Heart Transplantations Have Much to Teach Us About The Nature of Consciousness
A Midwestern Doctor – A Mid Western Doctor.com Aug 14, 2023

Story at a Glance:
•Organ transplant recipients often experience inexplicable personality changes and memories that appear to come from donor of the organ.

•In many of those cases, it appears that emotions which were trapped in the donor (e.g., because of the donor’s sudden traumatic death) transfer into the recipient.

•This transference provides critical insights into both the nature of consciousness and ways to mitigate many of the struggles transplant recipients face.

Note: this article was originally published on Mercola.com and has been slightly revised since the initial publication.

Modern science is founded upon a materialistic paradigm that rejects anything which suggests there is more to each human being than just our flesh and bones. Yet, as medical science finds more and more ways to pry open the doors between life and death, evidence always emerges suggesting the spirit is just as much a part of the human experience as our bodies and minds.

For example, cardiac resuscitation, a modern scientific miracle, made it possible to bring individuals who had died back from beyond the grave. In turn, there are many cases of resuscitated individuals reporting experiences (such as one witnessing and then recalling events that happened while they were clinically dead) that challenge medical science’s conception that conscious arises from electrical activity within the brain.
Organ Transplants

Organ transplants are another example of how medical science, through attempting to break a fundamental constraint of nature in order to save lives, simultaneously opened the door to an understanding of consciousness that challenges the entire materialistic paradigm modern science rests upon.

My interest in this topic first emerged from a conversation years ago with a very innovative mentor who had a knack for finding unconventional solutions to otherwise unsolvable medical issues. The topic at hand was organ transplantation, something which typically suffers from the following issues:

•Recipients can experience a variety of unusual symptoms from the new organ which significantly affect their quality of life.

•There is always a high risk the transplanted organ will fail. Likewise, there is a high risk of death for individuals who received transplanted organs (e.g., 15-20% of recipients die within a year of a heart transplant, and after that, there is a constant 4% death rate per year, which results in only 50% being alive after 10 years).

Many of the issues with heart transplants arise from the immune system viewing the organ as a foreign invader and attacking it. Preventing this requires taking heavy doses of immunosuppressive drugs which both create symptoms from their intrinsic toxicity and from the immune suppression that they create (which in turn requires taking even more medications for life). To share one story from medical school, I spent quite a bit of time with at the hospital with a classmate who had a kidney transplant, was repeatedly hospitalized for recurrent urinary tract infections, and when hospitalized, required somewhat dangerous intravenous antibiotics.

Note: Because of how problematic transplants can be (yet alone how difficult it is to get a donor organ), I believe anything that can be done to avoid needing a transplant should be the number one priority. Often when organs fail, the failure is preceded by a gradual decline which can potentially be halted if appropriate steps to reverse that unhealthy momentum are taken early enough in the disease process. Once a significant loss of function has occurred, the only approaches I have ever seen bring those organs back were correctly administered systemic regenerative therapies.

I hence asked my mentor if they had ever found anything which helped and their answer was immediate:

“You have to clear the trapped emotions.”

At the time, I didn’t really know what to make of this response; I trusted my mentor’s results but this really was quite the odd answer. Years later when I came across Paul Pearsall’s The Heart’s Code that response began to make a lot more sense.

Note: much of what follows is sourced from Pearsall’s book. Due to graphic nature of some of the stories within it, I chose to present summarized versions which did not explicitly restate those details. For those who are interested in the full versions, they can be found within his book.
The Heart’s Code

Personality changes are frequently observed after organ transplantations, especially with heart transplants. Since the existence of this phenomenon challenges the materialistic paradigm of where consciousness comes from, very discordant views exist towards it within the medical profession. Many adamantly deny it happens, some attribute it to other factors (e.g., the extreme stress of waiting for a transplant as your life lies in the balance while always needing to be ready to go the instant it becomes available, the experience of the transplant surgery or the psychological effects of the immunosuppressant drugs), but in face of the overwhelming evidence something we can’t explain is happening, there have been those who were compelled to study it.