The Heart's Code: Tapping the Wisdom and Power of Our Heart Energy - Hardcover

Pearsall, Paul P.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0767900774 ISBN 13: 9780767900775

Publisher: Broadway, 1998

Synopsis

A fascinating synthesis of ancient wisdom, modern medicine, scientific research, and personal experience that proves that the human heart, not the brain, holds the secrets that link body, mind, and spirit.

You know that the heart loves and feels, but did you know that the heart also thinks, remembers, communicates with other hearts, helps regulate immunity, and contains stored information that continually pulses through your body? In The Heart's Code, Dr. Paul Pearsall explains the theory and science behind energy cardiology, the newly emerging field that is uncovering one of the most significant medical, social, and spiritual discoveries of our time. The heart is not just a pump; it conducts the cellular symphony that is the very essence of our being.

Ten years ago, Pearsall, who was then running a clinical and research center at a major hospital, knew he had cancer long before his doctors confirmed his self-diagnosis. His heart was crying out that something was seriously wrong, but his doctors and colleagues dismissed his misgivings and said he was overstressed. Months later, Pearsall was diagnosed with Stage IV lymphoma with a small chance of survival. But he did survive, and his experience led him to enter research and make discoveries that are nothing short of revolutionary.

Pearsall, the author of the New York Times bestsellers Superimmunity and The Pleasure Prescription, explains how we live in a society that is run by our brains, not our hearts, and why this is damaging to us on a personal and sociological level. Pearsall shows that by listening to the subtle energy and wisdom each of us has within our hearts, we can learn valuable lessons for loving, working, playing, praying, and healing.

Full of amazing stories of transplant recipients who experienced profound changes in their lifestyles and cancer patients who recognized their illness before diagnosis, as well as data from scientists and sources on cellular memory and the power of subtle energy, Pearsall explores what these breakthroughs mean for the rest of us. By unlocking the heart's code we can discover new ways of understanding human healing and consciousness, even as we create a new model for living that leads to better health, happiness, and self-knowledge.

About this title

About the Author

Paul Pearsall, Ph.D., a psychoneuroimmunologist, has given more than 5,000 national and international presentations and speaks regularly at Fortune 500 companies, organizations, medical schools, and societies. He is the author of several books, including Write Your Own Pleasure Prescription, as well as the New York Times bestsellers The Pleasure Prescription, Superimmunity, and Super Marital Sex. He lives in Hawaii.

From the Inside Flap

g synthesis of ancient wisdom, modern medicine, scientific research, and personal experience that proves that the human heart, not the brain, holds the secrets that link body, mind, and spirit.

You know that the heart loves and feels, but did you know that the heart also thinks, remembers, communicates with other hearts, helps regulate immunity, and contains stored information that continually pulses through your body? In The Heart's Code, Dr. Paul Pearsall explains the theory and science behind energy cardiology, the newly emerging field that is uncovering one of the most significant medical, social, and spiritual discoveries of our time. The heart is not just a pump; it conducts the cellular symphony that is the very essence of our being.

Ten years ago, Pearsall, who was then running a clinical and research center at a major hospital, knew he had cancer long before his doctors confirmed his self-diagnosis. His heart was crying out that something was seriously w

Reviews

Pearsall, the prolific guru of self-help advice combining scientific theories with New Age spiritualism (Sexual Healing, 1994; Ten Laws of Lasting Love, 1993; etc.), finds evidence in the experiences of heart transplant recipients to support his claim that the heart thinks and the cells remember. Energy and information are one and the same, says Pearsall, who sees the heart as a generator of this ``info-energy,'' and the cells as storehouses of info-energetic memories. When a heart is transplanted, some ``cardio-sensitive'' recipientsthe stories of five such people are told herereport recovery of these memories, which to Pearsall indicates they are tapping into the ``L'' (for life) energy of the donor. While the nature of ``L'' energy remains obscure, Pearsall offers some 20 different descriptions of this mysterious force, ranging from its speed (faster than the speed of light) to its visual manifestations (auras, spirals, etheric webs). By learning ``cardio-contemplation,'' he assures the reader, one can tune into one's own heart and the coded information that is the human soul. Further, since hearts exchange information with other hearts, one can also become sensitive to the incoming ``L'' energy of other people's hearts. Connecting to one's own and to others hearts is presented as the key to healing, happiness, and living and loving better. Pearsall provides a Heart Energy Amplitude Recognition Test and a Cardio-Sensitive Inventory for those who want to assess their likelihood of being able to listen to their heart's code and even to tap into the collective unconscious. Lots of scientific jargonthere's even a glossary of technical termsto dress up a familiar New Age message about getting in touch with oneself and becoming one with the cosmos. ($75,000 ad/promo; Literary Guild alternate selection; author tour) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Psychologist Pearsall had a personal experience with "energy cardiology" when he had hip cancer. His logical, directing brain struggled over his disease and what it meant to him with his sensitive, more accepting heart. He began to study the heart and learned about its "L energy" and how to recognize its warnings. He went on to study heart transplants and how the background of a new heart could affect its recipient; for example, one man began to yearn for spicy foods and to study Spanish before he knew that his donor had been Hispanic. Documenting the stories he tells with medical and psychological literature, Pearsall states that we have been too brain-focused and have not listened to all the heart has to offer. We should learn to be patient, connected with others, pleasant, humble, and gentle, Pearsall says, and for those who want to find out whether they are cardiosensitive, he presents a personal inventory. Although hardly a work of completely hard science, Pearsall's effort has much to offer thoughtful readers. William Beatty

The author of The Pleasure Principle uses the new field of cellular memory to show that the heart thinks and remembers.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

First Scientific Contact with the Soul?

Science has recently discovered three startling new possibilities regarding how we think, feel, love, heal, and find meaning in our life.  This research suggests that the heart thinks, cells remember, and that both of these processes are related to an as yet mysterious, extremely powerful, but very subtle energy with properties unlike any other known force.  If the preliminary insights regarding these prospects continue to be verified, science may be taking the first tentative steps to understanding more about what shamans, kahuna, priests, spiritual leaders, and healers from ancient traditional medicines have been teaching about for centuries--the energy of the human spirit and the coded information that is the human soul.

The research and true life stories presented in this book will introduce preliminary documentation that is offering clues about the heart's code, the phrase I will use throughout this book to represent a proposed subtle life or "L" energy "cardio-cryptogram." This heart's code is recorded and remembered in every cell in the body as an informational template of the soul, constantly resonating within and from us, sent forth from our heart.

Toward One World Medicine

By exploring the possibility of a heart's code, we may be able to begin to build a bridge between the biomechanical wonders of modern medicine, the spirituality of ancient traditional healing systems, the various alternative or complimentary medicines, and the wisdom of religious scholars and spiritual leaders.  It is not likely that we will be able to understand all the forms of medicine in the world until we are willing to broaden our understanding of the world.  By doing so, we may not have to select from among all the models of healing.  Instead, perhaps we can combine them into one world medicine made up of all the wisdom about the brain, body, energy, information, the spirit, and the soul.  With sufficient patience, tolerance, creativity, a more inclusive view of the human system as it interacts with all systems, and perhaps most of all, with a more open heart and less defensively reactive brain, we may be able to combine the rigor of science with the subtle wisdom of the heart to answer the most important questions in the universe: what and why is life?

The Burden Of Prudence

The hypotheses regarding the heart's code are without doubt among the boldest proposals any scientist could make.  I offer them to facilitate more discussion and study and as new possibilities to be explored as medicine experiences its growing pains associated with the challenges in dealing with the issues of spirituality and mortality, which are of such deep concern to patients, and the lessons of so-called alternative or complementary medicines.  These are proposals that many of my scientific colleagues often say they "have a very hard time accepting." Surgeon Dr.  Bernie Siegel is the well-known author of Love, Medicine and Miracles and other books that deal with ideas about mind/body/soul interactions that many of his colleagues still refuse to accept, get angry with, and often consider strange and even crazy.  He writes, "What disturbs me is the use of the word 'accept.' If we close our minds and don't accept, science and healing cannot move forward.  Instead of 'hard to accept,' let us say, 'hard to understand.'"

Using our current scientific way of thinking, it is very difficult to understand how the heart could have a code, a cell could have a memory, and an immeasurable form of energy could contain information about the soul.  I suggest that we should study these ideas precisely because they are "non-sense." They do not make sense in terms of science's current ways of trying to explain the mysteries of life.  Perhaps these new possibilities regarding the heart's code will offer some new ways to come to our senses about the meaning of life and the processes of healing.

In the mid-1800s, the idea that tiny germs invisible to the eye could make us sick was seen as "utter nonsense" by the medical leaders of that time.  Based on seemingly strange but recurring reports from patients and some doctors and nurses about the suffering that seemed to be caused by dirty hands delivering babies, and thousands of needless deaths caused by the use of scalpels still defiantly sharpened on the bottom of the surgeon's boot to show disdain for the silly "germ theory," doctors began to reluctantly accept the possibility of the existence of imperceptible but deadly microorganisms.  This doubting acceptance allowed the development of more understanding about invisible things causing visible consequences, and doctors began to wash their hands and sterilize their instruments before any medical procedure.  Today, because of the historical prudence of their predecessors, the burden of proof has been met and doctors understand much more--but not all--about bacteria.  This same cautious but accepting prudence is required if we are to learn more about the existence of a heart's code and the cellular memories it conveys.

Four Hypotheses Regarding Energy, Information, and the Mind/Body Connection

Our understanding of the heart as a sentient organ is about where our understanding of the miraculous complexities of the brain was more than one hundred years ago.  In comparison to the continuing rapid progress in study of the brain, learning about the heart as more than just a pump is developing much more slowly.  The central hypotheses regarding information-containing energy communicated by the heart were initially proposed by Drs.  Gary E.  Schwartz and Linda G.  Russek.  They are as clearly stated and testable as any other set of scientific suppositions, but the ideas of a "thinking" heart and information-carrying energy seem excessively difficult for many scientists to accept as starting points for study.

Dr.  Gary Schwartz is a professor of Psychology, Neurology, and Psychiatry and director of the Human Energy Systems Laboratory at the University of Arizona.  His associate, Dr.  Linda Russek, is a research psychologist at the Harvard University Student Health Service and codirector of the Human Energy Systems Laboratory.  They are a creative, energetic, sensitive research team who have always been interested in a "systems" or interactive view of how life works.  They have dedicated their professional lives to the attempt to create one medicine out of the many diverse approaches to healing and have never been afraid to challenge and extend the accepted principles of psychology and medicine.  They have combined the fields of biology, the new physics that studies subtle energy and the invisible atomic world, and modern cardiology to help explain the info-energetic nature of the heart beyond what skeptics call the abiding impulse to mythologize the heart.  They based their field of energy cardiology on what they call "dynamic systems memory theory," the idea that all systems are constantly exchanging mutually influential energy, which contains information that alters the systems taking part in the exchange.  They offer four hypotheses to explain how cells might be able to make memories out of the info-energy constantly circulated through the body system by the heart.  I have paraphrased and expanded their hypotheses here.  

1. Energy and information are the same thing.  Everything that exists has energy, energy is full of information, and stored info-energy is what makes up cellular memories. Based on theories and research from the field of biology and other sciences, all living systems are by their nature manifestations of energy that contains the information (memory) of what they are and how they function.  To scientists, the word "system" refers to a set of interactions between inseparable units.  From the interactions between the tiniest parts within a single cell to the exchange of information between family members at dinner to the energy bouncing back and forth between the stars and planets, everything exists in a continuous info-energetic relationship.  Since all systems are information-containing energy "stuff," all systems constantly exchange memories.  

2.  What we call mind, consciousness, or our intentions are really manifestations of information-containing energy. Based on the lessons learned from modern physics, information and mind seem to be one and the same.  What I am calling "L" energy is the basic code of life and what our "system" remembers as "who" we are.  Energy is the ability to do work and a force that conveys our personal life code (our systemic memory) along with the information it contains.  Information is what gives a system its form and structure, and energy is the force or function that moves a system, connects all aspects of a system, and helps systems communicate and connect.  Since all systems are connected and share forms of the same energy, all systems share common memories.  

3.  The heart is the primary generator of info-energy. The heart is constantly sending out patterns of info-energy that regulate organs and cells throughout the body.  Every cell in the body is literally bathed in the info-energy conducted from and by the heart.  Since the heart is a primary generator and transmitter of info-energy, it is central to our system's recollection of its life--its cellular memory.  

4.  Because we are manifestations of the info-energy coming to, flow...

Edition details

• Publisher: Broadway
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0767900774
• ISBN 13: 9780767900775
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304