Sculpting an Intelligent Heart

Christmas 2020

The intelligent heart seeks knowledge

(Proverbs 15,14)

“Everything is part of a whole” had to think the architect Frank Lloyd Wright when he designed in 1934 the house of the waterfall in the Bear Run Nature Reserve, Pennsylvania, a paradigmatic work of integration between man, architecture and nature.

The pandemic has once again shown us the growing interdependence between the members of the human family and of this with the rest of “everything”; the world we inhabit. The “whole”, our world, is a “system” whose functionality depends on the quality of its elements and the quality of the integration between those elements. Ortega y Gasset correctly observed “I am me and my circumstance, and if I don’t save her, I won’t save myself.”

This reflection comes to me when I am in Tehran, with Christmas very near, exposing to some executives from the Middle East the battles that are being fought between the three parts of our brain. We talked about the very different consequences in our biographies of the winning coalition of brains.

There are two coalitions that can be hegemonic. On the one hand, a progressive coalition led by the brain that thinks (neocortex) but in good harmony with the brain that feels (limbic) and the brain that acts (reptilian). At the other extreme, a populist coalition led by hearts that feel and act and where the brain that thinks plays a secondary role.

We were half surprised to comment on how common it is for the populist coalition to win. We argued that doing what your heart asks you, thinking little or badly, does not help to take flight in life, or to invest in the future, or to contribute to the better functioning of the “circumstance”. We lamented how in politics it is common to create contexts that favor the hegemony of the populist coalition.

The populist coalition gives rise to a primitive heart that feels and acts according to primary instincts: survival, eroticism, labeling people as good (or bad) if they belong to the same (or another) ideological tribe, seeking gratification with the minimum effort and little else.

In a primitive heart, the thinking brain is limited to justifying and rationalizing what has already been decided by the other two brains. Consciousness, the highest quality thinking, is turned “off” so as not to interfere with the agenda of rewards that are usually sought in easy money, sex, posturing, fame, or power.

Throughout the centuries awakened people, many of them in tune with the Creator, have distilled a concentrate of knowledge that has turned out to be brilliant for the proper functioning of the “whole”. That distillate is called wisdom; that it is nothing other than knowledge capable of giving flavor to the life of one, of others and of the relationship between one and the other.

When our thinking brain uses wisdom as a source of knowledge, the primitive heart becomes an intelligent heart, and that brain becomes hegemonic. Wisdom provides compelling reasons to transcend immediate gratification and self-interest, allowing for the introduction of long-term variables into the decision-making formula such as personal progress, the improvement of others and the best integration between one and others.

The alternative, therefore, to a primitive heart is an intelligent heart. The coalition of brains behind an intelligent heart is brilliant: the thinking brain using wisdom as “software”; the emotional brain “feeling” the long term and the legitimate interest of others; and the brain to act obeying the other two and without excessive overtones.

This progressive coalition allows us to enjoy doing good to “everything” and feel uncomfortable with what harms the “circumstance”. An intelligent heart allows you to enjoy more and suffer better; for example, by making it possible that pain does not end in suffering.

I end this writing wishing you a very Merry Christmas and the desire that we learn how to sculpt an intelligent heart with all the wisdom donated by previous generations. If we do so, rest assured that we will affirm, as the years go by, that life is becoming increasingly beautiful and rewarding.

Prof. Luis Huete