Sunday, March 15, 2015

#79 The Heart

Here is a major miracle that you experience every second of your life…your heart.


About 3 to 4 weeks after the sperm and egg united and got started to make you, there were a couple of blood vessels that suddenly started pulsing in a very regular beat. Those vessels grow together, enlarge, and twist around each other to form your heart in only about 2 weeks. A swirling pattern of muscles forms around a bulge which splits into the 4 chambers of the heart. It continues to beat about every second for the rest of your life.


In the womb, the heart is responsible for the very development of that fetus into you. 

The average heart is about 10 ounces and the size of a fist. Through an amazing process the electric pulses (red lines below) cause the top part of the heart to beat first, followed by the lower part. 

It beats an average of 72 times a minute. It beats 1,000 times in 14 minutes. It beats 10,000 times every 2.3 hours. It beats 103,680 times a day, every day, your whole life. It beats a million times in less than 10 days. That’s a pretty amazing muscle.

The average heart pumps about 2.4 ounces of blood (.073 liters) each heartbeat. It pumps about 1.3 gallons of blood (5 liters) per minute. That is 1,900 gallons a day (7,200 liters). That would fill an Olympic sized swimming pool in a year. It would fill a couple super size oil tankers in your lifetime.


All the veins in your body are dumping blood into your heart which sends it to the lungs to pick up oxygen before sending it back out through arteries to capillaries and every cell of your body. The blood takes nourishment to your cells and withdraws waste products. There are 60,000 miles of blood vessels in your body. End to end they would reach around the world at the Equator 2.5 times.


That’s not all. That’s just the very basics. Modern research is learning a lot more about the heart.

For example, there is more information being carried by your nervous system from your heart up to your brain than from the brain down to the heart. Some research is even showing your heart perceives things milliseconds before your brain does.


The energy field of the heart can actually now be measured up to 8 feet away from your body. Other people are constantly picking up on that energy intuitively and being affected by it. We influence each other on an invisible energy level. Our hearts to a much larger extent than we realize effect our emotions, our physical bodies, our relationships, and our health. [1]

"The heart generates the largest electromagnetic field in the body. The electrical field as measured in an electrocardiogram (ECG) is about 60 times greater in amplitude than the brain waves recorded in an electroencephalogram (EEG). The magnetic component of the heart’s field… is around 5,000 times stronger than that produced by the brain"[2]

Although our hearts are nearly autonomous, there are still nerves that run from our brain to the heart that can speed it up or slow it down according to what is going on in our consciousness. Is that really a lucky accident?


When people get a new heart through a heart transplant, they find themselves with habits and memories from the previous owner of the heart. Research is showing that there are sections of memory cells in the heart exactly like the memory cells in the brain.

If you believe that all of this came about by accident through mutations and natural selection over many, many generations, how did it happen? Did the beating start first in some random muscles and then many generations later a heart accidentally formed? Or did the heart accidentally form and then some generations later it started beating accidentally in exactly the pattern necessary to push the blood in the right directions. 


When did the valves and the chambers inside the heart form? Even if the heart was beating and pushing blood in the right directions, where did it push the blood before the arteries, veins, and capillaries were accidentally mutated into place which must have taken many generations? 

Blood is made in the marrow of our bones. When did blood accidentally start being produced? How did the hemoglobin cells that carry oxygen evolve over many generations? Toxins are cleaned from the blood by the liver. Food and water are inserted into the blood stream by the intestines to be sent to every cell of the body. When did the lungs get accidentally connected to the heart arteries so they could start supplying oxygen that the cells needed (before they all died)?

I’m having an impossible time seeing how small changes over many generations could accidentally put all these complicated systems into place. Oxygen, food, and water are essential for life to exist from the very first cell and the systems need to be in place at the beginning of the very first organism. Waste products and CO2  need to be removed in the very beginning. The very first human cannot live without all these systems in place right at the start. You can’t wait generations for them to develop by mutations one at a time.

All cultures have expressions like “from the bottom of my heart” and “follow your heart.” Our very existence is a miracle and at the center of it all is the biggest miracle of all, our heart. It is our constant, trusted and faithful companion. “Be true to your heart” because it is being true to you. It is symbolic of something much bigger than yourself. It is symbolic of your Creator and the essence of your creation.

It’s not in your brain, it’s in your heart where you will find that there must be God. 

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[1] McCraty, Rollin, Ph.D., The Energetic Heart: Bioelectromagnetic Interactions Within and Between People, 2003, Institute of HeartMath, http://www.heartmath.org

[2] McCraty, Rollin, Ph.D., The Energetic Heart: Bioelectromagnetic Interactions Within and Between People, 2003, Institute of HeartMath, http://www.heartmath.org





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