Heart of Faith: Chapter 2

Chapter 2 — Sensory Heart Science

Look up the term “bioelectromagnetics” — as a branch of science, it’s been around awhile. While the bulk of research is aimed at exploring how electromagnetic fields affect biology, some scientists have discovered that the human body generates its own fields.

We have long known that the human body has its own electrical currents. The nerves in our bodies form a network for passing information via both chemistry and electrical currents. It’s pretty low power because that’s all it takes. And wherever there is electrical current, there is usually a certain amount of electromagnetism. Since the brain is a tightly packed bundle of neurons and electrical activity, it stands to reason that it offers a measurable electromagnetic field. However, being so weak, you just about have to keep your instruments in close proximity, if not directly against, the head.

If you introduce a stronger electrical impulse to the head, you can wipe away memories. Recently, research indicates you can also plant false memories with carefully tailored electromagnetic interference. The field around the brain isn’t that strong, so it doesn’t take much to knock it around. A hand-held battery is enough to operate tasers that pretty much shut the whole thing down.

What keeps tasers from being consistently fatal is that the heart has its own electrical system that is considerably stronger than the primary nervous system. Indeed, the heart has its own neural network, running parallel to the brain’s nervous system. It’s so much more powerful that scientists have discovered that the electromagnetic field generated by the cardiac system is thousands of times stronger than the one from the brain. In fact, the heart’s field is measurable as much as fifteen feet (4.5m) away from the body.

This heart field has its own resonance. While the equipment used to measure this can detect a reaction with the presence of other hearts within range of the field, few scientists pretend to know much about just what it is that reaction does. That is, we don’t have any real scientific details about how two human hearts interact, only that they do. There’s an obvious and largely untapped potential there. Further, the resonance responds to the presence of a wide range of other living things, including plants or even some supposedly inert objects.

So it’s a simple matter of fact that the heart is a sensory organ in its own right. But beyond that fact, the science gets pretty murky. I would suggest part of the problem is that scientists still tend to associate emotions with the heart. That is, you can find a lot of effort to use this information as a means of giving the mind a better connection to human emotions. Even when scientists recognize that the heart has its own “brain” of sorts, they tend to assume the intelligence in that brain is closely associated with emotions. It seems as if it never occurs to them to look elsewhere in human nature.

Perhaps that’s because science in the West remains trapped in Western assumptions, particularly as found in the teaching of the Greek philosopher Aristotle. He taught that the universe was a unitary entity. While he gave room for the existence of non-physical beings, he insisted they were confined to this universe. Materialism is written into his basic assumptions about reality. It’s hard to imagine he didn’t encounter Ancient Near Eastern philosophers who traveled the entire Mediterranean Basin, but if so, he consciously rejected their notion of a distinctly separate Realm of the Spirit. So it is that modern Western science just assumes such as reality and makes no room for human nature beyond the material and rational.

Indeed, this is such a pervasive assumption that it affects Western Christianity. Despite parroting the words of Scripture that flatly state we have at least potentially a spiritual component, you end up with Christians instinctively picturing “eternity” as unlimited time, instead of time being no longer a factor at all. We suffer a similar mental image about the Spirit Realm regarding the space factor. We cannot imagine an existence that is not affected by time and space. So we read that bias back into the Bible and come up with a lot of false notions about what it says.

But saddest of all is that Christians seem to have ignored the entire field of study about the heart as a sensory organ. I’ve not found any major Christian teachers addressing this in writing. How do we suppose Paul was able to tell that a certain disabled man had faith to be healed (Acts 14:9)? Did Paul have long-range clinical analytical abilities? Or would we prefer to think of God’s power as murky as magic? Would it not make more sense to envision that he was within range of the literal heart-to-heart sensory field?