Here’s a puzzling quote from Swedenborg’s Arcana Coelestia:
“As long as the heart is sound the surrounding organs can go on living. But when it is weak, deterioration sets into them all and the person dies.” (AC 468.2)
This is clearly not true. A person can die from pneumonia, cancer, or countless other diseases that have no connection to the heart. What am I supposed to do with such a quote?
I can wiggle the Latin… The word for sound or healthy is “integer.” This can also mean morally sound, honest, whole. OK, this is maybe a way of getting around this error…
Another possibility is: did Swedenborg know something that we don’t? That modern medicine doesn’t know? What if the heart, even biologically, performs other functions than pumping blood around the body?
In Divine Love and Wisdom 379 Swedenborg furthermore indicates that the body’s vital heat comes from love, and not from chemical processes that keep our body temperature constant. The heart is the organ in the body that corresponds to love.
Questions, questions…
In ‘Alternative Medecine’ it is known that the Heart Meridian (electrical current from an organ) is the most influential in the whole body. That may be part of the explanation -
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