“lub dub, lub dub, lub dub”
That’s what I was taught to listen for when I was first shown how to use a stethoscope. This was the natural sound of the heart. It was a beautiful rhythm. I think you can’t help being impressed, or even moved by it. I remember the first time I was taught to use another, similar, but different device – the pinna. A pinna was a plastic cone which you placed on a pregnant mum’s tum to listen to the baby’s heart beat. So fast, but so amazing. Thrilling every time. But it was a kind of private thrill because nobody else could hear it. These days, we use technology to show the beating heart of the baby, or to play the fast lub dubs through speakers so everyone can hear it.
The heart beat is a constant alternation of opposite states – systole, where the heart muscle is contracted and the chambers of the heart are emptied, and asystole, where the muscle rests and the chambers fill with blood. There is a such an amazing truth in that observation.
At the heart of the universe there is creation. There is a story of the universe, from The Big Bang, to the emergence of hydrogen and helium, the cycles of growth, expansion and contraction of the great billions of stars, to the creation of Planet Earth, at first lifeless, then rapidly (in universe timescales!), creating simple, single celled life forms, complex, multicellular ones, plants, creatures of the sea and the land, right up to our continually developing, evolving human race with its most peculiar characteristic of consciousness. This story is the the story of constant becoming. It’s a story of ever increasing amounts of uniqueness. The universe loves diversity. And it loves to make connections.
This is the heart of the universe. Two opposite processes, tightly bound together – diversification and integration.
We need both the diversity generators and the conformity enforcers as Howard Bloom refers to them in The Global Brain.
Can you hear it?
This constant creative heart beat?
Lub dub, lub dub.
Right here inside you, right here and right now, in your unique and singular life, the amazing, constant rhythm of becoming…..
Heroes Not Zombies 
I do love your blog! Have sent your previous post (the Heartmath diagram) on to my daughter in London (I’m in North Carolina, US). She had just told me, in a very long conversation, what a difficult time she is having as a freelance writer/editor in London, and how she wishes she could be in Edinburgh, where the pace is more humane and the people seem kinder. It was good to be able to send her a link to your Heartmath post and give her a bit of Scotland, to boot. Thank you!