The Language of the Heart:
From Dream Language towards Understanding the Language of the Heart

by Wolfgang A. Klebel

Abstract: The Bahá'í Religion could justifiably be called the "Religion of the Heart." The heart in the Bahá'í Writings is given a special meaning; concepts like the city of the heart and the citadel of the heart are emphasizing the importance of the heart. The heart is described as possessing sensory capacities. Bahá'u'lláh talks about the "eye of thine heart" (KI 90),"ear of his inmost heart" (SLH 86),"hearts have been sorely shaken" (PM 12) and the "wise and understanding heart" (ESW 65) and suggests that one "Ponder this in thine heart" (ESW 74).

These statements can be correlated with the findings of modern Neurocardiology, which describes the "little brain" of the heart, having perception, memory and decision making ability. Recent work in the relatively new field of Neurocardiology has firmly established that the heart is a sensory organ and a sophisticated information encoding and processing center. Its circuitry enables it to learn, remember, and make functional decisions independent of the cranial brain. The question raised in this presentation is about the form and style of the language of the heart, in what way is this language different from our normal language and thinking as it is developed in the human brain. There are about 2,000 heart transplants made in the USA annually, giving us a stuffiest large number to study what is in the heart and how does the recipient of these transplants experience the new heart. There is evidence that dreams can be transplanted together with the heart from one person to another. The conclusion can be made that the language of the heart is similar than the language of dreams and that dreams can be stored in the heart.

Studying dream language, the following distinction needs to be made. The logic that we miss in the dream work is the syntactical logic of speech - the syntactical logic that is essential for the framing and testing of propositions and reasoning from them. ^[2] Consequently dreams express syntactical logic differently, for example causality is expressed in terms of contiguity, contradictions and conflicts are described by following pictures that are contradictory, as will be exemplified in the presentation.

Another conclusion is made by this author from seeing many patients with Post-traumatic Stress disorder that memories heavily loaded with emotions seem to be located in the heart and not in the brain, therefore they can be transplanted with the heart and are difficult to remove and will disturb the patient for a long time.