The Human Heart is a Supersensible Organ of Perception
By Douglas Gabriel
Chapter Six: Dodecahedron Universe
“Wherever you go, go with all your heart.”
Confucius
As has been presented above, the human heart is nested in the mediastinum which appears as a type of cube, or box surrounding and protecting the heart itself. In our current age, the shape of that box is a six-sided cube, but in the future, the shape of this protective enclosure will develop into a twelve-sided dodecahedron.
The heart shape and size evolve over time.
This mystery of the heart is little known and even less understood. Dr. Rudolf Steiner was very keen on this idea and believed that the evolution of the heart was a key factor in the overall development of humanity. The significance of this heart evolution is critical to expand human awareness and consciousness of the inside and outside world of the individual. As humans expand beyond the awareness of the inner world of the human body, a larger, more universal perspective must arise in a new form.
This new perspective takes the step to become aware of the twelve directions raying in from the surrounding cosmic shape. The human being becomes more universal, or macrocosmic, through this expansion of awareness. Steiner insinuated this new perspective by teaching what he called, the “Twelve World Views.” Only when one is able to understand the world through twelve perfectly valid, but different, World Views, is the individual able to become a universal citizen of the cosmos. Broadening and expanding human consciousness to encompass the entire world of the stars that ray in from the twelve cosmic directions opens the heart to the new shape it will become as the heart develops into a greater and greater sense organ of the entire universe.
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The original Foundation Stone of Rudolf Steiner’s first Goetheanum was a double pentagon-dodecahedron made of copper which was laid into the ground in Dornach, Switzerland. Ten years later, a tragic fire destroyed the nearly completed building. In 1923, at the Christmas Foundation meeting, Rudolf Steiner presented a ‘spiritual Foundation Stone,’ the ‘Dodecahedron of Man,’ as he called it, to the members of the newly-formed General Anthroposophical Society, which was to initiate a new phase in the revelation of the Mysteries of mankind. The meditation is mantric, that is, a spiritual revelation in which sound, form and rhythm integrate with the esoteric meaning which lies in layers of evocative multiplicity.
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Let us here and now lay in the ground of our hearts the dodecahedral Foundation Stone of love. Our own hearts are the proper soil in which to lay this Foundation Stone – our hearts, in good will, imbued with love, working together to carry the anthroposophical will and purpose through the world.
Rudolf Steiner
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Supersensible Knowledge: Blood is a Very Special Fluid, Rudolf Steiner, 25 October, 1906
“Thus the whole cosmos lives in the form of a crystal. In the same way the whole cosmos is expressed in the living substance of a single being. The fluids coursing through it are, at the same time, a little world, and a counterpart of the great world. And when substance has become capable of sensation, what then dwells in the sensations mirror the cosmic laws, so that each separate living creature senses within itself microcosmically the whole macrocosm. The sentient life of a simple organism is thus an image of the life of the universe, just as a crystal is an image of its form. The consciousness of such living creatures is, of course, very dim. But its vagueness is counterbalanced by its far greater range, for the whole cosmos glimmers in the faint consciousness of an elementary being. In man there is only a more complicated structure of the same three bodies that are found in the simplest sensitive living creature.”
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Toward the 21st Century – Doing the Good, The Stone of Love, Bernard Lievegoed
“Rudolf Steiner describes the reality of that dodecahedral love stone. He says, ‘The foundation stone will light up before the eye of our soul. Even that foundation stone which receives from universal and human love its substance, from universal and human Imagination its living picture quality and form, and from universal and human thoughts its radiating light.’
Love is its substance; Imagination is its form; thoughts are its radiating light.
It is not an earthly thing. It is an Imagination living in the hearts of a society. Such words are spoken by the hierophant, the high priest of mysteries – in this case the high priest [Rudolf Steiner] of new mysteries in which human hearts are the altars, the radiating love stones on which the hierarchies may celebrate the cosmic cult of the future.”
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The Universe as a Phi-based Dodecahedron, by Gary Meisner, May 1, 2012
“New findings in 2003 reveal that the shape of the Universe is a Dodecahedron based on Phi.
In October 2001, NASA began collecting data with the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) on cosmic background radiation. Like visible light from distant stars and galaxies, cosmic background radiation allows scientists to peer into the past to the time when the universe was in its infancy. Density fluctuations in this radiation can also tell scientists much about the physical nature of space.
NASA released the first WMAP cosmic background radiation data in February of 2003. In October 2003, a team including French cosmologists and Jeffrey Weeks, a freelance mathematician and recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship used this data to develop a model for the shape of the universe.
The study analyzed a variety of different models for the universe, including finite vs. infinite, flat, negatively curved (saddle-shaped), positively curved (spherical) space and a torus (cylindric). The study revealed that the math adds up if the universe is finite and shaped like a dodecahedron, as in the illustration below provided by Weeks.
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The Universe as a Dodecahedron is based on Phi, the golden ratio. The connection to Phi is found in the pentagons that form the faces of the dodecahedron. A dodecahedron consists of twelve pentagons. Take a pentagon and connect all the points to form a 5-pointed star. The ratios of the lengths of the resulting line segments are all based on phi, or 1.618. This is still a theory but supported by data that can be tested.”
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Let’s take a moment and make sure everyone is familiar with these concepts of vibration, dimensions, and sacred Geometry – Pi – Phi – Fibonacci Sequence
This unique platonic solid (dodecahedron) incorporates the golden ratio, which is often denoted by the Greek letter phi, usually lower case: φ. When you stack a number of dodecahedra together, interesting things happen with the way the different faces and vertices rotate: they can be seen to enfold one into another, and the resulting hints of rotating helix shapes, fractals, and the spirals found in nature link not just to the broad field of sacred geometry, but to cosmological theories about the structure of our universe.
Our universe is not really flat and infinite, but rather slightly curved, making it finite but unbounded. Curved spaces includes the Poincaré dodecahedral space model which lets you fly through the stacked dodecahedra that would form the surface of the 4D hypersphere our finite but unbounded universe resides within.
Another interesting thing about a dodecahedron is that it can be constructed from five pyramids (tetrahedrons).
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Besides tutoring Eudoxos, some historians assume that Archytas also tutored Plato in mathematics at some point during the ten years that Plato spent in Sicily and Southern Italy. Plato was impressed by Archytas showing him that only five regular solid forms exist; the tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron and the icosahedron. Plato develop a whole mathematical theory using these geometrical objects to associate these with the four elements the fire, earth, water and air. And because one polyhedron was left he introduced the “ether” or “quintessence.” In using triangles as building blocks for the geometric objects he developed something like our “quarks” as building blocks of the “Platonic solids.”
Of the five solids, the tetrahedron has the smallest volume for its surface area and the icosahedron the largest; they therefore show the properties of dryness and wetness respectively and so correspond to FIRE and WATER. The cube, standing firmly on its base, corresponds to the stable EARTH but the octahedron which rotates freely when held by two opposite vertices, corresponds to the mobile AIR. The dodecahedron corresponds to the UNIVERSE because the zodiac has 12 signs (the constellations of stars that the sun passes through in the course of one year) corresponding to the 12 faces of the dodecahedron.
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It is clear that the very ratios of the planetary intervals from the sun have not been taken from the regular solids alone. For the Creator, who is the very source of geometry and, as Plato wrote, ‘practices eternal geometry,’ does not stray from his own archetype. Thus, God, the eternal geometer must have given us the Platonic solids on behalf of the planetary orbit structure — they were made for each other.
Kepler was also influenced by Plato’s ideas. He assigned the cube to Saturn, the tetrahedron to Jupiter, the dodecahedron to Mars, the icosahedron to Venus, and the octahedron to Mercury.
Pacioli devotes the second part of his book De Divina Proportione, published around 1509, to the Platonic solids. He writes:
“As God brought into being the celestial virtue, the fifth essence, and through it created the four solids . . . earth, air, water, and fire . . . so our sacred proportion gave shape to heaven itself, in assigning to it the dodecahedron . . . the solid of twelve pentagons, which cannot be constructed without our sacred proportion. As the aged Plato described in his Timaeus.”
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The most amazing vindication of Plato has come from recent surveys of the universe that indicate that the universe may indeed be a dodecahedron, whose reflecting pentagonal faces give the illusion of an infinite universe when in fact it is finite. Plato’s answer is that: ‘time is an image of eternity.’
The best candidate to fit the observed power spectrum of the universe is a well-proportioned space called the Poincaré dodecahedral space. This space may be represented by a polyhedron with 12 pentagonal faces, with opposite faces being “glued” together after a twist of 36°. This is the only consistent way to obtain a spherical (i.e. positively curved) space from a dodecahedron. The Poincaré dodecahedral space is essentially a multiply connected variant of a simply connected hypersphere, although its volume is 120 times smaller.
In the dodecahedral universe, a rocket leaving the dodecahedron through a given face immediately re-enters through the opposite face, and light propagates such that any observer whose line-of-sight intercepts one face has the illusion of seeing a slightly rotated copy of their own dodecahedron. This means that some photons from the cosmic microwave background, for example, would appear twice in the sky.
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Could our universe be fractal?
The pentagon in space disperses into the number twelve and becomes the number of the
transfigured spatial cube. In this way it descends into the plane becoming dodecahedron woven of triangles, squares and hexagons – the dodecahedron in the plane. Twelve is the number of opened up space, through and through transformed to the pentagon.
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In the plane, the strong qualities of three dimensional space are preserved in it — it is revealed there. In this same way, the oldest Egyptian representations of starry space show a bow of an arch of twelve star pentagrams. There are also ancient traditions which show that the twelve parts of the zodiac are related to the zones of the dodecahedron.
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Douglas Gabriel has written a book about the heart, entitled The Human Heart is a Supersensible Organ of Perception, and is being released section by section until complete. You can also access the chapters by typing “The Human Heart” in our search bar and all of the posts will be displayed.
Chapter One: The World Changes When Our Hearts Do
Chapter Two: Physiological Aspects of the Human Heart
. . . . . Secrets of the Heart
. . . . .Chambers of the Heart
. . . . .A Thumb of Fire
Chapter Three: Three Fields of Force
Chapter Four: Great Thoughts About the Heart
Chapter Five: Rudolf Steiner on the Human Heart
Chapter Six: Dodecahedron Universe (you are here)
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Two articles from the Glass Bead Game that you might deepen your understanding of this chapter:
Perception as a Bridge to the Spiritual World
Etherization of the Blood: There is a continuous reciprocal feeding and nourishing between the spiritual world and the human.
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For your enjoyment, put your favorite music on headphones. Then turn the sound off of this video and watch the fractals unfold. Mandelbrot Fractal Zoom