Supersensible Organ of Perception

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.

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.