Yin and Core Intelligence: The Heart of Cognition
"The heart is the smaller cousin of the sun.
It sees and knows everything. …
The door to the mind should only open from the heart."
In the modern period, a major and unfortunate inversion occurred. "The mind" came to take precedence over "the heart." Said differently: abstract, conceptual, linear cognition was prioritized over tangible, qualitative, sensory, and emergent cognition. In the wake of this, and a handful of related shifts and movements, "mind" came to be associated with - and even defined as - abstract conceptual thought, whereas "body" came to be associated with qualitative, sensory thought. It might sound strange to think of things this way; thought belongs to mind, and feeling belongs to body, right?
Nope. Thought and mind belong to body, because the body is the mind. There is not "body" and "mind" as two separate, independent, somehow connected things. Everything in human existence is a cognitive phenomenon. So, it's not body v. mind, physical v. mental. It's a question of what sort of cognition is manifest by any aspect, or multiple aspects, of our systems.
Science has confirmed what Joy Harjo is referencing in the poem excerpt above. What we have come to call "mind" is an emergent function or realm of cognition utterly dependent on the more fundamental realms of cognition manifest in "the body" - i.e., the embodied mind. In short, conceptual mind ("mind," as simplistically referred to by most folk, scientists included) arises from qualitative mind ("body," as is also simplistically conceptualized). In Joy's poem, I take her reference to "the heart" to refer to this understanding of our entire body as a complex organ system of cognition, with "the heart" at the core of this. And it is, quite literally.
The core of human cognition is the core of the human body. This is no coincidence. This is literal metaphor (i.e., "the core of human cognition" is metaphorical, but the physical core of the body quite literally is the physical center of all cognitive function). Our gut, heart, and the fascia surrounding them and the entire body are our primary organs of knowing. The brain and nervous system are not where "knowing happens." The brain and nervous system are primarily concerned with coordinating action, perception, behavior, and communication.
Where and how we really know and think in multidimensional, dynamic, creative, and original form is "the body" - the qualitative mind. This is mediated through a complex system of organs, tissues, and neurophysiological functions that incorporate quite literally everything in the body and center on the physical core of our bodies: the gut, heart, and fascia. The polyvalent axes connecting these organs, tissues, and systems generate the bulk of human cognitive function. It's a rather clunky, convoluted way to say it...but that's why I prefer a poetic description of the same phenomenon.
Sherri Mitchell, Penobscot lawyer, activist, and healer, expands on this idea in her book Sacred Instructions: Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit-Based Change:
Science is beginning to provide evidence that balance between the wisdom of the heart (feminine) and rational thought (masculine) is essential to our overall well-being. We used to believe that all thinking was done in the brain, and that this was the exclusive domain of our intelligence. We now know better. …The heart sends more information to the brain than the brain sends to the heart. The heart informs the brain how to take action that manifests in our physical body, just like the heart-based wisdom of the divine feminine is meant to inform the divine masculine how to act out in the world. This is the balance that we all need.
This balance between "head/brain and heart," "masculine and feminine," "rational thought and wisdom," is just what we seek to restore in yin practice. We live in an excessively yang/masculine-oriented culture. In most cases, the yang/masculine dominates to the extreme in contemporary cultures characterized by high degrees of technological industrialization, consumerism, patriarchy, hierarchical government and legal structures, capitalist commodity economy, and the like. This has infiltrated even the intellectual/cognitive realm of being, reflected in the overemphasis on abstract, conceptual, linear cognition (yang) at the expense of tangible, qualitative, emergent cognition (yin).
None of this is to say that yang/masculine/quantitative cognition is simply "bad." It has its place (I'm using it right now to make the claim that yin/feminine/qualitative is seriously neglected). But like anything, too much of a good thing becomes sour. Too much of literally anything is harmful: oxygen, water, spinach, vitamins, etc.; too much of any of those will, at a minimum, upset your system, and can even make you sick or kill you. The same is true of yang/masculine/conceptual cognition. It's important; we need it. It's like a vital cognitive nutrient. But overdosing on that nutrient is harmful, just like overdosing on any number of vitamins or minerals actually harms the body rather than helping it. Excessive yang/masculine/linear thinking harms our cognitive health, our communicative health, our relational health. There must be a balance, and it is - in a delicious twist of irony - the modern, analytic, linear sciences themselves that have now revealed that yin/feminine/heart/body/qualitative cognition actually constitutes the vast majority of human cognitive function and ability.
Yin practice is an opportunity to reconnect with this neglected majority of our cognitive capacity. It is an inversion of the inversion that wrongly displaced "the heart" in favor of "the mind." These are in no way opposed; "the mind" includes, and is fundamentally dependent on, the heart/core body for its function and connection to reality. When the heart/body is excluded in favor of pure abstraction in the vain and illusory pursuit of an "objective," "neutral" perspective, the connection to the reality ostensibly being described is lost. And when connection to tangible reality is lost, anything goes. The wildest, most irrational, and irresponsible thoughts, values, predictions, and beliefs may arise. Without a tangible tethering to concrete reality, conceptual thought has no checks and balances (except for others thinking in a similar realm of pure abstraction, or dialectics, which then results in the checks and balances being nothing more than whatever's intellectually popular at the time, based on contingent sociocultural trends and preferences), and certainly no wisdom. The contemporary world is full of - nay, it is downright bloated with - conceptual, factual knowledge. But where is the wisdom? This is where we're severely lacking, and yin can help to restore some balance here.