The soul's electric light

Every day we hear expressions like “He’s got a magnetic personality”, “She has a radiant smile”, “The performance was electrifying”. Each of these is an example of raising our spirits – as individuals and in groups. We know these energies are contagious. A magnetic personality does raise the vibration of the group. A radiant smile can light up a room. The electrified performance does energize the audience. So what does all this talk of energy mean? And why does it impact us like it does? Perhaps we can shed some light on the subject by understanding electromagnetism.

We know the brain – the head brain and the heart brain – works with electricity. We also know that our brains react to electricity, whether that’s from its own chemical processes or from an external source. The New Scientist recently ran an article on how skull electrodes can boost our memory. Stimulating the brain with electricity can also make people recall memories, sometimes in astonishing detail. The Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield found that with some of his patients, when he stimulated the temporal lobes, “The patient ‘re-lived’ all that he had been aware of in that earlier period of time as in a moving-picture ‘flashback’.” (Creative Memory).

But electricity is also magnetism – or rather, they are part of the same thing, electromagnetism. Electric currents creates a magnetic field, and magnetic currents create a magnetic field. The electromagnetic spectrum is already familiar to most of us – from radio waves to the colors we see to x-rays and gamma rays.

We’ve always known about visible light and color, though we may not have known about its relationship with electricity. It was only in the late 19^th century, though, that we discovered the other parts of the spectrum – the radio waves, on the low energy side, the x-rays and gamma rays on the high energy side. These high-energy rays are invisible, useful, and dangerous.

Try to imagine how we would have thought about these dangerous, powerful, invisible “rays” before we could prove their existence. Would we call it magic? Would we be skeptical about their existence? Would it be some “flakes” insisting they’re real and powerful and scientifically-minded people shaking their heads wisely? What if I said that electric currents are evil, so people shouldn’t live near power stations? Most people would laugh. But electric currents create a magnetic field. And you can apply a magnetic field to part of the brain, you can destroy someone’s moral judgment – says MIT.

Ask yourself this question: is it worse to try to kill someone, and fail, or to kill someone by accident? Most people say it’s worse to try to kill someone. Intent is essential. Apply the magnets – and the same people will say it’s worse to kill someone by accident. It’s fine to try to kill someone and fail. After all, no-one died! Moral judgment is usually seen as the domain of the soul.

What we can’t prove yet isn’t necessarily wrong.

‘That’s argument by analogy.’
‘So? You’re arguing ad ignorantiam. Analogy doesn’t make it wrong!’
‘It’s not proof, either!’ Ray was adamant.
‘I am talking about not having proof for everything – that there’s a whole world of stuff out there that we can’t yet prove!’
‘So we can just make up what we like in the meantime?’
‘No!’
– Godspeed

We can’t just make it up – but perhaps we can admit that we don’t know everything. The limit of our knowledge isn’t the limit of the world. And sometimes, while we wait to prove things scientifically, we have other ways of knowing.

Think of how we talk about spirituality:

“People are always talking about light when they talk about spirituality – God being blinding, angels shining, Paul’s Damascus road experience, the word enlightenment, chakra light meditations, auras as colored invisible light, all that stuff. The Gnostics and Manicheans believed that our spirits were particles of light, trapped in a dark universe. Then all the hippy talk about vibrations and vibes, and a lot of that originally comes from Eastern religion … So all these different traditions of spirituality come back to the same metaphors about light, magnetism, and vibration.” – Ray of Light

The human body really is a vast energy system, storming with electro-magnetism. In Russia in 1939, Semyon Kirlian took the first photograph of the human energy field. An electromagnetic field surrounds all living and inanimate things. Our health, the level of stress in our lives, and environmental factors all affect that field. This life energy has been recognized for centuries by many healing traditions. We can call it an “aura” and depending on the level of someone’s vibration, it changes color – just like the color spectrum. In Chinese medicine, it's called qi; in India, it’s called prana.

So, what if the electromagnetic spectrum offers us a way to look at, even to measure, spirituality? How would that change our view of it? The electricity that our brains – head and heart – use, the electromagnetism that fills our bodies, might just be the inner light we’re looking for.

Throughout this blog and the Science & Spirituality website we speak about creating Heaven on Earth by December 21^st 2012. What we mean by that is creating a vibrant planet full of spirited, compassionate, and loving people – a human race experiencing light, love and an energetic existence. By quieting the mind (lowering our brain waves) and open our hearts (accessing the heart brain) we can, as a human race, create the age of new enlightenment, where spirit creates spirit, magnetism creates electricity, and Heaven is created on Earth.

Listen to your heart-brain

When we make important decisions, we talk about our hearts. Follow your heart. You know in your heart it’s true. What does your heart tell you? Listen to your heart. I’ve set my heart on it. I’ve had a change of heart. Our language is full of idioms about our hearts. But the heart is just a muscle, right? It pumps blood around your body. Those feelings are actually in your head, your brain. Billions of neurons, linked up by synapses, firing electricity back and forth – that’s what’s really happening... Or so we thought.

Then we discovered that the heart has its own brain. We already knew that the heart communicates with the brain, with nerve impulses, pressure waves, and biochemicals. But in 1991, Dr J Andrew Armour discovered that it also has about 40,000 neurons – just like the brain – and that it also communicates using electricity. Neurons + electricity: that’s how we think. The heart is capable of thought.

This is the study of “neurocardiology”, which would have sounded absurd 20 years ago – the study of how the heart thinks and how it communicates with our head-brains. The pathway of information from our heart to our head is very important, because it shapes how we interpret that information. The heart’s pathway to the head goes up the vagus nerve, to the medulla, then the sub cortex (with the thalamus and amygdala) to cascade up to the cortex. Let’s look at this, to see what that means.

The cortex is the “gray matter” around the top of our brains – what we usually think of when we talk about our brains. That’s the place of conscious, logical thought. But deeper inside the brain, other parts don’t think in that conscious, logical way – and are often more powerful. This is the sub-cortex.

The sub-cortex doesn’t deal in thoughts. It’s the arena of instinct, emotion, impulse. The amygdala, inside the sub-cortex, is especially important – it’s a storehouse of emotional memory, comparing what is emotionally familiar with new information. It also manages stressful situations and negative emotions: if something bad happens, the amygdala lights up. The thalamus, also in the sub-cortex, processes our senses, manages sleeping and waking, and is closely tied to consciousness. “These areas are directly connected to the base of the frontal lobes, which are critical for decision making and the integration of reason and feeling,” writes the Institute of HeartMath. The heart’s signals “cascade up into the higher centers of the brain, where they may influence perception, decision making and other cognitive processes.” We really are thinking with our hearts.

The vagus nerve is also important, because it controls the heart rate, and it's all about the heart rate.

But Hope was shaking her head. “Your nervous system, your emotions, everything points back to the heart. You get excited, your heart races. You feel calm, your heart slows. If you’re constantly stressed, you can get heart-attacks; a terrible shock can stop your heart...”
           – Revelations, final book in the Godspeed Trilogy

We already know how important emotions are for health – that stress can cause heart-attacks, that meditation can slow the heart rate and improve health. Now we’re discovering the heart’s role in this. A steady, calm heartbeat is called “coherent”. We know that being calm is good for thought. But now we’ve discovered that our heart rate isn’t just a response to feelings or thoughts.

Our data indicate that when heart rhythm patterns are coherent, the neural information sent to the brain facilitates cortical function. This effect is often experienced as heightened mental clarity, improved decision making and increased creativity. Additionally, coherent input from the heart tends to facilitate the experience of positive feeling states. This may explain why most people associate love and other positive feelings with the heart and why many people actually "feel" or "sense" these emotions in the area of the heart. In this way, as will be explored further in the studies presented in this Overview, the heart is intimately involved in the generation of psychophysiological coherence.
           – The Heart Math Institute

The heart has its own thoughts, it can communicate them to our head-brains, and it can change the way we think. The last post spoke about brainwaves and how adjusting our brainwaves can control our consciousness. The heart’s rhythms can change brainwave patterns. And we know that to reach our head-brain, our heart-brain’s thoughts have to come through the amygdala and the thalamus, the places of emotion and of decisions which run deeper than logic.

Perhaps, to be enlightened as part of the New Age of Enlightenment, we need to listen to our hearts.