You might be reading this in isolation. A lifestyle that has suddenly become our new normal. Maybe you’re starting to miss the feeling of other people around you. I know I am. What is it exactly that we are missing?

It’s something we’d already been looking for. There’d been a lot of talk about empathy leading up to this moment. Strategizing around it. Building brands on it. Teaching it. Developing it. Marketing books & businesses & masterclasses about it. All of it established on a hunger to understand something that felt more distant than maybe it should.

A quick look into Google Search Trends on ‘empathy’ shows the story clearly:

Search Interest Over Time on ‘Empathy’ Topic — Source: Google Trends (2004–2020)

Then, without warning, our chance to be physically present with each other was suddenly taken away. Talk of empathy surrendered itself to the rapid growth of a new idea: social distancing.

So here we are, staring into the spaces where other people once stood. Our brains searching for the words to describe the feeling of what’s gone missing from our hearts.

Words will not get us there. That’s because words are the Language of Logic. Logic can bridge the gaps between ideas, but it cannot bridge the gaps between people. It is not words that connect us, it is our feelings.

What words like empathy seek to describe exists behind a veil past which Logic cannot go; past which our reliance on the firm ground of objective facts must give way to a trust in the shifting sands of subjective experience. There is a doorway through the Heart into a laboratory of spirit — more than science — which we must enter alone to see for ourselves what is truly real.

Therein lies the great irony of human connection — and the great opportunity of our isolation. The journey toward understanding each other begins with understanding ourselves.

The Answer In The Asking

Words are like swords. They are ideas condensed into sound & symbol, engineered to cut through the dense foliage of nature’s uncertainties.

There are myths of our primordial language. The Hebrews refer to Lingua Adamica as the words carried between Adam and Eve and God in the Garden of Eden — and in turn, the words by which Adam named all things.

We can hear the echoes of such a language in the passage of the most basic phonetics like Ka, carrying with it one fundamental meaning across time and culture.

In this way, words have been the weapon by which humanity has achieved its dominion over reality with ever-increasing complexity — acting collectively as Adam walking through our garden and naming all we find.

So then, as we turned this naming gaze of Adam within, we arrived at a simple, but vital question suggested by the mystery of Ka: where is the seat of the soul?

Like swords, the sharpness of words cuts both ways. Their power also tempts us to strike them against each other; to test their strengths. The more complex and divergent our language, the more forceful our battles.

In the march of history, this question has come to be understood as a battle between deliciously complex words, each forged with the linguistic alloy of latin & science and bejeweled with the ornaments of mankind’s most celebrated thinkers.

It is known as the Cardiocentric vs Cephalocentric Debate.

Cardiocentrism believes in the Heart as the seat of our soul and with it, our innate intelligence; the central operation of our body. The Ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians are counted amongst the Cardiocentrists enchanted by the mysteries contained within the rhythmic beating of our hearts, believing it brought the story of our souls into the afterlife. With them in their belief in the Heart were also the Greek Stoics and Epicureans as well as philosophers Aristotle, Democritus, Praxagoras, and Empedocles.

These people, according to the measured analysis of the Cephalocentrists for whom seat of the soul clearly resides in the Head, are imbeciles. Among their ranks are some of the greatest thinkers in human history: Pythagoras, Plato, Galen, Alcmaeon, Herophilus, Erasistratus, Rufus of Ephesus, and the writers of the Hippocratic Corpus, which laid the foundations of modern healthcare.

The weighing of the heart ceremony, the judgment day of the ancient Egyptian religion. The heart of the deceased is weighed against the Feather of Ma’at, the goddess of truth and justice. In the Papyrus of Ani circa 1200 BCE.

Today we sit on the other side of centuries of achievements in medical study probing the depths of the human body and the debate would seem to be settled: The Cephalocentrists were right.

We live in our Heads.

For instance, we know that the brain holds the executive power in the operation our body’s many functions. In fact, we have minted a whole new vast roster of words to explain precisely how and why this is.

We know…that through afferent nerves, signal from all over the body is sent to the brain for processing while through efferent nerves, signal is sent back to the body for regulation & movement.

We know…that what keeps us awake lives in the thalamus of our brain. That is, according to a 2020 study that zapped monkey brains to keep them up at night.

We know…that we can probe the brain for consciousness. We call what we’re looking for Neural Correlates of Consciousness. In 2016, researchers at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre at Harvard Medical School proudly announced, “For the first time, we have found a connection between the brainstem region involved in arousal and regions involved in awareness, two prerequisites for consciousness.”

Digging deeper, the explanation as to what this means and why it matters comes as a flurry of words, dancing with schooled, sophisticated flourishes:

First, they identified the rostral dorsolateral pontine tegmentum and the relationship of its damage to the dark sleep of “coma”. They then found that this region links up to two other regions of the brain that prior research had shown plays a role in regulating consciousness; one in the left, ventral, anterior insular cortex and the other in the pregenual anterior cingulate cortex — both of which have been linked in to arousal and awareness specifically.

It’s a stunning amount of knowledge we’ve been able to amass about ourselves.

There is something else we know now too though. Something that adds a layer of puzzlement to all of these discoveries.

We know…that words, themselves, live in the brain.

Words, it turns out, live specifically in the cerebral cortex, where the Wernicke’s Area, located in the left cerebral hemisphere, houses language comprehension and connects to the Broca’s Area, located in the inferior frontal gyrus, for the motor functions of speech.

So again — Where is the seat of the soul?

This knowledge about our knowledge adds an interesting wrinkle, doesn’t it.

In using these words made by and for the brain, we didn’t so much settle the debate between Head & Heart as seat of the soul, we’ve only narrowed our gaze.

The modern world we’ve built on the foundation of this conclusion is a monument to the language of logic. Yet here we are, struggling through a maze of technology and data of our own construction to confront the very pains of our existence. We call it malaise, we call it anxiety, we call it depression, we try word after word to describe what’s wrong — to ask once again who we are and how we can connect with each other.

Perhaps, our answers are pre-determined in the manner of our asking. Perhaps we’ve gotten lost in our heads. The portrait we’ve painted of ourselves is but a reflection of the brain’s own image — and nothing more. Can we find our way back out of its brilliant labyrinth?

Yes.

Pulling back on the thread that brought us here, let us return our gaze to the original mystery stirred by Egyptian mummifications, Greek pondering, and Renaissance vivifications of unfortunate corpses.

What did they find when searching for the origins of Ka, the essential force of life and death within our human bodies?

Contemporary artist Alex Grey depicts internal bodily systems such as the nervous & cardiovascular with arresting physiological accuracy // More info at alexgrey.com

Sit with the images above for a moment and feel the balance between the two primary networks of our bodies, both of them featuring central operating organs within vast systems of apparently equal complexity. The Head, served by its peripheral network of nerves running & returning all across the body — and the Heart, served also by its own peripheral network of veins running & returning all across the body.

Could it be that the signals carried within these systems convey information more primary than words can describe? Could it be that intelligence is not the exclusive provenance of the brain?

We’ve listened to the Head. We’ve built our world in its image.

How might we also listen to what the Heart has to say?

The Whispers Of The Heart

The heart is an instrument of rhythm.

The tempos of its beat tune us between our different modes of being. There are memories in those rhythms. I feel it. I can journey into my past and feel through my heart who I was when I reached for my first kiss. The nervousness. The new. Who I was when when I found myself truly on my own for the first time. The spartan craving for discipline that kicked in. The excitement. The fear. How time slowed down when I proposed to my wife. The bliss. The eternity.

These chapters and moments in my life story, they each carry their own signature. Each of their heartbeats carry their own character — and each character embodies a feeling.

There’s something archetypal about the information encoded within our Hearts. There’s a heartbeat for The Hero. A heartbeat for The Lover, The Victim, The Sage. It’s as though the essence of what is held in myth & memory is software for our bodies.

I learned to listen to my Heart from my father. The lifetime we shared together filled me with memories that each carry their own feelings, rich with the subjective knowledge of direct experience; none of them sharper than at the end of his life, when I stepped into his hospital room shortly after his heart stopped beating — when I felt for myself the ineffable awe of what language has tried to capture through Ka.

The essence of life becomes apparent once it has gone missing.

There are no words that can explain the release in my Heart when it happened while I was miles away on a train racing to that room. I felt it when he died. Nobody told me, but I knew. Before any words carried any facts my way, I was with him in my Heart when it happened.

I like to think he trained me for that moment. A decade earlier, he taught me how to listen to my Heart. He showed me you can reach the Heart through Music.

Bill Cady aka William Of Acton aka Reverend Feng Huang aka the Grandbohoo aka The Phoenix Who Rides On Dragon’s Breath aka my father

When I was thirteen, my dad agreed to drive — on a whim — for five hours through back country roads so I could see my favorite band live at the New York State Fair. On that drive, he shared with me his entire college mixtape collection — each and every cassette painstakingly recorded from vinyl into a curated musical experience of his passions.

The ebb & flow between those songs taught me how intimate —and how potent — the connection between Music and the Heart truly is.

That experience in that car for those five hours is what made me a musician. The rest was just practice. As it would many times again in my life, my Heart led and my Head followed.

Ripples In Time

And follow it did. A year after that road trip, I bought a bass guitar and began studying.

I was fortunate to go to a school for music with teachers that encouraged to not just learn how to play, but to chase virtuosity. Speed, dexterity, knowledge, and a deep understanding of the Masters. All of those pursuits absorbed me completely. A constant call to the practice room where my stool and my bass guitar awaited — where one day, I discovered that my Heart can slow down time.

I was alone when it happened, as tends to be the case with the biggest breakthroughs in the laboratory of subjectivity. At 16 years old, in an empty recital hall— just me and my bass guitar — I was chasing one of the esteemed masters named Jaco Pastorius, working my hands through one of the heroic performances he’d left behind for generations of players to try and keep up with. I was practicing “Donna Lee”.

I worked through the song with a metronome next my stool on the floor beside me. Jaco tops out at 230 beats per minute in his take. I was working on breaking the 200 barrier. I’d run through it over and over again at one bpm until I’d felt I’d grabbed the tempo. Stop. Crank up the metronome up 5bpms and start again.

When I hit 210 bpm, I noticed something strange. Time would seem to slow down when I started playing. The space between the metronome’s clicks would stretch longer as I leaned-in to race my hands up and down the fretboard. My heart was pounding. I became aware that I was pushing into the liminal space above which the heroic energy of this Master waited. I was beginning to tune into how Jaco experienced time.

So I stopped. And I listened.

I listened to the clicks of the metronome and to the beat of my heart like I would any two beats. When you’re training to be a musician, you learn how to hold something called a polyrhythm —when two beats or two different tempos are happening at the same time. I’d learned to hold polyrhythms it by shifting my focus to just one of the beats until my mind could catch the placements of the other. It’s like jumping from one moving platform to another.

Some records by other masters hold astounding performances of this skill. Like on ‘Stratus’, the dance between Billy Cobham’s time-bending drum fills dance around Leland Sklar’s stubborn-as-hell unflinching bass line.

That day in the empty recital hall, I put my instrument down and I tuned in to these ripples in time.

I locked in on the polyrhythm between the metronome and my heartbeat. I focused first on the thumping in my chest. I found that it was steady. The space between thumps consistent and predictable. I held my ground there to leap my focus toward catching the metronome’s click.

The clicks, though, they kept shifting. The space between each would wax and wane, but my heartbeat remained steadily the same.

In sitting with the steady rhythm of my own heart, I experienced the fluidity of time.

I was in awe. I wondered, how can it be that something as internal as my heartbeat can so drastically alter something as external as time? Is the rhythm of our heart, much like the speed of light is for objective space-time, some sort of universal constant for subjective experience?