The heart's two blood circuits

In the human heart, two blood circuits meet, a minor and major blood circuit. The rhythmic heart and lungs mediate between these two circuits:

• the minor circulation connects with the brain and nervous system (sensory impressions)
• the major with the organs and metabolic system (food stuff)

Through the process of Human breathing, the lungs are intermediate between the oxygen (inhalation) and carbon-dioxide (exhalation) in the blood (see Schema FMC00.157 below)

Aspects

arterial or red and venous or blue blood

• arterial blood is oxygen-rich, bright red blood that circulates from the heart to the body through arteries, while venous blood is oxygen-poor, dark red blood that returns from the body to the heart through veins. The primary difference lies in their oxygen content, with arteries carrying freshly oxygenated blood from the lungs, and veins carrying blood that has offloaded its oxygen to tissues and picked up carbon dioxide and waste products
• the arterial blood does not immediately goes over there into the venous blood: a fine flowing out and again an absorption takes place. In what takes place as the out-flowing vibrates the rhythm of circulation and in the nerve adjacent to it, the rhythm of the respiration vibrates really in these two rhythms which hit into each other. (1922-10-20-GA218)
• the origin and symbolism of red and blue blood (1908-03-15-GA265A, see Streams of Abel and Cain#1908-03-15-GA265A)
  •  red blood: oxygen people, the Abel stream, received revelation directly 'from above'
  • blue blood, carbonic people, the Cain stream, 'chained to the Earth', had to attain wisdom through their own work (sciences, etc).
• on the fourth apocalyptic seal - see Schema FMC00.228 below - the red oxygen-rich blood and blue carbon-dioxide-rich blood are represented in the two pillars labelled J and B where they represent the trees of Knowledge (blue blood, death, B) and the tree of Life (red blood, J) - see more on Golden legend (also for more on the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge)

two blood streams

• through the two blood streams, the heart merges both a) impressions from the senses, and b) mineral impressions from the metabolic systems. In the Holy Grail, this concept is covered on the Ganganda Greida page, see Schema FMC00.354 (also explained on Kundalini)
• the layout of the two blood circuits and the four heart chambers can be mapped to the spiritual streams around the Sun, see Schema FMC00.034 and the Discussion note: Sun#Note 1 - About Schema FMC00.034
• See also: Ganganda greida

breathing ↔ blood circulation

• relation between human breathing (rhythm) and (heart rhythm of) blood circulation in Man - see also: Rhythmic subsystem#ratio between breathing and blood pulse rhythms
• the lion as an archetype for balance: "In the lion a balance exists between breathing and blood-circulation. ... The lion is so organized that this interaction of heart beat and breathing is brought to expression in the reciprocal relationship of heart and lungs. (1923-10-19-GA230)

Inspirational quote

Rudolf Steiner:

The Christ mystery is the revelation of the great miracle that takes place between the heart and the lungs. The cosmos becomes the human being and the human being becomes the cosmos.

The Sun carries the human being out of the cosmos and onto the Earth. The Moon carries the human being from the Earth into the cosmos. In larger terms, what streams from the lungs to the heart is the human correlate of the descent of Christ onto the Earth; what moves from the heart to the lungs is the human correlate of the human being carried into the spirit world by the Christ impulse after death.

Thus the secret of Golgotha lives between the heart and the lungs in each human being, in a very human, organ-related sense.

For a commentary, see Note 1 in Discussion area below.

Illustrations

Schema FMC00.157 illustrates the blood circulation through the upper four organs (Holtzapfel, see also Spiritual scientific physiology)

Schema FMC00.034 shows a mapping of the organs in Man's spiritual scientific physiology and the Sun-Earth-Moon constellation. The form layout of the heart with the two circuits (see drawing right) can be mapped to the Earth between Sun and Moon (see middle drawing).

Notes:

• Compare the above with the notebook entry lower right of FMC00.339A on Rudolf Steiner's Gesamtausgabe (GA). See also Discussion note Sun#Note 1 - About Schema FMC00.034
• regarding links with Sun and Moon streams, see eg also Schema FMC00.542 below and on Working of substances and their forces
• For more on references to Man as linked to Sun and Moon, as per the Emerald Table, see also how this relates to the two etheric streams .

Schema FMC00.034A shows the symbolism of the form in the layout of the first Goetheanum in Dornach, with the heart in the center of the two circles. The Representative of humanity was placed in the small circle above. Compare with Schema FMC00.034.

Schema FMC00.542 illustrates the process of breathing air and the two streams of oxygen and nitrogen combining with liquid carbon in the human body and giving rise to processes generating carbonic acid and cyanic acid. Click twice and open in new tab to enlarge.

• from the intake of oxygen (remnant of the separation of the moon): the carbonic acid stream 'flows up' to combine with sodium and iron to carbonic iron (and links Man to the moon); this is why 'soda in the head-nerve subsystem' is linked to thinking.
• from the intake of nitrogen (remnant of the separation of the Sun: the cyanic acid stream 'flows down' to combine with calcium oxides (lime) to generate cyanide (and links Man to the sun); this links to the limb system and willing.

Note this schema focuses on the stream of coarse breathing of air as part of the middle rhythmic subsystem of Man. The silica and calcium processes (see above head and below the figure) are polar opposites related more typically to the head-nerve and metabolic-limb systems, though these processes work in the whole human body and affect all three subsystems (see 1921-04-11-GA313 and 1920-03-29-GA312 and other schemas).

Schema FMC00.180 (from Olive Whicher) shows an etheric perspective on the heart (left), connecting it with the image of 'Man as an inverted plant' (right - see also Schema FMC00.110 on Man as a threefold being ). The middle drawing represents the area between two focal points with the heart above and the brain below. See more on: Etherization of the blood

Schema FMC00.228 shows on the left, the fourth apocalyptic seal with the two pillars J and B representing (red and blue) the Trees of Knowledge and Life. The blue tree clearly knowledge with the linked book and standing on physical earthly ground, the red tree clearly upstreaming life. Two pillars supporting earth’s development: Jupiter and Mercury, Old Sun and Moon, Strength and Wisdom.

See 1907-10-GA284 about the pictures of the apocalyptic seals and columns (as well as more references in that volume GA284 about the symbolic meaning of the colours blue and red in 1911-10-15-GA284, and more).

On the right, a Freemason Rosicrucian illustration dated 1779 (taken from 'The Freemason by Eugen Lennhoff, published 1913). See also the alchemical symbols of earth below B, and air below J

Lecture references

1911-03-21-GA128

1911-03-23-GA128

[outer and inner]

There appears thus before our eyes this truly remarkable fact: that what we may call the noblest instrument possessed by Man, his blood, which is the instrument of his I, stands there as an entity that receives all its nourishment, everything that it takes from the life of the outside world, carefully filtered by the organ-systems we have characterised. In this way the blood is made capable of becoming a complete expression of the inner organisation of Man, the inner rhythm of Man.

On the other hand, however, in so far as the blood comes into direct contact with the outside world, with that particular substance in the external world that may be taken in as it is, in its own inner form of law, its own vital activity, without needing to be directly combated, to that extent is this human organism not something secluded within itself but at the same time in full contact with the world outside.

We have, accordingly, in this blood-organism of man, looked at from this standpoint, something very wonderful. We have in it an actual, genuine means of expression of the human I which is in fact

• turned toward the external world on the one side,
• and on the other toward its own inner life.

.

Just as man is directed through his nerve-system, as we have seen, toward the impressions of this outer world, taking the outer world into himself; as it were, through the nerves by way of the soul, just so does he come into direct contact with the outer world through the instrument of his blood, in that the blood receives oxygen from the air through the lungs.

We may say, therefore, that

• in the system of the spleen, liver, and gall-bladder, on the one hand,
• and in the lung-system on the other,

we have two systems which counteract each other.

Outer world and inner world, so to speak, have an absolutely direct contact with each other in the human organism by means of the blood, because the blood comes into contact

• on the one side with the outer air
• and on the other with the nutritive material that has been deprived of its own nature.

One might say that the action of two worlds comes into collision within man, like positive and negative electricity.

We can very easily picture to ourselves where that organ-system is located which is designed to permit the mutual rebounding of these two systems of cosmic forces to act upon it.

• Upward as far as the heart there work the transformed nutritive juices, inasmuch as the blood, which carries them, streams through the heart;
• inward to the heart, inasmuch as the blood flows through it, works the oxygen of the air which enters the blood directly from the outer world.

We have in the heart, therefore, that organ in which there meet each other these two systems into which the human being is interwoven and to which he is attached from two different directions. The whole inner organism of man is joined to the heart on the one side, and on the other, this inner organism itself is connected directly through the heart with the rhythm, the inner vital activity, of the outer world.

[harmonious balance - kidney system]

It is quite possible that when two such systems collide the direct result of their interaction may be a harmony.

• The system of the great outside world or macrocosm presses upon us through the fact that it sends the oxygen or the air in general into our inner organism,
• and the system of our small inner world or microcosm transforms our nourishment;

therefore we might imagine that these systems, because of the fact that the blood streams through the heart, are able in the blood to create a harmonious balance. If this were so, the human being would be yoked to two worlds, so to speak, providing him with his inner equilibrium.

Now, we shall see later in the course of these lectures, that the connection between the world and the human being is not such that the world leaves us quite passive—that it sends its forces into us in two different ways, while we are simply harnessed to their counteracting influences. No, it is not like that; but rather, as we shall more and more learn to know, the essential thing with regard to man is the fact that at last a residue always remains for his own inner activity; and that it is left ultimately to man himself to bring about the balance, the inner equilibrium, right into his very organs.

We must, therefore, seek within the human organism itself for the balancing of these two world-systems, the harmonising of these two systems of organs. We must realise that the harmonising of these two organ-systems is not already provided through that kind of conformity to law operating outside man and that other kind of conformity to law which works only within his own organism, but that this must be evoked through the help of an organ-system of his own. Man must establish the harmony within himself. (We are not now speaking of the consciousness, but of those processes which take place entirely unconsciously within the organ-systems of the human being.)

This balancing of the two systems, the system of spleen, liver, gall-bladder on the one hand and the lung-system on the other, as they confront the blood which flows through the heart is, indeed, brought about. It is brought about through the fact that we have the kidney-system inserted in the entire human organism and in intimate relationship with the circulation of the blood.

1914-07-05-GA286

is the reference for the spiritual streams around the four chambers of the spiritual Sun, see Sun#1914-07-05-GA286

1920-05-15-GA201

Consider for a moment the circulation of the blood. The blood, transmuted by the outer air, enters the left auricle, passes into the left ventricle, and from thence branches off through the aorta into the organism.

We can say: Blood passes from the lungs to the heart, thence into the rest of the organism, but branching off also to the head.

• The blood however in passing through the organism takes up the nourishment. And into this is introduced all that is dependent on the Earth. All that the digestive apparatus introduces into the circulation of the blood is earthly.
• What is introduced through the breathing, when we bring oxygen into the blood-course, is planetary.
• And then we have the blood-circulation that goes to the head, which includes all that composes the head. Just as the circulatory course of the lungs with its absorption of oxygen, and giving out of carbonic acid, belongs to the planetary system, just as what is introduced through the digestive apparatus belongs to the Earth, so that part of the circulatory course that branches off above, belongs to the starry world. It is, as it were, drawn away from the aorta and then streams back and unites with the blood streaming back from the rest of the organism, so that they stream conjointly back to the heart. That which branches off above says, as it were, to the whole of the rest of the circulatory course: ‘I do not share either in the oxygenating process nor in the digestive process, but I separate myself out. I invert myself upwards.’ That it is that belongs to the starry world.

And the nervous system might be followed up in the same way.

1922-10-20-GA218

It is not as coarse as one generally presents it; instead it is so that the arteries of the blood have their own course and the veins join in again (diagram red), so that not one also loins the other. In the eye especially, the artery runs so that the blood flows out so to say, and is there only then absorbed in turn by the vein, so that a slight flowing off and a re-absorbtion comes about in the eye.

It is an entirely false and coarse view, if one believes that arterial blood immediately goes over there into the veinous blood. It is not so.

A fine flowing out and again an absorbtion takes place. In what takes place as the outflowing vibrates the rhythm of circulation and in the nerve adjacent to it, the rhythm of the respiration vibrates really in these two rhythms which hit into each other.

Imagine these two rhythms were alike, then we would not see.

1923-01-27-GA348

states the breath:pulse relationship (≈18 breaths : ≈72 pulses ≈ 1:4)

discusses how breathing and blood interact in the chest and with organs such as the liver

A question is asked concerning the relationship between human breathing and the pulse. Wouldn't this have been completely different in earlier times?

Dr. Steiner: You mean in the human being himself? Well, let's quickly review how things stand today.

• We have on the one hand the breathing. Man is connected to the outer world through breathing, because he is constantly inhaling and exhaling air. It can thus be said that man today is constituted in such a way that he absorbs the healthy air and expels the air that would make him ill. The expelled air contains carbon dioxide.
• The circulation of the blood, on the other hand, is an internal process in which the blood flows through the body itself. I shall not discuss whether it is accurate to say that the blood circulates in the body, but the force of the blood circulates through the body.
• Now, although it varies slightly in each individual, a person takes approximately eighteen breaths per minute. As for the blood, the pulse rate is seventy-two beats per minute. So, one can say that breathing is related to blood circulation in an adult today in such a way that his pulse is four times faster than his breathing.

Now, we must be clear what is really involved in the human being when breathing is considered in relation to his blood circulation. First, we must be clear that man breathes chiefly through the lungs—the nose, mouth, and lungs—but this is only his primary way of breathing. Indeed, with the human being, functions primarily carried out by one part of his body are also actually carried out to a lesser degree by his whole body. Hence, air, or particularly the oxygen in the air, is constantly absorbed through the surface of his skin. Man therefore also breathes through his skin, and along with the ordinary breathing process of his lungs one can also speak of his skin's breathing. If, for example, the holes of his skin, called pores, are clogged, the skin absorbs too little air. Something is not right with the skin's breathing. Man's skin must always be in such shape that he can breathe through it.

Now, in the case of human beings, all outer processes can, as it were, also be found to exist inwardly. Making a sketch of a human being, we can say that breathing occurs through the entire surface of the skin but most particularly through the lungs in eighteen breaths per minute. All this, however, requires a counterbalance in the human being, and something quite interesting makes its appearance. Man cannot breathe properly through his lungs nor through his skin, but especially not through his skin, if this counterbalance is not present.

You know that a magnet has not only a north pole, a positive pole, but also a south pole, a negative pole. If man has his lungs and skin for breathing, then he also needs an opposite, and that opposite is located in the liver.

We have already familiarized ourselves with the liver from various standpoints; now we must learn to view it as the opposite of the skin-lung activity; the liver and the skin-lung activity balance each other. One could say that the liver's constant purpose is to bring into order internally what man acquires through breathing in his relation with the outer world. That is what the liver is for.

[continues covering liver disease]

...

[ratio 4:1 - see also Rhythmic subsystem#ratio between breathing and blood pulse rhythms]

Now, if you consider respiration and the activity of the blood, these two processes are related in today's adult in a ratio of one breath to four pulse beats. The blood stream flows faster; after three pulsations man inhales, and after three more, he inhales again. This is how air goes through his body. The blood moves through the body: one, two, three, and with the fourth we inhale; one, two, three, and with the fourth we inhale again. This goes on throughout our body.

All this produces carbon dioxide. Now, most of this carbon dioxide is exhaled, but if all of it were exhaled, we would be the worst dopes. A part of the carbon dioxide must continuously enter our nervous system, which needs carbon dioxide, because it must be continuously deadened. The nervous system requires this deadening carbon dioxide. Through inhaling air it therefore rises up continuously in me and supplies my nervous system.

What does this mean? Nothing other than this, that since carbon dioxide is a poison, I continually require a poison in my system for my thinking. This is a most interesting point. Unless a continuous poisoning process took place in me, with which I must continuously struggle, I could not use my nervous system. I would be unable to think. Man is really in the position of having constantly to poison himself by inhaling air, and by means of the poison in the breath, he thinks. Carbon dioxide constantly streams into my head, and with this poisonous air I think.

Today, man simply breathes air. The air contains oxygen and nitrogen. Man absorbs the oxygen, omitting the nitrogen.

When we study man today, the following is discovered. The human head today requires carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is a combination of carbon that is produced in the human body and oxygen. Man omits the nitrogen contained in the air. If one studies the human head today, one discovers that this human head is so organized that it can think quite well because of the absorption of carbon dioxide and therefore of carbon and oxygen. This human head, through the carbon dioxide, which is a poison and rises fleetingly to the human head from the organs, is constantly exposed to damage. It is as if we were always to inhale a bit of carbon dioxide instead of oxygen. You really always inhale a bit of carbon dioxide into your head. This is of great significance, because we constantly take in something that actually destroys life. This is also the reason that we must sleep, that we require a time during which the head does not absorb this minute amount of carbon dioxide as vigorously and thereby is able to restore its organs.

Studies of the head show that in its present condition it can make use of this poison, carbon dioxide, by repeatedly sustaining a little damage and then restoring itself through sleep, then again being damaged, again restoring itself, and so on. In very ancient times, however, man did not as yet have a head. It came about through evolution. Man would never have acquired a head if he had inhaled only carbon dioxide. The fully evolved head can tolerate carbon dioxide, but if man had always inhaled carbon dioxide, he would never have acquired a head.

Therefore, he must have breathed something else long ago. Now we must ask ourselves what man used to breathe. If all human evolution is studied in detail, one discovers that during embryonic development in the womb, the human being uses something other than mere carbon dioxide. It is an interesting fact that in the mother's womb man is almost all head. The rest of the embryo, if you study it in the early stages, is minute (see sketch) and still is almost all part of the head; the rest is terribly small. The whole embryo is then surrounded by the walls of the womb.

You see, man is almost all head, but he must still develop, and for that he requires nitrogen. He requires nitrogen, and this is supplied by the mother's body. If man did not have access to nitrogen in the womb, a substance he later rejects in the air, not allowing it to enter him, it would be impossible for him to develop. We would not acquire a proper head if it were not for nitrogen. In an early stage of evolution, when his head was only beginning to develop, man must not have absorbed oxygen but nitrogen. The essential elements for man must, therefore, have been carbon and nitrogen instead of today's carbon and oxygen.

Just as man inhales oxygen today, he once must have inhaled carbon combined with nitrogen—in other words, he must have absorbed nitrogen. But what is carbon plus nitrogen? It is cyanogen, and when it is present as an acid, it is hydrocyanic acid. This means that conditions must have been such at one time that man did not absorb oxygen from the air but nitrogen, with which he internally produced cyanogen, an even stronger poison. This even stronger poison is what has enabled man to think today with carbon dioxide. At that time he fashioned the organs with an even stronger poison.

Going back in time, we come to a point in ancient evolution when, unlike today, man produced cyanogen, and instead of exhaling carbon dioxide as he does today, he exhaled hydrocyanic acid, a much stronger poison. Thus, from man and his present-day respiration, we go back to an ancient condition in which the air was filled with hydrocyanic acid just as it is today permeated with carbon dioxide.

...

Likewise, man didn't need oxygen to stay alive in earlier ages but instead required nitrogen, and through that he was formed. Man was fashioned during a comet-like formation of the earth, and the relationship between breathing and the blood was completely different in those earlier ages.

...

Let's now consider what we have learned in connection with the world itself. If we focus on the fact that we take one breath to four pulse beats—one, two, three, breath of air; one, two, three, breath of air—the same rhythm can also be found in nature: spring, summer, fall, winter. One: spring; two: summer; three: fall; four: winter. Here we have the correlation between what's outside in the universe and what you have within man. So we can say, if we behold the entire earth, that our inner rhythm can be found outside on earth as well.

...

[Earth seasons rhythm 4:1]

So we have discovered an interesting rhythm in the universe. One: spring; two: summer; three: fall; four: winter, and the water no longer directs itself to the earth but to the universe. Again, one, two three—spring, summer, fall; then four: the water follows the universe, no longer the earth.

Now compare this rhythm with the blood and the breathing process.

One, two, three pulse beats, the blood is directed to the body's interior; four: breath of air, the blood is directed to what is outside.

Here you have the same activity with the earth as in the human being. If you compare the blood with the Earth's water, the blood directs itself accordingly. The first three pulse beats are inwardly a little like spring, summer, and fall; four, now comes earthly winter, and aha, we breathe, now comes the breath, just as with the earth itself. Inwardly, man is attuned completely to the earth's breathing process.

It can therefore be said that what runs its course in one year in the earth takes place quickly, eighteen times in one minute, in man. What takes a year for the earth takes place eighteen times in one minute in man. Man actually is always filled with this rhythm, but it is much faster than with the earth. When we consider the earth in the light of our discussion today, we realize that the condition of the earth was formerly quite different, and it comes to acquire for us a certain similarity to the comets. Now, when a comet disintegrates, the pieces, which contain iron, fall to earth as meteors. An entire comet, which falls to earth when it splinters, therefore contains iron.

1923-09-14-GA228

The form also corresponds to the layout of the Goetheanum and the Druid stone circles near Penmaenmawr in Wales, as Rudolf Steiner points out in when describing the particular geographical qualities of a specific location and the astral atmosphere in 1923-09-14-GA228:

You come to realize how these old Druids chose for their most important cult-centers, just such places in which the spiritual as it approaches mankind, expresses itself to some extent in the quality of the place. Those Druid circles we visited — well, if we had gone up on a balloon and looked down from above on the larger and the smaller circles, for though they are some distance apart you would not notice that when you are a certain height above them — the circles would have appeared like the ground-plan of the Goetheanum which has been destroyed by fire.

Olive Whicher goes into this in her book 'Sunspace'.

1923-10-19-GA230

[context of eagle, lion, bull, Man archetypes] ...

And now let us look away from what lives in the air, and, in order to have a representative example, let us consider a mammal such as the lion. We can really only understand the lion when we develop a feeling for the joy, the inner satisfaction the lion has in living together with his surroundings. There is indeed no animal, unless it be related to the lion, which has such wonderful, such mysterious breathing. In all creatures of the animal world the rhythms of breathing must harmonize with the rhythms of circulation; but whereas the rhythms of blood circulation become heavy through the digestive processes which are dependent on them, the rhythms of breathing become light because they strive to rise up to the lightness of the formation of the brain.

....

In the lion a kind of balance exists between breathing and blood-circulation.

• Certainly in the case of the lion the blood-circulation is weighed down, but not so much, let us say, as in the case of the camel or the ox. There the digestion burdens the blood-circulation to a remarkable degree. In the lion, whose digestive tract apparatus is comparatively short and is so formed that the digestive process is completed as rapidly as possible, digestion does not burden the circulation to any marked degree.
• On the other hand, it is also the case that in the lion's head the development of the head-nature is such that breathing is held in balance with the rhythm of circulation.

The lion, more than any other animal, possesses an inner rhythm of breathing and rhythm of the heartbeat which are inwardly maintained in balance, which are inwardly harmonized.

• This is why the lion—when we think of what may be called his subjective life—has that particular way of devouring his food with unbridled voracity, why he literally gulps it down. For he is really only happy when he has swallowed it. He is ravenous for nourishment, because it lies in his nature that hunger causes him much more pain than it causes other animals. He is greedy for nourishment but he is not bent on being a fastidious gourmet! Enjoyment of the taste is not what possesses him, for he is an animal which finds its inner satisfaction in the equilibrium between breathing and blood-circulation. Only when the lion's food has passed over into the blood which regulates the heart-beat, and when the heart-beat has come into reciprocal action with the breathing—for it is a source of enjoyment to the lion when he draws in the breath-stream with deep inner satisfaction—only when he feels in himself the result of his feeding, this inner balance between breathing and blood-circulation, does the lion live in his own element. He lives fully as lion when he experiences the deep inner satisfaction of his blood beating upwards, of his breath pulsing downwards. And it is in this reciprocal crossing of two wave-pulsations that the lion really lives.
• Picture the lion, how he runs, how he leaps, how he holds his head, even how he looks around him, and you will see that all this leads back to a continual rhythmic interplay between coming out of balance, and again coming into balance. There is perhaps hardly anything that can touch one in so mysterious a way as the remarkable gaze of the lion, from which so much looks out, something of inner mastery, the mastery of opposing forces. This is what looks out from the lion's gaze: the absolute and complete mastery of the heartbeat through the rhythm of the breath.
• And again, let those who have a sense for the artistic understanding of forms look at the form of the lion's mouth, revealing as it does how the heart-beat pulses upwards towards the mouth, but is held back by the breath. If you could really picture this reciprocal contact of heart beat and breathing, you would arrive at the form of the lion's mouth.

The lion is all breast-organ. He is the animal in which the rhythmic system is brought to perfect expression both in outer form and in way of living. The lion is so organized that this inter-action of heart beat and breathing is also brought to expression in the reciprocal relationship of heart and lungs.

So we must say: When we look in the human being for what most closely resembles the bird, though naturally metamorphosed, it is the human head; when we look in the human being for what most closely resembles the lion, it is the region of the human breast, where the rhythms meet each other, the rhythms of circulation and breathing.

...

If one is to understand the human breast—the heart beat, the breathing—as a secret within the secrets of nature, the gaze must be turned to something of the nature of the lion.

And man must try to understand his digestive system from the constitution, from the organization, of the ox or cow. But in his head man has the bearer of his thoughts, in the breast the bearer of his feelings, in his digestive system the bearer of his will. So that in his soul-nature, too, man is an image of the thoughts which weave through the world with the birds and find expression in their plumage, and of the world of feeling encircling the earth, which is to be found in the lion in the balanced life of heart beat and breathing and which, though milder in man, does indeed represent the inner quality of courage—the Greek language made use of the word for the qualities of heart and breast, the inner quality of courage in man. And if man wishes to find his will-impulses which, when he gives them external form, are predominantly connected with the metabolism, he must turn his gaze to the bodily form in the cow.

Discussion

Note 1 - Commentary on: "the secret of the MoG takes takes place between the heart and the lungs"

Once again the full quote:

Blood in the heart, striving toward the breath in the lungs, is humanity's striving for the cosmos.

The breath in the lungs, striving toward the blood in the heart, is the cosmos forgiv­ing humanity.

Blood striving for the heart is the refined process of dying. The blood, carrying carbon dioxide out of the body, is portraying the refined process of dying.

The human being streams into the cosmos on an ongoing basis in the flow of the blood. This is an event that shapes itself radically after death by seizing the entire physical being through the blood....

The Christ mystery is the revelation of the great miracle that takes place between the heart and the lungs. The cosmos becomes the human being and the human being becomes the cosmos.

• The Sun carries the human being out of the cosmos and onto the Earth.
• The Moon carries the human being from the Earth into the cosmos.

In larger terms,

• what streams from the lungs to the heart is the human correlate of the descent of Christ onto the Earth;
• what moves from the heart to the lungs is the human correlate of the human being carried into the spirit world by the Christ impulse after death.

Thus the secret of Golgotha lives between the heart and the lungs in each human being, in a very human, organ-related sense.

Consider Schema FMC00.034 to 'read' the above, maybe the few lines can help your contemplation: Man - Earth - lungs, Christ - sun - heart.

• 'the sun carries Man from cosmos to Earth' means that the major blood circuit allows Man to function on Earth thanks to cosmic influences and metabolic transmutation that are circulated in that major circuit.
• 'The moon carries Man from earth to cosmos' means that the minor circulation carries the sense impressions, and through living Man participates on earth and matter disappears in the brain and these fruits of Man's life will ultimately be brought to the cosmos.
• 'What streams from lungs to heart is descent of Christ to earth' means that Man breathes in, with fine breathing, the higher ethers.
• 'What moves from heart to lungs is like Man's return to spirit world after death through Christ impulse' is the out-breathing whereby Man is returned to the spirit world with all fruits of his life, but now in the image of a single breath or the breathing process.

Last, see also related: Mystery of the Heart#Note 1 - The heart as the center

Related pages

• Mystery of the Heart
• The human heart
• Etherization of blood
• Golden legend
• Ganganda Greida

References and further reading

• Heinz-Hartmut Vogel: 'Blut und Lymphe : entwicklungsgeschichtliche und morphologisch-pathologische Phänomene zum Verständnis der Kreislauferkrankungen und ihrer Therapie' (1967)
• Wolfgang Schad: 'Dynamische Morphologie von Herz und Kreislauf' (Goetheanistische Naturwissenschaft Band 4 Anthropologie, 1985, Seite 190–206)

• Olive Whicher: 'Sunspace'
• Werner Christian Simonis: 'Herz- und Kreislaufstörungen im Spiegel ihrer Heilmittel' (1988)