On Attaining Spiritual Sight (Part I)

[Federica]

I have to say, I am unconvinced. Having in mind Steiners words, I can’t get onboard that, speaking of the heart not being a pump, he was referring to an unfolding spiritualization of man that would hopefully make his statements true in the decades to come, and that he overestimated that unfolding. At so many other occasions he’s crystal clear about the imminent, even catastrophic risks of mechanization of humanity. At other occasions, he speaks explicitly of organ transformation in the future. Why in this case would he have decided to speak strongly and repetitively about something he considered a work in progress under threat of mechanization? How he speaks is also relevant. He calls the pump theory “grotesque”, referring very decidedly to the heart movements as being an effect, not a cause, of the blood flow. Therefore my perception is that one cannot run with the hares and hunt with the hounds in this matter. Either one holds the conviction that the heart is primarily a pump and concludes that Steiner made a blunt mistake (not an overestimation), or Steiner is right, and the heart can’t be properly described by materialistic science, not even in its physical form. Because how he speaks makes it clear that he is talking about his present time. I would add, Steiner definitely thought that some organs are more spiritual than others, and these are the ones that materialism struggles the most explaining, like the spleen for instance, and the heart. In these organs, the function is more detached from the form than in other organs. By contrast, the eye for example, is almost a machine in and of itself. It’s almost like engulfed by the outer environment and much more under the purview of the laws of physics.

About your point on cardiopulmonary resuscitation (which I know well by having taken multiple trainings to it) I propose that the explanation could be as follows - as a thought experiment, not as a firm conviction. So this is a situation of respiratory arrest and cardiac arrest (or soon-to-be cardiac arrest). It’s clear that, as you say, it doesn’t make much sense that chest compressions somehow trick the blood into moving itself. But it seems to me, this is not sufficient to conclude that pumping is demonstrated. It could also be that, by compressing the chest, heart contractions and expansions are induced from without, and the dispatching heart activity (lawful opening and closing of valves) can be maintained. In other words, thanks to the CPR assistance, the failing heart doesn’t completely capture and block the blood flow, standing in the way of the circulatory paths. The valves are ‘squeezed open and closed’ and the flow can continue through. So, it seems possible to me that CPR works and Steiner is right at the same time. Then CPR would work by maintaining the damming function (I feel that retaining/ organizing/ dispatching, like at a crossroads, is a better image than damming - Stau in German) rather than by maintaining pumping.

Is all this plausible?

PS: Steiner at the beginning of the XXth already saw in cellular life a fully Ahrimanic force.

The way I presently see it is that troubles come mainly from trying to divide things into such a binary way (maybe I sound like ML here). So it is either that the heart is a pump, and nothing else contributes to the blood flow, or the blood flow runs on its own, and the heart is only a sense/damming organ. The second binary pole is difficult to reconcile with something like this:



Notice that they do not even use blood in these experiments. They use a completely inorganic clear fluid (Krebs–Henseleit solution) with a salt profile similar to that of blood. Go explain to these guys that their fluid will keep moving even if they bypass the heart and simply short-circuit the pipes.

As I tried to convey in the previous post, the main point is that from a perspective that includes the full spectrum of reality, everything should be grasped as a living interplay. Yet, in the process of the rigidifying of the physical world, more and more compromises must have been made. I don't see anything problematic in the fact that the holistic (etheric precursor) circulatory system rigidified in such a way that one organ could act as the main contributor to the flow. The key is simply to think of the whole system as something indeed whole. As many things, it has polarized into more active and more passive poles, and we only assume the proper evolutionary stance when we strive to find this holistic spiritual precursor.

Cleric, I do not get how this video brings value to the conversation. How to compare what a dead heart is induced to do in such experiments with a living heart, beating in the chest of a living human being, with their own warm blood flowing through? What they are doing is not a demonstration of what a living heart and a living blood do or don't do. I am struggling to recognize you in the post you have just written. I have well understood how you presently see things. You have pointed to the importance of seeing things holistically, and that (simplified) the etheric circulation is an active whole, not that one part of it causes the movement of other. And in your view, what Steiner meant by his contention is grounded in this balanced etheric understanding, so that he was wrong only in timing (simplified) since mechanization has worked harder than he anticipated. From there, you point at the heart in physical space and say: the physical heart does pump blood as a primary function (among other things it does) and Steiner simply underestimated things, counting on a slightly more spiritual turn in the evolution than what actually happened. As a side note, I also thought it was surprising that a mere century of human evolution may have made such a significant difference in human physiology. In any case my two points remain hanging, both:

1. If the heart does pump (among other things it does), I think it's untenable to say that Steiner simply underestimated things, because he strongly stated that the physical blood causes the movement of the physical heart. And that the physical heart does not cause the movement of the blood. This is basically the opposite of the holistic view you have conveyed. So it's not that I reject or didn't pay attention to your holistic view. It's that Steiner's purposes on the question are so strong and so recurrent that one has to conclude he made a blunder (from your perspective).

2. You have used the CPR example as a logical corroboration that the heart pumps. I have said how I doubt it is logical.


And now you share this video, as if to suggest that organs inside and outside the body are the same, and that all living organs are equally described by laws of physics? As you know, I personally don't have the capacity to inquire about these things supersensibly by myself. But I do feel that, if Steiner really made a blunder on the heart, it would not be like a minor mistake, like when he was wrong on future trends in world population or something. This is at the core of his entire conception of the human physical sheath as a microcosm of the universe. What he meant is that the I moves the physical blood.

But even beyond what Steiner thought - and ultimately this is more important - do you think it is possible that a living organ, holistically intended, in a living human being, can operate in ways that may escape the explanatory intents of current science? Do you think it is possible that the physical blood is moved by forces that physics today cannot entirely account for? That we leave aside the CPR or Steiner’s mistake is not important, these are secondary points in a sense, but please at least tell us if you think the above is possible. You seem to intend that it is possible, when you say "The same can be said also for the aliased physical subset of inner space, but in a way, the activity is constrained in such a way that it appears too predictable, and we call it laws of nature". But that's vague - in my understanding, of course. You seem to mean “yes, but no”. Yes, the blood is active, but actually it isn't. And you seem to imply that the laws of physics describe the nature within and the nature without just as well.

[Federica]

Sorry Ashvin, I am not trying to be antipathetic, but I can't help but think that you have just used GPT in the same way Eugene did: you have decided to resort to gpt to for support, then you have turned your question in a quite specific way (not shared), than you have shared a mix of gpt-facts and gpt-conclusions (thus the heart may be doing this.. may be more of that)

It's simply a list of facts about the heart acting as regulator/dam vs pump, where are the conclusions? For example, "Embryology shows circulation starts before the heart’s pump is active." This is a fact. I think it's an interesting one to contemplate. Do you have thoughts about such a fact that you want to share?

I think these are conclusions:

“The heart may thus be more of a regulator“

“Instead of creating all circulation, it may chiefly function as a valve and timing mechanism”

“the heart may not “create” blood flow but regulate and synchronize it”

Even if the content of the conclusions is expressed open-endedly, the quality of the statements is that of a conclusion: deductions that ensue (according to some process) from what previously presented. Thanks for posing the question of the embryo. I think it’s very relevant, but I would like to give it more thought.

[Cleric]

But even beyond what Steiner thought - and ultimately this is more important - do you think it is possible that a living organ, holistically intended, in a living human being, can operate in ways that may escape the explanatory intents of current science?

Of course, and I think that even a single cell cannot be explained by the sum total of locally interacting molecules (billiard balls model).

Do you think it is possible that the physical blood is moved by forces that physics today cannot entirely account for?

Yes. However, I think we should see facts in their right proportions. Returning to the teeth example, we can ask the same thing: "Is it possible that there are forces unaccountable by our familiar physical interactions that are at play when we grind our food?" Well, it could be. But we may say that these interactions do not play the dominant role. We can tell this because we can use a chopper to grind our food, and the result is not that different (at least on a purely physically structural level - we know that chewing our food has other subtle significance). Things get weird only if we insist that our teeth have very little to do with chewing, as if they only follow along the food that crumbles for completely different reasons.

We have something analogous with circulation (although surely not that extreme). We have a heart muscle that, by all aspects of its physical structure, looks designed to propel fluid; it can propel fluid (even if it is not blood, as experiments show); we lack observations that circulation can continue on its own if we simply bypass the heart (in an adult creature); and so on.

I can understand why it seems to you that I'm teaming up with the materialist scientists. But what I'm doing is only including the facts that have been accumulated over the last century. Our job is to seek the harmony of the facts.

Also, I do not at all see Steiner making a major blunder (except that it is a major vector for mocking him). The biological form is not at all trivial! It is not simply the Divine etheric blueprint, only denser. Actually, we can look at things in an inverse way: almost everything of our biological structure took form in order to prevent the etheric flow from simply dissipating into decoherence. In that sense, the biological organism is like an external scaffold, within which the essential spiritual can still maintain its intrinsic metamorphoses, clearly, severely constrained by the scaffold. The most important thing is for us to climb to the same peak from whence he spoke. Then, at the face of the widened horizon of facts, we can clearly see, for example, "Oh, I see what precisely he was observing, and why at that point of history, his conceptions took the shape they did."

Here's even another way things can be reconciled. This is purely hypothetical, patched up in my intellect, but it's nevertheless something to consider. It is possible that the heart initially developed indeed as a sense organ of the etheric flow. Then, by living in that flow, it was 'made in its rhythmic image'. At a certain point, the flow was becoming more and more inertial, and it is as if the heart says, "That which I learned by sensing the flow, I must now impress through myself, because otherwise, soon there'll be no flow left at all." Again, this is a mere conjecture, but my point is that there are plenty of possibilities in which the physical heart is indeed the dominant propelling force, without this contradicting the deeper intuitions in any way.

[Federica]

But what I'm doing is only including the facts that have been accumulated over the last century. Our job is to seek the harmony of the facts.

Also, I do not at all see Steiner making a major blunder (except that it is a major vector for mocking him). The biological form is not at all trivial! It is not simply the Divine etheric blueprint, only denser. Actually, we can look at things in an inverse way: almost everything of our biological structure took form in order to prevent the etheric flow from simply dissipating into decoherence. In that sense, the biological organism is like an external scaffold, within which the essential spiritual can still maintain its intrinsic metamorphoses, clearly, severely constrained by the scaffold. The most important thing is for us to climb to the same peak from whence he spoke. Then, at the face of the widened horizon of facts, we can clearly see, for example, "Oh, I see what precisely he was observing, and why at that point of history, his conceptions took the shape they did."

Concretely, what are these heart-facts that have accumulated over the last century? Was the circulatory system such a different organ 100 years ago? And since we can be sure that Steiner also was seeking the harmony of the facts, what configuration of facts was present at his time which made him express the harmony of facts in terms such as these:

And just as the organ of the larynx will be transformed, so too will the human heart. It is the organ which stands in intimate connection with the circulation. Now science believes that the heart is a kind of pump; that is a grotesquely fantastic idea. Occultism has never made such a fantastic statement, as has modern materialism. It is the feelings of the soul which give rise to the movement of the blood; the soul drives the blood, and the heart moves because it is driven by the blood. Thus the truth is exactly the opposite of what materialistic science states.

[Cleric]

Concretely, what are these heart-facts that have accumulated over the last century? Was the circulatory system such a different organ 100 years ago? And since we can be sure that Steiner also was seeking the harmony of the facts, what configuration of facts was present at his time which made him express the harmony of facts in terms such as these:

Well, one thing is that it has become possible to do various kinds of imaging of the living heart. We should try to feel how, many things that we take for granted today could not have been part of our perceptual knowledge a century ago. Anatomy could be studied in books where there were sketches of the heart. Some could have the chance to dissect the hearts of cadavers. But the heart in motion could be something that can only be built in imagination. In a way, it was indeed the case that scientists were guessing what happens in the living heart. But today, we can practically observe the process in vivo. Let's look at the heart again:



The valves are passive tissues. They are even routinely replaced with mechanical valves (like in the Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement). We know for a fact that the heart contracts; we can simply see it. We also see the very basic functioning of the valves. So when, for example, the left ventricle is filled with blood from the left atrium above it, the mitral valve lets the blood through. Then, in the systolic cycle, the ventricle contracts. The contraction effectively reduces the volume of the ventricle and thus pushes out the contents, exactly like when we squeeze some toothpaste on the brush. Now only the aortic valve is in the correct orientation, and the blood is squeezed through it.

This is nothing new, of course, except that now it can be observed in different ways in its real-time nature. So when the ventricle contracts and squeezes the blood through the aortic valve, the mitral valve is closed - simply because when blood tries to squeeze toward the atrium, it pushes the valve in the opposite direction and closes it (this is the function of a valve - it is a one-way pass). Thus, there's no other reason for blood leaving the ventricle into the aorta, except for the contraction. We cannot say that incoming blood pushes the blood in the ventricle out, because this incoming blood (even if it was propelled externally) is blocked by the mitral valve. If that was not enough, we also have the simple fact that the pressure of the incoming blood is far lower than that exiting the aorta. Thus, it is clear that the contraction ejects it.

And I repeat that Steiner's quote immediately becomes factual if we look at it in its deeper sense.

[Cleric]

PS: This whole situation is analogous to the lemniscate-shaped orbits. Once again we have inner facts, there's true reasons to speak of such shapes in the Imaginative sense. Yet, the way the soul/astral dynamics manifest all the way down in the physical spectrum is not trivial. We cannot directly translate the Imaginations to the sensory spectrum.

[Federica]

Concretely, what are these heart-facts that have accumulated over the last century? Was the circulatory system such a different organ 100 years ago? And since we can be sure that Steiner also was seeking the harmony of the facts, what configuration of facts was present at his time which made him express the harmony of facts in terms such as these:

Well, one thing is that it has become possible to do various kinds of imaging of the living heart. We should try to feel how, many things that we take for granted today could not have been part of our perceptual knowledge a century ago. Anatomy could be studied in books where there were sketches of the heart. Some could have the chance to dissect the hearts of cadavers. But the heart in motion could be something that can only be built in imagination. In a way, it was indeed the case that scientists were guessing what happens in the living heart. But today, we can practically observe the process in vivo. Let's look at the heart again:



The valves are passive tissues. They are even routinely replaced with mechanical valves (like in the Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement). We know for a fact that the heart contracts; we can simply see it. We also see the very basic functioning of the valves. So when, for example, the left ventricle is filled with blood from the left atrium above it, the mitral valve lets the blood through. Then, in the systolic cycle, the ventricle contracts. The contraction effectively reduces the volume of the ventricle and thus pushes out the contents, exactly like when we squeeze some toothpaste on the brush. Now only the aortic valve is in the correct orientation, and the blood is squeezed through it.

This is nothing new, of course, except that now it can be observed in different ways in its real-time nature. So when the ventricle contracts and squeezes the blood through the aortic valve, the mitral valve is closed - simply because when blood tries to squeeze toward the atrium, it pushes the valve in the opposite direction and closes it (this is the function of a valve - it is a one-way pass). Thus, there's no other reason for blood leaving the ventricle into the aorta, except for the contraction. We cannot say that incoming blood pushes the blood in the ventricle out, because this incoming blood (even if it was propelled externally) is blocked by the mitral valve. If that was not enough, we also have the simple fact that the pressure of the incoming blood is far lower than that exiting the aorta. Thus, it is clear that the contraction ejects it.

And I repeat that Steiner's quote immediately becomes factual if we look at it in its deeper sense.

Alright I see. The problem is that these are no heart-facts. These are technological facts, which have mimicked an extension of the sense of sight, to thrust it into the inner organs. In other words, what we previously could do with a cadaver (look at dead matter in the environment, reminiscent of the form of human organs) has been pushed as is into the physical scaffolding, to basically deaden the inner organs twice - first in our percept, and then again in the mental image - to obstruct good and proper their intimate understanding, just like screen scrolling and the consequent systematic abuse of unlawful images deadens our thinking process twice, to obstruct its intimate understanding from two sides. So I do not agree with your expression “observe the process in vivo”. To be honest I find this precise expression really inappropriate.

And so what you are saying is, scientists were guessing the heart function, and Steiner also was guessing it, since he, like the scientists, could “only build it in imagination”. And, on such a crucial matter, his imagination actually went astray at physical level, gone with the wind of the equally failing imagination of all Initiates through the millennia.

You said that yes, physical blood is moved by forces that physics today cannot entirely account for, but the concrete answer you are demonstrating here is “yes but no”. When you state “there's no other reason for blood leaving the ventricle into the aorta, except for the contraction” you are contradicting your own yes. I think Steiner too knew for a fact that the hearts contracts. You say “we simply see it” (through our tech-eye) but we don’t need to 'see' it. We can first and foremost know it by direct experience. We know the pulses. We know that no other organ does anything remotely similar to the rhythm-giving pulsing contractions of the heart. We can recognize this core of inner activity directly. And we can guess that Steiner was also not without knowing what a valve is, and the form of the cardiac valves. Undoubtedly he knew about the contractions, he knew about the valves, he knew about the outer structure of the organ, with its chambers, inlets and outlets, and so he was obviously aware of the physical flow dynamics. This step-by-step description in which you have abstracted the circulatory dynamics was known to him. “Contraction ejects”, indeed.

I think it's grotesque to imagine that Steiner didn’t realize that heart contraction happens, and ejects. What he’s saying is that the cause of the “contraction that ejects” is the soul (broadly intended). Hence, physically, the blood is the manifestation of what induces the movements of the heart (not in a fully physically surveyable way of course). This dynamic is involuntary today, to reflect that average man does not recognize their I, and so the I-organization expresses it instead, through its instrument, the blood. The heart is there to articulate with rhythm and consideration this I-principle into the complexity of the rest of the human organization. The I wants to permeate the entire organization, but in the current decohered state needs the heart-organ for interfacing. Later, the blood will make heart movements voluntary, in other words it will take full residence in the heart, appearing more obviously as that cause that we today struggle to realize when we say “the heart is a pump”, “the heart is the cause of the blood flow”. The heart is not the cause of the blood flow. The heart is what integrates the I-expressing blood flow in the historical human makeup. “The heart is a pump” completely conceals the right direction of understanding. It's an epitome of materialistic thought and its mindless, mechanical depictions of the sensory spectrum, from which equally mindless causal relations are fantasized. In this way, the pump is a "grotesquely fantastic" idea.

Clearly, this doesn’t mean that Steiner, by lack of modern imagery didn’t see, or underestimated, the muscular contractions in the heart, the valves, the flow dynamics, and the blood ejections that ensue. That is another grotesque idea indeed. Of course he knew all that, and he meant that these contractions and ejections are timely, coordinating, and regulatory. They harmonize the blood impulse in coherence with respiration. They execute the blood intent to incorporate the information coming from the head and senses, and from metabolism. To use one of your metaphors, the blood is the CEO and the heart is the executive board, the blood’s right hand (or left hand should we say). And the involuntary contractions are the material expression of an ongoing human transformation, in which the warmth of the blood is recentering and re-cohering the entire man, to eventually install willed warmth into the centrality of the heart-organ. But for now, the heart is the connector and integrator, the executive intelligence the hierarchies have provided the I-organization with, in order to fulfill its overall job of transformation. Not a mindless pump that mindlessly imparts movement to the blood. That’s how I see it.

[AshvinP]

My 2 cents is that much confusion ensues from saying Steiner made an error (not because it's impossible, and indeed it has happened in other cases). It's probably too strong of an assertion and would only apply if Steiner was exclusively speaking of physical blood-heart dynamics, which of course he wouldn't do, because that has little relevance to Anthroposophical medicine or any other knowledge of long-term value and potential. To put it in a metaphor he often used, that's like measuring and speaking exclusively about the lines and squiggles of words rather than the meaning of the sentences in which they are embedded.

If anything, Steiner may have overstated (or underestimated) the extent to which the blood movement separated into the passive pole at the docohered physical scale, and conversely the heart organ into the active pole, something which would indeed be more apparent with modern imaging technology. These are simply facts that need to be ackowledged and placed into the picture, because all such facts testify to the deeper scale processes. It wouldn't change any of the meaning of the sentence that is critical for orienting to cardiovascular functioning and disease, but it may have prompted less stark proclamations on the pump aspect of the heart's functioning. This is too trivial of a modifcation to be called an error, in my estimation, however.

At the same time, the last 100 years of cardiovascular research has simultaneouly shed more light on the active essence of blood movement, i.e., the etheric precursor. As human consciousness has attuned more to the holistic spectrum and began asking new questions, devising new ways of observartion and experimentation, looking at the results from new and more integrated angles (utilizing other disciplines), etc., more aspects of the heart's functioning comes to light within the holistic biological and environmental context. More people in the field are intuiting that the cardiovascular mystery is growing rather than diminishing with more precise technologies. This is exactly what we would be expect via the spiritual evolutionary process as consciousness expands simultaneoulsy into the super and subsensible.

[Cleric]

Clearly, this doesn’t mean that Steiner, by lack of modern imagery didn’t see, or underestimated, the muscular contractions in the heart, the valves, the flow dynamics, and the blood ejections that ensue. That is another grotesque idea indeed. Of course he knew all that, and he meant that these contractions and ejections are timely, coordinating, and regulatory. They harmonize the blood impulse in coherence with respiration. They execute the blood intent to incorporate the information coming from the head and senses, and from metabolism. To use one of your metaphors, the blood is the CEO and the heart is the executive board, the blood’s right hand (or left hand should we say). And the involuntary contractions are the material expression of an ongoing human transformation, in which the warmth of the blood is recentering and re-cohering the entire man, to install willed warmth into the centrality of the heart-organ. But for now, the heart is the connector and integrator, the executive intelligence the hierarchies have provided the I-organization with, in order to fulfill its overall job of transformation. Not a mindless pump that mindlessly imparts movement to the blood. That’s how I see it.

Everything that you say belongs to the deeper side of things. Remember that it was you who started the present discussion with:

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).

What I did was precisely to address these questions. In my view, Cowan's arguments are completely flawed. For example, he says that it is absurd that the heart generates so much pressure that it can pump blood through a capillary pipe that goes three times around the Earth. I specifically tried to address this by showing that when the pipes are parallel (as the capillaries are), the resistance is lower. There's no need to repeat the cash registers analogy. Similarly, the idea that once the blood slows down in the capillaries, it needs an 'engine' to get moving again is once more completely flawed. He immediately forgets that there's incoming blood that displaces the slowed down (and the change in speed I also explained with the pipes of different diameters).

So, you expressed a doubt in the line of reasoning, and I only confirmed that with examples. From a mechanical perspective, there's nothing preventing the circulatory system from working in the way it obviously does.

About the "yes but no" question - I specifically stressed that I'm relating to the proportions. I do not exclude the possibility that there could be strange effects in the circulation (the 'yes'), but from the obvious facts, it seems that the major propeller of the blood flow is nevertheless the heart. Think about it: each year, about two million open-heart surgeries are performed worldwide. The majority of them require cardiopulmonary bypass.



This complicated machinery takes the function of propelling and oxygenating the blood (and a few other functions, for example, it needs to keep the heart empty of blood to ease the manipulations), while the heart is disconnected from the blood flow and put into cardiac arrest (not beating). Materialist scientists may be spiritually myopic and stubborn, but they are not idiots. In millions of such procedures each year, there should have been at least one or two to notice, "Hm, why do we go through the trouble of even building such a complicated apparatus? Look: when we disconnect the heart, the blood continues to flow just fine in a smooth laminar flow."

Now, one can go wild in conspiracy theories and say: "Well, actually, doctors very well know that blood flow continues without a heart. But they are heavily invested in this expensive equipment, and they keep that fact a secret, so that they can continue making money." Another 'theory' can be that blood drives itself, but when it notices that the heart has been bypassed, it decides to stop. This is like saying, "Actually, power plants do nothing. Electric current flows through the wires on its own, but it wants to feel that there's a power plant connected somewhere in the grid. Not that it needs it, but it simply wants to feel that it is there. If it feels that there's no power plant, it refuses to flow."

By giving these examples, I'm not implying that the heart is a 'mindless pump'. I believe I was clear enough about this. But in the face of the simple facts, I do not see anything that contradicts the heart being the dominant physical factor in the blood flow. I also do not see this as being somehow blasphemous, as if it demeans the heart in some way. I explained that in my view, the circulatory system is something whole, which in its etheric flow is indeed reflecting the holistic activity of the soul, but in the physical spectrum it is polarized into a more active part (the heart) and the more passive parts (the vessels). Logically, this polarization will be relaxed in the course of evolution.

[AshvinP]

Cleric, thanks for the detailed elaborations you have provided here. It seems I probably prematurely judged many of Cowan's arguments as holding weight simply out of ignorance of the technical dynamics involved. Eugene also presented a valid issue from GPT, namely that Cowan misstated that the aortic arch bends inward rather than expanding in systole, presumably a flawed interpretation of angiograms. That's not to say everything in the book is wrong or the underlying issue with 'heart as exclusive pump' isn't a huge one, but it doesn't seem Cowan is a great resource with that many flawed arguments, as Federica has also pointed out. I had to withhold judgment until more details were presented.

(I still think the heart functioning as hydraulic ram has a lot of evidential support as well)

This complicated machinery takes the function of propelling and oxygenating the blood (and a few other functions, for example, it needs to keep the heart empty of blood to ease the manipulations), while the heart is disconnected from the blood flow and put into cardiac arrest (not beating). Materialist scientists may be spiritually myopic and stubborn, but they are not idiots. In millions of such procedures each year, there should have been at least one or two to notice, "Hm, why do we go through the trouble of even building such a complicated apparatus? Look: when we disconnect the heart, the blood continues to flow just fine in a smooth laminar flow."

Now, one can go wild in conspiracy theories and say: "Well, actually, doctors very well know that blood flow continues without a heart. But they are heavily invested in this expensive equipment, and they keep that fact a secret, so that they can continue making money." Another 'theory' can be that blood drives itself, but when it notices that the heart has been bypassed, it decides to stop. This is like saying, "Actually, power plants do nothing. Electric current flows through the wires on its own, but it wants to feel that there's a power plant connected somewhere in the grid. Not that it needs it, but it simply wants to feel that it is there. If it feels that there's no power plant, it refuses to flow."

It seem to me such examples can be misleading in this context, simply because no one is claiming the blood can sustain its own movement in the current (adult) physical organism without the heart. No matter how exactly the heart is functioning - as pump, ram, both, something else as well, etc. - it is clearly integral to the holistic system, just like the flow of physical scale thinking-willing is suspended when we stop sensing the outer environment and anchoring sensations in decohered tokens, gestures, etc. I suppose that, like Federica, I am also confused as to the relevance of such examples. Am I missing something from Steiner in which he suggested otherwise?