On Attaining Spiritual Sight (Part I)

[Cleric]

So, if I understood correctly, basically this boils down to two positions here: The first approach (Eugene) focuses on experiencing a general, holistic feeling of unity, of "oneness of being". It is an immersion in a felt, flowing state that resembles a dreamlike experience. The second approach (Spiritual Science) focuses on the active, conscious, and gradual development of a clear, detailed, and high-resolution understanding of spiritual reality. It is about recognizing and integrating the details, their connections, their laws, and their development. Correct?

So, my intuition senses the following:
Eugene: "The emphasis is on inner transformation (love, compassion) that arises from a sense of unity"
Cleric: "The emphasis is on the need to see reality as it is, with all its complexities and unpleasant aspects, in order to then actively participate in its further development"

Or, specifically:
Eugene: "Passive "knowledge" or "reading" of the thoughts and feelings of others. An intuitive understanding of the consciousness of others"
Cleric: "Active "co-experiencing" and "co-thinking" of thoughts. A dynamic "co-experience" of the spiritual process in real time"

(Side-note: The term "co-experience" doesn't quite reflect what Cleric means here, and I have difficulty pinning it down. The german word for it does somehow "Mit-Erleben" . Basically "co-experiencing" and "co-thinking", in this context here, means the active, conscious, and simultaneous process of not only recognizing the thought processes of another being as a finished result, but also understanding their development process in real time from the inside out and participating in it)

Correct me if I'm wrong. And I'm aware boiling a complex topic down to what I just did might be, unfullfilling, but it can help sometimes.

We can surely contrast things in this way, but my goal is not really to oppose the viewpoints. As said, both Eugene and I agree that things go hand in hand. Surely, it would also be incorrect to equate SS with the masculine pole (active, harsh, dissecting), while the ‘other’ approach with the feminine pole – love, unity, compassion, etc. (although many people on the forum have tried to cast things in this way – simply because it’s so convenient for the intellect to drop SS in a box and feel justified in not dealing with it because of its inherent one-sidedness). We do not need to go far to see that this balance is at the very foundational principles of Initiation. In How to Know Higher Worlds, we read:

It must be clearly realized that the purpose of this training is to build and not to destroy. The student should therefore bring with him the good will for sincere and devoted work, and not the intention to criticize and destroy. He should be capable of devotion, for he must learn what he does not yet know; he should look reverently on that which discloses itself. Work and devotion, these are the fundamental qualities which must be demanded of the student. Some come to realize that they are making no progress, though in their own opinion they are untiringly active. The reason is that they have not grasped the meaning of work and devotion in the right way. Work done for the sake of success will be the least successful, and learning pursued without devotion will be the least conducive to progress. Only the love of work, and not of success, leads to progress. And if in learning the student seeks straight thinking and sound judgment, he need not stunt his devotion by doubts and suspicions.
…
The higher we climb the ladder of knowledge, the more do we require the faculty of listening with quiet devotion.

I think the translation ‘devotion’ (Andacht) falls a little short of what is implied here. It’s really a religious, prayer-like openness and humility toward the Cosmic Mystery that we yearn for our inner and outer life to be a revelation of.

So if this polar interplay rests within the foundations of Initiatic Science, why do we still see these accusations of one-sidedness, that there’s not enough Oneness, and so on? This is what I tried to hint at in the previous post. To put it simply, it matters a lot where one calibrates the ‘zero’ of the scale. Where’s the ‘zero’? For some, vegetarianism is too extreme (too far on one side of the balance). People like to say, “Everything in moderation!” But then, for some, eating dogs is normal, for others, it is extreme.

Of course, these are trivial examples, but even they show how multilayered everything is. Things get even more tricky when we consider the direction of proper evolutionary development, because this is not something that we see laid down as several doors and pick the one in the middle.

The depth of this meandering development can be seen even on the other thread, where we study some of the lofty human individualities that push humanity’s evolution forward. For example, is learning something about the Saturn, Sun, and Moon stages too extreme? Or is it a ‘neutral’ knowledge and a matter of private concern? On first glance, this seems plausible. These appear to be so far beyond our reach that it seems far better to leave them for the future while we focus on our more immediate soul development tasks. But things are so interrelated that such a seemingly clear linear progression may in fact be misleading. For example, if we sit in Plato’s cave, it might be considered ‘neutral’ knowledge whether there are such things as trees outside or not. This looks pretty straightforward – we should focus on stepping out of the cave. After that, we can investigate more advanced topics like trees. Of course, if we are already venturing outside of the cave and still consider trees to be optional knowledge, we run a real risk of bumping into one.

Now, one may say, “This doesn’t concern me. I’m not experimenting with astral travel, so I’m safe.” However, this is where we touch upon a far deeper misunderstanding of what the spiritual is. Even the layperson of our age ventures beyond the cave when they think about the Big Bang, the formation of the galaxies, star systems, the evolution of life, and so on. This thinking is still experienced entirely as mental glitter in the head region, yet with our soul sphere, we instinctively stretch in all directions. There could be exceptions, of course. For example, today, one can be a commercially successful astrologer while living entirely in the mental images of charts, symbols, degrees, oppositions, and so on. One may not even know that these symbols correspond to the starry heavens. But outside such extreme abstractness, when we study these things with living interest (even if only in a physical sense), with our soul body we indeed reach out beyond our cave – the physical organism.

So, whether we know it or not, even the average person with popular scientific interests already ventures outside the cave. This is part of the reason why the truths of Initiatic Science had to be brought to the open. Modern man grows with his intellectual tentacles into the wider world but without the proper inner stance, this results in a wall of mental imagery, which is swiftly utilized by the adversarial forces. For them, these images are like rich material through which they can inspire storyboards that build up our illusory pictures of reality.

When we see things in this way, we can realize that things like the Saturn, Sun, Moon, stages are not simply exotic facts for those who are eager to rush forward in evolution. Today, even people with popular scientific understandings are aware of the currently accepted picture. After the Big Bang, it is said, there have been several generations of star systems. After the initial Cosmic plasma cooled down sufficiently, only the lightest hydrogen atoms formed. These gravitationally condensed into the first stars, which fused helium. Second-generation stars could also fuse helium into still heavier elements, and so on, gradually building up the Mendeleev table. This is common knowledge. In a certain way, the Saturn, Sun, Moon, stages paint a picture that has certain parallels with the physical one. It is not serious today to complain that spiritual science is difficult to understand. If we can understand the physical theory of the generations of matter and its gradual complexification, then we are totally capable of understanding also the spiritual picture. In fact, this picture comes precisely to open our eyes to the regions beyond our cave, which we are instinctively probing.

If we understand that, we should really shudder – what we thought was ‘neutral’ or quite optional knowledge, turns out to concern trees that we are already bumping into.

[Federica]

Thanks for indicating this book, Ashvin! In fact I am interested in heart disease.
Was it a simple suggestion or did you read the book?

I am reading it right now, actually As is often the case, I switch back and forth between various books in a semi-random (or I'd like to imagine, inspired) fashion.

It's a fantastic book! The research surrounding the cardiovascular system is truly mind-blowing and it's amazing that so few people, including heart surgeons, know about it or choose to acknowledge it. My father actually had a heart operation (stent) recently, and I wish he had been able to review the research in this book first. Not that it would have necessarily changed his mind or revealed it as unnecessary, but it's always best to go into such procedures with eyes wide open.

It also delves into the spiritual implications of the latest cardiovascular knowledge, although I haven't gotten much into that portion yet. The portion discussing Frank Chester's 'chestahedron' as a way of modeling the heart is quite interesting. It sheds light on the heart's function of forming vortices that bring the water-blood into its fourth phase of 'structured water'. Here is a quote and relevant video:

Excellent, Ashvin, thank you, also for the additional links! I have ordered it and look forward to reading it, hopefully connecting it with what I am gathering through Steiner and Klocek. I also have a parent affected. It's been a strange experience to hear a cardiologist telling with great assurance that such and such would support the "pump function" of the heart. Great will be the day when such mechanistic fantasies will begin to feel puerile and delirious to normal human discernment and sensing.

I guess the reading will be valuable for your father even post-operation. I recall Steiner saying that, especially for the most spiritual organs, their function remains somewhat independent of operations, that is the level of consciousness and/or appropriate therapy brought to the organism affects the image of the organ first and foremost, and that's what counts the most for healing.

[Federica]

Yes, clarifying the terms first here would be really useful to follow along the conversation or at least to syntactically differentiate them (like using another word for it). Otherwise, we'll just run in circles here. If possible, we could maybe even make some kind of a highlighting PHP script or plugin for phpBB, such that commonly used terms can be hovered over with the mouse and then display a small box, giving an explanation or cross-referencing other topics. That would be insanely useful to navigate the forum, to be fair.

So, if I understood correctly, for Heidegger, “Being” is not a substance, a state, or a place. It is the intangible enabling factor, the event that makes it possible for us to encounter things (beings) in the first place. The closest analogy (I can think of right now) a language could get to that in a phenomenological way (leaving aside any spiritual practices) is a "verb" in contrast to substantives which would be more closer to "beings". Correct?

(Anyway, in my mother tongue (German) we actually do differentiate the word more clearly. "beings" ("Seiendes") and Being ("Sein"). Maybe that's why I don't seem to have much difficulty understanding it. Or I misunderstood it)

Hi Kaje,

Reading a passage from Steiner today (the quote below), I've been reminded of these thoughts of yours about definitions and I would like to make a point about the momentarily practical, but fundamentally illusory value of definitions in esoteric understanding. I guess (I would be interested in your take on that) this point is not only an Anthroposophical thing, but equally applicable to Bardon's approach, in a crucial way.

The idea is that the establishment and application of definitions only provides an illusion of progress and clarity. It is a statically conceptual clarity, that rivets the superior, inherently mobile nature of spiritual activity (supersensible reality) onto its constrained, sequential-associative operative mode, typical of its sense-bound function. In this way, definitions impede fluidification of spiritual activity (thinking), and the consequent unleashing of higher faculties. In other words, one must dare to sacrifice the perceived certainty of definitions, to venture into the unchartered territory of forms in movement, whose dynamics transcend all definition-based constraints. When we try to pin down those ideal, moving forms in definitions, we are left with neither the living form nor its dynamics, but only with the form-corpse: the sensory form (or sensory-like form) which is indeed definable, when taken in isolation, for limited purposes. Even mathematical forms, when pinned down in definitions, are of that same sensory-like, corpse-like nature: useful for specific earthly purposes in a contextual way, but insufficient to approach the supersensible. At the same time, we accept - for lack of better contextual tools - the use of our linguistic expressions - idioms, mathematical language, PHP scripts, or any other coding systems - not as building blocks of definitional aggregates, but as proxies that can be shaped and aggregated more freely and creatively, in order to convey, or render, the literally undefinable supersensible dynamics.

Another way to say the same is: we still use the human languages at our disposal - aware of their imperfection and inherent inadequacy to render the supersensible - as a composable collection of emitters of diverse qualities of influence, whose handcrafted combinations may affect our consciousness (as if coloring it, as if shaping it, as if dissolving it, as if burning it, as if energizing it, etcetera). By effecting these influences, we intend to evoke and mobilize concepts so that their compound image may induce other minds, at the receiver's end of the communication, to become fittingly active towards the experience of the ideas in question.

Yet another way to say it is: when addressing supersensible realities, we have to use our human languages with artistic intent, not with definitional intent.

Well, if you had heard my discussions more often, you would have noticed that I never give definitions; indeed, that I even strongly oppose definitions in Anthroposophy. Since I have to speak popularly, I sometimes have to present things conceptually. And although I know quite well that definitions can be of some help for knowledge that is more scientific or historical in today's sense, and although I am therefore aware of the limited right of definitions, I nevertheless recall how, within Greek philosophy, it was said that one should define a human being. The definition given was that a human being is a living being with two legs and no feathers. And the next day, someone brought a plucked rooster and said it was a human being. You see, one very often strays that far from immediate perception, even with useful definitions. One simply has to delve into things.

This is precisely a peculiarity of intellectualistic knowledge, and it is also often what has led to the judgment that seeks to see the boundaries between belief and knowledge in such a sharp way. One must delve into the subtleties here. You see, even in our simplest sciences there are definitions that actually have no justification at all. Open any physics book. You will find a definition there: What is impermeability? Impermeability is the property of bodies that in the place where one body is, another cannot simultaneously exist. – That is a definition of impermeability. In the entire scope of knowledge and cognition, however, it cannot be defined in this way at all; rather, this [definition of] impermeability is actually merely a disguised postulate. In reality, one should say: A body is called impermeable if it is such that in the place where it is, another cannot simultaneously exist. – This is, in fact, merely an instruction for defining a body, for postulating its peculiarity; and only under the influence of the materialistic way of thinking are postulates given disguised as definitions.

GA 343 - Lecture of September 28, 1921

[Federica]

Thanks for indicating this book, Ashvin! In fact I am interested in heart disease.
Was it a simple suggestion or did you read the book?

I am reading it right now, actually As is often the case, I switch back and forth between various books in a semi-random (or I'd like to imagine, inspired) fashion.

It's a fantastic book! The research surrounding the cardiovascular system is truly mind-blowing and it's amazing that so few people, including heart surgeons, know about it or choose to acknowledge it. My father actually had a heart operation (stent) recently, and I wish he had been able to review the research in this book first. Not that it would have necessarily changed his mind or revealed it as unnecessary, but it's always best to go into such procedures with eyes wide open.

It also delves into the spiritual implications of the latest cardiovascular knowledge, although I haven't gotten much into that portion yet. The portion discussing Frank Chester's 'chestahedron' as a way of modeling the heart is quite interesting. It sheds light on the heart's function of forming vortices that bring the water-blood into its fourth phase of 'structured water'. Here is a quote and relevant video:

I've begun reading the book and watched the YT. I have a doubt on Cowan’s first line of reasoning in the video (Ch. 2 in the book), namely, that the heart cannot be a pump from a purely conventional scientific viewpoint. Later, he tackles the questions of what moves the blood and what the heart does. I am letting these aside here, to focus on Cowan’s point that anatomy and physics, by themselves, (commonly intended) are sufficient to show that the heart cannot do it. Has anyone looked into this? That would be great, if basic Newton laws, power, pressure, viscosity of the blood, how the network of blood vessels is structured, etc., could by themselves explain the error in the pump-conception!

But is this really the case? Cowen presents a few seemingly intuitive reasoning but these are also quite vague. He speaks of "studies" but in the book they are not referenced. What he references has to do with the further questions, mainly the phases of water. So, are Cowen lines of reasoning reasonable? These are the moments when I regret my lack of scientific education! Is it not the case that a pump, in a closed circuit, pumps on one side and exerts suction on the other, for example? (which could explain why the blue blood comes back into the heart at a higher speed that the blood speed at the periphery).

To be clear (I don't think it's necessary to say that, but who knows...) I am not questioning that the heart is not a pump. I just would like to fully understand whether or not the pump-conception is blatantly flawed, even from a merely natural scientific perspective.

[AshvinP]

Is it not the case that a pump, in a closed circuit, pumps on one side and exerts suction on the other, for example? (which could explain why the blue blood comes back into the heart at a higher speed that the blood speed at the periphery).

I can't shed much technical details on these questions, either, and mostly I had to proceed with loose intuition of the dynamics Cowan has presented in the book. I found this passage from Ch. 4 to present helpful images in that respect, which do suggest some kind of suction (or negative pressure) action at work.

***

When Rudolf Steiner was pressed to suggest a more appropriate mechanical image for the heart than a pump, Steiner replied that the closest “machine” to the heart is a hydraulic ram. A hydraulic ram is a device that is primarily placed in flowing water; it holds the water in a holding tank behind its gating mechanism. When the pressure and volume build up on the incoming side of the gate, a vacuum, or negative pressure, is created on the far side of the gate. At a certain pressure differential across the gate, the gate will open, and the fluid can be propelled up the hill.

Something similar happens in the heart. The venous blood flows into the right atrium, the pressure in the right atrium builds up, then the gate (the tricuspid valve) opens, and the blood enters the right ventricle. But this isn’t all that happens. As the chestahedron model shows, fluid arriving into the right ventricle converts into a vortex before emerging out of the next gate (the pulmonary valve). This is the crucial point. There are two processes happening simultaneously. The first is the increase in momentum due to the hydraulic ram/gating mechanism described above. But along with the increase in momentum, the form of the blood changes from a laminar flow to a vortex. Furthermore, the activity of the right side of the heart converts the vertically oriented laminar flow of the venous blood to a vortex, a horizontal flow, as the blood goes from the right ventricle to the horizontally positioned lungs.

The blood then travels through the lungs, again moving into the capillaries as a result of water’s—or, in this case, blood’s—fourth phase tendency to flow within hydrophilic tubes. I have never heard any other remotely possible explanations of how or why blood can move through the high-resistance environment of the lung capillaries. Remember that you have highly viscous blood with blood cells suspended in plasma and whose diameter is almost as large as the capillaries moving effortlessly through an extensive network of lung capillaries. Attributing this to the low pump pressure of the right ventricle would be like taking a mile-long hose, putting water and beads inside the hose where the beads are about the same size as the internal dimensions of the hose, giving a little push, and expecting the water and beads to travel a half mile—and then return the half mile back to the pump.

After the blood flows into the capillaries, it then continues its now horizontal flow back to the left atrium of the heart, which serves as a temporary holding area to store the energy of the flowing blood behind the mitral valve. The pressure builds up in the left atrium, the gate opens, and the blood flows into the left ventricle. Then—think now of the spinning chestahedron in water—the left ventricle converts this laminar flow into a vertically oriented vortex. This vortex flow, combined with the pressure buildup, opens the aortic valve, and the blood is released through the arteries to the rest of the body.

Further evidence that the best model for the heart is a hydraulic ram and not a pump is the behavior of the aortic arch during contraction, known as systole. If the heart were a pump, you would expect that as the heart pumps blood through the aortic arch, the flexible arch would straighten with each forceful push. On the contrary, however, during this contraction, the aortic arch bends inward, forming a more acute angle. This can be seen on a routine angiogram.

Imagine putting a flexible garden hose on your outside spigot. Attach the hose to the spigot and shape the hose into an arch soon after it emerges from the spigot. Then quickly turn the spigot on to full flow, causing a forceful stream of water to emerge. What would you expect the flexible arch of the hose to do? The arch would straighten under the increased force, but this is the opposite of what happens in our aortic arch. Each time we expect the force to increase in systole, the arch bends in. This bending in during systole can only be explained by a negative pressure, and this negative pressure is akin to the suction created by a hydraulic ram. In other words, this anomalous behavior of the aortic arch demonstrates that rather than pushing blood under force, the heart is creating negative pressure, or suction. The action of the heart on the blood is not one of creating force, but instead of using suction to increase the momentum of the blood.

So what is the function of the heart, if not a pump? The function of the heart is to create vortices.

[Kaje977]

Hi Kaje,

[...]

I never talked about definitions though. Aside from that though, I agree with what you said.

My point was that cross-referencing other topics (that were hopefully created with artistic intent) might be helpful, which provide the eventual missing context and helps more with not talking past eachother as evidently happened multiple times, unfortunately. Hence, why a phpBB script of some sort would be useful for solving that. (Basically, a script that's triggered whenever a common term used and then auto-links to all relevant topics on this forum)

[Stranger]

When Rudolf Steiner was pressed to suggest a more appropriate mechanical image for the heart than a pump, Steiner replied that the closest “machine” to the heart is a hydraulic ram. A hydraulic ram is a device that is primarily placed in flowing water; it holds the water in a holding tank behind its gating mechanism. When the pressure and volume build up on the incoming side of the gate, a vacuum, or negative pressure, is created on the far side of the gate. At a certain pressure differential across the gate, the gate will open, and the fluid can be propelled up the hill.

Something similar happens in the heart. The venous blood flows into the right atrium, the pressure in the right atrium builds up, then the gate (the tricuspid valve) opens, and the blood enters the right ventricle. But this isn’t all that happens. As the chestahedron model shows, fluid arriving into the right ventricle converts into a vortex before emerging out of the next gate (the pulmonary valve). This is the crucial point. There are two processes happening simultaneously. The first is the increase in momentum due to the hydraulic ram/gating mechanism described above. But along with the increase in momentum, the form of the blood changes from a laminar flow to a vortex. Furthermore, the activity of the right side of the heart converts the vertically oriented laminar flow of the venous blood to a vortex, a horizontal flow, as the blood goes from the right ventricle to the horizontally positioned lungs.

The blood then travels through the lungs, again moving into the capillaries as a result of water’s—or, in this case, blood’s—fourth phase tendency to flow within hydrophilic tubes. I have never heard any other remotely possible explanations of how or why blood can move through the high-resistance environment of the lung capillaries. Remember that you have highly viscous blood with blood cells suspended in plasma and whose diameter is almost as large as the capillaries moving effortlessly through an extensive network of lung capillaries. Attributing this to the low pump pressure of the right ventricle would be like taking a mile-long hose, putting water and beads inside the hose where the beads are about the same size as the internal dimensions of the hose, giving a little push, and expecting the water and beads to travel a half mile—and then return the half mile back to the pump.

After the blood flows into the capillaries, it then continues its now horizontal flow back to the left atrium of the heart, which serves as a temporary holding area to store the energy of the flowing blood behind the mitral valve. The pressure builds up in the left atrium, the gate opens, and the blood flows into the left ventricle. Then—think now of the spinning chestahedron in water—the left ventricle converts this laminar flow into a vertically oriented vortex. This vortex flow, combined with the pressure buildup, opens the aortic valve, and the blood is released through the arteries to the rest of the body.

Further evidence that the best model for the heart is a hydraulic ram and not a pump is the behavior of the aortic arch during contraction, known as systole. If the heart were a pump, you would expect that as the heart pumps blood through the aortic arch, the flexible arch would straighten with each forceful push. On the contrary, however, during this contraction, the aortic arch bends inward, forming a more acute angle. This can be seen on a routine angiogram.

Imagine putting a flexible garden hose on your outside spigot. Attach the hose to the spigot and shape the hose into an arch soon after it emerges from the spigot. Then quickly turn the spigot on to full flow, causing a forceful stream of water to emerge. What would you expect the flexible arch of the hose to do? The arch would straighten under the increased force, but this is the opposite of what happens in our aortic arch. Each time we expect the force to increase in systole, the arch bends in. This bending in during systole can only be explained by a negative pressure, and this negative pressure is akin to the suction created by a hydraulic ram. In other words, this anomalous behavior of the aortic arch demonstrates that rather than pushing blood under force, the heart is creating negative pressure, or suction. The action of the heart on the blood is not one of creating force, but instead of using suction to increase the momentum of the blood.

So what is the function of the heart, if not a pump? The function of the heart is to create vortices.

Dr. Thomas Cowan is referencing a phenomenon he interprets in a way that challenges the conventional "heart as a pump" view. Let's look at what is actually known from cardiovascular physiology and imaging:

1. What happens during systole

During left ventricular systole, the heart contracts and ejects blood into the aorta.

The aortic root and arch are elastic structures designed to stretch outward to accommodate the stroke volume (this is part of the Windkessel effect).

High-speed cineangiography, MRI, and ultrasound show that the aortic arch expands radially and displaces slightly with each pulse.

The expansion is outward, not inward — the aortic wall moves away from the lumen as it stores elastic energy.

2. Why there may be confusion

The aorta is not a rigid tube; it is tethered to surrounding tissue (ligaments, spine, heart, lungs). As the heart moves during systole, the geometry of the arch can change slightly.

On angiograms, projection effects can make the arch appear to “bend inward” in 2D, but in 3D it is usually an outward expansion.

In fact, advanced imaging (cine-MRI, 4D flow MRI) consistently shows that aortic strain = expansion in diameter and sometimes elongation, not inward collapse.

3. Supporting evidence

A 2008 study using MRI (“Regional aortic distensibility: evaluation with ECG-gated MRI” – Radiology, 2008) showed that the ascending aorta and arch expand with each systolic pulse.

Ultrasound measurements of carotid and proximal aortic compliance confirm that vessels expand outward under systolic pressure.

If the arch bent inward, it would indicate a paradoxical collapse — this only happens in rare pathological conditions like aortic dissection, intramural hematoma, or external compression, not in normal physiology.

Answer:
No, in normal physiology the aortic arch does not bend inward during systole. Instead, it expands outward (radially) and can shift slightly due to tethering and heart motion. What Dr. Cowan describes may be a misinterpretation of 2D angiographic images, not an accurate representation of aortic biomechanics.

[Stranger]

The claim that “the heart is not a pump” has been circulating in alternative medicine circles, but modern physiology, imaging, and clinical practice give us many strong lines of evidence that the heart is indeed a pressure-generating pump (though not a simple mechanical piston). Let’s break it down:

1. Direct Pressure Measurements

Catheterization studies (since the 1940s) show that when the left ventricle contracts, the intraventricular pressure rises sharply, generating a peak of ~120 mmHg in a healthy adult.

This pressure is higher than atrial and venous pressure, and the gradient drives blood through the aortic valve into the systemic circulation.

If the heart did not actively generate pressure, these pressure gradients could not exist — blood cannot move uphill (from low venous pressure to high arterial pressure) without a pump.

2. Aortic Flow and the Windkessel Effect

The aorta expands during systole and recoils during diastole, helping smooth blood flow.

This “elastic reservoir” effect depends entirely on the initial pulse pressure from the heart. Without the pump, the Windkessel cannot be charged.

4D flow MRI and Doppler ultrasound show the systolic acceleration of blood in the aorta matches the ventricular contraction waveform.

3. Clinical Evidence from Cardiac Arrest

In ventricular fibrillation or asystole (when the heart stops pumping), systemic circulation immediately ceases.

Within seconds, blood pressure drops to zero, consciousness is lost, and organs fail.

If circulation were self-propelling or driven solely by vessel elasticity, blood flow would not collapse instantly when the pump stops.

4. Artificial Heart and Bypass Machines

Mechanical pumps (ventricular assist devices, ECMO, cardiopulmonary bypass) can fully sustain circulation in the absence of natural heart function.

Conversely, if the heart is surgically stopped and not replaced by a pump, life cannot continue — this is the clearest experimental refutation of the "heart is not a pump" theory.

5. Hemodynamics in Congestive Heart Failure

In heart failure, when the heart’s pumping capacity is reduced, we directly observe:

Reduced cardiac output

Elevated venous pressure and pulmonary congestion

Systemic hypoperfusion (fatigue, organ dysfunction)

These changes are exactly what you’d predict if the heart is a failing pump — and are reversed (partially) by therapies that improve contractility or mechanical pumping support.

6. Comparative Physiology

Invertebrates and vertebrates with open or closed circulatory systems have hearts (or contractile vessels) that actively generate flow.

For example, insects with open circulation still have a dorsal heart that pumps hemolymph forward.

Evolution consistently selects a pumping organ because passive flow cannot sustain complex multicellular organisms.

7. Imaging and Visualization

Echocardiography, MRI, and angiography show blood acceleration during ventricular systole.

Doppler ultrasound demonstrates pulsatile forward flow synchronized with heartbeats.

The waveform disappears immediately if the heart stops, proving the heart drives the circulation.

Conclusion

The heart is not a simple piston pump — it’s a muscular, pressure-generating organ whose function is modified by vessel elasticity (Windkessel), venous return, and microcirculatory dynamics. But the overwhelming evidence from physiology, pathology, clinical medicine, and bioengineering refutes the idea that the heart is not a pump.

[AshvinP]

The claim that “the heart is not a pump” has been circulating in alternative medicine circles, but modern physiology, imaging, and clinical practice give us many strong lines of evidence that the heart is indeed a pressure-generating pump (though not a simple mechanical piston). Let’s break it down:

1. Direct Pressure Measurements

Catheterization studies (since the 1940s) show that when the left ventricle contracts, the intraventricular pressure rises sharply, generating a peak of ~120 mmHg in a healthy adult.

This pressure is higher than atrial and venous pressure, and the gradient drives blood through the aortic valve into the systemic circulation.

If the heart did not actively generate pressure, these pressure gradients could not exist — blood cannot move uphill (from low venous pressure to high arterial pressure) without a pump.

2. Aortic Flow and the Windkessel Effect

The aorta expands during systole and recoils during diastole, helping smooth blood flow.

This “elastic reservoir” effect depends entirely on the initial pulse pressure from the heart. Without the pump, the Windkessel cannot be charged.

4D flow MRI and Doppler ultrasound show the systolic acceleration of blood in the aorta matches the ventricular contraction waveform.

3. Clinical Evidence from Cardiac Arrest

In ventricular fibrillation or asystole (when the heart stops pumping), systemic circulation immediately ceases.

Within seconds, blood pressure drops to zero, consciousness is lost, and organs fail.

If circulation were self-propelling or driven solely by vessel elasticity, blood flow would not collapse instantly when the pump stops.

4. Artificial Heart and Bypass Machines

Mechanical pumps (ventricular assist devices, ECMO, cardiopulmonary bypass) can fully sustain circulation in the absence of natural heart function.

Conversely, if the heart is surgically stopped and not replaced by a pump, life cannot continue — this is the clearest experimental refutation of the "heart is not a pump" theory.

5. Hemodynamics in Congestive Heart Failure

In heart failure, when the heart’s pumping capacity is reduced, we directly observe:

Reduced cardiac output

Elevated venous pressure and pulmonary congestion

Systemic hypoperfusion (fatigue, organ dysfunction)

These changes are exactly what you’d predict if the heart is a failing pump — and are reversed (partially) by therapies that improve contractility or mechanical pumping support.

6. Comparative Physiology

Invertebrates and vertebrates with open or closed circulatory systems have hearts (or contractile vessels) that actively generate flow.

For example, insects with open circulation still have a dorsal heart that pumps hemolymph forward.

Evolution consistently selects a pumping organ because passive flow cannot sustain complex multicellular organisms.

7. Imaging and Visualization

Echocardiography, MRI, and angiography show blood acceleration during ventricular systole.

Doppler ultrasound demonstrates pulsatile forward flow synchronized with heartbeats.

The waveform disappears immediately if the heart stops, proving the heart drives the circulation.

Conclusion

The heart is not a simple piston pump — it’s a muscular, pressure-generating organ whose function is modified by vessel elasticity (Windkessel), venous return, and microcirculatory dynamics. But the overwhelming evidence from physiology, pathology, clinical medicine, and bioengineering refutes the idea that the heart is not a pump.

Thanks for sharing, Eugene. This is an excellent example of how we, as humanity, desperately need to start to thinking carefully if we want to avoid further collapse into crass materialism. Especially if/as we become more and more reliant on algorithms to feed us facts and conclusions from those facts. Once we get the former, we should be able to sift through them and understand their implications and what sort of phenomenal relations they can be consistent with. Once we start asking the algorithm to do that inner cognitive work for us, feeding us conclusions, we will surely end up going astray and remain stuck in a dying materialistic paradigm.

I will need to return to this later to elaborate more. There is a ton of question begging going on in the algorithm's conclusions.

[AshvinP]

Thanks for sharing, Eugene. This is an excellent example of how we, as humanity, desperately need to start to thinking carefully if we want to avoid further collapse into crass materialism. Especially if/as we become more and more reliant on algorithms to feed us facts and conclusions from those facts. Once we get the former, we should be able to sift through them and understand their implications and what sort of phenomenal relations they can be consistent with. Once we start asking the algorithm to do that inner cognitive work for us, feeding us conclusions, we will surely end up going astray and remain stuck in a dying materialistic paradigm.

I will need to return to this later to elaborate more. There is a ton of question begging going on in the algorithm's conclusions.

So I think we should make clear that no one is disputing that the cardiovascular system and heart, as an integral component of that system, have mechanical aspects in their functioning. They are, after all, comprised of physical sense-perceptible structures. That is why even Steiner uses the image of a mechanical device, a hydraulic ram, to help orient our understanding of the physical heart's function. The question is whether such mechanical understanding exhaustively illuminates the cardiovascular system and its functioning, its deviations from harmonious rhyrhms, and so forth. Standard secular science say yes, and if anything, we just need to fill in some minor details about the mechanical functioning. That is exemplified in GPT's output above, which of course mimics the standard intellectual-reductive approach.

Spiritual science, on the other hand, says we can never hope to attain a deeper practical understanding if we reduce the living and holistic system to such mechanical aspects that we have isolated in our thinking. As we have spoken many times before, the heart as a pump, a hydraulic ram, or anything similar is only useful for deeper understanding if we don't use such images literally-reductively, but metaphorically, as pointers to limited aspects of the holistic system's functioning under various conditions. They can help us anchor our intuition of the complex lawfulness involved in biological phenomena. These phenomenoligical principles are quite simple, and most people here (including Eugene) would not hesitate to acknowledge them in the cognitive-supersensible domain, but as soon we begin applying them to natural-biological systems, they are discarded and people default to the reductive mentality.

It is exactly what Cleric noted above about how we project our experience of being 'things' onto the wider World flow. When we reduce the system to a thing-like organ which mechanically pumps blood around the body, the flow and movement becomes only a secondary consideration, just like our verbal tokens feel primary and the living flow of intuitive activity from which those tokens condense is left in the blind spot. The fact that this continual flow stands in a deeper scale relation to the thing-like organs gets obscured, and thus the interrelations between the cardiovascular system and other organic and psychic systems also is minimized in the study of pathological conditions. We simply need to learn to think more carefully and completely about these things, fitting the physical facts discovered into an ever-wider harmony, also informed by expanding knowledge of the depth axis.

More generally, spiritual science will inevitably seem fantastical if its descriptions are imagined to be functioning at the same reductive level as standard materialistic thinking, using images as literal mechanisms to exhaustively explain how thing-like objects function and interact with each other.