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.

The voice I heard was not the usual voice of conscience that speaks when we need to determine right from wrong or other such situations. It was not the voice of any spiritual being that I had encountered up to that time. It was a real voice outside of myself that produced clearly audible words. It was a man’s voice that was filled with authority and love. I felt the voice was helping me, even though his command didn’t seem reasonable. I had never heard a “discarnate” voice before and it took me by surprise, but yet it was not scary or frightening in any way.