezer Yudkowsky

When it comes down to it, becoming a highly evolved human is about spitting out the unhealthy blue pill of comfort, safety, and security based on outdated laws, and having the courage to swallow the healthy red pill of curiosity, questioning, and skepticism that questions bad laws in order to create healthy laws that align with universal laws.

It’s about becoming the personification of checks and balances. It’s about putting in the hard and difficult work of becoming a highly evolved person who has the wherewithal to “use their own conscience as pure law.” And to teach others how to do the same.

The answer is not creating more bad laws to shove down people’s throats. The answer is creating people smart enough to question the authority that seeks to shove bad laws down people’s throats. Indeed. The answer is teaching people how to become bigger than the law, how to gain the capacity to have their own conscience as pure law, and how to become a more valuable human. As Niels Bohr said, “Every valuable human being must be a radical and a rebel, for what he must aim at is to make things better than they are.”

If, as Plato famously said, “Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws,” then it stands to reason that we should focus more on teaching people how to act responsibly and less on creating laws. Especially since humans are so terrible at making good laws. And especially-especially since humans are even more terrible about abusing their power regarding those ill-conceived laws.

As Edward Abbey wisely suggested, “Since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.” The few seeking to rule others do so through the enforcement of bad laws.

So, it is incumbent upon anyone with their own conscience as pure law to ruthlessly interrogate such bad laws and then mercilessly check and balance any authority seeking to enforce such bad laws. We do ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren a disservice when we decide not to.

There is no greater cause than becoming more ethical than the society you grew up in. Will you defend outdated unethical laws and merely turn a blind eye to those who unjustly enforce them? Or will you defend the people’s right to ruthlessly challenge unethical laws and those who unjustly enforce them? The choice is yours. As William James said, “We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause.”

“The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.” ~Friedrich Nietzsche

If you would be alive –if you would choose to live an examined life, a fulfilled life, a self-actualized life, a life well-lived– then don’t fearfully choose the safe road, what Jung called “The Road of Death.” Choose instead the courage to face the trials and tribulations of an adventurous road, a road full of danger and risk.

On the bridge from Man to Overman, there is no place for half-assed lifestyles and herd instincts. There’s no place for fear-based perspectives and cowardly excuses. There’s no place for play-it-safers and goodie-two-shoes clinging to comfort and light. The bridge is too narrow for narrow-mindedness. It’s too shadowy for those who have not reconciled their own shadows. It’s too full of dark nights for anyone who hasn’t experienced a Dark Night of the Soul. It’s too painfully real for those who have not overcome the Matrix and embraced the Desert of the Real.

The bridge is only for courageous self-actualizers and heroic self-overcomers. If your intent is not self-actualization and self-overcoming, then simply get out of the way. Don’t block those with a full heart just because your heart is empty. Better yet: fill your heart with courage. Join the ranks of healthy progressive evolution. “I teach you the Overman,” writes Nietzsche. “Man is something that should be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?”

Taking the leap of courage:

“Every valuable human being must be a radical and a rebel, for what he must aim at is to make things better than they are.” ~Niels Bohr

Can you feel the constriction of your comfort zone? Like a heavy life-jacket weighing you down? Like a too-safe straight-jacket keeping you out of harms way?

Can you feel the warm glow of contentedness quietly stagnating you? Causing you to feel like you’ve made it somehow? Can you feel the secure pressure of the status quo keeping you in line? Causing you to blindly accept, to myopically believe that you’ve somehow got it all figured out?

Taking a leap of courage is daring yourself to escape these feelings. It’s encouraging yourself to step outside your comfort zone. It’s having the audacity to think rather than believe, to take things into consideration rather than rely on conviction. It’s inspiring yourself to be heroic despite fear.

Look, I get it. Inside the comfort zone everything is safe and warm, solved and unriddled. But there’s also no adventure there. There’s no risk. There’s no challenge. There is everything in there to help you heal, it’s a great place to lick your wounds, but there’s nothing there to help you grow.

Healthy growth, the kind of growth that builds resilience and robustness, can only be achieved outside the comfort zone. There’s got to be risk. Like Nietzsche said, “Man is a rope, tied between beast and Overman – a rope over an abyss. A dangerous across, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and stopping.”

Inside the comfort zone there’s placation, pacification and pity. There’s everything that keeps us appeased and satisfied. There’s God with his shiny promises and glossy platitudes keeping us pampered and coddled and giving us that warm fuzzy feeling. But there’s no growth. There’s no questions. There’s no humor. There’s no furthering of evolution.

Outside of the comfort zone God is dead. Or, at least, God is a garden. A vast and vital garden filled with the compost of every man-made God to ever have existed, rotting like deified fertilizer for the future fertilization of ever-improved and ever-updated Gods.

Alas, the bridge from Man to Overman can only be built outside our comfort zones. Building the bridge is building adventure. It’s building something to grow into. It’s rebuilding God. It’s building a path into godhood and creative evolution. Indeed, we stand upon the corpse of God in order to self-actualize our place as Gods in the making.

Building the bridge out of the bones of God (and Giants):

“We are all Mothers of God, for God is always needing to be reborn.” ~Meister Eckhart

The bridge is a symbol for revivification, a creative renaissance, a spiritual rebirth, an existential resurgence. The bridge is a path, but it’s also a crossroads –a snarling juxtaposition. It’s built out of the outdated bones of God toward the updated end of creative evolution. It’s fixed into place with existential glue. It’s sturdier than any bridge ever created, but it’s surrounded by an angry abyss, and it’s never completed.

We are all architects of this bridge to some extent. Some of us are aware of it, but most of us are not. Most of us are cluttered and stuck in stopgap ideologies. We’re clustered and bottlenecked before the crossroads. Unable to self-actualize. Unable to self-overcome. Unable to see how everything is connected to everything else. Like pre-enlightened Rumis, we’re incapable of seeing that the door to our prison is wide open. And always has been.

Building the bridge from Man to Overman is proactively engaging and leveraging open-mindedness through self-actualization and self-overcoming. It’s inflicting awareness. It’s launching existential flares. It’s highlighting creative evolution through courageous interdependence.

The bones of God are sturdy and steadfast. Solid ground upon which to keep moving, ever-forward, ever-overcoming, ever-evolving. It takes the Newtonian notion of “standing on the shoulders of giants” to the next level. It’s Meta-perceptual. We stand on the bones of God in order to see further than God did. In order to perpetually propel human imagination and ingenuity. In order to grow and keep growing, despite creature comforts, herd instincts, and psychosocial hang-ups.

Building the bridge begins with each of us taking personal responsibility for our contribution to human evolution. Indeed. We all carry the bones of God. Self-overcoming is taking the reins of our life into our own hands, and proactively going about improving upon who we were yesterday. It’s a personalized Fibonacci sequence (self-improvement) striving toward Phi (enlightenment), where our own development is predicated upon an individualized progressive evolution that will ultimately contribute to the evolution of the species.

If you meet Nietzsche on the bridge, kill him:

“If you meet The Buddha on the road, kill him.” ~Linji

As Zen master Shunryu Suzuki wrote in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, “Kill the Buddha if the Buddha exists somewhere else. Kill the Buddha, because you should resume your own Buddha nature.” Similarly, we should kill our notion of self-mastery in order to continue improving our mastery. Think of it as a kind of recycled mastery, where we recycle the mastery of yesterday into the remastered mastery of today.

This applies to the concept of deification itself. So as not to get stuck in a particular state of growth, it is vital that we “kill” the notion that we have “arrived.” That our evolution is somehow “complete.” That there is nothing further to grow into, nothing to question, nothing to overcome. For there will always be something to grow into, to question, and to overcome. There will always be a vast infinity toward which our limited finitude must strive. Indeed. The bridge from Man to Overman is built ever-finitely into the infinite future.

Killing Buddha (God) on the road and killing Nietzsche (Godhood) on the bridge is vital to keep creative evolution in perspective, so as not to get hung-up on any particular notion of Truth. The bridge from Man to Overman is filled with the outdated bones of dead Gods and the burnt-out husks of outdated truths. As James Russel Lowell said, “Time makes ancient good uncouth.”

Those who are proactively and courageously building the bridge understand that Truth is a fickle beast. Almost as fickle a beast as human fallibility. It’s for both reasons that those who are building the bridge consistently recycle their own mastery.

At the end of the day, the bridge from Man to Overman is a process of self-actualization and self-overcoming. It’s the collective personification of creative evolution. We build the bridge to provide a flexible and malleable path toward godhood. We keep building, destroying and rebuilding so that past growth adds to, without subtracting from, the healthy and progressive evolution of the species. We stand and face the Abyss, honoring each other… “Overmaste: the (r)evolutionary potential in me honors the (r)evolutionary potential in you.”

Image: Source

(TMU) – Life abounds with stress-making, havoc-provoking mayhem. Did you misplace your keys when you were already late for work this morning? Was traffic worse today than after a 5-car accident on a Los Angeles turnpike? Is your boss expecting the impossible from you, while you stare into your kid’s eyes and choke back tears explaining you’re going to have to miss their game – again?

In these moments, you need a fast, effective method to chill the heck out. This simple exercise can calm you down and eliminate stress in three minutes or less.

A Stealth Breathing Technique Used by Navy Seals and First Responders

The best thing about this breathing technique is that no one will even know you’re doing it.

It is used by first responders, Navy Seals, and people who are regularly under massive amounts of stress because it has a direct, palpable, and positive effect on the way their nervous systems function.

If you were to pick someone up in an ambulance from one of those LA traffic pile-ups, you don’t have time to freak out. Maybe they won’t live. You have seconds sometimes, to make smart choices that could possibly keep them breathing long enough to get them to a hospital.

Every fiber of your being has evolved over time to signal danger. This is part of your body’s fight-or-flight response.

Counter-Acting the Fight or Flight Response   

When faced with danger or any perceived threat, you instinctively default to two choices: run or fight.

A cascade of chemical reactions occurs the minute a stressful situation presents itself. This is how the body mobilizes its resources to deal with a threat. It doesn’t matter if it is a lion about to pounce on you – as our ancestors had to deal with – or that one last email that finally breaks you. Your natural response to stress will be the same – until you learn how to interrupt it.

The sympathetic nervous systems will trigger the adrenal glands to release catecholamines, which include adrenaline and noradrenaline. This causes your heart to pound, your blood pressure to rise, you’re your breathing rate to speed up.

Your pupils may dilate, and your skin may flush. In extreme stress, your muscles tense up – literally preparing you to run away from the dangerous trigger.

Modern-day triggers are so varied and pervasive, we are almost never in a state of calm.

After a stressful event, it can take up to 45 minutes for your body to return to homeostasis.

That’s why a simple breathing exercise can literally save your life, and retrain you to face stressful situations like a seasoned, meditating monk instead of a raging lunatic.

Cynthia Stonnington, chair of the department of psychiatry and psychology at the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix, Arizona, says she introduces people to breathwork because “many people find benefit, no one reports side effects, and it’s something that engages the patient in their recovery with actively doing something.”

Breathwork is in fact, so useful, that one study published in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine in 2017 found that patients with major depression who practiced deep breathing methods for three months had significantly reduced symptoms as compared to those who did not.

Another study found that our breathing is so closely linked to our emotional state, that changing it can practically negate anxiety completely.

How it Works

Sometimes called box-breathing, you can really use any form of deep, present and conscious breathing to change your physiological response to stress.

Most of us breathe in an unconscious, stress-promoting way. Here’s what happens when you breathe deeply, and correctly for just a few minutes:

• An exhale that is longer than your inhale (deep breathing) causes the vagus nerve which runs from the neck down through your diaphragm to relay a message to your brain to turn up your parasympathetic nervous system and turn down your sympathetic nervous system – the part of your nervous system responsible for rest, relaxation, peace, and digestion.
• This counter-acts the adrenal-dump and flight or fight response.
• Your brain is freed to make smart choices based on relaxed concentration, a state known as Alpha that is seen on EEG scans as neural oscillations in the frequency range of 5–12.5 Hz arising from synchronous and coherent (in phase or constructive) brain activity.
• Alpha waves caused by a deep-breathing pattern create a positive feedback loop that restores harmony between your mind and body.
• This brainwave state is also indicative of those “aha” or “eureka” moments of a compelling new idea, or insane creativity. They allow you to literally create something out of nothing. And when do you need to do that most often? When you are faced with a challenging or stressful situation!

How to Do It

You can start with a box breath and expand into larger inhale-exhale ratios.

A box breath is a simple inhale to the count of four, using your diaphragm. You then exhale for a slow count of four.

Be sure you expand your lungs completely, and fill them as much as you can. If your shoulders are shrugging into your ears, you are likely doing a “stress-breath” which only keeps you in the fight-or-flight stage. This is a shallow breath that we normally do when we are agitated or depressed.

Your stomach should expand, not just your lungs. This is because your diaphragm is moving down into your belly to allow your lungs to expand more fully.

Once you can do this, you will change the ratio. You will start with a 4:8 inhale to exhale ratio, and then move to 8:16, 10:20, 22:44, or even 30:80 etc.

If you want some real inspiration for deep breathing, check out this video of the famous yogi, B.K.S. Iyengar, conducting one of the longest exhales ever.

You don’t have to be this advanced to get all the benefits of deep breathing, though. Simply have enough awareness to take control of your breath the next time a stressful situation arises, and you’ll be feeling less anxious, and calmer.

It’s that simple. You can breathe yourself into peace, in three minutes or less.

Thich Naht Hanh, the Zen Buddhist master, has some interesting advice about what it means to truly let go. Many people mistake detachment or non-clinging to be a form of aloofness, or emotional disconnect from others, but as Hanh explains, truly letting go often means loving someone more than you have ever loved them before.

The Buddha taught that detachment, one of the disciplines on the Noble Path, also called ariyasaavaka, is not a physical act of withdrawal or even a form of austerity. Though the Buddha teaches of a “non-action which is an integral part of the Right Way,” if it is taken out of context it can give the impression that we should develop a lack of concern for others, and that we should live without truly feeling or expressing our emotions – cutting ourselves off from life.

These type of misinterpretations are sadly common, since there are not always direct translations from the Paali language into English.

This form of “detachment” is an erroneous understanding of the Buddha’s message. Master Hanh states that to truly let go we must learn to love more completely. Non-attachment only happens when our love for another extends beyond our own personal expectations of gain, or our anticipation of a specific, desired outcome.

Hanh describes four forms of complete detachment, which surprisingly, aren’t about holing yourself up in a cave and ignoring everyone who has broken your heart, or ignoring your lust or desire for a romantic interest. This is not detachment. Letting go, means diving in. For example:

Maitri (Not the Love You Know)

Hanh describes the importance of Maitri, not love as we normally understand in a Westernized use of the word. He states,

“The first aspect of true love is maitri (metta, in Pali), the intention and capacity to offer joy and happiness. To develop that capacity, we have to practice looking and listening deeply so that we know what to do and what not to do to make others happy. If you offer your beloved something she does not need, that is not maitri. You have to see her real situation or what you offer might bring her unhappiness.”

In other words, your detachment may come in accepting that certain things you would normally do to make another person feel loved and appreciated may not be what the person you are actively loving now, needs. Instead of forcing that behavior on another person, with an egoic intent to “please” them, you simply detach from that need in yourself, and truly observe what makes another person feel comfortable, safe, and happy.

Hanh further explains,

“We have to use language more carefully. “Love” is a beautiful word; we have to restore its meaning. The word “maitri” has roots in the word mitra which means friend. In Buddhism, the primary meaning of love is friendship.”

Karuna (Compassion)

The next form of true detachment is compassion. When we let go, we don’t stop offering a compassionate touch, word, or deed to help someone who is in pain. We also don’t expect to take their hurt or pain away. Compassion contains deep concern, though. It is not aloofness It is not isolation from others.

The Buddha smiles because he understands why pain and suffering exist, and because he also knows how to transform it. You become more deeply involved in life when you become detached form the outcome, but this does not mean you don’t participate fully – even in others’ pain.

Gratitude and Joy

In truly letting go you practice gratitude. Mudita, or joy arises when we are overcome with gratitude for all that we have, such that we no longer cling to some other longed-for result. The Buddha’s definition of joy is more like “Unselfish joy.” It means that we don’t only find happiness when something good happens to us, but when others find happiness.

If you’ve ever had to say goodbye to a love or friend so that they could continue on their life’s path – one that may not have continued to intertwine with your own – you may have felt pain when they found someone new to love, or made a new friend that seemed to take your place. This is not true detachment. Joy arises when you find happiness even when others find joy – and it has little or nothing to do with you.

Upeksha (Equanimity)

Master Hanh describes the final quality of true love which sheds inordinate light on the true process of letting go.

He states,

“The fourth element of true love is upeksha, which means equanimity, non-attachment, nondiscrimination, even-mindedness, or letting go. Upa means “over,” and iksha means “to look.” You climb the mountain to be able to look over the whole situation, not bound by one side or the other. If your love has attachment, discrimination, prejudice, or clinging in it, it is not true love.

People who do not understand Buddhism sometimes think upeksha means indifference, but true equanimity is neither cold nor indifferent. If you have more than one child, they are all your children. Upeksha does not mean that you don’t love. You love in a way that all your children receive your love, without discrimination.”

Hanh explains that without this quality our love tends to become possessive – a stomping ground of the ego. We try to put our beloved in our pocket and carry them with us, when they are more like the wind, or a butterfly, or a stream, needing to move and flow, or risk dying. This is not love, this is destruction.

For love to be true love, it must have elements of compassion, joy, and equanimity – and this is truly letting go.

The Art of Letting Go is Artless

The real secret is that letting go is not an art, it is an allowing, a being. A non-attached relationship is healthy, strong and filled with effortless love, kindness and compassion. It is completely selfless because your sense of ‘self’ is no longer asserted in every situation. If you want to truly let go, you’ve got to love more, not less. This is the most common misunderstanding about this priceless teaching of the Buddha.

Featured Image: Photo © Unified Buddhist Church.

For far too long, but particularly in the modern, Western world we have thought of the heart as simply a pumping mechanism responsible for bringing blood to our organs.

The heart’s physical importance not to be underestimated, it supports life, sending the blood of life to the tree-like limbs of our vascular system – but this is an overly simplistic view of what the heart is capable of.

Gregg Braden’s latest research elaborates on the ancient technique of using the heart as an intelligent organ.

The heart’s intelligence has been ignored for far too long. What we’ve learned about the heart’s wisdom, however, in the past several years through the Heart Math Institute and through the research of psychologists, neurobiologists, and res-surfaced wisdom teachings from our ancient past – should inspire everyone to look at the heart in a completely new way.

For those who are not used to using their innate intelligence – that is their intuition — tuning into the heart for answers to the most profound and difficult questions they could possibly drum up might seem ridiculous. Why ask the heart whether to stay in a relationship that is challenging, or even if you should go through with a medical procedure?

It might seem ignorant or even haphazard to ask the heart questions like these, but it has wisdom that the intellect cannot match. Here’s why:

The heart does not send information through an egoic filter.

The heart knows your past, your present, and your future. Its intelligence does not care about your egoic constructs. The heart simply speaks from a completely neutral place.

You can think of it like a close friend who has your best interest at heart, and who does not care about making themselves look good in your eyes.

Hridaya

There is an ancient term that does not have a direct English translation that describes this intelligence of the heart. Hridaya, is the energy which is contained within the heart chakra. This is not just the physical heart, but the spiritual heart. It contains the intelligence of God, or the transcendental mind.

The word comes from the Sanskrit language, and the closest meaning to English would be something like this:

Hrid = center

Ayam = this

Thus, the spiritual heart always brings you to your center. It will not veer away from your highest self, always taking in a 360-degree (and beyond) view of any situation you could possibly face.

The yogi Bhagavan wrote once to explain this spiritual heart in more detail:

“Just as there is a cosmic center from which the whole universe arises and has its being and functions with the power or the directing energy emanating therefrom, so also is there a center within the frame of the physical body wherein we have our being. This center in the human body is in no way different from the cosmic center. It is this center in us that is called the Hridaya, the seat of Pure Consciousness, realized as Existence, Knowledge and Bliss. This is really what we call the seat of God in us.”

Conversely the mind-brain thinks of our past experiences, our past erroneous beliefs assigned to those experiences, and takes all sorts of twists and turns through a conceptual landscape that we’ve created to give us a “right” answer to life’s deep questions.

A Zen Buddhist can also describe what happens when we think with the head (brain) instead of the heart.

We place a fog – a type of perceptual overlay on top of a situation and then add an emotional investment. We call this “real,” but this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Yet, we think we have to obtain a siddhi (great accomplishment or miracle) in order to obtain supernormal wisdom or intelligence. So, we go on trusting the false perceptions of the mind-brain.

The Neuro-Biology of the Heart

Moreover, if we were to look at the simple neuro-biology of the heart – there are many more fibers leading from the heart to the brain than from the brain to the heart. This means – as Gregg Braden recently pointed out in a Gaia talk – that there is much more communication being sent to the brain then being received from it.

As the HeartMath Institute explains, the heart also begins beating in the unborn fetus before the brain has even been formed, a process scientists call autorhythmic.

We humans also form an emotional brain long before a rational one, and the heart has its own independent complex nervous system known as “the brain in the heart.”

The heart can also create a level of coherence in the body just through its rhythm, which regulates all its systems, and corrects even diseased cells.

And finally, the electromagnetic field of the heart is about 60 times greater in amplitude than the brain, and permeates every cell in the body. The magnetic component is approximately 5000 times stronger than the brain’s magnetic field and can be detected several feet away from the body with sensitive magnetometers.

How to Think with the Heart’s Wisdom

Here’s what Braden suggests to help us learn to tap into the heart’s massive wisdom: 

1. Focus on the heart (and heart chakra). This sends a signal to the heart that you seek its intelligence.
2. Slow your breathing. This sends another signal to your body that you seek higher intelligence, and not that of the normally stressed, and freaked out ego. Deep breathing calms the nervous system and quiets the brain.
3. Conjure a sense of gratitude, compassion, or love. These are the feelings which trigger an activation of the heart’s energy.
4. Ask your heart a question. The question should be brief and to the point.
5. Everyone will experience the heart’s intelligence a bit differently. You may feel butterflies in your gut, a warm sensation growing around your body, or tingling in your fingertips. You may not feel any bodily sensations, but have a clear, short answer that comes through your mind. Know that it likely won’t need a long-drawn out story to “justify” its wisdom. The heart speaks directly and clearly. If it isn’t try this process again to let your body know that you seek the intelligence of the heart and not the ego.
6. Practice makes perfect. The more often you do this, the easier it will be to tap into the seat of pure consciousness – the Hridaya.

Please republish this article freely with credit to The Mind Unleashed, Johanna Bassols, and with all links intact.

By: Johanna Bassols

Johanna Bassols is the creator of the Soul Reprogramming Method and founder of the Healers of the Light Academy.