Picture yourself in nature and so long ago that nothing that looks like *man* as we know it has made its mark. Even you arent quite sure just how smart you are! Compared to the predators that hunt you, you suspect youre even a little slow on the uptake. Your kind has not even developed the language to talk about the experience. You are one of the aboriginals, the first people, and you are of this land, indigenous to it. Learning -- because your elders dont quite have the words -- is based on observation. You live by your senses and your relationship with the moment. Sure, you think about things, but not much. The moment is much too important to your survival, and the more you think, the less time you have to act. In this world, action is survival. This is so out of step, you may say, With what life is about now. Okay, test something out. Go in to a forest or wilderness area far away from home and the road, to a place youve never been. Do it on a moonless night, alone, and do it without having anything but the clothes on your back. Walk deeper into the woods. You will will get in touch with an important part of who you are as a human being the same core that lived inside your distant Grandparents lives inside you today. You will immediately switch into a reliance on what you feel rather than what you know. You will take in cues from your external and internal environments and respond to them. As soon as the moment comes that you experience a feeling of rightness in your chest, you will take the action that that feeling dictates. When you follow your gut, you are responding to a feeling of knowingness having little to do with the analysis of a preponderance of information. When you are tuned-in to the moment, you are gathering in impressions and then allowing them to coalesce into a choice. Where do you literally feel this sensation of rightness? From what place do you move? Somewhere a lot closer to your heart than your head. The reliance on information over sensation for survival is a relatively new development in our species. Even living within the idea that we are separate from our environment (as opposed to the experience of being an integral part of it and not perceiving a separation) is a culture that even today exists in only a relatively small part of the world. Every person who relies on nature for his or her survival moves from a sensation-based (a heart-centered) way of being first. This is not to minimize the importance of the brain, it is meant to offer you perspective. You, who are reading this, are simply part of a culture that has forgotten how to do this. If you have any doubts, take a look at the remaining indigenous cultures, like Lakota, Maori, or Inuit among others. They are the remnants of what had once been an unbroken line of a heart-centered way of being. Certain differences between them and us are evident, including their relationship with the environment, non-reliance on verbal communication, cosmologies that are nature-, rather than personality-based, a certain lack of guile, cultures of sharing, and perhaps most telling of all, relationship with time. Our ancestors did not have enough information to know just how much the brain does. Somewhere within, they knew where the decisions were made. Our ancestors only knew what felt right. The implications of this to our lives today have nothing to do with either/or. Clearly each way of being has its merits. The species has survived. The brain and heart are meant to work in unison. They come from the same source. They are complementary. They need each other. What Im doing this minute is working with your brain to help you gain access to your heart-consciousness. Once there, you will learn that localized consciousness is able to access and utilize the thinking power of the brain. The challenge of today is to more consciously move from one to the other and use the result for the benefit of all. What we are learning today, and what this series is about is that, #1) There is a difference between the consciousness of the heart and the consciousness of the brain, #2) They are able to work in intimate communication, and #3) We can choose which state of consciousness will take the lead at any one time. It has been a natural part of evolution that our brains took the reins for a while. How else could we get to learn so much about ourselves from a nuts and bolts perspective? Ironically, the use of our brains has brought us the facts that tell us it is not alone when it comes to being a center of consciousness. The next installment will examine the role of relationship in heart-consciousness. |
