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.