Ref: The Seeds of Shalom
Over the years I’ve reiterated the clinical evidence cited in my book, Heart of Faith, indicating that the heart has a sensory field of its own. While in theory that field extends outward to infinity, the interaction it has with other living things is measurable with instruments to about 10-15 feet (3-5m). However, it has proven impossible so far for clinical testing to discern what that interaction is or does.
Similar studies have noted that the heart also has a rather independent nervous system, with nodes that appear capable of processing something, likely to be whatever that sensory field encounters, but no one is sure.
That doesn’t stop sleazy outfits trying to profit from a little knowledge and a whole lot of ignorance — such as the Heart Math Institute. They’ve built a whole market in courses teaching folks how to maximize their “emotional intelligence” based on this incomplete clinical evidence. Their mistake is building on Western cultural assumptions about the heart as the repository of sentiment, a quasi-emotional something inside of us. There’s no doubt their books and courses do include a lot of good stuff, but the basic assumptions about what the heart does is purely speculative, not based on science at all. Yet they claim science as their basis.
We make no such claim. The best that science can do is indicate that there is something there in the heart that is separate from other sensory inputs, and not directly connected to the intellect. We cite such limited science as support, but not as any kind of basis for extensive speculation and selling books (all my books are free) or expensive courses.
Our basis is a different culture — broadly the Ancient Near East (ANE) and specifically the ancient Hebrew background. The whole ANE was mystical in orientation, but such mysticism bore little resemblance to what passes for “mysticism” in the West. ANE mysticism was based on a very wide and extensive lore, but nothing we would call “clinical” literature. They would never dream of nailing down something important in concrete descriptive language. Indeed, most ANE languages were indicative instead of descriptive, relying heavily on parabolic expression. Readers were supposed to understand this in the first place, recognizing that most discourses on important matters could not be taken literally.
Hebrew Scripture in particular refers to the heart as the seat of the will, of commitment and faith. The heart could be corrupt, but it could also be fully committed to the Creator as feudal Master. Sometimes the heart was a symbol of conscious awareness, because it was assumed you were not “living” in your head, but in your heart. If you lacked a firm commitment to the Lord, you were considered to have a corrupted consciousness. It was untrustworthy, duplicitous.
In this sense, faith is not a matter of what’s in your head, but what’s in your heart. Faith was not something that could be defined in terms of knowledge and practice. Rather, your knowledge and practice were manifestations of faith, which was somewhere else. Faith is a distinctly separate faculty from the mind. By faith you could “know” things your fleshly nature could not discern through senses and reason.
Throughout the ANE, a simple reliance on mere sensory data and reason was regarded as juvenile, making one unfit to lead. It meant you were unable to handle things at the heart level, that you were ill-equipped to make clear moral commitments. Everyone knew the intellect was variable, deceived in thinking it was capable of objectivity, when it was actually wide open to influence from the lower passions of the flesh. Thus, a man in his mind was manipulable by anyone appealing to his lower nature. Men of heart and conviction were more likely to resist such temptation.
In the psychology of the Bible, convictions are the finger of God writing on the stone tables of your heart. Your mission in life was to clear away the garbage that obscured a clear view of your convictions. By your convictions you would know God’s will for you. In more modern terms, convictions are burned into your very DNA. You can hold opinions, but convictions hold you.
