Have A Heart!

The brain is not (nor should not be) the source of our thoughts.
Dear Reader,


Without further ado, please read this quotation from the Bahai Teachings site:
If you’re reading this, you obviously have a beating heart.
In fact, why don’t you take a moment, right now, to sit back and just feel your heartbeat? Touch a finger to your wrist or your neck, and there, right beneath your skin, try to imagine the marvel of that faithful muscle. It beats constantly, without stopping, every minute of every day for your entire life. Try to truly feel your pulse and consider your heart’s job. Approximately the size of your fist—a little muscle that weighs maybe 12 ounces—it powers your entire physical existence, loyally pumping blood starting about three weeks after you begin life in your mother’s womb until your last moment on Earth.
The average human heart beats a hundred thousand times a day.
If you live a normal lifespan, your heart will faithfully beat nearly three billion times. No human organ—with the possible exception of the brain—has a harder or more complex task.
Perhaps that explains why the ancients saw the heart as the seat of life. In the oldest human societies, the heart represented the source of empathy, emotion, consciousness, reason, will, intellect, purpose and even the mind. That expansive, warm wonder of a feeling centered in our chests when we experience love? The heart. That terrible broken pain centered in our chests when love fails us? The heart. That sympathy and connection we feel to others when their emotions peak? The heart.
But modern science has traditionally viewed our hearts as mere mechanistic pumps. Because it sends our blood coursing its way through our arteries and veins, medical science has treated the heart muscle as the most machine-like of our vital organs.
Recently, though, that thinking has begun to change, as extensive scientific research and the new field of neurocardiology has increasingly shown that our hearts actually have a much larger role than simply pumping our lifeblood:
…one of the early pioneers in neurocardiology, Dr. J. Andrew Armour, introduced the concept of a functional “heart brain” in 1991. His work revealed that the heart has a complex intrinsic nervous system that is sufficiently sophisticated to qualify as a “little brain” in its own right. The heart’s brain is an intricate network of several types of neurons, neurotransmitters, proteins and support cells like those found in the brain proper. Its elaborate circuitry enables it to act independently of the cranial brain – to learn, remember, and even feel and sense. (From Neurocardiology, The Brain in the Heart, Heartmath Institute, 2015)
So we have known, for the past quarter-century, that the human heart contains a complex network of neurons that make up an intrinsic nervous system. These neurons transmit the heart’s signals to the brain, and the two organs actually work together. In fact, scientists have discovered neural pathways that allow the heart to inhibit or stimulate the brain’s electrical activity—to actually overrule the mind.
Everyone who has fallen in love understands how that mechanism works.
In fact, when we say our happiest and most spiritual feelings radiate from our hearts, we may be on to something scientifically and biologically real. The heart isn’t just a cardiac pump with its own nervous system—it’s also an endocrine gland, releasing peptides that stimulate the pituitary gland, which in turn releases hormones like oxytocin, commonly referred to as the love or bonding hormone. That expansive feeling of well-being, affection and love you’re experiencing in your chest? Turns out it literally does come from your heart. Maybe the ancients were right after all.
The article goes on to say that humans are "hard-wired, in other words, for attachment, affiliation and unity. We are inherently loving beings. We seek the bonds that only love can bring." Universal spiritual teachings state that every human heart innately and naturally desires connection, devotion and lasting love.

But we do not here talk simply about human inter-connection but about our connection with the entire environment in which we live, which is endless in reality. However, for now let's talk of our immediate (and physical) environment - called Planet Earth.

In the UK, these are some of the main development plans that our Government is pushing ahead with:
  1. Fracking.
  2. Heathrow's 3rd runway.
  3. HS2 (London-Midlands high speed railway), with HS3 to follow.
  4. Nuclear submarine replacement.
  5. Cancellation of a remarkable tide-control project in favour of nuclear power.
The cost and the ramifications of these projects are stellar in proportion and, frankly, hugely dangerous and wasteful in the main - and that's apart from the health issues.

Where is the heart that we allow these decisions to be made with barely a whimper? Since when has government been purely about economics and not inclusive of ethics?

There will be a cost to this: an enormous cost, not just in terms of money but the affect on people and nature itself. And we think that Mother Earth won't answer back?

We need to firstly think through the heart, not the head.

There's more to read - please click on this link.

Thank you for reading this.

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