The science of the heart and Sri Ramana Maharshi

The modern science about the heart and the teachings of Indian sage Sri Ramana Maharshi have much in common. The similarity suggests Ramana experienced truths that science has caught up with 50 years later. Ramana used personal experience and the yogic sciences to map these inner realities. Modern scientific methods maps the heart’s biological and neurological structures. And surprise surprise, they are talking about the same things.

For years I’ve been studying science about the heart via the Heartmath Institute. Recently I discovered Sri Ramana’s teachings and saw how they directly align to the current heart science. This overlap is what I will attempt to bring forward here.

I’ve been traveling in south India, where I’m staying at the foot of the sacred mountain of Arunachala. This mountain is home of Sri Ramana Maharishi’s Ashram, in town of Tiruvannamalai (a.k.a. “Tiru”). Ramana lived here for over 50 years. He loved the mountain and considered it to be his teacher. Arunachala is said to be Shiva himself. The mountain is many caves where saints have meditated down through the ages.

Ramana was part of the Hindu yoga tradition. The yogic sciences map the human physiology thoroughly within a worldview that includes the Divine. The search for truth in pre-modern times was often done by scientists who wore monks robes instead of lab coats.

The Heartmath Institute has been at the front of an emerging field called ‘neurocardiology’, or how the brain wires to the heart. They say the heart functions as an organ of perception, picking up and processing the vibrations of the world and sending intuitively felt synopsis to the brain that we register as feelings.

The universe is electromagnetic and everything gives of waves of energy. The heart sends off waves of energy into the world around that can be measured by a ‘magnetometer.’ These waves carry information as a holonomic imprint of the content of a person’s consciousness.

Our experiences that somebody has a ‘good vibe’ or ‘bad vibe’ are literally, scientifically verifiably true. The Heartmath Institute has used a ‘magnetometer’ to measure the subtle electrical impulses that come off people. The heart is the most powerful electrical generator in the human body, creating 5000 times more charge than our brain. The squeezing and pumping the four quadrants of the heart creates a spiraling, vortex effect.

People with good vibes give off coherent waves, repeating waves with the same steady peaks and valleys of energy. People can get into synch, or biological entrainment, with others who are giving off this coherent pattern. Feeling love or gratitude gets our heart to start emanating coherent waves. People feeling anger give off incoherent and disordered waves.

If we start to listen to our hearts, or tune into the intuitive impressions, we can start to process actual information that our bodies are receiving. We do it all the time, anyway, but this process can be made conscious.

This information is spelled out further in the books The Heartmath Solution by Doc Childers, and The Biology of Transcendence, by Joe Pearce. There are web resources at www.heartmath.com. If you have a heart, or knows someone who does, this info will helpful.

In the ashram bookstore, I got a little book called Spiritual Heart by A.R. Natarajan, that gathers Ramana’s thoughts about the heart. The following quotes come from this book.

Ramana identified a spiritual heart located on the right side of our chests, two fingers pointed upward to the right of the mid-line. Ramana says “This heart is different from the physical heart; beating is the function of the latter. The former is the seat of spiritual experience.”

“Heart is usually understood to be the muscular organ lying on the left of the chest. The Bible says that a fool’s heart is on the left and a wise man’s on the right. Yoga Vasishta says that there are two hearts; one is the samvit; the other the blood vessel.

Disciple: “What is Heart?”
Master: “It is the center of the Self. The Self is the center of centers. The Heart represents the psychic center and not the physical center.”

Ramana says that “The yogi is engaged in cleansing the nadis. Then Kundalini, the primal power is awakened which is said to rise up from the coccyx to the head. The yogi is later advised to come down to the Heart as a final step.”

“The yogic chakras counting form the bottom to the top are various centers in the nervous system. They represent various steps manifesting different kinds of power of knowledge leading to the Sahasrara, the thousand petaled lotus, where is seated the supreme Shakti. But the Self that supports the whole movement of Shakti is not placed there, but supports it from the Heart center.”

“The Heart in the Upanishads is construed as “Hridayam” meaning: this is the center. That is, it is where the mind rises and subsides. That is the seat of Realisation.”

This is important to know that the Heart is the proper seat of our consciousness and after Kundalini rises, it should settle back downward into the Hridyam. Ramana says “By yogic practice one goes down, then rises up, wanders all through until the goal is reached; by jnana abhyas (cultivation of spiritual wisdom) one settles down directly in the center.” And also “(Some) yogis say that the current rising up the sahasrara ends there. That experience is not complete. For jnana, (knowledge of the Absolute), they must come to the Heart. Hridaya (heart) is the alpha and the omega.

It is important to note that Ramana’s ‘hridyam’ heart center isn’t the same as the anahata heart chakra. Ramana says
“Anahata is the chakra lying behind the heart. It is not samvit (the full energy of knowledge).”

Disciple: “What is the difference between the bound man and the one liberated?”
Maharshi: “Self-aware is one who lives in the Heart. When he moves about and deals with men and things, he knows that what he sees is not separate from the one Supreme Reality, the Brahman, which he realized in the Heart as his own Self, the Real.”

Ramana introduces us to a useful word in “sphurana” to describe the rustling, vibratory pleasure that comes when the heart center ‘scintillates with consciousness.” The following exchange talks of sphurana and a central Ramana technique for finding the self, repeatedly asking yourself “who am I?”

Disciple: “Does the inquiry ‘who am I?” lead to any spot on the body?”
Maharshi: Evidently, self-consciousness is in relation to the individual himself and therefore has to be experienced in his being, with a center in the body as the center of the experience. It resembles the dynamo of a machine, which gives rise to all sorts of electrical works. Not only does it maintain the life of the body and the activities of all it’s parts and organs, conscious and unconscious, but also the relation between the physical and the subtler planes on which the individual functions. Also, like the dynamo, it vibrates and can be felt by the calm mind that pays attention to it. It is known to the yogis and sadhakas by the name ‘sphurana’ which in ‘samadhi’ scintillates with consciousness.

Disciple: How to reach that Center, where what you call the Ultimate Consciousness- the I-I- arises? It it simply by thinking “Who am I?”
Maharshi: Yes, it will take you there. You must do it with a calm mind- mental calmness is essential.

Disciple: How does that consciousness manifest itself when the center- the Heart- is reached? Will I recognize it?
Maharshi: Certainly, as pure consciousness, free from all thought. It is pure, unbroken awareness of your Self, rather of Being- there is no mistaking it when it’s pure.

Disciple: Is the vibratory movement of the Center felt simultaneously with the experience of Pure Consciousness or before, ore after it?
M: The are both one and the same. But sphurana can be felt in a subtle way even when meditation has sufficiently stabilized and deepened, and the Ultimate Consciousness is very near, or during a great fright or shock, where the mind comes to a standstill. It draws attention to itself, so that the meditator’s mind, rendered sensitive by calmness, may become aware of it, gravitate towards it, and finally plunge into it, the Self.”

“This self is the eternal, immutable Self that ever throbs as ‘I’, ‘I’. It is not touched by birth and death; it is eternal. It is not confined to the physical body in which it stations itself; it is universal in its spread” writes MK Pandit, scholar sage of the highest order, in the book "Mighty Impersonality."
“Where is this Self to be found, is the next natural question. In the heart, is the answer. But it is made unambiguously clear that it is not the physiological heart on the left side of the body that is meant. The Heart that Maharshi speaks of is not the usual heart muscle. It is the spiritual heart which is two digits to the right of the center of the chest. it is not physical. It is in the subtle body and lends itself to be felt and experienced to the earnest inquirer in the course of his quest.

Is it the anahata of the science of the Tantra? No, says Bhagavan. The anahata center is not this spiritual heart. Is this spiritual heart a special concept of Maharshi or is there any scriptural support or evidence for it? Yes, there is, says the Mararshi. It is mentioned as the ojasthana in an old Ayurvedic text “Ashtanga Hridayam.” It is also referred to as ullam (meaning Lord, the same as Heart) in one of the verses of Saint Appar’s Thevaram.

In Sri Aurobindo’s Purna Yoga, for instance, the anahata is described as the emotional center; behind it, behind the cardiac center, there is the psychic center, the seat of the antaratman. It is the locus of the divine entity in man.”

Sri Ramana talked a lot about residing in the Self, the great being, the divine consciousness, God, the larger I. He called this the Heart. And now we find that the physical heart in the body is related to a uniting point in the body where different realms of consciousness come together in a holonomic intersection.

The highest Vedantic vision of the Divine is a ‘field’. Krishna says in the Gita “I am the field and the knower of the field.” Quantum physics says that beneath matter is a sub-manifest realm where the information and energy and and consciousness and potential exists in a unified field. This appears to be where Ramana spent a lot of his time, fully plugged into the Unified Field that he called the Heart, the Self, God. Deepak Chopra spoke eloquently on this subject at 2005 conference of the Institute of Noetic Sciences. That talk called “Deepak Chopra on Action for the Future” is on-line from IONS “Shift-in-Action” program.

This vision of a unified field of consciousness as Self perfectly lines up to the best models physics can come up with. So Ramana got that to. So we might want to just look at his vision, his other ideas and say, since he got the heart right, what else was he saying?

Ramana’s life also demonstrated the positive effects of being heart centered. He was nice to everybody: the monkeys, the dogs, the poor people who came to see him. He went out of his way to be compassionate and kind to everybody. He had an open door policy, and people came to see him at all hours for decades. There are lovely stories about his relationship with animals. He mediated disputes between warring tribes of monkeys. He bandaged up a young monkey who was getting harassed by the other monkeys, and conceived the other monkeys to play nice. Clearly, Ramana’s heart worked in a big way.

May our hearts be as big as Ramana so that we’re strong enough to heal our planet.