From The Words of Jesus by Phyllis Tickle,...

From The Words of Jesus by Phyllis Tickle, Jossey-Bass Publishers, 2008, page 35-38.

Christian Scripture, like the Scripture of Judaism out of which it comes, consistently refers to the "human heart" as a place of knowing and dwelling. Implicit in thosse teachings is the idea that brain and heart both are organs of perceiving and being, yet they remain patently distinct from one another.

...The notion that the self can receive consciousness from anything other than the brain is as fey as it is untenable. Or it is unless there is indeed a consciousness that is more than mind and in whose image we ourselves are constructed.

Being forced to acknowledge in a a working, practical way, that somewhere in me there is a second site or organ or means of knowing that led to my realizing that which it knows and reports is the traffic going in and out of it. Now I realize, of course, that one has only to listen in order to perceive this principle as central to Jesus' teaching. See Luke 6:45; Matthew 5:8; Luke 8:10; and Matthew 13:15.

The heart, it would seem, has its own consciousness and knowledge and ways that can be experienced just as the brain's consciousness and knowledge and ways are experienced.

Accepting, even cautiously, the possibility of a receptive and cognitively functional heart probably raises a myriad of questions. Only one of them seems accessible here. Accepting the heart as a way of knowing requires a reexamination of what sacred writ is.