The Heart Revolution

The Heart Revolution is an exploration and celebration of life and being human driven by the question "Why do we have a heart?" If you think your heart is a pump, you're in for a big surprise. Your heart is not what you think it is ... Darkness. A tiny shimmering light. A subtle thumping sound and heavenly harmonies. Darkness. Pulsing impressions of life. Holding hands. A gentle kiss. Giving birth. The first stumbling steps, tears, looking into the stars, war, and destruction, growing old, entering a hospital... moments of being human, dancing to the eternal heartbeat of life. Darkness. The face of an older woman looking straight into the camera. She is breathing faintly. Her biggest wish is to see her family again when she is back home after her open-heart surgery. Dr. Mukesh Goel, a surgeon from New Delhi, explains, "I look at heart purely as a working organ, because everything we call soul or consciousness, it is in our brain. All the emotions, all the everything. Conscious, cognitive. Everything is happening in the brain. Human Heart is a pump. Its only job is to keep the blood circulation moving. It has no other function." Dr. Pollack, the leading water researcher worldwide, started his career doing computer modeling of the cardiovascular system. And he thought we had all the answers. Until a few years ago, when he discovered that we did not have all the answers. "We try to focus on finding ground truth. "We go wherever the experiments lead us, and we just follow, you know, like a child would follow." He and Zheng Li research the relationship between blood circulation and the heart. What they found will turn our worldview upside down and impact the foundations of several scientific fields. In a small corner of the lab at the University of Washington, Zheng has worked 7 years on his Ph.D. The first time Prof. Pollack told him of this project, he thought, "Are you kidding me?" Li is adjusting the microscope. The screen shows the small vessels of the chicken embryo. He feels terrible about having to stop the heart of the embryo. But what our camera captures is mind-bending. Although the heart is no longer 'pumping' - the blood continues to flow. Very slow, but constant. And it gets even stranger. If infrared light is applied, the blood flows visibly faster. "I can only speak for the research itself. I can only say that other than the heart, something is driving the blood circulation. So the next question that should be asked is what is the role of the heart. And that's a question that I don't know the answer to." From this point on, the film intimately portrays the story arc of 'being human' through archetypal moments (Disease, Shift, Love, Birth, School, Earth, Death, Rebirth), exploring this seemingly silly sounding question. We go on a road trip with a young couple in love, reminding the audience of the beauty and magic of their first big love. Then we follow Katie and Dave to having their first child Aiden and becoming parents. The chapter 'School' shows Milli, an ordinary 8-year-old girl who attends an unusual program. Being guided into her heart and expanding light from there, within three weeks, she learns to read a book while blindfolded. Ancient Vedic scriptures might point towards an explanation of this mind-boggling skill. We explore the connection of the human heart to our planet itself, and moments of losing a loved one, grief, dying - and - coming back. While we follow these characters through their lives, experts share their insights into the roles our heart plays throughout life. In medical school in his early twenties, Dr. Cowan realized he did not want to practice the kind of medicine he was taught. Escaping to Africa to teach gardening, he stumbled upon books by the visionary Rudolf Steiner, the inventor of Waldorf education and biodynamic farming. Steiner suggested that for humanity to evolve, we'll have to realize that the heart is not a pump. For the last 40 years, Dr. Cowan looked into this. "I ended up thinking, how could anyone believe the heart is a pump?" Kabir Helminski, a Sufi master in the tradition of Rumi, who traveled with the whirling dervishes, shares his personal experience of this mystery we call the human heart. How it relates to love, relationships, and how numb hearts impact our world. "So what to do with the heart, how to develop it, how to awaken it? I think this is a very fundamental human question, if not the fundamental human question." Dr. Wendy Ann McCarty, a leading psychologist in the yet fringe field of pre and perinatal psychology, paints a vivid picture of the importance of heart to heart connection between mother and baby during pregnancy. "We found out how to awaken the heart from the beginning of life. That is how I would put it." Dr. Rollin McCraty, director of research at the Heartmath Institute, is delivering groundbreaking insights about our hearts since decades. Their latest research shows the connection between our hearts and the earth's magnetic fields. The conclusions sound stranger than fiction, and that's why they first thought they made a mistake. Looking back, the picture becomes clear. We are connected with Earth in ways that echo what ancient traditions and indigenous tribes have told us already a long time ago. While we follow our cast through their lives, and the experts share their insights, distinct side-themes emerge. All these experts encountered something that was way outside their worldview. They could have ignored it. Shrugged it off as nonsense, because they were taught otherwise. But they didn't. Instead, they dared to question their own beliefs, and what they found might change the world as we know it. The century-old dogma that our heart is a pump is crumbling.