Category Archive: The Human Heart

Rudolf Steiner’s Heart-Thinking

The supersensible nature of the heart is the penultimate expression of the human soul and spirit. From ancient teachings to modern research, there is no greater sense organ that exists beyond the human heart. The modern view that the brain is the seat of the mind and consciousness is simply partial truth. Without the heart being in coherence with the brain, the brain is only a mirror of the five senses that is lacking wisdom without the participation of the heart. Brain-bound thinking leads to cold, dead, materialistic shadow-thinking that will not get beyond superficial knowledge.

But heart-thinking, the source of wisdom extracted from experience, is the key to understanding the meaning of life and the reality of life after death.

Eastern Wisdom of the Etheric Heart

The heart can sense the outside world with much more than the five senses provide and can know and understand much than is considered invisible, or beyond the five senses.

The heart can also sense every organ inside the human body and respond to the needs of respiration, circulation, nutrition and all of the bodily systems. The highly developed heart can assume the autonomic aspects of the cardiovascular system and control circulation, respiration and many other aspects of maintaining internal equilibrium.

The pulse of the heart is the voice of the divine, both inside and outside of the human being. Heart perception is far beyond what science understands about this Holy Grail of human consciousness.

The Centrality of the Human Heart

Heart knowledge has evolved over time rather slowly and often has forgotten what the ancients already understood about the function and nature of the human heart. Modern science is only slightly further along in a comprehensive understanding of the cosmic significance of the human heart and its nature as a supersensible organ of perception.

The ancients had the advantage of being clairvoyant and could “see” what was actually happening in the heart. They used archaic images and descriptions of heart functions and pointed at mysteries concerning the ultimate nature of the heart.

They placed the heart above all else in the grand picture of human evolution. Following this path through history is quite instructive and demonstrates that the ancients may have used poetic language to describe the heart, but their insights were just as useful now as they were then.

Dodecahedron Universe

This mystery of the heart is little known and even less understood. Dr. Rudolf Steiner was very keen on this idea and believed that the evolution of the heart was a key factor in the overall development of humanity. The significance of this heart evolution is critical to expand human awareness and consciousness of the inside and outside world of the individual. As humans expand beyond the awareness of the inner world of the human body, a larger, more universal perspective must arise in a new form.

Only when one is able to understand the world through twelve perfectly valid, but different, World Views, is the individual able to become a universal citizen of the cosmos. Broadening and expanding human consciousness to encompass the entire world of the stars that ray in from the twelve cosmic directions opens the heart to the new shape it will become as the heart develops into a greater and greater sense organ of the entire universe.

Great Thoughts About the Heart

In Chapter Four of Douglas Gabriel’s book on the human heart, we examine the thought of great thinkers about the nature of the heart.

According to Rudolf Steiner, it is important that mankind creates a spiritual compensation, a counterweight to the past, when the heart was a God-given, a God-protected organ. Human beings must connect the separated etheric heart to the spiritual world through a transformed thinking and feeling life. In our age they need to find a new Michaelic (Archangel Michael) path on which they search for the truth, then they will find the right way to this cosmically created third etheric heart.

This new spiritual and dynamic path gives man the possibility to structure his etheric heart organ as a sense organ ever more in the greatest possible diversity.

Three Fields of Force

The heart is an amazing organ. As it opens, you will begin to perceive a world that you never knew was around you. Like a person who might be given sight or hearing for the first time and sees and hears things never experienced; those sights and sounds were always there, but the person didn’t have the proper organ of perception.

A Thumb of Fire

This chapter of Douglas Gabriel’s book – The Human Heart is a Supersensible Organ of Perception – you will learn about the amazing fire in the heart that keeps it working – both at the physical level, as well as the spiritual.

Learn how suffering opens the heart to spiritual insight and learn about the “cube” around the heart that the ancients saw as a fiery box that fell from heaven to Earth.

Learn to eat and live optimally by knowing what blood type you are and the best food and exercise for that type.

Chambers of the Heart

Douglas Gabriel has written a book on the heart, entitled The Human Heart is a Supersensible Organ of Perception. In this next section of the book, you will learn about the chambers of the heart and the secrets they hold for your personal ascension.