Dear Friends, 

We wanted to salute the great work of the Anthroposophist Ralph Marinelli who was credited with establishing the fact that the heart is not a pump. 

Together with John Barnwell and others, Ralph accomplished the task Rudolf Steiner had given to his followers who wanted to know how to help Waldorf education spread to a greater audience - "prove that the heart is not a pump." 

Ralph, John, Douglas, and others worked in the eighties to try to find a way to prove that the heart is not a mechanical pump but, in fact, acts like a biological vortex momentum booster that works with the "draw" (suction) of the circulation of the blood, especially from the peripheral capillary dynamics. 

We provide you with these three videos to share our memories of Ralph and to recall the process that led to this most important discovery. John also shares an imagination of how the heart and kidneys work together in the human body and human consciousness. Douglas shares, in the third video, an imagination of the cosmic place of the heart in the universe and human development.     

    
Tyla and Douglas Gabriel
John Barnwell




The Heart is Not a Pump 

A REFUTATION OF THE PRESSURE PROPULSION 
PREMISE  OF HEART FUNCTION
by Ralph Marinelli et al

     
 

In 1932, Bremer of Harvard filmed the blood in the very early embryo circulating in self-propelled mode in spiralling streams before the heart was functioning. Amazingly, he was so impressed with the spiralling nature of the blood flow pattern that he failed to realize that the phenomena before him had demolished the pressure propulsion principle. Earlier in 1920, Steiner, of the Goetheanum in Switzerland had pointed out in lectures to medical doctors that the heart was not a pump forcing inert blood to move with pressure but that the blood was propelled with its own biological momentum, as can be seen in the embryo, and boosts itself with "induced" momenta from the heart.  

He also stated that the pressure does not cause the blood to circulate but is caused by interrupting the circulation. Experimental corroboration of Steiner's concepts in the embryo and adult is herein presented.
 
Introduction

The fact that the heart by itself is incapable of sustaining the circulation of the blood was known to physicians of antiquity. They looked for auxiliary forces of blood movement in various types of  `etherisation' and `pneumatisation' or ensoulement of the blood on its passage through the heart and  lungs. With the dawn of modern science and over the past three hundred years,  such concepts became untenable. The mechanistic concept of the heart as a hydraulic pump  prevailed and became firmly established around the middle of the nineteenth century.

The heart, an organ weighing about three hundred grams, is supposed to `pump' some eight thousand liters of blood per day at rest and much more during activity,  without fatigue.  In terms of mechanical work this represents the lifting of approximately 100 pounds one mile high!  In terms of capillary flow,  the heart  is performing an even more prodigious task of `forcing' the blood with a viscosity five times greater than that of water through millions of capillaries with diameters often smaller than the red blood cells themselves! Clearly, such claims go beyond reason and imagination. 

Due to the complexity of the variables involved, it has been impossible to calculate the true peripheral resistance even of a single organ, let alone of the entire peripheral circulation.  Also, the concept of a centralized pressure source  (the heart) generating excessive pressure at its source, so that sufficient pressure remains at the remote capillaries, is not an elegant one.
Our understanding and therapy of the key areas of cardiovascular pathophysiology, such as septic shock, hypertension and myocardial ischemia are far from complete. 

The impact of spending billions of dollars on cardiovascular research using an erroneous premise is enormous. In relation to this, the efforts to construct a satisfactory artificial heart have yet to bear fruit. Within the confines of contemporary biological and medical thinking, the propulsive force of the blood remains a mystery. 

If the heart really does not furnish the blood with the total motive force, where is the source of the auxiliary force and what is its nature?  The answer to those questions will foster a new level of understanding of the phenomena of life in the biological sciences and enable physicians to rediscover the human being which, all too often, many feel they have lost. 

Overview

Implicit in the notion of pressure propulsion in the cardiovascular system are the following four major concepts.

(1)  Blood is naturally inert and therefore must be forced to circulate.
(2)  There is a random mix of the formed particles in the blood.
(3)  The cells in the blood are under pressure at all times. 
(4)  The blood is amorphous and is forced to fill its vessels and thereby takes on their form. 

However, there are observations that challenge these notions. It is seen that the blood has its own form, the vortex, which determines rather than conforms to the shape of the vascular lumen and circulates in the embryo with its own inherent biological momentum before the heart begins to function. 

Just as an inert vortex in nature pulses radially and longitudinally, we tentatively assume that blood is also free to pulse and is not subject to the pulse-restricting pressure implied in the pressure propulsion concept. The blood is not propelled by pressure but by its own biological momenta boosted by the heart.

When the heart begins to function, it enhances the blood's momentum with spiraling impulses.  The arteries serve a subsidiary mimical heart function by providing spiraling boosts to the circulating blood.  In so doing the arteries dilate to receive the incoming blood and contract to deliver an impulse to increase the blood's momentum.




In this video, Douglas explains the backstory of how Ralph Marinelli began researching the heart from indications given by Rudolf Steiner. 






Douglas Gabriel and John Barnwell explain how they worked with Ralph Marnelli and many surgeons and physicians over several years to test Steiner's indications that the heart is not a pump.   
 



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Douglas Gabriel explores the deep esoteric nature of the heart   




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