Seven Little Known Birds of the Inner Eye by Mulk Raj Anand

Author:Mulk Raj Anand [Anand, Mulk Raj]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781462911455
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

40. Krishna's nervous reactions.

At this stage, when the rhythm bird moves across the elastic terrain of the underworld, the bird of the heart takes over from the rhythm bird, which is still soaring across the human system, evoking complementary responses from all the nerves and blood vessels, and from the eyes, ears, brain and spinal cord.

5: The Bird of the Heart

41. Union of hearts.

THE BIRD of the heart flies off from the core of life, which is the centre of the process of human breath.

Although we are normally not very conscious of the fact that we owe our whole existence to the functioning of the heart, which pumps blood into our system, we cannot take it for granted if we wish to understand the propulsion of the body by the ventricles and the auricles.

From ancient Egypt, in the seminaries around the temples of Heliopolis, Sais and Thebes, have been handed down certain papyri which contain important insights about the functioning of the body.1 In the Edwin Smith Papyrus and Ebers Papyrus, treatises on the functions of the heart point out how the heart speaks in various parts of the body, so that the physician may be able to measure the influence of the heart on those parts of the organism. As both these papyri were compiled during the period of the Old Kingdom, around 2800 B.C., it would seem that the organic connection of the heart and the various parts of the body was considered important very early in human history.

These observations came to be further analysed by several Greek medicine men, by Ptolemy, and by the seminarians of Alexandria.

The poetical metaphors which trace the pain of love to the broken heart of the lover when he is jilted, or in separation from the beloved, wove themselves into literature in all parts of the world. The male and female union is always conceived as a union of hearts, (Fig. 41).

The familiar literary idea of death from a broken heart may have some basis in reality. A research paper by three British physicians, published in the British Medical Journal and reported in the Times of London (March 22, 1969), concludes that grief over bereavement might well account for heart-disease fatalities among widowers. The paper, according to the Times report, was based on a study of nearly 5,000 widowers. It indicated that "one in twenty died within six months of his bereavement and nearly half those deaths were from heart disease." The authors, Drs. C. Murray Parkes, R. Benjamin and R. G. Fitzgerald, noted that psychological factors had long been considered important in coronary disease, and that blood pressure, blood clotting and pulse rate were known to be affected by emotional stress. Thus their statistical findings suggested that grief can kill, and that "a broken heart" is much more than a poetic phrase.

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