Lecture VI
Dornach, April 16, 1921
I said yesterday that these studies are
intended to lead us on to a clarification of the essential
nature of the remedies we have proposed, and we will continue
to pursue this theme. Today I would like to begin by
mentioning something that can suggest a great deal regarding
our method of working.
In
approaching an illness or a complex of symptoms with
imaginative observation, we frequently receive a direct,
intuitive knowledge of the remedy. Then we obviously attempt
to think about the matter in accordance with judgments
connected with the matter by external scientific knowledge,
and we find we are wrong, that it cannot be so. This is an
experience frequently encountered by one who is able to make
occult investigations, and it also applies to domains other
than therapeutics. Only on thinking more about the matter,
pursuing it still further, does one come to see how correct
one actually was. What is discovered by imaginative
investigation followed by intuition is always correct,
provided, of course, that it is based on sound powers of
cognition. But one's judgment activity must first wrestle
through — if I may put it so — to what one comes
to know in this way.
It must first
be realized that this human organism is complicated to the
highest degree, so that in fact an intellectual grasp of it
presents the greatest conceivable difficulties, especially if
one tries to relate this human organism to the outer world
again. This is especially noticeable if we examine more
closely the function of nitrogen in the human organism.
Earlier in these lectures, I reported that nitrogen is found
in greater quantity in exhaled air than in inhaled air and
materialistic thinking can hardly help regarding the
difference as unimportant. The reason for this is that the
materialistic view of the human being is basically unable to
discover the function of nitrogen. This is possible only if
the following is considered:
You know that
the most varied theories exist about nutrition and that,
accordingly, investigators often hold diametrically opposed
views regarding the question: ”What is the function in
the human organism of protein in food? Why does the human
organism need protein?” Some say that the structure of
man's protein organism is constant, or at least relatively
constant, and that the protein absorbed undergoes rapid
disintegration and has little significance for the plastic,
constructive forces of protein in the human organism. Others
hold the view — regarded somewhat out of date today
— that the proteinaceous body of the human being is
continually disintegrating and built up again from the
protein absorbed. These diametrically opposed theories are
put forward in the most varied forms, but both miss the
essential point, because they compare protein with protein in
a one-sided way without considering the human organism as a
whole.
In this human
organism we have to do with an opposition between the head
formation, and therefore the formation of nerves and senses,
and the formation proceeding from the metabolic-limb system.
This is a polar opposition within human nature, and we cannot
pay enough attention to it. Without taking into account what
I have just said, we cannot understand the sequence of stages
in the build-up of man that are so important in therapeutic
deliberations. For instance, one will not be able to
understand the real relationship of the lung to the entire
human organism unless one's investigations begin in the
following way. If we are considering the head organism,
certain forces obviously predominate there. Next we have the
chest organism containing the lungs. The lung is an organ
that also has forces of head formation within it, though to a
lesser degree. The whole human organism has everywhere these
same forces, but in varying intensities. And if we
investigate how the ego, astral body, and etheric body work
in the whole plastic formation and deformation of the organs,
we are brought to the paradoxical statement that the lung
formation is a less intensive head formation. The lung
formation is a metamorphosis of the head formation, only it
is arrested at an earlier stage. The head advances further
with regard to the same formative forces that are present in
the lung but remain there at an earlier stage.
Because the
lung has remained a kind of retarded metamorphosis of the
head formation it is adapted to its own function, i.e.,
breathing. If the same forces that remain retarded in the
lung, making it suitable for breathing, develop further, they
render the lung more and more head-like. A consequence of the
lung becoming more and more head-like is that it takes in
thought forces — the organic forces of thinking —
and strives to become a thinking organ. In trying to become a
thinking organ, taking up too strongly the forces properly
seated in the head, the lung becomes disposed to
tuberculosis.
Pulmonary
tuberculosis can only be understood in this way, proceeding
from the entire human being. It can certainly be understood
if we realize that in a tuberculous lung breathing strives to
become thinking. In the head, breathing is metamorphosed, and
all functions of thinking, even the processing of
perceptions, are nothing but breathing developed further in
an upward direction. The head is an advanced respiratory
organ, having moved beyond the lung stage, but it represses
breathing and, instead of taking in air, takes in etheric
forces through the senses. Sense perception is nothing but a
more refined — which means extending more into the
etheric — respiratory process. Thus head and lung
breathe. There is something else in the human being that is
also breathing, something that remains at a still lower stage
in this process of metamorphosis: the liver. The liver is a
lung that has not reached its final development, it is a head
formation not fully developed. It also breathes, but now the
other metamorphosis, the polar metamorphosis of the sense
perceptions — that is, taking in food and working it
through — predominates in the liver. Therefore lung and
liver formations lie in the middle between the stomach and
the brain and head formations.
If you lay a
foundation with such thoughts, you will not be far from
understanding what I have to say about certain human organs
really being organs of respiration. All those organs that are
shaped like the brain, lung, and liver are at the same time
organs of respiration, but they have a tendency to breathe
out. Thus they also excrete carbon dioxide externally. Such
external excretion of carbon dioxide is the essential thing
in breathing. These organs absorb oxygen and give off carbon
dioxide, and this holds good not only for the lung but for
the entire organism, for every organ. It is essentially an
activity of the astral body, which develops its activity in
sympathy and antipathy. Sympathy as a force corresponds to
inhalation; antipathy as a force corresponds to exhalation of
the astral body. In the description of the astral body given
in my book,
Theosophy,
you find that it is permeated
by the forces of antipathy and sympathy. It works in the
human being in the whole breathing process according to
antipathy and sympathy. This must be regarded as the inner
activity of the astral body.
And now we
come to the final point of these considerations. The
proteinaceous content present in the human being, in so far
as it belongs to the organs described, is essentially for the
support of breathing and manifests outwardly through
breathing. But everything that manifests outwardly also
expresses itself inwardly. This is how I would sketch it
schematically. If you have here a human organ rich in protein
and belonging to the group of organs I mentioned, it
manifests outwardly by developing the activity of breathing
(see drawing, red).
But in breathing
outward, it unfolds another activity within, the polar
activity to breathing, namely, the activity liberating the
soul, liberating the spirit. An activity freeing the soul: in
breathing out, in unfolding the act of breathing in an
outward direction, you unfold inwardly a soul-spiritual
activity. This does not require space, of course; on the
contrary, in space it disappears continually, passing out of
three-dimensional space. This activity manifests within,
however — in an inward direction — and to develop
this activity within is essentially the function of human
protein. What functions as an activity in the head enters
from outside by way of the senses. Hence the head organs are
the organs containing least of what is spiritual. They absorb
the spirit from outside, acquiring it for themselves by means
of the senses. The head is the least spiritual organ in the
human being.
By contrast,
man's spirituality — that is, the development of spirit
within, the development of spirituality in the body, of real
spirit, not abstract spirit — begins in the pulmonary
system and works from outside inward in contrast to
breathing. The most spiritual organs are those belonging to
the liver system. These are the organs that develop the most
spiritual activity in an inward direction. This also explains
why “head men” are often materialistic, because
only the external spirituality can be worked through with the
head, and in this way one is wrongly led to believe that
everything spiritual that is developed is received from
outside, from the world of the senses. If a person is a real
intellectual, then he becomes at the same time a materialist.
The more one is a “head thinker,” the more one is
disposed to become a materialist. On the other hand, if the
whole human being struggles to attain knowledge, if a person
begins to develop a consciousness of the way the entire human
being thinks, including the organs situated further back,
materialism ceases to be justifiable.
The activity
manifesting in breathing is also revealed outwardly in the
excretion of carbon in carbon dioxide. But the inward
activity of spiritualization is bound up with nitrogen. The
nitrogen that has been used in spiritualization is
eliminated, and the degree to which nitrogen is eliminated is
a measure of the inner work of the human organs in the
direction of spirituality. You can conclude from this that
one who does not believe in such spirituality will obviously
have to remain very unclear about the absorption of nitrogen
in the human organism. The role played by nutrition can be
clarified only if one knows how in all protein formation
there unfolds an activity directed outward and one directed
inward. If you study this process, which is essentially a
breathing process with its polar opposite, you will realize
that nutrition and digestion border everywhere on the
breathing processes, that nutrition and digestion everywhere
encounter the processes of breathing and
spiritualization.
In this
process of spiritualization, and therefore on the other side
of breathing, are found the real shaping, plastic forces in
protein formation: there we find everything that shapes the
human being. From this you will also be able to see that what
is active here points to an interaction between the astral
and etheric bodies. The astral body is active in breathing by
means of sympathy and antipathy; the etheric body is active
through encountering in its activity the sympathies and
antipathies of the astral body. Everywhere the etheric body
with its activities hits up against the breathing process in
the human organism. These etheric activities have their
primary point of attack in the fluid constituents in the
human being. As you know, at least two-thirds of the human
body consists of water, and in this water-organism the
etheric body is chiefly active. The etheric forces express
themselves physically in this water-organism. The forces of
breathing find expression in the air organism built into the
human being. Thus we may regard what takes place between the
astral body and the etheric body as an interaction between
water forces and air forces.
This
interaction of air and water forces is continually ongoing in
the human organism. Of course, neither completely suppresses
the other; hence we always inhale traces of water vapor with
the air. There the etheric element encroaches on the
breathing. Similarly, the breathing activity encroaches on
the digestive and nutritive organs. In so far as you are
formed out of protein, you also breathe. Thus these
activities always overlap, and we are always faced with a
predominance of one activity or another in one organ or
another. There is nothing here that can be described in a
one-sided way. We can never describe this or that organ as
being exclusively a respiratory organ. If we maintain this
about the lung, we are in error. The other activity is always
there, even if to a lesser degree. Nutrition takes place
primarily through an activity that impresses itself on the
fluid-etheric and on the solid-physical. Therefore nutritive
and digestive activities occur primarily in the ethericfluid
and the physical-solid, whereas the main respiratory activity
is developed in the astral-airy, and the main ego activity,
the actual spiritual activity, unfolds in the warmth
conditions connected with the ego itself. Spiritual activity
within the physical organism is a cooperation of the ego with
warmth conditions, i.e., with all those organizations where
warmth can work into the physical. The ego must always go
hand in hand with warmth, must always operate through warmth.
If we put a patient to bed and tuck him in, this is simply an
appeal to the ego to make use of the warmth generated in an
appropriate way.
These
considerations provide insight into human nutrition in
general. Nutrition is an interaction between tissue fluid
— i.e., the watery constituent in which nutrition and
elimination chiefly take place — and the protein organism
of the human being. The latter is, relatively speaking,
extraordinarily stable; it is labile in a certain respect
only during the period of growth, then becomes stable and
undergoes a kind of disintegration during the second half of
life. In the tissue fluid there is a continual assimilation
and disintegration of the protein in food. It is in this
activity that attacks are made on that which wants to remain
stable in protein formation: the human being's inner
proteinaceous organs generally; they want to remain stable.
This is because they wish to liberate soul-spiritual activity
inwardly, to isolate it within. What is achieved through the
process of nutrition is this continual interaction between
the extraordinarily mobile play of forces, constituted by
this active assimilation and disintegration of protein, and
the play of forces striving towards rest that arise in this
interplay of the inner protein in the human being. Hence it
is partly a superstition, partly correct, to say that the
human being builds up his body through the substances he
absorbs from his food. It is a superstition because the
constructive forces are already present in his proteinaceous
body simply by virtue of the fact that a human being is a
human being; on the other hand, the human being unfolds an
activity from the other pole, which conducts a continual
attack on this stability of his own proteinaceous
formation.
We may say
then that it is incorrect to believe that human life is
maintained only by the consumption of food. This is simply
not correct. It would be just as correct to say that life is
maintained by the active interplay of forces in the tissue
fluids. When you give food which stimulates this activity in
the tissue fluids, you maintain life. This does not happen by
merely introducing food substances into the body but by the
encounter with the stable forces of its own proteinaceous
constituents. This is a process that you stimulate by
absorbing food, and this process is the most fundamental
factor in the maintenance of life. Here, too, we find that we
have to look at the process. It can be, for example, that
substances we know to be effective in children do not
necessarily act in the same way in an adult; for a child is
developing his body and needs the introduction of substances
and the unfolding of their forces in an inward direction. If
you know that something is effective as substance in a child,
it will not be similarly effective in the adult. In an adult,
it may be much more necessary simply to maintain and
stimulate the forces in his tissue fluids that are striving
toward rest.
If you now
study everything that takes place in the human organs with a
backward orientation, as it were (the head is also such an
organ), everything taking place in the lungs and liver, and
then turn your attention to those more embedded in this
activity of the tissue fluids, you will find the heart
enclosed by the lungs as the archetypal organ. The human
heart is entirely formed out of the activity of tissue fluid,
and its activity is no more than the reflection of this inner
activity.
The heart is
not a pump! I have often said this; it is rather an apparatus
for sensing or registering the activity in the tissue fluid.
The heart is moved by the circulation of the blood; it is not
the pumping action of the heart that moves the blood. The
heart has no more to do with human circulation than a
thermometer does with the production of outer heat or cold.
Just as the thermometer is nothing more than an instrument
for registering the degree of heat or cold, so your heart is
nothing more than an apparatus for registering what takes
place in the circulation and what flows into this from the
metabolic system. This is a golden rule that we must heed if
we wish to understand the human being. In the belief, that
the heart is a pump driving the blood through the blood
vessels, we can see how modern natural science reverses the
truth. Anyone believing in this superstition about the heart
ought to be consistent and believe that it is warmer in his
room because the thermometer has risen! This is the
consistent conclusion of such an approach.
You can see
to what results one is led by views that simply do not take
into account what is by far the most significant aspect of
man's being: the soul and spirit. Such views ignore the
mobile, the dynamic aspects and proceed from what is merely
material, trying to draw from the substance itself those
forces that are only imprinted on the substance. Such views
want to attribute to the heart the forces that are only
imprinted upon it by the dynamics, by the play of forces in
the human body.
In the heart
activity and in the heart organ we really have the most
advanced organization of what is placed over against
respiration and the liberation of the spirit in man. This may
now be called a polar metamorphosis, in contrast to a mere
transformation. In the head, lung, and liver, you have
various stages of metamorphic transformations. But as soon as
you study the heart in relation to the lungs, you have to
speak about a polar metamorphosis, for the heart in its
formation is the polar opposite of the lung.
All those
organs that develop in a more forward direction — for
example, the female uterus, which is the most prominent
example — are then further transformations, step by
step, of the heart formation. (I speak of the “female
uterus,” because there is also a “male
uterus,” but this is only present in the male as part
of the etheric body.) The uterus is nothing other than a
transformed heart. With this method of studying things, we
can gain all that is necessary to understand this
organization in the human being.
The fats and
carbohydrates now intervene in this other activity that has
its center in the heart — if I may put it so — and
comes to rest in the heart's movement. The fats and
carbohydrates exert their activity here. Of course, this
extends over the whole body, because the whole body deposits
substance and is a functional outcome of systems of forces
directed toward combustion, just as the whole body breathes
and develops what is spiritual.
This sheds
some light on pulmonary tuberculosis and we will see how such
an inner study of the human organism leads us further and
further toward therapeutic matters. What was formerly called
consumption — and has now been labelled tuberculosis for
purely theoretical reasons — is really due to man's being
cut off from the extra-terrestrial and confined to the
earthly through various influences such as poor housing and
so on. All descriptions of pulmonary tuberculosis can be
summed up by saying that the patient is being cut off from
the sun and cosmic space and is drawn toward what is cutting
him off. He is drawn toward that which paralyzes his delight
in the extra-terrestrial. This delight depends essentially on
sense perception. The patient's soul cannot penetrate to the
senses and retreats down into the lungs, so that the lungs
strive to become an organ of thought, to become a head. This
is, in fact, revealed clearly even in the pathological
manifestations. In wanting to become a head they take on a
form and one can see that the forces tending to ossify the
human head then come to expression in the lungs, resulting in
indurations, consolidations, tuberculomas, and the like.
How can this
tendency be opposed? If you want to work against this
tendency of the lung to become “head,” you must
realize first of all that we have to do with a weakening of
the required astral activity and with an excessive
strengthening of the ego activity. This activity of the ego
begins to overpower the astral activity. This must be
remedied. Sense impressions from outside especially stimulate
ego activity, but sense impressions from outside pass into
the whole human organism by bringing about salt depositions.
These are not properly regulated in a person with a tendency
to pulmonary tuberculosis. Hence you must help in such a case
by using rather strong salt rubbings to try to oppose, at the
right moment, what the lung can no longer oppose. Salt
rubbings, applied from outside, oppose the consolidating
processes acting from within. Of course, one must form the
whole treatment in such a way that the organism is inclined
to receive what is introduced in the effects of salt from
outside. The patient could also take salt baths, strong salt
baths, but then the organism must be led to become disposed
to work upon the salt within, i.e., to respond from
inside.
Here we can
be led to the following considerations, which follow partly
from our discussions last year. If you wish to stimulate the
organism to develop an activity from within that interacts
with and regulates certain outer organizing forces, you must
give mercury in small doses, i.e., in doses approaching the
homeopathic. Mercury is an important remedy in this
direction, an important means for regulating this. Here you
will have to take into account something of general
importance regarding dosages. Putting together all I have
presented, you can conclude that the system most similar to
outer nature is the metabolic-limb system. If something is
lacking there, you must use the lowest potencies. As soon as
you have to deal with the middle system, you need
intermediate potencies. When you have to work with the head,
when something has to do with the spiritual in the head, you
have to work with the highest potencies. But in this case we
are dealing with the lung activity, i.e., with a part of the
middle human being, and an intermediate dosage of mercury
must be used.
Whenever one
intends to work primarily upon the head organization and from
there back upon the entire organism, the highest potencies
are required. These will be particularly beneficial in cases
where one believes that something can be achieved with
compounds of silica. Silica compounds require the greatest
dilution by their very nature, for they always rise toward
the head and the periphery of the body, which belongs to the
head system. On the other hand, when you have occasion for
other reasons to administer calcium compounds, you will
usually do right not to use the highest potencies but lower
ones. In short, the potency required will be determined by
whether, in your view, you have to act on the metabolic-limb
organism, the middle, rhythmic organism, or the head
organism. You must bear in mind, of course, that the head
organism works powerfully upon the whole organism from the
other direction. For example, you may believe a patient to be
suffering from a foot disease, but actually this may be a
disguised head disease, having its origins in the head. In
such a case you will have to effect a cure not from the
metabolism but from the head. Thus one must use
high — but not too high — potencies of a substance
perhaps known to be valuable in lower potencies in cases that
have to be treated from the metabolism. Gradually a rationale
can be introduced into these deliberations, and this must be
done. The details will become clear only when you consider
precise observations yielded by experiments. The
investigations must pursue these details in the directions I
have suggested.
Only an
individual who can carefully retain in his memory all that
his experience has taught him will be able to speak about
healing in detail. Every individual experience is obviously
instructive and bears fruit for further experiences. If you
consider then what I have said, it will no longer appear so
puzzling that there are diseases that, for instance, attack
the brain and the liver simultaneously, for the liver is only
a metamorphosed brain. If you therefore find deterioration of
the liver together with degeneration of the cerebral ganglia,
these conditions run in the same direction, and you have a
form of disease that is an intensification of what causes
pulmonary tuberculosis. It is only an intensified
metamorphosis of pulmonary tuberculosis. Hence internally you
will have to give stronger doses of mercury. Regarding
external treatment, you should not be content with salt
rubbings and with baths of table salt (sodium chloride);
instead you will have to use calcium salts.
You see now,
however, that sources of error are everywhere, and one really
finds what is right only if the human organism is studied
from within. Imagine that someone can go and say, “Here
is a disease that I will cure with mercury,” he may
achieve some success. The disease, however, may have nothing
to do with syphilis, but at some point this person got the
idea that when mercury effects a cure, the disease must be
connected with syphilitic processes. This is not necessarily
the case at all. You will now better understand what I said
last year when I spoke of "mental illnesses." Of course I
meant paralytic disease when I spoke a few days ago of
softening of the brain, but the description is not so vivid
if one uses the word “paralysis.” One always has
the feeling that one is dropping into a description of the
outer complex of symptoms.
Questions now
arise regarding what I said last year about the actual causes
of psychological diseases. As I said then, these have to be
looked for in deformations of the organs. One gets nowhere if
one merely takes into account the psychological symptoms.
Similar psychological complexes can even be traced back to
totally different causes of illness. Especially in so-called
mental illnesses we are led more and more to deformations of
the organs, to an organ that is not functioning properly, and
then the question arises as to why the organ is not
functioning properly. It is because the stable — not
the variable — forces in protein formation have become
defective. Something in the patient is therefore continually
striving to destroy the original plastic structure of the
affected organ. Therefore it does no good to look for the
cause in what is going on in the tissue fluid, which presents
the other pole, the metabolism. If we proceed from the
symptoms, it will not help us to study what is presented by
the metabolism itself within the organism. Instead it is
exceptionally important in trying to gain knowledge of mental
illnesses to study the excretions. An important reference
point will always be found there. It is of tremendous
importance to investigate the excretions of mental patients,
for — as I said last year — in certain forms of
mental illness there is a compulsive tendency to form
imaginations, inspirations. This is what “freeing the
spiritual within” signifies.
This tendency
is there because the organ has become defective. If the organ
were not defective, if it were constituted normally, it would
indeed form imaginations, but these would remain unconscious.
When the organ has become defective, it is not able to form
imaginations correctly. On the one hand, the organ is
defective and the tendency to form imaginations arises; on
the other hand, imaginations remain uncovered by the organ,
and hallucinations arise. You could say then, that when we
have an organ with imaginations developing within it
(see drawing, red)
which radiate through the rest of the human organism
(see drawing, bright) and become
perceptible, we are dealing with a deformed organ. The
formation of imaginations (red) cannot unfold properly in its
plasticity. As a result, because the imaginative activity is
abnormal, it intrudes upon consciousness, and visions and
hallucinations arise. On the other hand, the organ is
damaged, and this gives rise to an urge to form correct
imaginations. Only by seeing through these things from within
can they be explained.
We will
proceed tomorrow to answer individual questions that have
been posed and to an explanation of our remedies.
|