PEQUEÑAS OBRAS PARA CAPTAR AGUA LLUVIA Y UTILIZAR VERTIENTES EN EL SECANO INTERIOR DE LA VII REGIÓN, CHILE

• Action: The previous three steps create the harmony between your

brain and your heart that enables you to tap into your heart’s wis- dom. As you continue to breathe and hold the focus in your heart, this is the time to ask your question.

• Result: Heart intelligence generally works best when the questions

are brief and to the point. Remember, your heart doesn’t need a preface or the history of a situation before the question. Ask your question silently as a single concise sentence and then allow your heart’s wisdom to respond in a way that works for you.

I’m often asked to interpret the symbols that show up in people’s dreams or the meaning of an experience that they’ve had in their lives. While it’s possible for me to offer an opinion, it’s just that. It’s my sense of what the image or experience may mean in their lives. The truth is that I can’t possibly know what others’ dreams or experiences means for them. It’s also true that they can!

The key is this: If you are empowered enough to have the experi- ence, then you are empowered to know for yourself what your expe- rience means.

A mysterious dream is the perfect opportunity to apply heart wisdom to a real-world situation. From the heart-brain harmony established in the previous three steps, simply ask the following kinds of questions, fi lling in the blank with the names of the people, symbols, or identities of what you’re asking about. These are example formats only. You can choose one that fi ts for you, or create your own using any of them as a template.

• From the place of my heart’s deepest knowing, I ask to be shown the signifi cance of _____ in my dream.

• From the single eye of my heart that knows only my truth, I ask for the meaning of the _____ that I saw in my dream.

• Please help me to understand the signifi cance of _____ in my life.

Step 5: Listen

• Action: Become aware of how your body feels immediately as you

are asking your question. Make a note of any sensations such as warmth, tingling, ringing of the ears, and emotions that may arise. Everyone learns and experiences uniquely. There is no correct or incorrect way of receiving your heart’s wisdom. The key here is to know what works best for you.

• Result: For people who are already attuned to their bodies’ and

their hearts’ intelligence, this step is the easiest part of the process. For those who may have less experience in listening to their bodies, this is an exercise in awareness.

As I mentioned before, I tend to receive my heart’s wisdom as words while at the same time I’m feeling the sensations in my body. Other peo- ple never hear the words but experience a nonverbal communication only, such as warmth radiating from their hearts or their gut. Sometimes people feel a wave of peace wash over them as they receive the answer to their question. What’s important here is to listen to your body and to learn how it communicates with you.

I can honestly say that my heart’s wisdom has never led me to make a bad choice. And while I haven’t used this technique for every big decision I’ve made in my life, I can also say with honesty that the only choices I’ve regretted are the ones I made when I did not honor my heart’s wisdom.

Now you have a step-by-step technique to help you feel em- powered in the face of life’s greatest challenges. While you prob- ably can’t change the situations that arrive at your doorstep, you can definitely change the way to feel and respond to those situa- tions. If you haven’t already done so, you may discover that your ability to access the wisdom of your heart, on demand, becomes a good friend to you and one of your greatest sources of strength in life. The consistency and accuracy of heart-based solutions em- power you to face any situation, meet with any person or force, with a confidence that’s hard to find when you feel helpless, over- whelmed, powerless, and lost.

Do We Already Know the Future?

The example of my trip to Egypt illustrates a form of intuition that most of us are familiar with. It stems from a deep knowing of a relative truth—something that is right for us in a given mo- ment. There are other forms of intuition that show up in other ways. Sometimes these kinds of intuition are less about decisions and moral choices in our personal lives and more about following

an impulse that helps us in some way. The experience of precog-

nition—the ability to know or sense that something will happen

before it actually does—is one of those ways.

There are times when precognition appears in our lives in a personal and conscious way. Gamblers that have the “knack” to choose winning lottery tickets or who consistently fi nd themselves with winning hands at high-stakes card games use their ability for their personal gain. We’ve read stories of law-enforcement agents who have a sixth-sense “gut feeling” that something isn’t right with the home they’ve just visited, follow their instinct, and end up saving a baby from a life-threatening domestic-violence situ- ation. These are common examples of conscious precognition. In the course of their lives the people in the previous examples learned to trust their sense that something was about to happen in a certain way, and more often than not, it did.

While our sense of future events often happens on a person- al level, there are well-documented instances of group or mass precognition of big events that affect large numbers of people, as well. This kind of precognition is less about the conscious knowl- edge of a specifi c event, and more about an unconscious sense, an impulse, to deviate from the typical routines of the day just because it feels like the thing to do. September 11, 2001, illustrates this kind of subconscious intuition in a powerful way.

As tragic as the events of 9/11 were, and as many lives as there were lost on that day, almost immediately it became clear that the day could have been even worse. Had people scheduled their day to follow their typical routines, the number of deaths could have been much higher and the tragedy much greater. Immediate- ly after the events of 9/11, story after story emerged of how peo- ple had unexpectedly changed their plans that day in ways that saved their lives, and for reasons that they attributed to chance and sheer luck. Fathers with their offi ces high in the World Trade Center buildings suddenly chose to take the day off and stay home with their families. People who had planned to fl y on the planes that were hijacked found themselves in unexpected traffi c jams

while it’s common for these things to happen occasionally, the large numbers of people who altered their plans on September 11, and saved their own lives by doing so, tells us that there is more than coincidence at work here.

A number of celebrities are among those whose lives were saved on 9/11, seemingly by “chance.” Robert Redford, for exam- ple, was in New York City for business meetings and scheduled to return to California on September 11 aboard the Newark–Los An- geles flight that he took frequently, United Airlines flight 93. His meetings ended unexpectedly early the day before, however, and he was able to fly back to California on September 10. Had Redford taken his typical flight, he would have been among the casualties of the hijacked flight 93 that crashed into a Pennsylvania field, killing all passengers and crew on board. In a USA Today report about his experience of 9/11, Redford said, “We all have our access to the horrors [of the attacks]. For some of us, it’s ‘There but for the grace of God . . .’ I fall into that category.”23

Redford was not alone in his “lucky” change of plans on 9/11. Over 350 people who had planned to take the four flights that were hijacked and destroyed that day failed to make them for a number of reasons. Among the celebrities who shared Redford’s good fortune and changed their travel plans that day were actors Mark Wahlberg (scheduled to fly on American Airlines Flight 11 but flew to Boston the night before to be with friends),24 _Jaime

Pressly (canceled her flight on American Airlines flight 11 unex- pectedly at the last minute),25 _{and Edward James Olmos (scheduled}

to take American Airlines flight 11 to appear at the Latin Grammy Awards in Los Angeles but was tired and rescheduled for another flight)26_{, as well as San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, comedian}

Seth MacFarlane, MTV reality star Julie Stoffer, and others.

When we hear these kinds of stories, the number of people involved tells us there’s something happening here that we owe it to ourselves to understand. Regardless of what we choose to call it, that so many people shifted their travel plans on such short notice for that day, or found that a shift of their plans was beyond their control, suggests that they responded to an impulse—an

unconscious cue—to do so. A research paper published by Cor- nell University may provide the fi rst viable explanation for how it’s possible for us to sense such outcomes in a way that is beyond statistical chance. Not surprisingly, the Cornell study may have created an even deeper mystery in the process.

In a paper published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psy-

chology, social psychologist Darly Bem described a series of experi-

ments that he performed to explore the ability of some individuals to sense, or feel, the outcome of events before they happen.27 _In

other words, the experiment was designed to explore the possi- bility of precognition. In one of Bem’s experiments, he used a computer that repeatedly showed the same image of two curtains on the screen side by side. Each time the curtains appeared, one would have a picture behind it and the other would not, showing a blank wall. When the curtains appeared, the person tested was instructed to select the one that felt as though it were covering an image.

There are two pieces of information that are key to illustrate the signifi cance of this experiment:

1. The image behind the curtain was of couples engaged in consensual and nonviolent sexual acts. The test participants were told this, and also told that they had the opportunity to decline the test if they felt the images would be offensive to them.

2. No one, not even the scientists who designed the experiment, knew which curtain was hiding an image. The computer randomly chose the images each time the curtain appeared.

In each test, the curtains appeared on the screen 36 times. Bem conducted the experiments on over 1,000 participants, and the results were clear and consistent. Because there were two pos- sibilities for each choice, there was a 50 percent chance that the participants would choose the curtain hiding the image. The suc- cess of the results was consistently beyond the chance statistics,

with 53.1 percent of the selections correctly choosing the curtain hiding an image. Somehow, the people tested correctly chose which curtain hid an erotic image to a degree statistically beyond luck. Through a process that the scientific community continues to struggle with, studies like this show that the participants some- how knew—they sensed or felt in advance—the correct outcome before it was revealed on the computer screen.

A similar study, conducted by IHM, invites us to go a step fur- ther and may give us a clue as to why. The scientists at HeartMath designed a series of experiments to test for the possibility of what is called nonlocal intuition. Examples of this kind of intuition fall into broad categories of the kind of experiences described earlier in this chapter: parents connecting with their children, or vice versa; knowing that an event that has yet to happen is about to occur, as in the previous study; and having someone call you the instant you’re thinking about them (this also occurs sometimes when we find ourselves humming a particular song in our minds, we turn on the radio, and the song is the one that’s playing).

The IHM experiments consisted of a setting where a number of parameters could be measured in the body of the person being tested, including skin conductivity, brain waves, and heart activi- ty. The readings were made as the person being tested would click a computer mouse to trigger the appearance of a random image on the screen. This time, however, the images fell into two distinct categories: calming images of nature and stimulating images such as violence and war.

The scientists already knew that our bodies respond different- ly to calming images, such as ocean waves gently breaking along a beautiful sandy shore, than they do while witnessing the af- termath of a violent battle. It’s because of these differences that these experiments are so intriguing. The tests revealed that users’ bodies, including their hearts and brains, correctly anticipated the quality of the images they were about to see—before the images

actually appeared. In other words, during the six seconds between

the time the mouse was clicked and the image was seen, the heart of the user was already experiencing the image. The authors of

the study are clear about the signifi cance of these studies, stating, “Both the heart and the brain appear to receive and respond to information about a future emotional stimulus prior to actually experiencing the stimulus.”28

These studies shed new light and offer fresh insights into the power of our hearts’ intuition when it comes to events that affect our future. The key here is that the effect is more pronounced when the event has emotional signifi cance to us. In the Cornell study, the erotic images held an emotional charge for the partici- pant undergoing the test. On September 11, the events that were already in motion in the hearts and minds of those who carried them out held emotional signifi cance for them, as did the conse- quences of the aftermath for millions of people around the world.

In light of the 1987 confi rmation of the energetic fi eld that connects all things,29 _{the discovery that the human heart produc-}

es and detects subtle fi elds of electrical and magnetic energy, and the discovery of 40,000 or so specialized cells in the heart that detect just such fi elds, it should come as no surprise to us that we can sense in the fi eld the “signature” of events that exist there. Whether it’s an erotic image in the laboratory, the mass destruc- tion of 9/11, or the well-being of our children in another room or on the other side of the world, the evidence is clear: we are part of the world, and our ability to sense the world that we’re part of is a natural part of our being. Our willingness to embrace and develop this ability can enrich our lives and our relationships in ways that may have sounded impossible only a generation ago.

Living from Your Heart: The Next Step of Evolution

There is a saying among certain indigenous and ancient mys- tery traditions when it comes to the way we live our lives, and how we come to terms with life’s experiences. Though the traditions are different from one another, they are bound together by the theme of a common thread of wisdom: In order for us to come full circle and embrace our personal power in life, we must fi rst

embark upon a journey of personal discovery. And while the jour- ney may lead us away from what’s been familiar in the past, and may take our entire lifetime to complete, the distance of our trip is a short one. It only covers about 18 inches.

Whether we’re tall or short, and regardless of the race or na- tionality we call our heritage, for all of us the average distance from the center of our brains to the middle of our hearts is the same: 18 inches. But the short distance can be deceptive. Depend- ing on the beliefs of our families, our communities, our religions, and what happens in our life experiences, it can take months, years, or a lifetime to learn how to make the shift from the logical thinking of the mind to the intuitive wisdom of the heart, and

when it’s appropriate to do so.

The discovery of the “little brain” in the heart, however, and the benefits it affords us tells us that to make such a shift is cer- tainly worth the effort. It’s the journey that takes us out of the either-or polarity thinking of the brain, and into the intuitive knowing of our heart. And while the ability to do so would be em- powering for us at any time, it is especially so now, in our lifetime of converging extremes.

As you will find detailed throughout this book, it’s clear that the first years of the 21st century—the present—are no ordinary time in the history of our societies, our nations, and our world. We’re living a time of accelerated change—cycles of climate, con- flict, and economic shifts that are bearing down upon us in a way that no generation in recorded history has ever faced.

We no longer live in the isolated countries that formed the foundation of our society during the 19th and 20th centuries. We no longer live in nations with isolated economies, isolated tech- nologies, isolated energy grids, and isolated defense and commu- nications systems. The way we think about money and financial security now isn’t the same as how our grandparents thought about these things. The role that religion and spirituality has played in our lives is taking on new meaning as we try to apply 2,500-year-old ideas to a 21st-century world. The very principles that have helped us feel secure in our communities and homes are

changing. Facts like these lead us to one of the most crucial yet least understood realizations of our era: we’re living a time of many,

many extremes, and they’re all converging upon us at once in this life- time, today, now. These facts have led to the certainty of where we