The Holographic Heart

The following conversation took place between Joseph Chilton Pearce

and Casey Walker on May 20, 1998 with the production assitance of

KVMR, a community-supported radio station in Nevada City. ( below is

an extract from this interview)

Let's turn to the idea of intelligence -- what we are yet to understand -- with a systemic function between the body, the heart, and brain.

Yes. To me, the most exciting single thing happening -- which I touched upon in Evolution's End throughout the whole last part of the book -- is about the heart. The medical and scientific world is just now producing evidence to verify much of what I explore through my last three books: the intelligence of the heart. Hard core researchers, including the National Institute for Mental Health, have massively ignored these questions.

I thought I had put it together pretty well -- what the heart actually was and what was going on -- but I was a babe in the woods. I knew nothing. In 1995, I came across the Institute of HeartMath in Boulder Creek, California, and found that they were gathering together research from all over the globe. They brought me up to date on neurocardiology, which is the general title of the newest field of medicine. Oxford University brought out a huge, thick volume of medical studies from all over the world entitled, Neurocardiology, which includes studies that haven't worked their way into the journals yet. Discoveries in the field of neurocardiology are, believe me, far more awesome then the discovery of non-locality in quantum mechanics. It is the biggest issue of the whole century, but it's so far out and so beyond the ordinary, conceptual grasp, that a lot of the people doing the actual research are yet to be fully aware of the implications.

Close to a century ago, Rudolph Steiner said the greatest discovery of 20th century science would be that the heart is not a pump but vastly more, and that the great challenge of the coming ages of humanity would be, in effect, to allow the heart to teach us to think in a new way. Now, that sounds extremely occult, but we find it's directly, biologically the case.

I can't in a brief time share with you the full implications of neurocardiology except to say three things. First, about sixty to sixty-five percent of all the cells in the heart are neural cells which are precisely the same as in the brain, functioning in precisely the same way, monitoring and maintaining control of the entire mind/brain/body physical process as well as direct unmediated connections between the heart and the emotional, cognitive structures of the brain. Secondly, the heart is the major endocrine glandular structure of the body, which Roget found to be producing the hormones that profoundly affect the operations of body, brain, and mind. Thirdly, the heart produces two and a half watts of electrical energy at each pulsation, creating an electromagnetic field identical to the electromagnetic field around the earth. The electromagnetic field of the heart surrounds the body from a distance of twelve to twenty-five feet outward and encompasses power waves such as radio and light waves which comprise the principle source of information upon which the body and brain build our neural conception and perception of the world itself. This verifies all sorts of research from people such as Karl Pribram over a thirty year period, and opens up the greatest mystery we'll ever face.

Roger Pennrose, for instance, in England, has just recently come out with a new mathematics to prove that where dendrites meet at the synapse -- of which you've got trillions in your body and brain -- is an electromagnetic aura. And, we find that the electromagnetic field of the heart produces, holographically, the same field as the one produced by the earth and solar system. Now, physicists are beginning to look at the electro-magnetic auras as, simply, the organization of energy in the universe. All these are operating holographically -- that is, at the smallest, unbelievably tiny level between the dendrites at the synapse, the body, the earth, and on outward. All are operating holographically and selectively.

The next discovery is of unmediated neural connections between the heart and the limbic structure, the emotional brain. Now they've found that neural connections go right on up through the amygdala or the cingulate cortex into the pre-frontal lobes. Now, the pre-frontal lobes, or neocortex, are the latest evolutionary addition to the human brain because they were only rudimentary until, perhaps, 150,000 to 40,000 years ago. They are what we call the "silent areas" of the brain simply because we are using only the lower part of them so far. The higher parts of the pre-frontal lobes are not even complete in their growth patterns until age twenty-one, which is about six to seven years after the rest of the brain is complete -- when we thought the whole show was over.

And yet, if you look at Demasio's recent work in Descartes' Error, he writes about the role of emotion in reasoning and about the lowest levels of the pre-frontal lobes. He talks constantly about the pre-frontals being the whole show, but he's talking only about those parts that are developed in the first three years of life and the great, long dormant period following. Around age fifteen, the pre-frontals undergo a huge growth spurt and begin a massive, rapid growth which isn't complete until about age twenty-one. It is that area that then remains silent and unused.

At twenty-one, Rudolph Steiner said the true ego is designed to come down into the system and begin what he called the exploration of the higher worlds. Now, of course, that hasn't happened historically because of the entrenched positions of the lower structures of the brain system itself (which means that the entire thing is biological). We resort to philosophical concepts and moral, ethical issues -- but we're really always talking about the biology of our body and brain.

Even Paul MacLean at the National Institute of Mental Health, who is one of the brightest in brain research over the past fifty years and is still doing research in his eighties, spoke of the pre-frontals as the "angel lobes," as the origin of all the higher human virtues. That is exactly what Demasio was pointing out in Descartes' Error, and yet both are only talking about the lowest of the pre-fontal structures, which complete themselves in the first three years of life, and not of the new growth that takes place between fifteen and twenty-one.

For this reason, I am the arch-optimist of all. I think these discoveries, the implications, are terribly exciting. Of course, our whole cosmology will shift dramatically when we realize what I call the "holographic heart." But, you see, at the very time we're moving into a period of total chaos and collapse, this other incredible thing is simply gathering. I think of Ilya Prigogine's comments that so long as a system is stable, or at an equilibrium, you can't change it, but as it moves toward disequilibrium and falls into chaos then the slightest bit of coherent energy can bring it into a new structure. What you find in Waldorf families, and people who read Wild Duck Review, and others, may seem small, but they will be the islands of coherent energy which then bring about the organized, entrained energy for a new situation. I think it will happen very rapidly.

In the next issue, I expect to work with the idea of one's capacity for metaphor as one's capacity for a full life.

Joseph Chilton Pearce is well-known as author of six books: The Crack in the Cosmic Egg; Exploring the Crack in the Cosmic Egg; Magical Child; Magical Child Matures; Bond of Power; and Evolution's End.