The heart matters more than the brain

A surprising miss titled book I recently read is THE SECRET TEACHING OF PLANTS by Stephen Harrod Buhner, subtitled The Intelligence of the Heart in the Direct Perception of Nature. One would assume from the title that this book is about plant life but instead this book is about how the heart of a human being is the most overlooked intelligence organ in the body. Yes, it is astounding!

Buhner gathers evidence from remarkable people who experienced and saw the world though their heart like Henry David Thoreau, Luther Burbank and George Washington Carver and Masanobu Fukuoka.

I understand though my education that the brain, the mind, is the best way of reason, observe and understand the world around me. It is, at best, a linear way of taking in information. Think of a camera, no matter how fast it shows something two dimensional. Another example of brain/linear thought is the line from Los Angela to San Fransisco is 500 miles. If one walked the coast line between those two cities is would be much further because the shoreline is not a straight line. The point is that our mental perception of the world is only one way to understand the world and it maybe the less important way.

The heart is more than a muscular pump it is a electromagnetic generator and receiver, 'it is highly evolved organ of perception and communication'. The heart as it turns out has a brain of its own. It processes a battery of information about our bodies but also knows how we think and feel in our conscious.

The indigenous people of the Amazon were asked how they used two very different plants which also had many varieties of each one to form a highly useful drug, singularly these plants are deadly. The answer was that they used their heart and listen to the plants. In modern Western cultures we identify ourselves with the matter above our eyebrows and not with the center of our chests. We are in period of time that information is spread so quickly that we have focused on our brain skills and not our heart skills.

This book is part poetry, part science and at times a very slow read. I am sure than anyone that spends sometime with it is reminded of all the moments they have had with quietness and reflection. There is an energy that overcomes and refreshes.

The book is fulled with quotes and a favorite of mine is by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
And now there is my secret, a very simple secret; it is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.