WKHardy's Blog

Two days before the Spring Equinox, March, 2021, I was looking at a photo of a Snowy Owl in my WWF calendar. The owl was flying, about to land in its nest where young owls were waitiing. I could see directly into the owl’s eyes. I began to wonder then, how this bird, and any bird, and any animal, makes decisions and choices: choices about when to go get food for the young and how to agree with a partner on where and how to build a nest or dig a den; when to do whatever and how to do whatever and which direction to go when hunting. Animals and birds and fish make myriads of decisions and choices, and I wondered, Can it really be just pre-programmed instinct as we have all been told?

I have done a lot of reading and video watching of material produced by the HeartMath Institute. They among others have valid evidence that in humans, the heart has an energy field around it that is five thousand times as large as the field that is around the brain. The heart has forty thousand neurons in its makeup, neurons just like the brain has. And the heart actually does the majority of the communication with all organs and systems in the human body and passes the information on to the brain so that the brain can react. The heart also receives information from the brain and sends it to the organs and the systems.

So my sense and feeling became, as I looked into the owl’s eyes and wondered about animal responses to environment and choices about how to manage their moment-to-moment existences, was suddenly, that they are living primarily in the energy field that is around their hearts. They know that the function of the brain is as a control center for the body. The important information that they need is felt by the heart, and the decisions that use that information are made in the heart. There is very little confusion, if any, when an animal or bird or fish makes a decision, because the heart has felt the situation through its energy field and knows what to do next. It sends signals to the brain which then sends impulses to nerves and muscles and the animal moves or behaves accordingly. I suspect that even in response to information from the senses as in smells or sounds or sights, the sense organs’ sendings go first to the brain and then immediately to the heart for an appropriate response based on a comparison of the information with what is felt in the heart’s energy field. It could well be that the information from sense organs goes to the brain and the heart simultaneously. The brain is then told by the heart what to have the body do or not do.

Elsewhere in this blog, there is much writing about the heart. Follow your heart, Let your heart be your guide, The heart knows the way… the list of common old sayings about a greater wisdom residing in our hearts is notably a long one. I am convinced now, because I could, yes, feel it in my heart, feel what I saw in that owl’s eyes and in the eyes of other animals in my WWF calendar photographs, and from my childhood and youth spent living with the variety of animals on our family farm and in the forest and fields nearby, I am convinced that the heart’s energy field is where animals live their lives, do the majority of communication with possibly everything in their worlds.What they do in their lives is based on what they feel in their hearts. So many spiritual philosophies of the past and now spiritual channelings and guide books advise humans to do just exactly that. In those minutes of feeling what I saw in the animals’ eyes, I could feel how it is to live that way, and it is beautiful, and is the key to Living In One’s Own Truth.

Book of Eons

I opened the Ancient Book of Eons
   and every page told of today,
   and every sentence told of this hour,
   and every word told of this moment,
   and so the Book closed and
       became dust in my hands.

I rose to step across a threshold that appeared
   and it, too, disappeared, and
I was in a space that was full —
   full of waiting,
   full of choices that were waiting to be chosen
To be chosen by many who would not wait.

For the Time is now, no matter how ancient the Time,
It is now, as it always will be.
The Time we call Now is a space full of choices:
I have made them and you have made them
And they fill our space and time as we make them
To make the you and to make the me
That are only and always the Love and the Light that
Eons of books have tried to describe.

…and every word has told of this moment.
This moment is ours to have.

The Life that is within us is our own open, loving, Heart.

When we see that and feel gratitude for that, then we see that everything else and anything else is a magnificent theatre of opportunities for us to experience the wondrous things that our own open, loving, grateful, Heart can do. Can change. Can create.

And the most magical secret about all of that is that we ourselves are the author of what scenes are in our lives and what characters are in our lives and we have scripted what we experience and who we experience outside of ourselves, to help us find inside ourselves, that open and loving and grateful Heart that is who we really are. We are not our thoughts or our ego reactions or our emotions, though we must have those and feel those and know those; because when any of those is or are disturbed in any way, we learn then that finding peace through the disturbance is to find that Heart of ours just being there for us — open, and loving, and grateful.

We often hear, when we are on a so-called spiritual path — the movement in our lives toward recovering the feeling/knowledge of our true selves, away from ego and survival, toward our hearts and our compassionate, empathic, joy — we often hear that all that we see and experience outside of ourselves is like a mirror of our inner selves, that all of it is a reflection of what is going on inside of us.

That concept can be very hard to grasp. Many events that we witness and many people whom we encounter seem to be very different from how we see ourselves and how we would like our world to be. We meet many people and experience or witness many events that are sometimes very disturbing to the personal equilibrium and morals and goals that we feel that we operate from and try to maintain and project. So how do those people and those events reflect what is inside of us? Just doesn’t seem to work.

When we begin to understand that each of us is really a collective of all of the people we have ever been in all of the lives that we have ever lived, and then grasp that truth that there really is no time so that we are all of our “lifetimes” in every moment, that we are really not only the focal point that is this body here and now but an energy field that includes every life and person that we have ever been, we can begin to imagine and then feel the truth that we ourselves are a collective of people or beings just as is the entire collective of people and beings that appear to be outside of us in this particular existence. Every person and every event that we witness or meet or experience is something that we have inside of us because we “have been” and are that person and have experienced that event in our own version of that, whatever it might be.

We see it in front of us now, experience it “now”, as a scene or character in a play that we have scripted ourselves to help us experience ourselves in every aspect that is possible for a human being to experience; just as Source has scripted each one of us so that Source can expand and expand and expand through experiences. This is the truth of the message that we are all Source Energy Beings.

Compassion for all that we see and meet is then a fairly easy state to achieve because it is really compassion for ourselves.

We cannot argue to change

What’s in other people’s minds

We can only love them to help

Set free what’s in their hearts

A few days ago I saw a car license plate with a combination of digits that attracted my attention. But then I noticed the letters that were next to the digits – they were YBU.

In a moment or two, I heard that question clearly, as if it were coming from Source. Why be you? I felt the importance of recognizing, owning, my choice to be in this lifetime here and now. Why have I made the choices that resulted in being this person in this lifetime here and now?

Each of us must come to feel our own true response to that question. We each have the peace of that truth in our own heart. It is already in there. It has been with us since before we were born.

Our lives take us through many different Acts and Scenes, as in a grand stage play or movie. In each Act and each Scene, we are farther away from or nearer to or even in, that comfortable smiling peace in our heart.

When we come to being able to feel that peace regardless of what is happening in the Act or the Scene that we are in at the moment, then we are in the feeling of our own true response to the Awakening play entitled Why Be You.

And the surest way to create that experience for ourselves is to find our own way of giving that peace to everyone and every aspect that we have chosen to include in our play.

Examine your emotions.

Feel each one of them.

They are your most powerful tools for change.

Every cell in our bodies responds to our emotions. Emotions that include fear bring about certain types of survival-and-protection responses. Emotions such as enthusiasm, self-love, gratitude, wonder, compassion, appreciation, love of Nature, the feeling of laughter… bring about responses of strength and clarity and joy – a love of life.

Intuition and The Heart – Who We Really Are

I read an article recently from the Heartmath Institute that deals with the role that the heart plays in human intuition. The article includes guidelines that each of us can use for establishing within us, a new “baseline” of responses – both emotional and behavioral responses – to events that happen around us or that involve us directly, and for making the decisions and choices that are important to us. We all can be in control of such responses and can learn to “self-regulate” them in a way that makes our lives much simpler and more clearly about our true selves than what most of us have been programmed into believing that we are. Intuition plays a large role in this self-regulation, and the heart is seen to be the prime director of our intuition.

Rather than responding to situations from habitual patterns that are not necessarily healthful or constructive, we can respond instead with new responses that use our deeper intuition and the “core values” that come from who we really are.

And how do we know who we really are? We learn that knowledge, or begin to recover that knowledge, through our experiences; and we learn to recognize that knowledge, when we live from our hearts, and through our intuition, and begin to feel good and strong and real and clear in each of our responses and choices. We begin to feel good about ourselves, because it is our own voice that we hear giving us guidance and not voices from our past, or voices from our immediate surroundings or experiences.

The Heartmath Institute’s article “The Intuitive Heart” lists three types of intuition:

Implicit knowledge/learning. 

Knowledge that we acquired in the past and have forgotten that we have. The brain matches patterns that are seen or felt in new problems or challenges with these implicit forgotten memories that come from prior experiences.

Energetic sensitivity.

The ability of our nervous system to detect and respond to environmental             signals such as electromagnetic fields. Much is known in science about the abilities of all life forms to sense changes in electromagnetic fields such as those that are around and through our planet Earth. But what is pertinent here is that science is recently noticing and finding “scientific proofs” that every heart creates an electromagnetic field which is also detectable by all life forms. There is much recent evidence showing that in addition to words, facial signals, voice qualities, hand gestures, and body movements, there is a subtle but influential electromagnetic or “energetic” field that operates just below our conscious level of awareness. It has been called a type of intuition that is likely an aspect of empathy. “When people are involved in deep conversation, they begin to move into a subtle energetic flow that synchronizes their movements and postures, vocal pitch, speaking rates, and length of pauses between responses”.

Non-local Intuition

Having the knowledge or sense of something that has no apparent connection to past experiences or knowledge, or to forgotten experiences or knowledge, or to environmental signals. An example might be when a parent senses that something is happening to his or her child who is some distance away. This sort of intuition is sometimes thought of as telepathy, or clairvoyance, or precognition, and there is no real body of “scientific proof” for the existence of this ability as of yet. But there is an enormous body of evidence and awareness of its existence through centuries of human experiences. And there is considerable experimental evidence that the heart is involved in the receiving and processing of information that enables such awareness and even responses.

There has been more than seventy years of research on non-local intuitive perception. Repeatedly, it appears that the capacity to receive and process information about non-local events is a characteristic ability of all physical and biological organization, and that the reason for the existence of this ability lies in the inherent interconnectedness of everything in the universe.

There is in fact, compelling evidence that the physical heart is coupled to fields of information that are not bound by the limits of space and time.  
This evidence comes from a rigorous experimental study that demonstrated that the heart receives and processes information about an event before the event actually happens in space and time. It is even clear that the heart receives this type of information before the brain does – typically one to three seconds before. The heart then sends the information to the brain; and a special type of signal is sent when the information is about an adverse event that is about to occur. And as might be expected, there is a strong correlation between the brain’s state of coherence and its efficiency in responding to information from the heart. 

Shifting our emotions into a coherent state with coherent heart awareness, quieting mental chatter and emotional unrest, and paying attention to shifts in our feelings allows intuitive signals to come into conscious awareness. The heart plays a central role in creating coherence and positive emotions.

The Heartmath Institute’s article cites research showing that the heart and bodily systems send far more information to the brain than the brain sends to those same body parts. The brain uses that information to establish familiar “baseline” reference patterns that trigger or inspire responses that are based in emotions, and these patterns become familiar and comfortable, even if the reference pattern is chaos, anxiety, confusion, overwhelm, etc.

So if a new experience or challenge is encountered, a mismatch can be presented to the brain’s storehouse of references, and that event usually requires some internal adjustments or an outward action in order to try to return to a feeling of safety and comfort. If the new response lasts less than three seconds, it is called an arousal, or an alert, or an orienting response, and the brain just waits to see what happens next. If the new response lasts longer or is used often, the brain begins to adapt and the baseline reference is updated. An example could be moving from a quiet country home into a home in a city, and eventually adapting toward feeling comfortable with the background noise of the city. A departure from the familiar has occurred, and that usually creates a response that has an emotion connected to it, and that emotion (Latin emovere – to move out or away from) causes us or moves us to adapt. It can be the impetus toward evolution, toward creating and choosing a new response reference baseline, on both an individual scale and on a collective scale.

If a person wants to make major changes, and even minor ones, to a lifestyle or to personal feelings about life, it is important to begin feeling comfortable with responses that are not in the familiar reference baseline group of responses. When we begin helping ourselves learn how to regulate our emotions – to see them for what they are, accept them, and then make efforts to feel differently if that is the intention – we begin establishing new default points and eventually a new baseline for experiencing our lives. Responses that trigger emotions such as doubt, anxiety, frustration, hopelessness, and fear, begin instead to trigger emotions such as enthusiasm, acceptance, appreciation, gratitude, and joy. This last group can be called heart-based emotions as opposed to the previous group which can be called survival-based emotions.

It has been shown that the heart plays a unique role in stabilizing the functioning of every system in a biological organism. When the intentions of that organism are being expressed from among those heart-based emotions, the coherence level of all bodily systems increases measurably and responses to events in each and every moment are then based in coherence and intuitive awareness. The more often such processes occur, the more comfortable they become, until they have created and are, a new set of baseline references, creating in turn, new feelings about personal and even societal capacities for creating new positive experiences in every moment, in any situation.

The continued practice of coherence-building techniques creates re-patterning in the neural systems, and coherence then becomes the new baseline reference memory. This new baseline reference means that self-regulating of emotions, and stress responses, and behaviors toward coherence and stability, becomes automatic. It becomes easier then, to maintain your “center”, your “balance”. Such mental and emotional flexibility means freedom from old ways of reacting to triggers, and from uncertainty about abilities to respond to new kinds of input. And all of these processes make feeling the information that is available from all three types of intuition much easier.

There is considerable discussion in the article about the intuitive heart and about heart intelligence, and both terms refer to what is called the energetic heart  which is in coherence with a deeper part of the self. Many people refer to this deeper area of their consciousness and experiences as their Higher Self, or Soul, and there are many other terms for this realm of experiences. “Energetic” in this sense refers to functions that cannot be directly measured, touched, or seen – such as emotions, thoughts, and intuition. Science — most notably quantum physics but in other areas as well – has begun to recognize that this realm of non-measurable energies has its existence outside of our usual senses of time and space. And certainly, there is much evidence in experience that demonstrates that the physical heart is itself in-tune with this energetic (energy-based) heart.

Non-local intuition therefore contains and responds to wisdom and vision that streams from that soul’s or higher self’s information field into the heart, and subsequently into the mind and the body, through the energetic heart, informing and inspiring moment-to-moment experiences and interactions. There is then, a flow of higher awareness that is not connected to relative locations (space) or to relative sequences (time) that can create and inspire a synchronistic alignment with the heart, when the mind and body are in coherent states.

A calm and clear and balanced awareness then, is a key to a strong connection with that “deep inner voice” that every human being and likely every cellular organization has, very similar to the electromagnetic fields that affect every atom in our universe.

A quote from Neale Donald Walsch’s book “Home With God”, p25, :

(the channeled speaker says):  “Do not believe a single thing I say. Listen to what I say, then believe what your heart tells you is true. For it is in your heart where your wisdom lies, and in your heart where your truth dwells, and in your own heart where God resides in intimate communion with you. Please do not confuse what is in your heart with what is in your mind. What is in your mind has been put there by others. What is in your heart is what you carry with you of me.”

Intuition usually speaks “quietly”. So, when subtle shifts in feelings occur, from feeling frustrated and anxious, for example, to feeling patient or calm, the intuitive heart has begun contributing to the situation. Old reactions from the mind and its triggering of emotions and behaviors have been quieted or bypassed altogether.

A new “baseline” for responding to and enjoying our lives has been established.

The date is 12-12. Twelve is an important number in many systems that have to do with some kind of power that is extra- ordinary, meaning not usually associated with humans, though as we are learning increasingly, humans have far more power than they usually think they have. 

So let’s begin using this power, since two twelves is giving us a super starting point, if we haven’t started already from some other point. Look through this life: 

Grateful for every traumatic event, every joyous event; 
Grateful for every traumatic situation, every joyous situation;  

Extremes give impetus toward a finer evolution – in individuals, in societies, in entire species, in entire galaxies. 
Evolution — small changes in momentary responses and feelings that add up to enormous changes in Life.