The Rudolf Steiner Archive

We have looked at the Apocalypse with respect to its inner spirit and we have looked at it in connection with your work as priests. One could of course say a great deal more in connection with the Apocalypse; for instance, one could unroll the whole composition of the Apocalypse, but it seems to me that this conference in Dornach will get its best content if what was said in connection with the Apocalypse will show up in priestly activity in a really practical way.

We'll only have to add one more thing today. We should consider that we're living in the consciousness soul age or at that stage of man's overall evolution where he has to gain control over his intellectuality, as it were, so that it's integrated into his individuality. Of course to begin with this age is still restricted to man's spirit or intellect, as it were, where the things which are connected with the acquisition of intellectuality occur within human thinking and reflection, although a time will come when the deeper forces of the human soul will also be taken hold of by that which now occurs more within thinking, wishing and reflecting.

At present man can only form ideas about how he should use the intellectuality that is breaking into his individuality. However, before this age of consciousness soul development is over souls will be taken hold of by intellectuality right down into their deepest emotions, feelings and passions. And then what was still sought in the stars during the Middle Ages, when one spoke of angelic intelligences in the stars and planets will live even more deeply and pervasively in men.

All of this will be deposited in men, and later on when the Jupiter period comes even man's corporeality will be taken hold of by intellectuality. However, at present, where the soul has still not been taken hold of by intellectuality in its innermost structure and men can grasp the important things in their thoughts and words, it is possible to orient priestly activities in such a way that the world goals can really be attained.

So you see things are like this; when men grab intellectuality from the cosmos—and after all, it is a wise arrangement of the world powers that he is taking possession of it—there are always unguarded moments when it becomes possible for the Ahrimanic power who is called Satan in Christian tradition to take hold of this intellectuality that men have. Satan must not be confused with the ordinary devil, who is a lower power with different characteristics. Satan has the rank of a Principality (Archai), and he took hold of this intellectuality in the course of world evolution long before it approached men in the described manner, and one could say that he possesses more intellectuality than any other being. He is trying to bind human intellectuality to his own to such an extent that men can fall out of their evolution in this way. In other words, this Ahrimanic power is trying to nullify the Mystery of Golgotha and Christ's activity.

Now this Ahrimanic power who is called Satan in Christian tradition lacks the strength to work up further than the human level of cosmic beings. So one shouldn't think that the intelligence of an angel, for instance, could be taken hold of directly by this Satanic power; this can only happen in certain exceptional cases. These exceptional cases that could occur in the future, where it might not only be possible for the Satanic power to chain men to himself through their intellects, but also to bind beings from the spheres of the angels and namely of the archangels to himself—these things still belong to the higher secrets of occultism that cannot be spoken about at present, and that can only be disclosed under certain conditions. So we can only indicate that a temptation and a seduction of beings in the hierarchy of angels and namely of archangels might be possible in the future, but we must reckon with the fact that the power who is called Satan in Christian tradition has the ability to cling to something in man's inner life that is as independent as his intellectuality. And then when the intellectuality which men contain is taken hold of by the Ahrimanic power, a man can be torn out of evolution and can be put on an entirely different course, simply because his being is pulled along with the intelligence with which Satan is able to connect himself.

This is only possible with man's intellectuality, and not with any other psychical, spiritual or bodily force in him. For a man's intelligence sits in him in such a way that it is the most independent thing in him. Everything else is connected with certain divine powers, and so if Satan were to do anything with men's feelings, sensations, desires and wishes he would still have to deal with the superhuman forces that are in these soul-capacities. Intellectuality is the first thing through which each human being can separate himself entirely from the beings who bring about his personal evolution, and it is the first thing in which he must freely connect himself through his own efforts with those powers who have accompanied his evolution right from the beginning. So that he has to identify himself freely with the last goals of the Apocalypse, where the Apocalypticer clearly indicates that the power who is the Alpha and Omega of the creator beings who go through evolution will appear, and each human being has to decide for himself to attach himself to the being who led him during the time when he was becoming cosmically mature.

To be sure, Satan can use this great moment in the evolution of humanity and he can pull men's intelligences and the men with it into his own realm. We can already see how the Satanic power is trying to bring men into its evolution in this way. The way to do this is to bring people together in the kind of associations that we see arising everywhere in a germinal form today, where the old group souls end and a new group-soulness can begin.

That is why what is occurring in eastern Europe today, for instance, is so terribly Satanic because it all tends very forcibly in the direction of putting people together in such a way that group souls become necessary. If the most intelligent people are then taken over into the lower Ahrimanic regions in this way, the groups that are formed here can only be assigned to Ahrimanic powers as groups. That would be a way for the Satanic powers to tear mankind out of earth evolution and to bring it into another planetary evolution. That kind of activity with a group soul character can only succeed if the intellectual element becomes completely emancipated in a certain way.

Very clever beginnings in this direction are being made in the east today, and priests should understand these beginnings for their work, because they are becoming manifest in a very forcible way in the east, but they're also present in central and western Europe.

For example, something that seems to be more or less harmless in exoteric life but which must be discussed very seriously is the way that psychology is being allowed to pass over into an experimental observation of human souls. This is one of the methods that will eventually prevent the soul elements from working from man to man in the way that the old divine powers intended, and psychical things will be determined in a numerical way or some other way instead by the emancipated intellectuality.

These things in central Europe and in the West are still relatively harmless. However just consider, for example, that a statistical, intellectualistic way of looking at things that is emancipated from men's soul life has arisen in the west through William James and others. They apply statistical methods to the inner conversion of human beings or to what one could call a finding of one's inner religious bearings—which occurs in many people just before they're 20 years old. Many people also experience an inner transformation after they're 20, which is like a whirling up of the Godhead out of their own soul.

In the U.S. they determine the percentage of the population that undergoes such inner conversions, and they treat things in a statistical manner. The Satanic thing about this is the statistical treatment, the compilation of data, the emancipated intellect. All these conversions are really the results of karma, but then one has to look at each particular case. You will find that statistical methods are praised to the skies in all scientific fields today, if you follow such things at all. People can't penetrate inner things anymore, and they try to arrive at laws through statistics everywhere.

This is the hardest to combat in the medical field, where it has caught on in the most terrible way, and where all clinical methods tend in this direction. One simply records whether medicaments have a positive or negative effect, etc., in a statistical manner. This statistical element is becoming established, but it is completely worthless in this field. For it really tells one nothing to know how many cases went one way and how many went the other way. The important thing is to have a really thorough understanding of the individual case, no matter how it turns out. Only when all the cognitional methods have been pressed into the service of a study of the individual cases and their individual forms,—only after one has everything else through individual observations can one use statistics at the end and say that the thing was favorable in so and so many cases and unfavorable in the rest. As you know, statistics are very popular in social studies and social democracy.

The statistical approach has also produced some very nonsensical things in connection with suicides and crazy people. One determines what percent of the people in particular professions committed suicide or went crazy. But it has no real value to know this. Because the important thing is to know why this individual committed suicide and why that individual became insane. And so with regard to this statistical approach which scientists think is so important today when they write about theories of knowledge,—it's really as if Satan were loose: it's really quite terrible.

This approach has been successful for the Satanic power in central Europe and in the east. It became a philosophy in Avenarius and Mach, who were studied by leading Bolshevik philosophers, who then brought the thing to Russia and made it practical. Even good natured people who want evolution to proceed in an orderly way don't pay much attention to the fact that the seeds for Bolshevism were laid in central Europe decades ago and were carried over to Russia; it's as if one takes a seedling and transports it to another place where it is supposed to grow up.

Thus this Satanic power is working hard today and he turns to people everywhere and appeals to their emancipated intellect that is disconnected with things in some way. This applies to the soul, to the spirit, to inner conversions, etc. If Satan were to succeed in bringing about what he wants to do within a certain time, what has to approach then would occur in a harmful way for the evolution of humanity.

For the events of which the Apocalypticer speaks will come. It's just a question of how they will occur. There's only two possibilities: either human evolution will proceed in accordance with the intentions of the gods, or it will not. Intellectuality is breaking in now and men are becoming more and more intelligent through their own efforts, and not through inspiration. That is breaking in. But on the other hand mankind has been kept weak by influences that come from the Luciferic side. Even though the individual element is the only salutary thing for mankind in this age of the individuality, which is really a Christian age, groups will form, but these group formations must be taken away from the danger that they're in.

Through the efforts that the Satanic power is making to acquire the intellectual forces of humanity, a time will come when this Satanic power will be so strong that it will approach all groups that will have formed. So that it will really come about that Satan's power will work towards the four corners of the world, and these smaller and larger groups—Gog and Magog—will be exposed to the temptation and the seduction of the Satanic power. What will be decided then is whether or not those who have begun to work with spirituality have developed such an intensity that human intellectuality can be led to where it belongs with the aid of the Michael power, namely, to the starting powers who were connected with the origins of human evolution, and who want to lead what men have become further, although men are left free. A great deal will depend upon whether; men will get to the point where they will fully understand real spirituality that has an inner order. In priestly work one must already look at these affairs of humanity now, for only if one succeeds in directing everything into channels that run along these lines will the great seduction scene that Satan intends with Gog and Magog turn out in a way that is beneficial for human evolution.

Otherwise what men have experienced under the influence of their developing individualities; since the year 666 after the beginning of Christian evolution will someday have to be torn out of humanity. Darkness would be spread over all previous human incarnations and a new world evolution would replace the earthly one. We can already see the beginnings of this quite clearly, and we can also see the great danger that mankind is in today. Ahrimanic powers possess an almost unbelievably large amount of intellectuality, and they use men's vanity, untruthfulness and all of their other weaknesses in order to win them over. For instance, it is really quite terrible how the Satanic powers used the vanities of men at the beginning of the world war in order to create a tremendous turmoil in a few days—after there had been a very deep state of sleep—which put people in a great uproar, so that they're still not sure what really happened.

But it's only a phase. There are much worse phases in the purely intellectual so-called spiritual battles of the present. For where can one find truth anymore? One sees that things are being introduced everywhere in such a way that truth of action or a true way of working is becoming less and less important for men today. Just think of how they're increasingly trying to put the spiritual life under the control of the state. Just look at how much of our spiritual life is under state control.

All of these things expose humanity to a great danger, but men are not inclined to develop a real understanding along these lines. You could see this when the first attempt was made to do something with the threefolding movement so that the seduction by Gog and Magog that is to happen in the future can be brought into channels that are favorable for humanity. The threefolding idea should have led mankind over the threshold of evolution, and also would have had to lead it across, but the way it was received shows the tremendous dangers that mankind is exposed to with respect to these things, and priests should take these things very seriously.

There was an individual in the early Christian centuries who lived in the place where the actual church battle occurred which then made preparations in Europe for the Christianity that had been present in Rome throughout the centuries, who experienced the year 666 and perceived what really went on there with a certain clairvoyant power. This particular individual saw quite clearly and spiritually that the Satanic power was preparing itself for such a mission. Like many other people, this individual later confused the Satanic power that Michael knows is higher than he is, with the devil of the Middle Ages; he speaks of the devil, but in such a way that one sees that he really means the Satanic power. He reincarnated in Berlin in the first half of the 19th century; he was a high school teacher by the name of Drandorf. He spoke about the devil, that is, about Satan, and he wrote an article Is the Devil a Figment of the Imagination? You should also study his book on aesthetics some time. Drandorf remained relatively unknown; the consistorial and supreme consistorial counselors in Berlin were his enemies.

What all of this amounts to is: will you priests be able to represent the spiritual world in its full reality and not just in the sentimental way in which this has occurred everywhere in the last few centuries, so that one doesn't want to bring in the evil powers whenever one is speaking about the spirit. In other words, the main question is whether there is enough energy among you to really represent spirituality. The main thing is that such things like a knowledge of karma or an honest look, at earlier earth lives presuppose the same attitude of soul as the perception of the celebration of transubstantiation during an act of consecration of man.

These ideas must become real for men again. Only if they become real will it become possible to bring everything that is connected with the perspectives for humanity which the Apocalypticer wanted so much to present, into the right channels. It should be emphasized that the things that were discussed here in connection with the Apocalypse are truths which one should not receive without uniting them with one's whole being, which one should not receive without looking upon them as a kind of communion.

So one would like to say that a church is outwardly real, and it embraces the faithful members of the congregation. And the priesthood must look upon itself as that group of people in the church through whose activity a spiritual element flows into humanity. For this they need the right understanding and a little chapel for the sacraments and the consecrated bread and wine, which contains the secret of transubstantiation.

And one would like to say: If we imagine that we have a chalice, in which transubstantiation takes place, then men look for a way to the Father through transubstantiation. They look for a way to that creative power in the primal world which is present in there in a fully real way, and which therefore cannot be found if one only goes towards the material or only towards the spiritual. It can only be found if one discovers that the spiritual and the material are a unity. An understanding of the world is only present today when a transubstantiation is carried out at an altar. A sacred search for the Father really still occurs there, and here the Son always shows men the way to the Father; the Son who now mediates the way to the spirit.

And so when a man looks at what appears everywhere in the physical things during transubstantiation he can find the completely hidden spirit and the working of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones in the physical things. Their concealed activity becomes manifest as physical substances. If one wants to have the latter as something spiritual, one has to take the path to the Father. The path to the Father is indicated by the Son, and he then brings it about that the spiritual appears out of the physical.

Bread is bread, but one can look for the Father in it; this can also be shown for the wine. Christ shows the way; the transubstantiation puts an aura around the bread; man experiences the spirit in the aura. The wine reinforces what is present in the bread (drawing: sun). And so one can say that the longing for the Father is present in the sensory aspect that conceals the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. Christ leads each human being on the path, so that Kyriotetes, Dynamis and Exusiai become active before him in the way ye indicated yesterday, and he ascends into that region where he can only perceive the spirituality of the spiritual world today in angels, archangels and Archai, who however have the Holy Spirit in their midst.

To understand this and to draw the right conclusion from it today is written in the Apocalypse. What does that mean? It means that the one who understands it finds his own understanding already traced out in the Apocalypse. Hence one can say that whether or not the Apocalypse is speaking about you depends upon you and upon whether you will it.

For if you take the impulses in the Apocalypse into your work as priests in a truly spiritual way, you will be the ones who are spoken of in the Apocalypse, who will come and will ward off the power of the beast, the false prophet and Satan. And then at least in your mind you will always think that the book of the Apocalypse is placed underneath the chalice when it is standing there for the transubstantiation. And as you imagine that the chalice is standing on the apocalyptic book, you will be able to say to yourselves: My vocation is in the latter. And what we do over it is the carrying out of my vocation.

And so I didn't want to give you a theoretical exposition during this conference. After the justified wish arose in you to hear something about the Apocalypse I wanted to give you what I did and therewith I wanted to place the Apocalypse underneath the chalice for you, at least in your minds. That is the goal I had in mind for these lectures. You will definitely succeed in attaining the things that are possible if you intensify the ideals of your work as greatly as you can if you make these serious studies of the Apocalypse into the innermost impulse of your own activity. That is what I wanted to place before you at the end of these reflections. You can imagine that the most intensive thoughts about an intensive, forceful activity that is worthy of your great task will accompany everything that you will do in connection with these reflections.

Good morning, gentlemen! Today we want to use the time to add something to what we have heard. Then we will be able to understand a great deal about the dignity of man.

You see, I have roughly described how nutrition and breathing take place in the human being. We have also shown that nutrition is more closely related to human life, that nutrition consists of our absorbing nutrients that are actually in a lifeless state in our intestines, that these nutrients are then brought to life by the lymph vessels, and that they are then transferred to the blood in a living state. Then, as we know, this living food comes into contact with the oxygen in the air inside the blood. The air is absorbed by the human being. The blood is changed. This is the process that takes place in the chest. And at the same time, we have what our feeling gives us.

So, life is actually brought about between the intestinal processes and between the blood processes. Within the blood processes, in turn, between the blood processes and the air, that which is our mind is brought about. Now we also have to take care of the mind and try to understand how the mind came about in humans.

You see, it has only been possible to recognize this externally for about sixty years, one might say. We could have celebrated the sixtieth anniversary last year, in 1921. It was not celebrated because people today have little interest in organizing purely scientific anniversary celebrations. The discovery made in 1861, which could have been celebrated as a 60th anniversary – so only for the last fifty or sixty years has it been possible to talk about the matter I want to talk about today – is an important scientific discovery. I remember this discovery for the simple reason that it is exactly the same age as I am. This discovery consists of the following.

I recently told you how one can observe in a human being: one does not need to experiment, but one only needs to pay attention to what nature itself experiments on the human being when the human being falls ill in some way. If we know how to observe what has happened in the physical human being when the human being has fallen ill in any way, then such an experiment, such an attempt has been made by nature itself for us, and we can gain knowledge from this experiment.

Now, in 1861, it was found, namely, by Broca, it has been found that in people who have speech disorders, when they are dissected after death, something is violated in the third left frontal convolution.

It is not true, when we look at the brain, when we, so to speak, lift off the bony skullcap, the bony covering, we get to see the brain. This brain has convolutions: There is one convolution, there is a second, and there is a third convolution (it is drawn). This convolution is called the temporal convolution because it is located here at the temple. Now, every time a person has either individual speech disorders or is no longer able to speak at all, something is broken in this left frontal convolution.

This can happen when a person suffers a so-called stroke. A stroke consists of blood that should only be flowing in the veins pressing through the veins and flowing into the rest of the mass around the veins, where the blood should not be. This kind of hematoma then causes the stroke, the paralysis. So when the blood pours into the human being unlawfully, into this temporal winding, this ultimately causes, when this temporal winding is completely undermined, that the person can no longer speak.

You see, this is a very interesting connection. We can say: A person speaks because he has a healthy left temporal winding in his physical body. And now we have to understand what that actually means: a person has a healthy left temporal lobe. But to understand that, we have to look at something else.

When small children die, and we examine this same area of the brain, this left temporal lobe, then this strip of brain is a fairly uniform mass; especially before the child has learned to speak, it is a fairly uniform mass. To the same extent that the child begins to learn to speak, this left frontal convolution gets more and more small convolutions. It is formed more and more artificially. So that one can say: If, for example, this left frontal convolution would look like this in a very young child (it is drawn), it will look like this in a child who has learned to speak and in an adult: very artificially formed.

Something has happened to the brain; something happened just as the child was learning to speak. And no one should think differently about such a thing than one otherwise thinks in ordinary life. You see, if I move the table from here, no one will say: the table has moved here. Nor should I say: “The brain has formed convolutions.” Instead, I have to think about what actually happened and what the cause is. So I have to think about where this formation of the left temporal convolution comes from.

Now, you see, when the child learns to speak, it moves its body. It moves its body in the speech organs. Before that, when the child cannot yet speak, when it is still just a fidgety being, it screams at most and so on. As long as it just screams, this left frontal convolution is still a pulp like the one I drew at the beginning. The more it learns to do more than just scream, but to let screaming turn into sounds, the more this frontal convolution is developed. So that one can say: When the child just cries, then there is a brain mush at that point. Now it begins not just to cry, but to say sounds. Then gradually this general mush is transformed into a beautifully formed left brain part.

Now, gentlemen, the thing is this: You know that when the child cries, the cries it makes are mostly what are called vowels: A, E. So when the child just cries out, it does not need a structured left frontal convolution; rather, it always produces what it cries out from within itself, without having anything artificial in the brain. If you pay a little attention, you will see that what the child cries out first is very similar to the A sounds. Later, the child begins to add U and I sounds to his crying. And gradually, as you know, the child also learns consonants. The child first cries out A; then he learns the M to go with it: MA or WA. So the child gradually forms words out of his crying by adding the consonants to the vowels.

And how do you form these consonants? You only have to pay attention to how you produce an M. You have to move your lips. As a child, you have to learn this through imitation. When you produce an L, you have to move your tongue. And so you have to move something. You have to move from the fidgeting that the child does to regular movements, to movements that the speech organs perform by imitation. And the more the child adds such consonants, L, M, N, R, and so on, to the vowels, which are only present when screaming, the more this left frontal convolution is structured, the more this left forehead is artificially developed; so that the left frontal convolution develops with the same strength with which the child learns the consonants.

Now, we can say: How does the child initially learn to speak? The child really only learns to speak by imitation. It learns to move its lips by intuitively imitating how other people move their lips. Everything is imitation. This means that the child notices, sees and perceives what is going on around it. And through this perception, through this mental work of perceiving, the brain is formed. Just as the sculptor forms his wood or marble or bronze, so this brain is formed by the child moving. The organs that it moves plant their movement all the way into the brain. So when I say L with my tongue, the tongue is connected to the brain by a nerve, connected to other organs. This L goes into my left frontal convolution and produces such figures in there. The L produces such a figure where one thing follows another, where this left frontal convolution almost forms like a bowel. The M produces such spherical convolutions. So you see, it is work on this left temporal convolution. It is the one that moves the child by noticing, by experiencing. It is very interesting that since we know that a stroke ruins the left frontal lobe and thus undermines speech, we can know that the child's left frontal lobe is actually being worked on all the time as it learns consonants and vowels. And that comes from the fact that the eye and all kinds of other organs notice that something is happening in the outside world. What is happening there in the outside world?

Well, you see, when we speak, we always breathe while speaking. We breathe all the time. And when we breathe, what is formed from breathing, this breath, as I have called it, first goes into the human body, then goes up through this spinal cord canal (it is drawn) and goes into the brain. So while the child cries, cannot yet say the consonants, but cries and breathes, during that time this breathing always goes up, this breathing impulse; it goes up and goes everywhere into the brain.

Let us ask ourselves: what actually goes into the brain? Well, blood goes into the brain. It goes everywhere, as I have explained to you in the last few days. So through breathing, the blood is actually pushed into the brain all the time. But that through breathing the blood is pushed in everywhere, yes, you see, that already takes place after the child is just born – even earlier, but there it is just working in a different way. So when the child is born, it begins to breathe. This rush of air, which pushes the blood into the brain, is actually always present.

And in this way we can say: as long as only the blood is pushed into the brain through breathing, the child can only scream. It begins to talk when not only the blood is pushed into it, but when, let us say, the child notices something from the eye or from some other organ, from the ear in particular, when it perceives something. When the child notices a movement in another person, it imitates the movement internally; then not only does the blood flow up there, but then, let's say, for example, another flow goes from the ear continuously into there (it is drawn). You see, that is the other current. And this other current is the nerve current.

So in the left temporal convolution, in the so-called speech convolution, as everywhere else in the human body, blood vessels and nerve cords meet. What one notices, what one perceives, acts on the nerve cords. The movements that the child makes during the consonants are thus transmitted through the nerves into his left speech coil. And there this is very well developed, in that the respiratory impulse always interacts with the blood with what comes from the ear or also from the eye, and what there gradually, beautifully structures the entire pulpy brain mass between blood and nerves. So you can see that our brain is actually only formed – at least in this part, and then in other parts it is exactly the same – formed by the fact that one activity, namely perception, interacts with another activity, namely this push that drives the blood into the brain.

But now you also have to be clear about the following. The child learns to speak in this way, that is, it trains its left frontal convolution. But, gentlemen, if you now sit with a corpse and dissect it, and observe the right frontal convolution, which lies symmetrically there, it is relatively untrained. So there we have the left frontal convolution; it has become as beautiful as I told you. The right one usually remains throughout life as it was in the child – so it remains undivided. I would like to say: if we only had the right frontal convolution, we could only scream, and only by artificially preparing the left frontal convolution can we talk.

But, you see, once a person is a lefty , that is, if he is in the habit of doing things not with his right hand but with his left, then it turns out that, when he is struck on the left side, he does not lose his speech, for example. And when he is dissected, it is found that in the left-handed person, the right frontal convolution has been structured in the same way as in the usual, normal citizens and people, the left frontal convolution is structured.

So the arm and hand movements play an extremely important role in the formation of the brain. Where does that come from? Yes, you see, it comes from this: when someone gets used to doing a lot with their right hand, they not only do what they do with their right hand, but they also get used to breathing a little harder on the right, and thus using more breathing power. They get used to hearing more clearly on the right, and so on. This only shows us that when a person gets used to using his right hand, he generally tends to be more active on the right side than on the left. But the left frontal convolution is developed when he is a right-handed person, and the right frontal convolution when he is a left-handed person. Why is that so?

Yes, gentlemen, you see: here (he draws) you have the right arm, the right hand, here you have the head and here you have the left temporal convolution. Now let's examine how the nerves run. The nerves run like this; you have nerves everywhere in here. If you didn't have these nerves, you wouldn't be able to feel warm or cold here, for example. It's all connected with the nerves. You have nerves everywhere here, which go up through the spinal cord and into the brain. But the strange thing is that the nerves in the right hand go here into the left brain, and the nerves in the other hand go into the right brain. Because the nerves cross inside there. In the brain, the nerves cross so that when I do, say, some gymnastic or eurythmy exercise with my right hand or my right arm, I feel it through the nerve that conveys this sensation; but I feel it with the left side of the brain because the nerves cross.

Now imagine that a child prefers to do everything with his or her right hand. Then he also breathes a little more on the right side, listens a little more, and even sees a little more sharply on the right side. The person then makes more effort on the right side and develops what he does in terms of movements into the left brain.

Now you just have to imagine that we also always have a little peculiarity that we make gestures when speaking: Ah! (corresponding gesture); and when we reject something: E! We make gestures when we speak. These gestures are felt by our nerves; and the gestures of the right hand that we make when speaking are felt by the left side of the brain. And in the same way, if we are right-handed, we tend to use the right side of the larynx more to pronounce the vowels and consonants, to pronounce the sounds more strongly; then what we do there is also felt more strongly with the left side of the brain. And that is where the fact that the brain, which is originally a pulp, is more developed comes from. We leave the left half more unused; therefore, the right hemisphere is less developed and remains pulpy. But if someone is left-handed, it happens the other way around.

This leads to a number of important pedagogical issues. Consider left-handed children – and there are a few of them even at school – you have to realize that while the left temporal lobe in the brain is very artificially developed in all others, it is fully developed in these left-handed children, and the right temporal lobe is developing. And when I teach the children how to write, I use the right hand. Those children who are right-handed will only strengthen what they have already begun to develop in their left frontal gyrus when learning to speak. But those children who are left-handed will ruin what they have formed in their right temporal gyrus through language if I force them to write with their right hand. They ruin it again, and so I have the task, since it should not be that way with writing, of letting left-handed people write with their left hand. I have the initial task of slowly and gradually gradually transfer what they do with their left hand to their right hand, so that they first learn to work with the other hand and only then, much more slowly than the other children, begin to write. It doesn't matter if they learn to write a little later.

If I just let left-handed children learn to write as quickly as right-handed children, I make these children dumber because I ruin what they have developed in the right hemisphere of their brains. So I have to make sure that I teach left-handed children to write differently from right-handed children. They will not become duller for later life, but cleverer, if I lead left-handedness slowly into right-handedness, and do not simply confuse the whole brain by writing with the right hand.

Now, you see, if you want to treat the whole person with writing at all, then pedagogically you achieve the opposite of what you want to achieve. There is now a great tendency to teach people everything with both hands, to let them do everything with both hands. That's how I mess up their brains. And it just shows how little people know when they have such a tendency to let people do the same thing left and right. You could strive for that; but you have to do something else first. And what should you do? Yes, gentlemen, you would have to change the whole person first! You would have to slowly let one activity pass from the left side to the right side and slowly weaken the activity on the right side. What would happen then? Yes, you see, what would happen then is that under this surface of the left temporal convolution (it is drawn) the left temporal convolution would be formed more artificially, and on the outside, on the outer side, it would remain mush. And that would then also occur on the right temporal convolution. Instead of dividing the two activities between the left and right sides, I make each temporal winding into two halves, an outer and an inner half. The inner half is then more suitable for speaking, the outer half is more suitable for shouting the vowels and consonants into it. But all speaking is a combination of shouting and articulating. This remains so throughout life.

So you see, you can't just mess around with people, but you have to know the whole person if you want to do pedagogy, even just elementary school pedagogy. Because with everything you do, you change the person. And that is the really sinful thing, that today people only tamper with appearances and do not look at how things are when you really get inside the person.

Now, in very few people are both frontal lobes usable, but the right frontal lobe is more permeated with blood flow, the left has less blood flow and is more permeated with nerves. And that is the case with our entire brain: the right brain is more for blood flow, i.e. for blood to run apart, while the left half is more for noticing, for perceiving.

As soon as we come to know that the brain develops under external influences, only then will we begin to understand how strong these external influences are. These external influences are, of course, extremely strong when we know that everything that goes on in the brain is caused by external influences. So, by having learned what actually happens in the brain when a person speaks, we can now form an idea of what the human brain is like in general. You see, if we examine this brain further, it turns out that there are always more blood vessels on the outer wall, where the brain has its outer wall, than on the inside. So we can say: the brain is richer in blood on the outside, and richer in nerves on the inside. So on the inside we have nerves; there are nerve cords inside.

So how is the brain actually formed in a child who learns to speak in the usual way, that is, who is right-handed? Well, you see, if you take a very young brain from a child, it is surrounded by a blood-rich, I would say, mantle (it is drawn). That is viewed from the front. That should be to the right of the person – seen from you, it is on the left – that should be to the left of the person. All these nerve cords are now forming there. Because of this, gentlemen, because there are nerve cords in there, you see, when you take them out, the inner brain mass looks whitish, while the more blood-rich brain mass around it looks reddish-gray when you take it out. It looks reddish-gray.

If the child continues to develop in such a way that it learns to speak, that its left temporal convolution is structured, what happens then? Yes, that is what happens: these nerve cords become more involved; as a result, the blood system develops less here and more there (it is drawn). So, in a sense, the inner part of the brain moves more to the left in a normally developing child; the other moves after it. The brain thus shifts over to the left side, and it becomes whiter and whiter towards the left side. It shifts over like that. The whole of human development is based on such artificial things.

Now, let's move on from language. You see, there are languages that have, let's say, a lot of consonants, and there are languages that have a lot of vowels: A, E, I and so on. There are other languages in which everything is squeezed out: S, W, so that one almost does not notice the vowels. Now, what is actually the case here?

If someone lives in a region – because it depends on the regions, the languages differ according to the regions of the earth – in which more of the consonants develop, what does that mean? It means that he lives more in the outer world, because the mitlaute have to be formed on the outside. So when someone lives more in the outer world, his white brain matter shifts more to the left. When someone lives more within himself, in such a region, where man lives more within his own inner being, this white brain matter shifts over less. Man is more inclined to produce harmonious sounds from his inner being. But this varies according to the regions of the earth.

So let us take the following, gentlemen. Imagine there is the earth (it is drawn) and at different points on the earth there are people. I will draw it very schematically, there is a person and there is a person. So there are different people standing on the earth. We always stand on the earth like that, even if it is drawn much too disproportionately, of course, but that is how we stand on the earth. And the person here, let's say, gets a language with consonant-final vowels, the other gets a language with consonant-medial vowels.

What must have happened in the area in question? Well, a great deal could have happened, many different things, but I will highlight one possibility. Imagine there are high mountains here (it is drawn) and a plain there. So here are high mountains, there is the plain. Now, in fact, when there are flat plains, you notice that the language there has more vowels. If there are towering mountains somewhere, then the language tends to become richer in consonants.

But you see, it's not that simple. We have to ask ourselves: what causes the mountains and the plains? This is how it is (it is drawn): here is the soil everywhere; here the sun shines. Our whole Earth was once a pulp. The mountains must have been pulled out of the pulpy mass. So the Earth is basically a pulp, and the mountains are pulled out of it here.

Gentlemen, what is pulling the mountains out? The mountains are pulled out by the forces from the universe that are working from outside! So that we can say: certain forces are at work from the universe, drawing out the mountains. These forces are strong, and that is why a mountain range is created. Here, weaker forces from the universe are entering, and that is why no mountain range is created. There the earth's surface was pulled out less in ancient times. And those people who are now born on such earth, where these forces are less effective, speak in self-sounds, and those people who are born on such earth, where these forces are more effective, speak in middle-sounds. So that depends on the whole forces of the universe.

And how can we state something like that? Well, gentlemen, what we indicate must be set up in such a way that we can look at the clock. We have to go to work or have to leave. But we will not say for a moment: Now it's too much! This damn big hand, he's a horrible guy, he's whipping me to work now! - That doesn't occur to us at all. The hand indicates when we should go to work, but we do not ascribe the slightest blame or cause to it. Don't we, we don't do that. So it is most innocent in the matter.

Likewise, gentlemen, we can look towards the sun here and can say: When we stand here, at a certain moment the sun is, let us say, for example, in front of the constellation of Aries. There we have the direction where the strong forces are at work. It is not the ram, but it indicates the direction where the strong forces are at work. At the same time, a person is standing here. For him, the following only comes into consideration: When the sun has moved over here (it is drawn), it stands here, for me in Virgo, in the constellation of Virgo. The forces are weak in that direction. Instead of telling the whole process now, I can say: If someone is born in an area where, at a certain time, let's say at the time of his birth, the sun is in the constellation of Aries, then he learns to speak more consonantly; if he is born at a time when the sun is in the constellation of Virgo, then he learns to speak more vowels.

So you see, I can use the whole zodiac like a clock to tell me what is happening on Earth. I must always be clear about the fact that it is not the constellations that do this, but that the constellations are there to read. From this you can see that the zodiac can tell us a great deal. It can tell us something to the extent that we can understand from it how languages on earth differ.

So we can definitely say: let's look at the earth. Let us imagine that there is the Earth and that we have placed a chair there – it may not be so, but hypothetically we can assume it – a chair in outer space, looking at a kind of language map, the different languages on Earth. Then we get a picture. And now we turn the chair around, now we look out into space. We get a picture of the stars, and they correspond to each other. If someone were to look at the southern half of the earth and observe the languages there, and then turn the chair around and look at the southern starry sky, it would be quite different from if someone were to do the same for the northern half. So that one could draw the starry sky, and anyone who has studied this connection can indicate from a particular constellation what language is common under that constellation.

So you see that just when we start observing the spiritual life of man, that is, where his mind is formed through language, we have to look up at the starry sky if we want to understand something. On earth, we don't get any context. No matter how much you think about why languages are different, you won't get an explanation.

You see, if you want to know what is going on in your stomach, you have to ask the ground – what is down there. If cabbage is mainly grown in a particular area, you can tell yourself: in this area, the killed cabbage fruits must be continually revived. So if you want to know how a particular area is nourished, you have to ask the soil. If you want to know how a particular area is breathing, you have to ask about what is happening in the air around it. And if you want to know what is going on inside this box, in the brain box, you have to ask how the stars are arranged out there. And so you have to be able to integrate the human being into the whole universe. And then you will see that it is indeed a superstition when, from remnants of what people once knew, it is merely said: When the sun is in Aries, this and that is effected. That is nothing at all. But when one knows the whole context, then it ceases to be an ordinary superstition, then it becomes science.

And that is what gradually brings us from an understanding of the mere reworking of materials to what happens and what is connected with the whole universe outside.

Good morning, gentlemen! Today, too, I will have to continue with what we have discussed, because the reason is that the matter can only be fully understood if one penetrates further and further into it.

You see, it depends on the human being, as you have seen, that he takes his nourishment from the earth, thereby feeding himself – that he takes care of his breathing from what surrounds the earth, from the air, only through this does he actually come to life, only through this is he able to become a sentient and feeling being -, and as we have seen, he takes forces from the whole world, only through this does he become a thinking being and only through this does he actually become a complete human.

So man must be able to nourish himself, man must be able to breathe, thereby becoming a sentient being - and he must be able to take the forces from the universe to thereby become a thinking being. He does not become a thinking being by himself, just as he cannot speak by himself. Man cannot think himself, just as he cannot eat himself.

Now let us take a closer look at how these things actually happen. Let us begin by clarifying how this process actually occurs when we absorb nutrients, have them in a dead state, so to speak, within our intestinal organism, and then they are revived again by the lymph glands and transferred by the lymph into the blood, the blood is renewed through breathing. The blood, or rather the force of the blood, the breath, then rises through the spinal cord into the brain and connects there with that which is brain activity.

You only have to consider how a child's nutrition differs from that of an adult to gain a great deal of insight into the human being as a whole. As you know, a child must drink a lot of milk in the very earliest period of life. At first, it feeds exclusively on milk. What does it actually mean for a child to feed exclusively on milk? We can visualize this if we consider what milk actually consists of.

Milk consists of 87 percent water. So when we drink milk as children, we actually drink 87 percent water, and only the last 13 percent is something else. Of these last 13 percent, only 4 percent is protein; 4 percent is fat in milk, and then there are some residual other substances, salts and so on. But essentially, that is what the child absorbs with the milk. So it is actually mainly water that it absorbs.

Now I have already told you that a human being consists mainly of fluid. The child must always increase this fluid. It must grow and therefore needs a great deal of water, which it takes in with the milk.

You may say: It would be the same if we gave the child only this 13 percent nutrition and the rest as water. Yes, you see, the human body is not designed for that. What we get with milk is not 13 ordinary percent of protein and fat and so on, but all of that, protein and fat, is dissolved in milk, dissolved in water, if it is milk. So it is the case that when the child drinks the milk, it gets the substances it needs in a dissolved state. And that is different from when the body first has to do the work that occurs during dissolution.

If you recall what I have already said about nutrition, you will say: we also have to dissolve the nutrients that we take in through our mouths first. We actually only have permission from nature to get solid nutrients into our mouths; then we dissolve them with our own fluids. The rest of the body, stomach, intestines and so on, can only use what has been dissolved. The child must first acquire this ability to dissolve; it must first develop it. So it cannot do it itself from the beginning. So it is dissolved beforehand. You can see this best from the fact that if a child is fed too much with any artificial food that is composed, it will still stunted.

Now you might say: What if I could create artificial milk after all, what if I could combine the 13 percent of protein, fat and so on contained in water with the water in such a way that it would be similar to milk on the outside, would that be a milk that would be just as good for the child as the milk it usually gets? Yes, you see, gentlemen, that is simply not the case. The child would waste away if it were given such artificial milk. And since people can only produce according to need, we will also have to refrain from producing such milk. It would be a means of corrupting humanity.

For who can supply, as a solvent, what the child needs? You see, only life itself can do that. Animals could do it in a makeshift way, but not all animals. But for the very early days, when the child depends on it – because it cannot yet dissolve properly itself – these nutrients, protein and fat, can only be properly digested if they are already properly dissolved, and the child can only be properly nourished with human milk itself.

And of other milks, donkey milk is the one most similar to human milk, and so, if there is no way to feed the child through self-breastfeeding or breastfeeding at all, the child can still be fed to the greatest extent with donkey milk. This is admittedly very strange, but donkey's milk is actually most similar to human milk, so that if the right human breast cannot be provided, then in a pinch, breastfeeding could also be provided by keeping a donkey and a she-donkey and in this way providing the child with milk. But of course this is only something I say as a hypothesis, so that you can see how things are connected in nature.

If you now compare milk, for example, with the chicken egg as food, you will find that the chicken egg contains about 14 percent protein, which is actually four times more than what milk contains. If we begin to give the child food containing more albumen, then the child must already have the power of dissolving. It must already be able to dissolve.

You can see from this how necessary it is for the child to receive liquid nourishment. But what kind of liquid nourishment? A liquid nourishment that has already passed through life and, since the child is nursed directly at the mother's breast, is still alive.

In the case of a child, it can be clearly seen that when it drinks milk and the milk passes through the mouth and oesophagus into the stomach – only then is it killed in the human body – that it can then be revitalized in the intestines. So we see directly from the child that the life must first be killed. And because the life is still little changed, the child needs less strength to revive when it drinks milk than when it enjoys something else. So you see how close man is to life.

But it shows something else as well. If you really think about it, what do you actually come to? Start thinking correctly about this point right now. You see, if we say to ourselves: The child must therefore take in living food that it can kill and revive itself, and we then say: the human being consists for the most part of fluid – may we then say that the human being consists of water, of the water that we find outside in nature, in inanimate nature? Then this water, which we find in inanimate nature, should be able to work in the child in the same way as it works in the adult, who has already accumulated more vital forces!

From this, however, you can see that the water we carry in us as our almost 90 percent water is not ordinary, lifeless water, but that it is revitalized water. So there is something else that a person carries within them: they carry revitalized water. And this revitalized water is the same water that we have out there in inanimate nature, permeated with what permeates the whole world as life, only asserting itself just as little in inanimate water as human thinking asserts itself in a dead corpse. So when you say: water – here I have water in the stream and water in the human body, you can understand this in the same way as when you say: here I have a corpse and here I have a living person; the water in the stream is the corpse of the water that is in the human body.

That is why we say: Man not only has this dead part in him, this physical part, but he also has a life body, a life body within him. This is what real thinking really gives: man has this life body within him. And how this continues to work in man, we can realize if we really observe man in connection with nature. But then we must actually visualize that we first look out into nature and then look into the human being. When we look out into nature, we find the components, the parts of which the human being consists, only that the human being processes these parts from nature in his own way.

So, to understand this, let us go to the very smallest animals. You will notice, as I talk, how I have already spoken similarly about what is in man in the same way that I now have to speak about the smallest and lowest living creatures out in nature. You see, there are very small animal creatures in the water, in the seawater. These little creatures are actually just little lumps of mucus, usually so small that they can only be seen through a strong magnifying glass. I am now drawing them enlarged (see drawing, left). These little lumps of mucus swim in the surrounding water, in the liquid.

If there were nothing else but a lump of mucus and water all around, the lump of mucus would remain at rest. But if, let's say, some small grain of some substance floats by, for example such a small one (see drawing, right) floats by, then this animal, without anything else being there, spreads its mucus so far that now this grain is inside its mucus. And of course it has to spread this mucus by pulling itself away. This makes the little lump move. So it is because this little creature, this little mucus of life, surrounds a grain with its own mucus that we see it moving at the same time. But the other grain there is now dissolved inside it. It dissolves and the little animal has eaten this grain.

Now, however, such an animal can also eat several such grains. Imagine there is this little animal, there a grain, there also a grain, there and there also a grain (see drawing), then the little animal extends its feelers here, there, and there, and where it has extended them the most, where the grain was largest, it then pulls itself along and pulls the others with it. So this little animal moves in such a way that it feeds at the same time.

Now, gentlemen, when I describe to you how these little lumps of mucus swim around in the sea and feed at the same time, you will remember how I described the so-called white blood cells in humans. They are initially exactly the same in humans. Such small animals also swim around in human blood and feed and move in this way. We come to an understanding of what is actually swimming around in human blood by looking at what is swimming around out there in the sea in the form of such small animals. We therefore carry this within us.

And now that we have remembered how we actually have, in a sense, such creatures swimming around in our blood, creatures that are spread out in nature, living in our blood on all sides, let us try to understand how our nervous system, namely our brain, is constructed. Our brain also consists of the smallest parts. If I draw these smallest parts for you, you will see that they also represent a kind of lumpy, thick mucus. Rays emanate from this mucus (see drawing), which consist of the same substance as the mucus. You see, there is a cell, as it is called, from the brain. It has a neighboring cell. It stretches out its little feet or arms here, and touches the others there. There is a third such cell; it stretches out its little feet here, touches there. They can become very long. Some go almost through half the body. It borders on another cell. When we look at our brain through the microscope, it appears to consist of such dots, where the mucus is more concentrated. And then thick tree branches extend from here; they repeatedly enter into one another. If you would imagine a dense forest with thick treetops that have widely spreading branches that would touch one another, you would have an idea of what the brain looks like under the microscope, under the magnifying glass.

But, gentlemen, you can say now: So he has described these white blood cells that live in the blood. And what is described as the brain is quite similar; lots of little bodies settle there that are in the blood. If I could take all the white blood corpuscles out of a person without killing him, and then put them into the skullcap, after I had first taken out his brain, then I would have made a brain out of his white blood corpuscles.

But the strange thing is that before we could make a brain out of his white blood cells, these white blood cells would have to die halfway. That is the difference between the white blood cells and the brain cells. The white blood cells are full of life. They are always moving around each other in the human blood. I told you that they surge like blood through the veins. That's where they come out. As I explained, they become gourmets and go up to the body's surface. They crawl all over the body.

But if you look at the brain, these cells, these corpuscles, remain in place. They are at rest. They only stretch out their branches and always touch the next one. So the ones that are in the body and are in full motion, they come to rest in the brain and are indeed half dead.

Imagine this little animal crawling around in the sea, eating one time too many. If it eats too much, then the story goes like this: Then it stretches out its arm, its branch, takes this and that, and has eaten too much. It cannot tolerate this; now it splits in two, diverges, and we have two instead of one. It has multiplied. Our white blood cells also have this ability to multiply. Some always die and others are created by multiplication.

In this way, the brain cells that I have drawn for you cannot multiply – our white blood cells within us are fully independent and alive. The brain cells that interlock in this way cannot multiply; two brain cells will never develop from one brain cell. When a person gets a bigger brain, when the brain grows, cells from the rest of the body must always migrate into the brain. The cells must grow into it. It is not that this ever happens in the brain, that the brain cells multiply; they just accumulate. And as we grow, new cells must always migrate in from the rest of the body so that when we are adults, we have a brain that is large enough.

And from the fact that these brain cells cannot reproduce, you can see that they are half dead. They are always dying, these brain cells, always, always dying. If we really look at this properly, we see that human beings have a wonderful contrast: in their blood they carry cells full of vitality in the white blood cells, which want to live forever, and in their brain they carry cells that actually want to die forever, that are always on the path to dying. This is also true: through his brain, man is always on the path to dying; the brain is actually always in danger of dying.

Now, gentlemen, you will have heard, or perhaps experienced yourself – it is always unpleasant when you experience it yourself – that people can also faint. When people faint, they enter into a state as if they were about to fall. They lose consciousness.

What actually happens in a person when they lose consciousness in this way? You will also know that, for example, people who are quite pale, such as girls who are anemic, are most likely to faint. Why? Well, they faint because they have too many white blood cells in relation to the red blood cells. A person must have a very precise ratio, as I have indicated, between white blood cells and red blood cells in order to be consciously aware in the right way. So what does it mean when we become unconscious? For example, when we faint, but also when we sleep, we become unconscious. This means that the activity of the white blood cells is much too active, much too strong. When the white blood corpuscles are too active, when a person has too much life in him, then he loses consciousness. So it is very good that a person has cells in his head that constantly want to die; because if these white blood corpuscles in the brain were still alive, then we would not be able to have any consciousness at all, then we would always be sleeping beings. We would always be sleeping.

And so you may ask: why do plants sleep all the time? — Plants sleep all the time simply because they do not have such living beings, because they actually have no blood at all, because they do not have this life that exists in our inner being as an independent life.

If we want to compare our brain with something in nature outside, we again have to compare our brain only with plants. The brain, which basically continually undermines our own life, and in doing so creates consciousness. So we get a completely contradictory concept for the brain. It is contradictory: the plant does not get consciousness, the human being gets consciousness. This is something that we still have to explain through long deliberation, and we now want to set out to be able to explain it.

We become unconscious every night when we sleep. So something must be going on in our body that we now have to learn to understand. What is going on in our body then? Yes, you see, gentlemen, if everything in our body were the same when we are sleeping as when we are awake, we would not sleep. When we sleep, our brain cells begin to live a little more than they do when we are awake. So they become more similar to the cells that have their own life in us. So you can imagine: When we are awake, these brain cells are very quiet; but when we sleep, these brain cells cannot move very far from their location because they are already localized, because they are held in place from the outside; they cannot move around very well, they cannot swim around very well because they would immediately bump into something else, but they acquire a kind of will to move. The brain becomes restless internally. This is how we enter into an unconscious state, because the brain is inwardly restless.

Now we have to ask: where does this thinking actually come from in us humans? That is, how is it that we can absorb forces from the whole wide universe into ourselves? With our organs of nutrition, we can only absorb earthly forces with the substances. With our respiratory organs, we can only absorb air, namely with oxygen. In order to absorb all the forces from the wide world with our head, it is necessary that it is very quiet inside, that the brain is completely calm. But when we sleep, the brain begins to become active; then we absorb fewer of these forces that are out there in the wide universe, and we become unconscious.

But now the story is like this: Imagine that work is being done in two places; here, let's say, work is being done by five workers, and there by two workers. These are then combined, these works, and each batch continues to do a part of the work. But suppose it becomes necessary to stop work for a bit because too many parts of one kind have been made and not enough of the other. What do we do then? We ask one of the five laborers to go over to the two laborers. Now we have three workers there and four of the five here. We transfer the work from one side to the other if we do not want to increase anything. Man has only a very limited amount of strength. He has to distribute it. So when the brain becomes more active during sleep at night, when it works more, that strength has to be drawn from the rest of the body. This work has to be taken from there. Now, where is it taken from? Yes, you see, it is taken from some of the white blood cells. Some of the white blood cells begin to live less during the night than during the day. The brain lives more. Some of the white blood cells live less. That is the compensation.

But now I have told you: the fact that the brain slows down a bit and becomes calm is how a person begins to think. So when these white blood cells become calm at night, then the person should begin to think wherever the white blood cells become calm. He should begin to think with his body.

Now let us ask ourselves: Does a person perhaps think with his body at night? — That is a ticklish question, isn't it, whether a person perhaps thinks with his body at night! Well, he knows nothing about it. For the time being he can only say that he knows nothing about it. But the fact that I know nothing about something is no proof that it is not there. Otherwise, everything that people have not yet seen would have to be denied. Just because I don't know something, that is no proof that it is not there. The human body could indeed think at night, and one simply knows nothing about it and therefore believes that it does not think.

Now we have to examine whether man perhaps has signs that while he thinks with his head during the day, at night he begins to think with his liver and his stomach and his other organs, and perhaps even with his intestines.

We have certain indications of this. Every person has indications that this is the case. Because just imagine where it comes from, that something is there and yet we know nothing about it. Imagine I am standing there, talking to you, and I am turning my attention to you, that is, I am not seeing what is behind me.

Strange things can happen. For example, I may be accustomed to sitting down here on the chair from time to time while I am talking. Now I turn my attention to you, and during that time someone takes the chair away from me. I didn't see the whole thing, but it happened anyway, and I notice the consequences when I want to sit down now.

You see, the thing is that one must not judge merely according to what one usually knows, but one must judge according to what one might be able to know in a completely indirect way. If I had looked around quickly, I probably wouldn't have settled on the ground. If I had looked around, I would have prevented it.

Now let us take a look at human thinking in the body. You see, natural scientists like to talk about the limits of human knowledge. What do they actually mean by that? When natural scientists talk about the limits of knowledge, they mean that what they have not yet seen – whether through a microscope or a telescope or at all – is not there. But with knowledge, people just keep settling on the ground, because not seeing something is no proof that it is not there. That is the case.

Now, that which I am to become aware of must not only be conceived by me, but I must also observe the conceived. Thinking could be a process that always happens, sometimes in the head, sometimes in the whole body. But when I am awake, I have my eyes open. The eyes not only see outwards, but the eyes also perceive inwards. Likewise, when I taste something, I not only taste what is on the outside, but I also perceive inside, for example, if, let's say, I am sick all over, and what tastes pleasant to someone else becomes disgusting to me. So the inside always determines. The inner perception must also be there.

Now imagine we wake up quite normally. Our brain cells slowly calm down. They come to rest very slowly, and the thing is that I gradually learn to use my senses, that is, I use my senses again. The waking up process follows the cycle of life quite appropriately. That can be the one case.

But the other case can also be that I calm my brain cells too quickly due to some circumstance. I calm them down much too quickly. Now something else happens when I calm them down too quickly. Let's say that if one of the five workers directs the movement, as I said, he takes the fifth one away and puts him over there. If one of them directs it, it may go very smoothly. But suppose one of them has to take it away from one person and put it back with another, then all sorts of trouble can arise, especially if the two of them start arguing about whether it is right or not. If the brain cells in my brain now start to calm down too quickly, then the white blood cells that have now come to rest during sleep will not be able to get moving again so quickly. And it will happen that while I am already calm in my brain, while I have already calmed all my movement in my brain that was there during sleep, the white blood cells down there in the blood will not want to get up yet. They will still want to persist in their calm. They don't want to get up.

It would be truly wonderful if we could perceive these still-lazy blood cells – I am speaking only figuratively, of course – that still want to remain in bed. If we could, they would look at each other just as the quiet brain cells look at each other, and we would perceive the most wonderful thoughts. Just at the moment when we wake up too quickly, we would perceive the most wonderful thoughts. You can easily understand that, gentlemen, if you understand the whole story of the connection between man and nature. If you were to wake up quickly, if nothing else were to prevent it, you would be able to perceive the most wonderful thoughts in your body. But you can't. Why is that not possible? Well, you see, between these lazy, still-sleeping white blood corpuscles, and between that with which we perceive them, which we can only do with our heads, that is where all the breathing is going on. The red blood corpuscles are in there. Breathing is going on, and we have to look at this thought process that is going on in us through the whole breathing process.

Imagine I wake up; this calms my brain. Down there (it is drawn), the white blood cells are somewhere in the blood. I would also perceive them as calm, and I would see the most beautiful thoughts in there. Yes, but now in between there is the whole breathing process. It is just as if I want to look at something and I look at it through cloudy glass; then I see it indistinctly, everything becomes blurred. This breathing process is like cloudy glass. All the thinking that is down there in the body becomes blurred to me. And what arises from it? Dreams. Dreams arise from it: indistinct thoughts that I perceive when the brain activity in my body calms down too quickly.

And again when falling asleep, if I have an irregularity, so if the brain comes into activity too slowly when falling asleep, then the story happens in such a way that I, due to the fact that the brain comes into activity too slowly, still has the ability to perceive something – that I can observe the thinking that already begins down there during sleep, when falling asleep. And so it happens that a person perceives in dreams what actually remains unobserved by him throughout the night, when he is waking up and falling asleep.

We actually only perceive dreams at the moment of waking up. You can very easily visualize the fact that we only perceive dreams at the moment of waking up by taking a good look at a dream. Suppose I am sleeping and there is a chair next to my bed. Now I can dream the following: I am a student and meet another student somewhere, to whom I say some rude word. The other student has to react to it – it's called a 'comment' – and then he has to react to this rude word, and it comes to the point that he challenges me. Sometimes it can be something very trivial, that's how students have to challenge each other.

Now, everything is dreamt: the seconds are chosen, you go out into the forest in a dream, and you have arrived outside; you start shooting. The first one shoots. I still hear the shot in my dream, but I wake up and have just knocked over the chair with my arm next to the bed. That was the shot!

Yes, gentlemen, if I had not pushed the chair over, I would not have had the dream at all, the dream would not have existed! The fact that the dream became precisely such an image only happened at the moment of waking up, because the pushed-over chair was what woke me up in the first place. So in this single moment of waking up, the image arose, what is going on in me became unclear. From this you can see that what is pictorial in the dream is only formed in the single moment in which I wake up, just as what is pictorial in the dream must be formed in the single moment of falling asleep.

But if such images form, and if I can perceive something with such images, then thoughts must be there for it. What do we come to then? We come to understand sleeping and waking a little. So let's ask ourselves: What is it like to sleep? When we sleep, our brain is more active than when we are awake; when we are awake, our brain calms down. Yes, gentlemen, if we could say that our brain becomes more active when we are awake, then, you see, we could be materialists, because then the physical activity of the brain would mean thinking. But if we are reasonable people, we cannot say that the brain is more active when we are awake than when we are sleeping. It must just calm down when we are awake.

So physical activity cannot give us thought. If physical activity gave us thought, that thought would have to consist in stronger physical activity than non-thought. But non-thought consists in stronger physical activity. So you can say: I have lungs; the lungs would be lazy if the external oxygen did not come over them and set them in motion. But my brain becomes lazy during the day; so something external must come for the brain that sets it in motion. And so we have to recognize that in the world — just as oxygen sets the lungs in motion or sets them in action — during the day the brain is brought to thinking by something that is not in the body itself, that does not belong to the body itself.

We must therefore say to ourselves: If we do real science, we are led to assume something incorporeal, something soul-like. We see that it is there. We see it, so to speak, flying in when we wake up, because what is thinking cannot come out of the body. If it came out of the body, one would think better at night. We would have to lie down and fall asleep, and then thinking would arise in our brain. But we don't. So we see, as it were, what our soul and spiritual being flies in.

So that one can say: Science has indeed made great strides in recent times, but it has only come to know that which is not actually suited to life and to thinking, while it has not grasped life itself, and has grasped thinking even less. And so, if you really do natural science, you are led, not by superstition, but precisely by this real natural science, to say: just as there must be oxygen for breathing, so there must be something spiritual for thinking.

More about this next time, because it cannot be decided so easily. There will still be all kinds of counterforces in many of you against what I have said. But it must be said that anyone who does not talk like this simply does not understand the whole story in man. So it is not a matter of spreading superstition, but of creating complete clarity. That is what it is about.

Question: A listener has brought stones back from his vacation. The question is whether stones also have life or have once had life and how they came into being.

Dr. Steiner: I may be able to take up these stones again at a later date; but perhaps it is also possible that I can still incorporate it into our present consideration.

Look, gentlemen, I will say the following: We have seen that there is actually a kind of killing of life within us, in the human being. We have seen that we have these little creatures crawling around in our blood, the white blood corpuscles, which creep through the blood vessels to our skin. I told you that it is a special delicacy for these little creatures when they come to the surface, whereas they are otherwise only inside the human body. This is, so to speak, the spice of life for them. So these are the living cells that crawl around. In contrast to this, I told you: the cells in the nervous system, namely those in the brain, are actually cells that are continually being killed, continually entering into the dead. The cells in the brain are such that they actually only begin to be somewhat more alive when you are sleeping. They start to be a little more alive. They cannot move away from their place because they are very cramped among the others; they cannot move like the white blood cells, but they start to live a little during the night while you sleep. And that is why, when these cells get a little more life and willpower from the body, the white blood cells have to stay a little calmer. And that is why, as I have told you, thoughts actually arise in the whole body.

Now let us pose the question: Where do thoughts actually come from? — Not true, the people who just want to think materialistically, that is, comfortably, they say: Well, thoughts just arise in the brain or in the nervous system of the human being. Thoughts grow there like cabbages in the field. — But if only people would think it through — “like cabbages in the field”! Cabbages don't grow in the field unless they are planted. So, things have to be planted first, so to speak. For my part, everyone can see a kind of field in the human brain for thoughts. But just imagine: if you have a beautiful field of cabbages, and the person who has always cultivated it were to move away and no one were to be found to continue the work, then no cabbage would ever grow in that field.

So it must be said: Just when one thinks that thoughts come out of the brain, one must first ask: Where do they come from? Well, just as the cabbage comes out of the field! - So the question must first be properly understood. And then we have to ask ourselves the following: What you see here has actually come into being out there in nature. I would like to explain to you how what comes into being out there in nature. I have said: We find everything in man when we understand everything in man's surroundings. When we looked at the plants and so on, we understood many things in man. Now we have this stone. Let's take a good look at this rock. You see, it is a very soft rock underneath and behind and above. You can scrape it off with a knife. The outer part, what is around it, is just a bit denser earth. So it is like this – I just want to draw the bottom here –: there is this soft rock at the bottom, and just as if they were growing out of it, there are all kinds of crystals on this soft rock, crystals that look like they are growing out of it. I would have to draw many, wouldn't I, but this is enough. There are such small crystals; they are down there, as if they had grown out, but they are terribly hard. You can't scrape them off with a knife; the knife doesn't affect them; at most, if you can get at one, you can cut it off as a whole, but you can't scratch into it. So these are hard crystals that are embedded there.

Now let us ask ourselves: How do such crystals get into the softer soil, which is only a little compacted? Such crystals are bodies that are very beautifully designed; they have such a longitudinal shape, and at the top they have a small roof on them. There would also be a roof at the bottom if it did not extend into the earth. If the earth were soft enough, this would be the case with every crystal; but it perishes when it enters the earth.

Where do these crystals come from? When plants grow, carbonic acid must be outside the plants. Otherwise the plants cannot grow. The same substance that we exhale must reach the plants. And then, when the carbonic acid reaches the plants, the plants absorb this carbonic acid, retain the carbon that is in the carbonic acid, and they exhale the oxygen. That is the difference between humans and plants. Humans inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide; we retain the oxygen while we release the carbon dioxide. The plant is connected to the earth. When the plant dies, this carbon returns to the soil and becomes the black coal that we dig out of the earth after centuries.

But there are also other substances. There is a substance that is quite similar to coal in a certain respect, but is different in other ways. This is silica. Suppose you have a soil that is rich in silica, with a lot of silica in it. Then, because oxygen is always present, oxygen takes effect. There is oxygen above it now. This oxygen does not initially affect the silica. But after some time, in the course of the development of the earth, you suddenly find that the oxygen has combined with the pebble. And just as we produce carbon dioxide when we breathe out, when the pebble from the earth properly combines with the oxygen, quartz, silicic acid is formed; crystals like these are formed. It only needs the pebble to combine with oxygen from the earth, and crystals such as those that are there are formed.

But oxygen does not have the power to combine with silica on its own. You can have as much silica as you like, and oxygen on top of it, it would not all form. Why do these beautiful shapes form? Yes, they form precisely because forces are at work in the universe from all sides and the earth is constantly in connection with the whole universe. Forces are constantly coming in from all sides, and these forces bring oxygen into the pebble, and that is how such crystals are formed. So all these crystals are formed because the earth is influenced by all the other stars. We can therefore say that these crystals are actually formed from the world.

Now, however, you can say the following: What are you telling us? The rock that the pea-flour has given us proves the opposite! — The rock is actually like this: there is loose earth below (see drawing), above it is more loose earth, and behind it is more loose earth. It is completely surrounded by loose earth, and these crystal forms here, they are not just growing upwards from below, as I have described them now, but you could say that they are already growing upwards if only they were there from below. But these are now those that grow towards us from above. Now you might say: But that cannot be explained from the universe, because then one would have to assume that the same forces come from the interior of the earth, which would then have to come from the universe if one were to explain them only from bottom to top.

Yes, you see, that is an apparent contradiction. There must be something behind it. Now I will tell you what is behind it.

Such rocks do not form on the open ground; they form in the mountains. And if it is on the open ground, it is also the case that there are layers of earth above and below, just as there are in the mountains. But let's assume we get it out of the mountains. Imagine we have such a mountain range, and I want to draw the slope of the mountain range. If you now go up there (see drawing), you go up like this, and of course you have to go past there, the path has to go there, the earth or the rock can overhang a little; you will find overhanging earth everywhere if you go into the mountains. Now imagine that a very, very long time ago, what I have drawn here in brown would have been there, would have been deposited there, and that would have been deposited there (see drawing). According to my explanation, crystals would have formed here through the forces of the universe, as I have explained, and therefore also such crystals. Crystals would have grown down there, as it were, through the forces of the universe, and up there too.

Then it later happened that what was up there fell down and covered it. So you see: When the upper falls down, it falls in such a way that it is then at the top (see drawing), and at the bottom are the crystals that originally went up, and because of the fall they fell over them so that they were held by those that were at the bottom and were thus superimposed on each other. Those who fell down lay on top of those below, so that what was at the top came to be at the bottom.

This is how it was in the mountains all the time. Those who study will find that landslides like this have occurred continuously in the mountains, where the upper layer has been laid on top of the lower layer. That is precisely what is interesting about studying mountains. When you walk in the plains, you get the feeling that one layer has been laid on top of the other throughout history, because it has only happened in the last few millennia. We could never say that about the Alps. The Alps were also formed in this way a long time ago; but then the higher parts plunged over the lower parts, and the Alps are completely jumbled layers of earth.

That is why it is so difficult to study the Alps, because you have to consider everywhere whether what is above has also originated in this way. Often it did not come about that way, but rather that there was a layer down there, a layer up there, and then something was pushed up, knocking over what was below; and it covered what was below. And so these folds, as they are called, have formed in the mountains over the course of millennia and millennia, bringing about such things. So that one must first explain these things by the fact that the mountains have thrown themselves over each other again. So one would have to say: the lower part was formed on such a slope (see drawing), the upper part on such a slope, and behind it there was of course the mountain range, so that it fell over it; it was laid over it. So that one can only explain such a thing, where crystals face each other from below and from above, if one knows that on Earth, over the course of millennia, everything has gradually been mixed up.

So in the whole inanimate realm we always have forces that come from the universe and that also work in us in such a way that we actually have to do something in us to prevent these forces from disturbing us.

You see, gentlemen, the pebble that is common in the earth is also found in us. It is not too much, but we have such substances in us, from which such terribly hard stones can arise. But if such hard rocks were to arise in us, as Mr. Erbsmehl has brought here, then we would be in a bad way! If, for example, a child who already has pebbles inside could not help it and such crystals, even if they were very small, would form everywhere (they would be tiny after all), that would be a very bad thing! They sometimes form during an illness.

Sugar can also form crystals, as you know. If you look at rock sugar, it also consists of crystals that are layered on top of each other. Now, we have a lot of sugar in us. Not everyone on earth eats the same amount of sugar. That varies. For example, people in Russia eat very little sugar, while in England they eat a lot of sugar – on average, of course. But then people also differ again. The Russian character is different from the English character. The Russians are very different people from the English. This is largely due to the fact that the Russians get little sugar in their food. The English eat things that contain a lot of sugar, foods that contain a lot of sugar.

This is connected with what I have already said. The forces of the universe are at work in everything. So man has a lot of sugar in him. Sugar always wants to become crystal. What can we do to prevent it from becoming crystal?

You see, I told you that there is a lot of water in us, living water: that dissolves the sugar. That would be a nice story if the water didn't keep dissolving the sugar! Such small crystals would form, like rock candy crystals, and we would have such small stuffy crystals inside us if the sugar were not constantly being dissolved. We humans need sugar in our food, but we can only use it if we dissolve it continuously. We have to have it. Why do we have to have it? Because we have to do this, to dissolve it! We don't live on it alone, but it is part of our life that we dissolve the sugar. So we have to get it into us.

But if we now have too little strength to dissolve this sugar, then these very small crystals form, and then they leave with the urine. And that's when diabetes comes. And that is the explanation for why people become diabetic: they have too little strength to dissolve the sugar they eat. They have to get sugar, but if they have too little strength to dissolve the sugar, diabetes occurs. The sugar must not get so far that it comes off in small crystals, but it must be dissolved. Man must have the strength to dissolve the sugar. That is his life.

If you think about something like that, you can also see from it that we not only have to have the strength to dissolve the sugar, but we also have to have the strength to continually dissolve these small crystals that always want to form in us as quartz crystals – there are few of them, but they want to form, these quartz crystals. They must not be allowed to form in us. If they were to form in a child, the child would come and say: It's terrible, it stings me everywhere! It stings everywhere!

What has happened if it stings the child everywhere? Yes, you see, there are the small pebble crystals that have arisen in the nerves, have not been resolved. They have remained lying. You must not imagine that these are huge masses. There are very few, tiny ones that you can not even find easily with a microscope; much smaller than one ten thousandth of a millimeter. When many tiny crystals have accumulated in the nervous system, then the person gets tiny pricks everywhere that they cannot explain. It stings them everywhere. And in addition, small inflammations are caused by this happening; very small inflammations are caused. And then the person has rheumatism or gout. Gout is nothing more than such tiny crystals settling. These pains that a person has come from this. And that a person with gout gets the gouty lumps comes from the inflammation. When you push a nail into yourself, an inflammation occurs. These little skewers come from within, pushing to the surface. There are small internal inflammations, and then these inflammations form these gouty lumps.

These are all processes that can take place inside a person. But from this you can see that we must always have forces within us that, let's say, have to work against gout, otherwise we as human beings would constantly get gout. But we must not get it all the time. So there must always be something behind it that we can work against.

What does that mean? Yes, you see, it means that forces are at work from the universe. They actually do not want to form too large, but microscopically tiny crystals in us. When these forces come in and form these crystals here, they also work in us, so that we are constantly permeated by these forces, and we have to develop those forces in our inner being that constantly bring this matter into nothingness. We must continually work against these forces. We must therefore have forces within us that work against these forces. These forces of the universe also enter into us; but we work against them – and particularly strongly in the nerves. If we did not work against them, mineral substances would continually arise in the nerves.

These mineral substances must arise because, you see, there are children who remain stupid and die young. If you then dissect such children who have remained stupid, you often find that they have too little of what is called cerebral sand. Everyone must have a little cerebral sand in them. This cerebral sand must arise and must be dissolved again and again.

But if we have too little strength to dissolve it, too much can remain. But, gentlemen, if you get the food into your blood, the sand will continually settle in your brain, because that is what you are constantly doing in your brain. It is continually being deposited. And the cerebral sand that is in there (it is drawn) is exposed to the forces of the universe just as much as what is outside in nature, so that tiny crystals are constantly trying to form in there. But they must not form. If we don't have cerebral sand, we become stupid. If the crystals were to form, we would constantly faint because we would effectively suffer from cerebral rheumatism or cerebral gout. Because otherwise the body just hurts; but if the brain contains these crystals, there is nothing you can do but faint. So you need brain sand, but you have to keep dissolving it. It is a continuous process of brain sand being deposited, dissolved, deposited, dissolved.

If too much is deposited, it can sometimes also damage the walls of the blood vessels in the brain. Then the blood comes out. Then there is the stroke, not just the fainting, but the stroke, the cerebral hemorrhage.

So when you study the disease process, you can see what a person actually has inside them. Because in illness, everything in us that is in a healthy person is just too strong. Being sick means nothing more than that we develop something too strongly.

This also happens in life, gentlemen. You have already seen that when a small child is there and you touch its cheek gently with your hand, it is a caress, you stroke it. And you can also make the same touch with your hand too strong; then it is no longer a caress, then it is a slap.

Well, you see, that's the way it is in the world. Things that can be a caress on one side can be a slap in the face on the other. And so in life, what has to be done in the brain, this gentle work in the brain sand, becomes a slap in the face when it becomes too strong, when the power in us is too weak, so that we cannot dissolve this mineral that we have within us. Then we would constantly faint or if it becomes too strong, when these crystals keep piercing our blood vessels, we would have a stroke. So these crystals must be continually dissolved by us. This thing that I have now told you is constantly going on in you.

I will now tell you something else. Let us make things very clear. Suppose you have the human being here – I will draw it very schematically – here is his brain, here is his eye, and here I will draw something that you are somehow looking at, so let us say there is a plant in front of your eye for the sake of argument.

Now turn your attention to this plant. See, when you turn your attention to this plant – you can only do this, of course, when it is daylight all around – and the plant is illuminated by the sun's rays, then it is bright, and you receive the light effect in your eye. But through the optic nerve, which goes backwards from the eye, what is the light effect goes into your brain. So when you look at a plant, you are directed towards the plant through your eye, and from the plant the light effect goes through your eye into your brain.

This secretion, you have to imagine it as a completely human process. You will have noticed that you not only sweat when you exert yourself, but also when, for example, you are terribly afraid of something. You do not exactly secrete brain sand, but other salts, and with that water through your skin. That is secretion. But looking means constantly secreting brain sand. When someone looks very intently at something, brain sand is constantly being secreted. And that is where we have to dissolve this brain sand. Because if we did not dissolve this brain sand again, then a tiny little flower would arise in us from the brain sand in the brain! To look at the flower, that actually means that a very small, tiny flower forms in us from the brain sand, which is then only directed from top to bottom, just as the little picture in the eye is also directed from top to bottom. That is the difference, gentlemen.

It is like this: when we look at a chair – it doesn't even have to be a flower – a little bit of brain sand forms in there through the act of looking, and if we were now to just abandon ourselves to this looking, we would get a very small – much smaller than it can be in the microscope – a tiny little image made of silica sand of this chair. And if I were to stand in such a room, and I had developed a certain power of observation as a human being, the whole room would be reversed in me, only with the floor at the top, as an image composed of tiny pebbles. It is quite colossal how we are constantly building in ourselves. Only we are not the kind of people to let it happen. Without our consciously doing so, we dissolve the whole thing again. In this respect, we are very peculiarly constituted as human beings. We look at the world. The world constantly wants to form such shapes in us that are like the world, only reversed. And if we were not there, if we did not observe, then — especially at night when we sleep, when we do not develop the strength to dissolve from within — such formations would continually form through that which is in the universe. These formations also mainly form when the earth is not illuminated by the sun, by light, but rather they are formed by forces that come from much further away. But we are always exposed to these forces. So that we can say: When we sleep, all kinds of mineral, inanimate forms want to form in us continuously through the universe, and when we look at them, forms want to form in us that are just like our surroundings. When we sleep, we recreate the universe. In the universe, everything is arranged in a crystalline way. What we see there (in the crystals) is so because the forces in the universe are arranged just like the crystals. Some go this way, the others go that way, so that the crystals are formed from the whole universe. But this is what we want to happen in us. And when we perceive, when we look at our immediate surroundings, what is in our immediate surroundings wants to form itself. We must constantly prevent this from becoming solid, must constantly dissolve it.

Now, gentlemen, a peculiar process is taking place here. Imagine that the flower in there wants to form an inanimate image of itself out of stone. This must not be allowed to happen, otherwise we would not know the flower, but would get a headache. So that must first be dissolved.

I will make this process, which is constantly going on, even more clear to you by saying the following. Suppose you had a pot of lukewarm water here and someone blindfolded you, and after you were blindfolded, they brought some object that could be dissolved in this lukewarm water. You were to reach into this lukewarm water with your hand. You cannot see the object because you are blindfolded. But the other person can now ask you: “Reach into the water with your hand; can you feel something in there?” — “Yes, the lukewarm water.” — “Can you feel anything else in there?” — “Yes, it is cold around the fingers.

Where can that come from? The other person has put an object into the water that is dissolving! And this dissolution causes the lukewarm water around the fingers to become colder. He feels this dissolution around his fingers and can say: Something is dissolving in there.

But this is the case all the time when we have formed the object in here and have to dissolve it again. We feel the dissolution and then, because we feel the dissolution, we say: Yes, the object is out there, because it formed an image for us, and we dissolved the image. Because we have dissolved it, we know what the object looks like. Thus the thought of the object comes to us, because we must first dissolve the image of the object. Thus the thought comes. We would faint if we only had the image. But if we are strong enough to dissolve the image, then we know about it. So that is the difference between fainting when we see something or having knowledge of it.

So, consider someone who is, say, a little sickly, and there is a terrible thunder – that can happen. From this thunder, even if not through the eye, but through the ear, brain sand is deposited in him, an image is formed. He cannot dissolve this quickly enough. He may faint, lose consciousness. If he is healthy, he does not lose consciousness, which means that he has dissolved his brain sand quickly enough. So fainting means not dissolving the brain sand quickly enough. Not fainting means dissolving the brain sand quickly enough. We must always, by looking at the things around us, dissolve the brain sand quickly enough.

This brings us to the question of man's relationship to the forces in the whole universe. Last time I told you: if man's relationship to the forces in the universe is such that the brain cells in his brain are constantly dying, then they are indeed totally inanimate, and he has to handle them. That is his soul-spiritual with which he handles them. Now we even find the force that is constantly dissolving the brain cells. The cerebral sand is constantly killing the cells. The fact that cerebral sand is mixed in is what keeps killing the cells. And we have to work against that. And that, you see, is the reason why we are human: so that we can work against the cerebral sand in a certain way.

This is not the case with animals in the same way. An animal cannot work against the brain sand as much as we humans can. That is why animals do not have a head like ours, except for the higher animals. We have a head that can dissolve everything that constantly enters us. This dissolving of what comes into us is what enables a person to feel that he is saying 'I'. This is the strongest dissolution of the cerebral sand when we say 'I'. — Then we imbue our speech with consciousness. So the cerebral sand dissolves, all the nerve sand dissolves. This is not the case with animals. That is why it makes an animal scream or something similar, but not real speech. That is why no animal has the ability to feel itself, to say 'I' to itself like a human being, because a human being dissolves the brain sand to a much greater extent.

So that we can say: We are not only working against what is on earth, but we are also working against the forces of the universe. The forces of the universe would crystallize us inwardly. We would become a mountain range inside with all those layers of crystals. We are working against that inwardly. We are constantly dissolving that. We are constantly working against the forces of the universe with the dissolving forces.

And so we not only dissolve silicic acid – because that is silicic acid, which these crystals form here – we dissolve everything possible; we dissolve the components that sugar has and so on.

You can literally follow these stories. Suppose a person knows nothing at all about it properly, because such things happen like an instinct in man, but he still feels something vague in himself. Imagine, the person feels: Oh, I can't really think properly, I can't really hold my thoughts together.

A journalist who writes an article every day can very easily get into this mood. Yes, gentlemen, writing an article every day means dissolving an awful lot of brain sand! It's a really disgusting business, writing an article every day, because it means dissolving an awful lot of brain sand. And so you start, when you're supposed to be writing the article – at least that's how it used to be – nibbling on the back of the pen shaft. This is something that journalists in particular have been said to do, that they bite the back of their pen stems to draw out the last of their strength. It's true, when you bite something, you draw the last of your strength from your whole body, to have it in your head, to conquer this brain sand. You have to dissolve a lot of brain sand.

All this happens so instinctively. Of course, the journalist does not say to himself: I will bite my pen handle to get thoughts. — That can go on. In this instinct, he then goes to the coffee house and drinks black coffee. They do not think anything of it, the journalists, because they know nothing about these processes. But if they have now drunk black coffee – by Jove, there goes the story, they can write again when they have drunk black coffee.

Where does this come from? It comes from the fact that in this case the so-called caffeine is absorbed with the black coffee. This is a toxic substance that contains a lot of nitrogen. Nitrogen is in the air. But we can get it back in again. With breathing, we always get a certain amount of oxygen and nitrogen. Now, the person who has to dissolve the brain sand needs a force that lies particularly in the nitrogen to dissolve the brain sand. We draw this force from the nitrogen to dissolve the brain sand.

That is why we are more exposed to nitrogen at night when we sleep than when we are awake, and we said that by breathing in more oxygen we live much faster; if we breathe in more nitrogen, we would live much more slowly and would therefore be around for longer. We could dissolve more.

The journalist who drinks coffee unconsciously relies on this nitrogen, which he gets from coffee, and through this nitrogen, which he gets from the caffeine, he is able to create more brain sand and then also be able to dissolve more. Then he no longer needs to nibble on the quill but can write with the feather because his thoughts are connecting more and more again.

So you see how the human ego works. The human ego conveys, because you get nitrogen-rich food into the stomach, caffeine conveys this nitrogen into the brain, and this facilitates the dissolution of the cerebral sand, and we are thus able to connect one thought to another.

Some people, on the other hand, have the peculiarity that their thoughts stick together too strongly, that they cannot get away from their thoughts. They are so predisposed that they are actually always working on their brain sand. Yes, they do well when they do the opposite process. While one person's thoughts are held together by the fact that he can develop some coherent train of thought, the other person has to help himself with caffeine, with coffee. But if you don't want to hold your thoughts together too tightly, but rather let them shine and sparkle, if, as they say, you want to throw thoughts at people, which looks very witty, then you drink tea. This has the opposite effect. It scatters the thoughts. And it supports another dissolution of the cerebral cortex.

So that this story that goes on in the human being is actually an extremely interesting and complicated one. Each food works in a different way, and we must always add the opposite to what actually wants to arise. We have to dissolve it again. This is actually now our highest spiritual, through which we are constantly actually dissolving our human being internally.

And you see, when a person eats in a certain way, in that for a while they get too little of food that contains enough nitrogen, then what happens is precisely what makes them so sleepy, and one of the gentlemen also asked me about that.

So this is due to the fact that we do not get enough nitrogen with our food. And that is why, in such a case, when we become too sleepy, we must try to take in more nitrogen-rich food. This can, of course, be done in a variety of ways. But it happens especially when we try to take in, say, cheese or egg white, that is, eggs. Then the nitrogen in us is repeatedly replenished. So we have to work in the human being so that he is able to work with that which is his I in this matter.

I said to you at the beginning today: the field can be there, cabbages can grow on it; but they will not grow if the person who cultivates the cabbages is not there. But the field must also be properly prepared. So our brain must contain the necessary substances so that our I can work inside it. But this I is connected with the whole wide range of forces in the universe that want something different. These cosmic forces constantly strive to turn us into hard stones, and we must dissolve again and again. If we could not dissolve, we would not be able to think, we would not come to self-awareness. It is in this dissolution that what we call our self-awareness exists.

You see, gentlemen, these questions must first be answered sensibly if we are to go further in a scientific way to a world view, if we want to know something about man in his relationship to the world. It is most important for the human being to grasp something that is connected with his dissolution. We see a person die, which means that he now completely dissolves as a physical human being. If we do not know that dissolution is taking place in us in every waking moment, we can never grasp what dissolution means, which takes place when a person dissolves in death.

So, first of all, you have to know, gentlemen, that we can actually dissolve ourselves continuously within ourselves through our ability to work against the forces of the world within us. The dissolution is only continually suspended because nutrition provides us with the substances through which we dissolve. But when man has become so that he can no longer dissolve the substances he has within him, then he dissolves himself. Then man becomes a corpse; then he dissolves himself.

When we meet again, we must ask: What is the case when a person dissolves himself? Today we have at least come so far as to know that there is a constant process of dissolution, and if we do not have the strength — because we have too little nitrogen in us — to dissolve the things that want to form in us from the cosmos, then our ego will first become unconscious or it will become drowsy. Being drowsy means that we cannot dissolve enough; we are overwhelmed by the power of deposition. And so, these forces increase,

But just as you are when you fall asleep, because you can wake up again, so you must not conclude the spiritual from what happens externally in the body. Just as nothing can happen to the machine without the human being being present, nothing can happen to the human being without the spirit being present. That is scientific, gentlemen; the other is unscientific. This is not something that I want to tell you; it is something that a person acquires who can really take the matter scientifically very seriously.

We will continue these reflections at the beginning of September. You will see that the matter goes far into the understanding of the human being, leading to it in all possible detours, so that you can understand the human being in everyday life. You will understand the human being quite differently when we talk further, on the basis of what we have already discussed for some time. The human being is repeatedly restored, he dissolves and so on. We will continue to look at this in the near future. Then you will already see what a human being actually looks like to a real scientist.

Now, gentlemen, since there has been a fairly long interval between our lectures, I would like to pick up where we left off last time. At the time, I mainly tried to explain how sleep and waking are connected in life. I told you that we have certain small structures in the brain, they are called cells, and I also drew you the shape. These cells have the protein body here (see drawing) and then extensions, so they are star-shaped. But these extensions are unequal. One is long, the other is short. Then there is another such cell nearby that has its processes, then a third that also has its processes, and these processes, these threads that emanate from the round cells, become entangled with each other, so that they form a network. So that the brain is actually – you can't see it with the naked eye, but only if you use strong magnifications – a network, forms a network, and the little globules are embedded in this network.

You see, these brain cells are basically half dead. That is what is most striking. Because little creatures like brain cells – when they are alive, they also move. And I have already explained the other cells to you: the white blood cells swim around like little animals. They are little animals too; they look just like them. But they swim around and eat. If there is anything in the blood that they can absorb, they absorb it, stretch out their feelers and suck it into their own body. And so they swim through and flow through our body like streams. So we have half dead and half living cells swimming around in our blood.

Now it is the case that when we are awake, these brain cells are then really almost completely dead. And only because the brain cells are dead, can we think. If the brain cells were more alive, we could not think. And one can see that. Because when we are asleep, these brain cells start to come to life a little; especially when we are not thinking, when we are sleeping, the brain cells start to come to life. And the only reason they don't move is because they are so close together, because they can't get out of each other's way. Otherwise, if they started moving, we wouldn't wake up at all.

When someone becomes imbecile, i.e. can no longer think, and then dies and one examines his brain cells, then one also finds: these brain cells in a person who has become imbecile have begun to live, to proliferate. They are softer than they are in a normal person. That is why we also speak of brain softening in people who have become feeble-minded, and the term “brain softening” is not entirely bad.

If you really get to know the living human being without prejudice, you say to yourself: the life that is in him, this physical life, cannot be caused by his thinking, because that must indeed die in the brain if the person is to think. That is precisely the point. If science were to proceed correctly today, if it were to work properly, then science would not be able to be materialistic, because then one would see from the very nature of the human body that a spiritual element in him is most vividly active precisely when the physical element dies, as in the brain. So one can prove soul and spirit in a strictly scientific way.

At night, when we sleep, the brain cells are a bit more alive. That is why we cannot think. And the white blood cells, they start to become active when we are awake. That is the difference between sleeping and waking. So we are awake when our brain cells are paralyzed, almost dead; then we can think. We are asleep and cannot think when our white blood cells are somewhat deadened and our brain cells begin to have a little life. Man must therefore actually have something of death in him in relation to his body if he is to think, that is, if he is to live spiritually.

You see, gentlemen, it is not at all surprising that today's science does not come up with such things, because today's science has developed in a very special way. If you have the opportunity to see something like I have seen in Oxford, for example – I was able to give a series of lectures in Oxford, and Oxford is one of the most important universities in England – you may notice that this Oxford university is organized quite differently from our universities here in Switzerland or in Germany or in Austria. This Oxford college, university, still has something very medieval, absolutely medieval. It has such a strong medieval character that those people who do their doctorate there, that is, who do their doctorate, get a gown and a beret. Each such university has its own cut for gowns and berets. You can distinguish an Oxford Baccalaureus or Doctor from a Cambridge one because he has a different cut in his gown and beret. But people have to wear this gown and cap on certain solemn occasions so that it is known that he has been to such and such a university and belongs to it. This is just the way it is because in England many such things from the Middle Ages have been preserved, as for example with the judges there; when they are on duty, they still have to wear the wig; it is part of the uniform. Now you see, there the medieval way of doing things has been preserved in its entirety. That is no longer the case on the continent, in Switzerland, Austria or Germany. There you don't get a gown, and even judges no longer wear a wig. I believe that is no longer the case in Switzerland either, as far as I know.

For a continental European, it is very amusing to watch from the outside. He simply says to himself: Well, there they still have the Dark Ages. The bachelors, the doctors, they walk around on the street with robes and berets and so on. But it means something quite different. You see, science is still being practiced there as it was in the Middle Ages. That is to say, what is being done there is extraordinarily congenial. Compared to a modern university, which has done away with all that – I don't want the gown to be reintroduced, don't misunderstand me – but compared to some of what is at other universities today, it is actually something extraordinarily congenial, because it has a whole. It has really preserved the Middle Ages in all its forms. It has something complete. Because in the Middle Ages one could research all sorts of things, but one was not allowed to research anything about the world that religion had taken as a monopoly. This is also something that you can still feel in Oxford. As soon as someone would open up and want to say something about the supernatural world, they would be extremely reserved.

Now, medieval science had complete freedom as long as people did not express themselves about religious life. That has been lost in our country. Nowadays, at our universities, you have to be a materialist. If you are not a materialist, you are treated like a heretic. If, let us say, it were decent to burn people at the stake, they would still be burned today, even by the universities. You can see at close hand how you are treated when it comes to introducing anything new into the fields of knowledge. The external wigs have disappeared, but the internal wigs have not disappeared at all on the continent!

It is now the case that science has developed on the continent, but this science still has the old habits, and it becomes materialistic because it has never got into the habit of dealing with the spiritual. In the Middle Ages one was not allowed to occupy oneself with the spiritual, because that was left to religion. In this way people still continue to do it today. They just occupy themselves with the body, and for that reason they learn nothing about that which is actually spiritual in man. So it is actually just a neglect on the part of science that they do not really study the things that are there.

I would like to show you this today with an example, so that you can see: anyone who really does real science today can speak scientifically of the fact that a soul or a spirit enters the body when the human being develops his body in the mother's womb, and that in death the spirit leaves the body again. This can be scientifically proven today, but you really have to know science then. You have to be able to deal with science in the appropriate way. What does science do in a particular case today? Let us say, for example, that a fifty-year-old person develops liver disease and dies of it. Well, they put him on the dissecting table, cut open his stomach and examine the liver. They find that the liver is perhaps somewhat hardened inside, and they think about where this could come from. At most, they think about what the person might have eaten that could have hardened the liver through the wrong food. But our nature is not so easy to understand that we can simply have a person, examine his liver and know what the liver is like; it is not that easy. In fact, if you just think about a person's last few years, you can't even tell from the liver why it is the way it is.

If you cut out the liver of a fifty-year-old person and find that the liver is hardened, then in most cases - not in all cases, but in most cases - the reason for this is that the person was fed the wrong kind of milk as a very young child, as an infant. What often only manifests as an illness in a person's fiftieth year has its cause in very early childhood. But why? You see, the person who can really examine the liver and who knows what the liver means in the human being can tell the following. He knows that in a very young child the liver is still fresh; it is even still developing. Now the liver is a human limb that is quite different from all other human limbs. The liver is something very special. You can see that even on the outside. If you take any organ of the human body, heart or lungs or whatever you like, you can say that this organ belongs to the whole human body. Take any organ, let's say the right lung, for example, and you can say that red blood vessels go into this right lung, and you know what that means. The red blood vessels that go in carry oxygen – you can see this passing into the body – and the blue blood vessels carry the waste products, the carbon dioxide, which has to be exhaled (see illustration).

Now, you see, every organ – stomach, heart – is set up so that red blood enters these organs and blue blood comes out. The liver is different. At first it also looks the same with the liver. If you have the liver – the liver lies under the diaphragm on the right side of the human body – you also have the matter at first that red blood veins go in and blue blood veins go out. If that were the case, the liver would be an organ like the other human organs. But in addition, a large vein containing blue blood, carbonic acid, goes into the liver, which is not the case with any other organ. So a blue vein, the so-called portal vein, goes into the liver, a mighty blue vein. It branches out everywhere inside the liver and supplies it with blue blood, blood that has become unusable for all other organ processes and that would otherwise be cleaned by breathing out the carbonic acid. We are constantly sending carbonic acid into the liver. The liver needs precisely what the other organs have to throw away.

Where does it come from? This is because the liver is a kind of inner eye. The liver really is a kind of inner eye. The liver senses – especially when it is fresh, in a child – the taste, but also the goodness of the milk that the child sucks at the mother's breast. And much later, the liver perceives everything that comes from food in the human body. The liver is an organ of perception, an eye, one might say; I could also say, a tactile organ, an organ of feeling. The liver perceives all of this.

Another human organ that perceives is the eye. But the eye perceives the external world so strongly precisely because it sits almost separately in the head. It is completely inside this bone cavity, but it is almost a separate organ. You can take it out, and it lies completely separate from the body in this bone cavity. The other senses do not lead us into the outside world as much as the eye does. When you hear, you still experience something inwardly. Music is therefore more inward than seeing. The eye is designed in such a way that it does not belong so much to the human body, but rather to the outside world.

But because blue blood goes into the liver, which otherwise throws carbon dioxide out into the outside world and is turned red again, the liver is almost as isolated from the other human body as the eye. So the liver is a sense organ. The eye perceives colors. The liver perceives whether the sauerkraut I eat is beneficial or harmful to the body, whether the milk I drink is beneficial or harmful to the body. The liver perceives this very finely, and the liver releases bile, and the bile is released – this is really the case – just as the eye releases tears. When a person becomes sad, he begins to weep. Tears do not come from the eye for no reason. The process of becoming sad is connected with the perception, with the noticing of things. And in the same way, the secreting of bile is connected with the liver perceiving whether something is harmful or beneficial to the body. It secretes more or less bile, depending on how harmful it is for the person to receive it. So we have a perception organ in the liver.

Now imagine: if the child is given unhealthy milk, the liver is constantly annoyed. And if the person is so healthy that they do not immediately develop jaundice from excessive bile secretion, there is a constant urge for bile secretion in the child. And then the liver becomes ill in the child. A person can endure a lot. He can carry around this diseased liver, acquired in infancy, for forty or forty-five years; but finally, in the fiftieth year, it breaks out: the liver has hardened.

So it really isn't the case that you just put a fifty-year-old person on the dissecting table, cut open his stomach, take out the organs, look at them and say something about them. You can't say anything. Man is not just a creature of the moment, but man is a creature that develops over a certain number of decades. And what sometimes happened fifty years ago comes to expression after fifty years. But you have to know the person completely if you want to understand that.

Now I assume that you are materialists. But if you are materialists, then consider the following. I have told you that the liver is an organ whose disease can be caused in the infant and can break out in the fiftieth year of life. Yes, gentlemen, but what about the human being? Let us assume, quite schematically, that man is a being of flesh, blood, muscles and so on. He has blood vessels in him, veins in him, nerves – all these are substances, of course, real substances. But do you believe that the substances that are in the liver, for example, of a small child who is being breastfed are still present in the fiftieth year? No, that is not the case. Take the simplest example: you cut your fingernails. If you do not cut your nails, they grow like hawk claws. You are constantly cutting a piece of material from yourself! And when you cut your hair, you are also cutting a piece of material from yourself. But you will have noticed sometimes that this does not only happen when you cut your hair and fingernails, that material goes away, but when you scratch yourself sometimes and have not washed your head for a long time, then you scratch off dandruff with it. These are pieces of skin. And if you didn't wash completely, if it weren't for sweat washing away small scales from the body, you could end up with a completely scaled body. That is, on the outside of the body, the substance is constantly falling away.

Now imagine cutting a piece of your fingernail. It grows back again. It comes from the inside out. Yes, that is how it is with the whole human body. What is on the very inside is on the outer surface after about seven years, and we can get rid of it as scales. Otherwise, only nature does that, and we don't notice how we always get rid of the fine scales. The substance, the matter of the human being, always goes from the inside out and sheds itself externally. What you have completely inside today will be on the outside after seven years and will have shed itself completely, and what you then have inside is newly formed, completely newly formed. Every seven years, the soft parts of the human substance are newly formed. When you are a small child, this even applies to certain external bony organs. That is why we only have milk teeth until about the age of seven; then they are shed and new teeth form from within. They only stay because you no longer have the strength to shed your teeth; just as you shed your fingernails, you just can't shed them. But in fact, they don't tend to last very long in modern people! Well, people can endure a lot. The teeth endure, but for how long? They become terribly damaged after some time, especially in Switzerland. It has to do with the water, the teeth becoming damaged, especially in this area.

But from this you can see that after seven years you will no longer have the substance that you have inside you today. You have expelled it and formed a new one. If it were the substance that counted, then, for example, Mr. Dollinger would not be the person sitting there today, because the substances he had back then have gone, they have evaporated. Since then he has become a completely new person in terms of substance. But he was already addressed by the same name back then. He is still the same today, but it is not the substance. That which continually holds the substance together as a force, that which, when the substance goes out of any one part of the body, carries a new one there in return – you can see the substance when you lay a person on the dissecting table, but you cannot see that which is extended as a force in the person – that is the so-called supersensible.

Yes, gentlemen, so if the liver is ruined in the infant and a liver disease emerges in the fiftieth year, then the piece of liver that lies there is completely replaced. The substance is long gone. It is not because of the substance that we have acquired a liver disease, but because of the invisible forces. They have got into the habit of not allowing the liver to work properly during infancy. The activity, not the substance, the activity has been disrupted. So if we are clear about the fact that the liver is like this, we have to say: It is quite obvious that since man is always changing the substance, he carries something within him that is not substance.

If one only grasps this thought properly, it leads to the conclusion that, for scientific reasons, it is impossible to be a materialist. Only those people who believe that a man at fifty is the same substance as he was as a child are materialists. So that is what makes it necessary, for purely scientific reasons, to think of man as having a spiritual basis, that is, to think of man as having a spiritual substance within him.

But, gentlemen, you cannot believe that these liver particles, which have long since left at the age of fifty, build up the liver, that they can contribute to the liver being built up. They just go away, they just leave the liver. For these particles of matter, there is actually nothing left there but space. What the liver continually regenerates is strength, it is something supersensible. It continually regenerates the liver.

The whole human being must become newly formed if it is to come into the world at all. The forces that are in the liver must already be there when the human being is being formed in the mother's body.

Now, you may say: in the mother's body, the female ovum and the male sperm come together, and from that, the human being arises. Yes, gentlemen, from this mixture of substances, the human being can arise just as little as the liver disease in the fiftieth year can arise from the substance that has been spoiled in the first year of life. This substance must already be there. Anyone who claims that a human being is formed from matter in the mother's womb should also claim that he can put together wood and sit down for a few years and then, after a few years, a very beautiful statue will emerge. Of course, the material must be made available to the spirit. This happens in the mother's womb. But the human being is not formed in the mother's womb; rather, this substance, like the substance of a sculptor, is worked by the spirit, and in this way, what is formed in the human being is always newly formed when a physical substance is ejected. We would really need to eat much less than we have to eat if the substance had a greater significance. Of course, when we are small children we would have to eat in order to grow larger. But if we were fully grown at twenty years of age and the substance remained the same, we would not need to eat anything afterwards. It would be a wonderful story for the employer, because children are forbidden to be used today, and the workers would no longer need to eat. So it would be a wonderful story! But the fact that we still have to eat all the time when we are fully grown proves that what remains in the human being during life is not the material, but the spiritual-soul. And that must be there before human conception takes place at all, is also there, and works on the material from the very beginning, as it continues to work on it.

When a person is born, we can see how he sleeps almost constantly in his very earliest childhood. He sleeps constantly. It is actually only healthy for a person to be awake for one to two hours at most during the very earliest infancy; otherwise, the infant should sleep continuously and also has the need to sleep almost all the time.

But what does it mean when we say that an infant needs to sleep continuously and that it should sleep? This means that its brain should still be somewhat alive. The white blood cells should not yet be shooting too vigorously through the body; they should still be calming down, these white blood cells, and the brain should not yet be dead. That is why the infant must sleep. But it also cannot yet think. As soon as he begins to think, the brain cells also begin to become more and more dead. As long as we are growing, the force that makes us bigger continues to drive processes to the brain that can keep the brain quite soft. But when we are no longer growing, when growth has ceased, then it becomes increasingly difficult for that which should go to the brain to actually reach it during sleep. And the consequence of this is that, although we learn to think better and better the older we get, our brain has a much greater tendency to be dead, and we actually die in the brain once we are fully grown, continually dying.

Now, a person can endure a lot. For a very long time, he still holds his brain in such a way that it becomes soft enough during the night. But there comes a time when the forces that drive up to the head can no longer properly supply the brain, and then it approaches old age.

What is it that a person actually dies of in reality? Of course, when any organ perishes, then the spirit can no longer work, as one can no longer work on a machine that is out of order. But apart from that, his brain becomes more and more rigid, and he can no longer organize his brain properly. During the day, the brain is continually being ruined because the body is not what the brain restores, but it is the spiritual-soul. But that is, if one may put it that way, like a poison; the spiritual soul ruins the brain during waking. That is why we must sleep, so that the brain can be restored again. When the brain could not think, then the brain would not be killed, but would become stronger and stronger. Because the arm, which does not think, but works, becomes stronger and stronger. But the brain becomes weaker and weaker with thinking. The brain is not an organ that thinks through its life, but rather it thinks by dying, and in this way the body becomes useless to the person. The spirit is there, but the body will one day become useless.

This also becomes apparent when you remember what I said: the liver is like a sensory organ, like a kind of eye in there. Yes, gentlemen, that is a liver disease when a fifty-year-old person's liver is as stiff and as hardened as I assumed earlier. But the liver is always somewhat hardened at a later age. In young children, it is fresh and soft. There are these reddish-brown tissue islets – the liver is made up of such tissue islets – connected by such a network. That is the liver tissue.

Now, this liver is quite soft and elastic in childhood. But it becomes more and more stiff and hard the older you get. Do you think the same thing happens with the eye? As you get older, the inside of the eye becomes more and more rigid. If it stiffens abnormally, then comes the cataract. If the liver stiffens abnormally, then comes internal liver hardening with liver abscesses and so on.

'But even in a healthy state, the liver is used up just as much as a sensory organ as the eye is used up. And the liver perceives less and less, as the food inside is beneficial or harmful, because it has been used up. So when one has grown old, the liver no longer serves him so well to judge these things that come into the stomach, whether they are beneficial or harmful. It is no longer so good at keeping them out. When it is healthy, the liver ensures that useful substances are distributed throughout the body and harmful substances are kept out. But if the liver has become defective, then the harmful substances also enter the intestinal glands, the lymph, and then go around in the body and cause all kinds of diseases. And that is what it does, that the one who has grown old as a human being can no longer perceive his body internally as he used to be able to perceive it through the liver. He has, I might say, become blind to his own body internally. When one is blind externally, another can guide one, can help one. But when you become blind inwardly, then the processes no longer proceed properly, then very soon comes intestinal cancer, or stomach cancer or cancer of the pylorus, or anything where the liver is not in order. Then the body is no longer usable. But then the new substances, which have to be constantly shed, can no longer be properly integrated into the body. The soul can no longer function with the human body, and the time has come when the body must be thrown away completely.

Yes, gentlemen, you can see how the body is discarded from year to year, because when you shed skin on your head or cut your nails, you throw away what has become useless. But what is inside as forces remains. But when the whole thing becomes unusable, then what works inside can no longer replace anything. Then, just as nails and dandruff and other body parts are shed, the whole body is shed, and what remains of the person is the soul. So you can say: When I understand a person, I understand both body and soul, and it is not true that a person is only something physical.

Yes, you see, one could say that this is only a religious matter. But it is not just a religious matter. Here in this Goetheanum science, it is clear that it is not just a religious matter. Through religion, man should be reassured that he does not die when his body dies. These are basically selfish feelings, and the preachers also take this into account. They tell people things so that they don't die. This is not a religious matter, but a really practical one.

Someone who merely lays a person on the dissecting table, cuts open the abdomen and looks at the liver, will not think about how to ensure that an infant is properly nourished. But anyone who knows how this happens will realize how the child should be raised so that it can become a healthy person. Establishing health in childhood is much more important than curing illness later on. But you don't know anything about it if you only see the human being as a block of matter.

Now, from this example it is easy to see what I have said. But take another example. Suppose I have a child in school and I keep feeding it all kinds of stuff, and I keep it learning until its memory is overloaded and the child can't really come to itself. Yes, gentlemen, that's when you really strain the mind. But it is not true that you only strain the mind, because the mind is constantly working on the body. And if I teach and educate the child wrongly, even if it is only, let's say, in terms of memory, then I harden certain organs in him because what is used in the brain is lost to the other organs. And if you put too much strain on the child's brain, his kidneys will become diseased. That means that you can make a child sick not only through physical influences, but also by teaching and educating the child in such a way that you make it healthy or sick.

You see, this is where history comes in handy. If you really know the human being, then you will have proper teaching in schools. If you know the human being as today's science knows it, then you can present to people at the universities what we have seen: the liver looks like this, we have reddish-brown liver islets and so on. And what I have described to you can, of course, be described at the university. But afterwards you fall silent.

Such a science is not practical because it cannot be taught in schools. Teachers cannot use such a science. Teachers can only use it when they know that if the liver looks like this at the age of thirty, then in order for it to develop properly, they have to do this in the eighth or ninth year of life, not demand that the child do visual instruction, but rather teach the child something in the eighth or ninth year that guides his organs in the right way. So, for example, I have to tell him something and let him retell it to me, and I must not overload the memory, but leave it to itself. You bring that out by knowing the person in body, soul and spirit. But then you can also educate properly.

Now I ask you, is that not the most important thing, that you do not just calm people with a story from the supernatural through sermons, that they do not die when their body dies? Of course that is not done – I have proved it to you – but the result is that one only works with people's egotism, who just wish to live on, and one accommodates these wishes. Science does not deal with wishes but with facts, and these facts, when one knows them, make the whole story practical. There is something to be brought into the school if one really knows the human being.

And this is what distinguishes this Goetheanum science from other sciences. Here we would like to gradually bring about a situation in which science is not only applicable to a few people who happen to belong to the scientific community, but where science is generally human, benefits humanity and works for the development of humanity.

Today's science is only practically applied in technology, sometimes in this or that other field, for example in medicine, but not very much there either. Yes, gentlemen, theology is taught or history is taught – yes, ask whether this is applied anywhere in life. Not even in the pulpit can the theologian apply his science; he has to speak as the people want to hear it. Or ask the lawyer, the attorney, the judge! He learns his stuff so that he has it committed to memory and knows it in the exam. But afterwards he forgets it as quickly as possible, because outside he is guided by completely different laws. Nothing is applied to the living human being. In short, we have a science that is no longer practical for life. And that is the worst part.

From this you can also see that classes of people are really forming. In life, what is in life must also be applied. So if there is a science that cannot be applied, an useless science, then the people who pursue this science are also useless in a certain sense, and then an useless class of people arises. There you have the class differences.

I have tried to show in my “Key Points” that class differences are actually connected with intellectual life. But when you point out the truth, everyone declares you to be a fantasist. But here you can see for yourself that it is not a matter of fantasy, but of real, actual knowledge and of making science practical, which can really intervene in life. Then people will also be reassured about death.

Of course, some things are difficult for you, precisely because school education is not what it should be. But you will gradually understand things. And you can be sure that the others do not really understand it either. When you come to today's science under all these medieval conditions, you can see what kind of science it is. When I present the science of the Goetheanum at Oxford, it differs quite considerably from what is otherwise presented at Oxford. It is a completely different approach and will only gradually be understood.

And so I would like you to understand how difficult it is to make an impact with this. It is difficult, but it will happen and it must happen, because otherwise humanity will simply perish.

Gentlemen, the things we have discussed in the last few reflections are so important for understanding what I will say next that I want to at least briefly summarize these important things again.

We have seen that the human brain essentially consists of small star-shaped formations. But the rays of the stars are very wide. The extensions of these small entities intertwine and interweave, so that the brain is a kind of tissue, formed in the way I have told you.

Such little creatures, as they are in the brain, are also in the blood, with the only difference that the brain cells – as these little creatures are called – cannot live, only during the night, when sleeping, can they live a little. They cannot carry out this life. They cannot move because they are crammed together like sardines. But the blood corpuscles, the white blood corpuscles in the red blood there inside, they can move. They swim around in the whole blood, move their offshoots and only get something out of this life, die a little when the person sleeps. So sleep and wakefulness are connected with this activity or inactivity of the brain cells, and in fact of all the nerve cells and the cells that swim around as white blood cells in the blood, moving around in it.

Now I have also told you that it is precisely in an organ like the liver that one can observe how the human body changes in the course of a lifetime. Last time I told you that if, for example, the liver of an infant does not function properly – it is a kind of cognitive activity, the liver perceives and organizes digestion – so if the liver is disturbed in its perception, so that it actually perceives an incorrect digestion during infancy, this often only shows up in later life, I told you, in forty-five or fifty-year-old people. The human organism can withstand a lot. So even if the liver is already disturbed during infancy, it will endure until the age of forty-five or fifty. Then it shows internal hardening and liver diseases develop, which sometimes occur so late in humans and which are then a consequence of what was spoiled during infancy.

It is therefore best for the infant to be nourished with its mother's milk. Isn't it true that the child comes from the mother's body? So it can be understood that its entire organism, its entire body, is related to the mother. It therefore thrives best when it does not receive anything other than what comes from the mother's body, with which it is related.

However, it does happen that breast milk is not suitable due to its composition. Some human milk is bitter, some too salty. In such cases, it is best to switch to a different diet, provided by a different person.

Now the question may arise: Can't the child be fed on cow's milk right from the start? Well, it must be said that cow's milk is not very good as a food in the very earliest stages of infancy. But one need not think that a terrible sin is being committed against the human organism when one feeds the child with cow's milk that has been diluted in the appropriate way and so on. Because, of course, the milk of different creatures is different, but not so much so that one could not also introduce cow's milk instead of human milk for nutrition.

But if this nutrition is going on, it is going on in such a way that, if the child only drinks milk, nothing needs to be chewed. As a result, certain organs in the body are more active than they will be later when solid food has to be prepared. The milk is essentially so that, I might almost say, it is still alive when the child receives it. It is almost liquid life that the child absorbs.

Now you know that a very important thing for the human organism takes place in the intestines, an extraordinarily important thing. This extraordinarily important thing is that everything that enters the intestines through the stomach must be killed, and when it then enters the lymph vessels and blood through the intestinal walls, it must be revived. That is the most important thing to understand: that a person must first kill the food they take in and then revive it. The external life, taken up directly by the human being, is not usable in the human body. Man must kill everything he takes in through his own activity and then revive it. You just have to know that. Ordinary science does not know this, and therefore it does not know that man has the power of life within him. Just as he has muscles and bones and nerves within him, so he has an invigorating power, a life body within him.

The liver observes the entire digestive process, in which things are killed and then revived, in which what has been killed rises up inwardly in the new life and enters the blood, just as the eye observes external things. And just as in later life the eye can be affected by cataracts, that is, what used to be transparent becomes opaque, and hardens, so can the liver harden. And liver hardening is actually the same in the liver as cataracts are in the eye. Cataracts can also form in the liver. Then, at the end of life, a liver disease develops. At forty-five, fifty years of age, even later, liver disease develops. That is, the liver no longer looks at the inside of the person. It is really like this: with the eye you look at the outside world, with the ear you hear what sounds in the outside world, and with the liver you first look at your own digestion and what follows digestion. The liver is an inner sense organ. And only he who recognizes the liver as an inner sense organ understands what is going on inside a person. So you can compare the liver with the eye. In a sense, a person has a head inside his stomach. Only the head does not look outwards, but inwards. And that is why it is that a person works inside with an activity that he does not bring to consciousness.

But the child feels this activity. In the child it is quite different. The child still looks little to the outside world, and when it looks to the outside world, it does not know its way around. But all the more it looks inwardly in feeling. The child feels very precisely when there is something in the milk that does not belong there, that must be thrown out into the intestines so that it is discharged. And if something is wrong with the milk, the liver takes on the disease for the whole of later life.

Now, you can imagine that the eye, when it looks outwards, belongs to the brain. Simply looking at the outside world would not serve us as humans. We would stare at the outside world, stare all around, but we would not be able to think about the outside world. It would be just like a panorama, and we would sit in front of it with an empty head. We think with our brain, and think about what is outside in the world with our brain.

Yes, but, gentlemen, if the liver is a kind of inner eye that scans all the intestinal activity, then the liver must also have a kind of brain, just as the eye has the brain at its disposal. You see, the liver can indeed see everything that is going on in the stomach, how the entire chyme is mixed with pepsin in the stomach. When the chyme enters the intestine through the so-called pylorus of the stomach, the liver can then see how the chyme moves forward in the intestine, how it secretes more and more usable parts through the walls of the intestine, how the usable parts then pass into the lymph vessels and from these vessels then into the blood. But from there on, the liver can do nothing more. Just as little as the eye can think, so little can the liver do the further activity. There must come to the liver another organ, as to the eye the brain must come.

And just as you have the liver within you, which is constantly observing your digestive activity, so you also have a thinking activity within you, of which you are completely unaware in your ordinary life. This thinking activity – that is, you are not aware of the thinking activity, but you already know about the organ – this thinking activity is added to the liver's perception and comprehension activity just as the brain adds thinking to the eye's perception, and you have it, as strange as it may seem to you, through the kidneys, the renal system.

The kidney system, which otherwise only secretes urine for ordinary consciousness, is not at all such a base organ as one always looks at it, but the kidney, which otherwise just secretes the water, is the organ that belongs to the liver and performs an inner activity, an inner thinking. The kidneys are also connected with the other thinking in the brain, so that if the brain activity is not in order, the activity of the kidneys is also not in order. Let us suppose that we begin to cause the brain to work improperly in childhood. It does not work properly if, for example, we cause the child to study too much - I already hinted at this last time - to let it work with mere memory too much, if we make it learn too much by heart. The child needs to learn things by heart in order to develop a flexible brain, but if we make it learn too much by heart, then the brain has to exert itself so much that it carries out too much activity, which causes hardening in the brain. This causes brain hardening if we make the child learn too much by heart. But if hardening occurs in the brain, it is possible that the brain will not work properly throughout the whole life. It is just too hard.

But the brain is connected to the kidneys. And because the brain is connected to the kidneys, the kidneys no longer work properly either. A person can endure a lot; it only shows up later: the whole body no longer works properly, the kidneys no longer work properly either, and you find sugar in the urine that should actually be processed. But the body has become too weak to use the sugar because the brain is not working properly. It leaves the sugar in the urine. The body is not in order, the person suffers from diabetes.

You see, I want to make this very clear to you, that something depends on the mental activity, for example, on how much learning by heart there is, and that is how the person turns out later. Have you not heard that diabetes is particularly common among rich people? They can take extraordinary care of their children, materially and physically, but they do not know that they should also take care of a proper school teacher who does not make the child learn so much by rote. They think: Well, the state takes care of that, everything is fine, there is no need to worry about it. The child learns too much by rote, and later becomes a diabetic! You cannot make a person healthy through material education alone, through what you teach a person through food. You have to take into account what is in the soul. And you see, you gradually begin to feel that the soul is something important, that the body is not the only thing about a person, because the body can be ruined by the soul. No matter how well we eat as children and no matter how strong we are after eating the food that chemists study in the laboratory, if the soul is not in order, if the soul is not taken into account, the human organism will still break down. Through a true science, not today's purely material science, we gradually learn to tune into what is already present in a person before conception and what continues to be present after death, because we get to know what our soul is. Especially in such matters, we must take this into account.

But now think, where does it come from that people today do not want to know anything about what I have told you? Well, you can approach people with a so-called education today; it is “uneducated” to talk about the liver or even about the kidneys. It is something uneducated. Where does it come from that it is something “uneducated”?

You see, the ancient Jews in Hebrew antiquity – and after all, our Old Testament comes from the Jews – the ancient Jews did not yet regard speaking of the kidney as something so terribly uneducated. For example, the Jews did not say that when a person had tormenting dreams at night – you can read that in the Old Testament; today's Jews are educated enough not to repeat what is in the Old Testament when they are in decent company, but it is in the Old Testament – they did not say that when a person had evil dreams at night: My soul is tormented. Yes, gentlemen, it is easy to say that if you have no conception of the soul; then “soul” is just a word – it means nothing. But the Old Testament, speaking from the wisdom that humanity once had, said when someone had bad dreams at night: “Your kidneys are troubling you.” What was already known in the Old Testament is now being rediscovered through more recent anthroposophical research: kidney activity is not working properly if you have bad dreams.

Then came the Middle Ages, and in the Middle Ages, little by little, what is still valid today gradually emerged. For in the Middle Ages there was a tendency to praise everything that cannot be perceived, that is somehow outside the world. After all, the head is left free in the human being; everything else is covered up. One may only speak of that which is free. Of course, some ladies, especially in the educated world, walk around today leaving so much exposed that one is far from allowed to talk about what is exposed. But anyway, what is then inside the person has become something that, for a certain kind of Christianity in the Middle Ages — in England it was later called Puritanism — one is not allowed to talk about. One is not allowed to talk about it in terms of mere material sensuality. It is not spiritual, one must not speak of it. And so, little by little, they lost their whole spirit. Of course, if one speaks only of the spirit where the head is, one cannot grasp it so easily. But if one grasps it where it is seated in the whole human body, one can grasp it well.

And you see, the kidneys are then what thinks in addition to the perceptive activity of the liver. The liver observes, the kidneys think; and they can think the activity of the heart and can think everything that the liver has not observed. The liver can still observe the entire digestive activity and how the digestive juices enter the blood. But then, when it begins to circulate in the blood, thought is needed. And that is done by the kidneys. So that man actually has something like a second man within him.

Now, gentlemen, you cannot possibly believe that the kidneys you cut out of dead bodies and then place on the dissecting table – or, if they are beef kidneys, you even eat it; you can easily look at it before you eat or cook it – but you will not believe that the piece of meat with all the properties that the anatomist is talking about, that piece of meat thinks! Of course it does not think, but what is inside the kidney of the soul thinks. That is why it is as I told you last time: The material that is in the kidney, for example, let's say in childhood, is completely replaced after seven or eight years. There is a different substance in it. Just as your fingernails are no longer the same after seven or eight years, but you have always cut off the front part, so everything that was in the kidney and liver has been replaced by you.

Yes, you have to ask: if the substance that was in the liver seven years ago is no longer there, and yet the liver can still become ill after decades due to what was neglected in it as an infant, then there is an activity that cannot be seen, because the substance does not reproduce. Life continues from infancy to the age of forty-five. It is not the material that can become diseased – it is excreted – but the invisible activity that is there and that goes on throughout a person's entire life is what continues. There you see how the human body is actually a complicated, an extremely complicated being.

Now I would like to tell you something else. I said: the ancient Jews still knew something about how kidney activity is involved in such dull, dark thinking, as dreams are at night. But at night it is the case that our ideas have gone; then one perceives what the kidneys are thinking. During the day, our heads are full of thoughts that come from outside. Just as when there is a strong light and a weak candlelight, you see the strong light, and the weak candlelight disappears next to it. It is the same with a person when he is awake: his head is full of ideas that come from the outside world, and what is going on down there in the kidneys is just the small light; he does not perceive it. When the head stops thinking, then it still perceives as dreams what the kidneys think and what the liver looks at internally. That is why dreams look the way you sometimes see them.

Imagine there is something wrong with the intestines; the liver sees that. During the day you don't pay attention to it because there are stronger ideas. But at night when falling asleep or waking up, you notice how the liver perceives the intestinal disorder. But the liver is not as smart and neither are the kidneys as smart as the human mind. Because they are not so clever, they cannot immediately say: “These are the intestines that I see.” They create an image out of it, and the person dreams instead of seeing reality. If the liver saw reality, it would see the intestines burning. But it does not see reality, it creates an image out of it. It sees flickering snakes. When a person dreams of flickering snakes, which he does very often, then the liver is looking at the intestines, and that is why they appear to it as snakes. Sometimes the head is just like the liver and the kidneys. If a person sees something, for example, a bent piece of wood nearby and in an area where snakes could be, the head can even mistake this bent piece of wood for a snake when it is five steps away. Thus, the inner vision and thinking of the liver and kidneys considers the winding intestines to be snakes.

Sometimes you dream of a stove that is heated up. You wake up and have heart palpitations. What happened? Yes, the kidney thinks about the stronger heart palpitations, but it imagines it as if it were a stove that is heated up, and you dream of a boiling stove. That is what the kidney thinks about your heart activity.

So there inside the human stomach – although it is again 'not formed', to speak of it – sits a soul being. The soul is a little mouse that slips into the human body somewhere and sits inside. Isn't it true that people used to do that? They thought: where is the seat of the soul? But you don't know anything about the soul if you ask where the soul is located. It is just as much in the 'ear lobe' as in the big toe, only the soul needs organs through which it thinks, imagines and creates images. And in such an activity, which you know very well, it does it through the head, and in the way I have described to you, where the inner being is looked at, it does it through the liver and kidneys. You can see the soul at work in the human body everywhere. And you have to see that.

This, however, requires a science that does not simply cut open dead human bodies, lay them on the dissecting table, cut out organs and look at them materially; it requires that one really makes one's whole inner soul life visible in thinking and in everything a little more active than the people who just look. Of course it is more comfortable to cut open human bodies, to cut out the liver and then write down what you find there. There is no need to exert much mental effort. That's what the eyes are for, and it only takes a little thought to cut the liver in all directions, make small pieces, put them under the microscope, and so on. It's an easy science. But almost all science today is an easy science. We have to activate our inner thinking much more, and above all we must not believe that from the moment we put the person on the dissecting table, cut out his organs and describe them, we can get to know the human being. Because we are just cutting out the liver of a fifty-year-old woman or man and, when we look at it, we don't know what has already happened in the infant. We need a whole science. That is precisely what a real science must strive for. That is the endeavor of anthroposophy, to have a real science. And this real science does not just lead to the physical, but, as I have shown you, to the soul and to the spiritual.

I told you last time that the blue blood vessels, that is, the veins in which the blood flows not as red blood but as blue blood, that is, blood containing carbon dioxide, enter the liver. This is not the case in any of the other organs. In this respect, the liver is a quite extraordinary organ. It takes up blue blood vessels and almost makes the blue blood disappear into itself (see illustration $. 70).

This is something extraordinarily significant and important. So when we imagine the liver, the usual red veins also go into the liver. The blue veins go out of the liver. But in addition, a special blue vein, the portal vein, which contains a lot of carbon dioxide, goes into the liver (see drawing on plate 4). Now, the liver absorbs this and does not let it out again, which then enters the liver as carbonic acid through this special blue blood.

Yes, that's right. When conventional science has cut out the liver, it sees this so-called portal vein, but doesn't think much more about it. But anyone who has been able to arrive at a real science does make comparisons.

Now there are still organs in the human body that have something very similar, and that is the eyes. With the eyes, something is very small, only gently hinted at, but nevertheless, it is also the case with the eye that not all blood, all blue blood, that goes into the eye, goes back again. Veins go in, red veins go in, blue ones go out. But not all the blue blood that enters the eye goes back again, but is distributed just as it is in the liver. Only, in the liver it is strong, in the eye it is very weak.

Isn't that proof that I can compare the liver with the eye? Of course, one can point out everything that is in the human organism. That is how one comes to the conclusion that the liver is an inner eye.

But the eye is directed outwards. It peers outwards and consumes the blue blood it receives in order to look outwards. The liver consumes it inwards. Therefore, it makes the blue blood disappear inside and uses it for something else. Only sometimes, you see, the eye also gets into the habit of using its blue veins a little. That is when a person becomes sad, when he cries; then the bitter-tasting tear fluid wells up in the eyes, in the lacrimal glands. This comes from the little bit of blue blood that remains in the eye. When this is particularly stimulated by sadness, the tears come out as a secretion.

But in the liver, this story is always present! The liver is always sad because the human organism, as it is in life on earth, can make you sad when you look at it from the inside, because it is predisposed to the highest, but it just doesn't look that great. The liver is always sad. That is why it always secretes a bitter substance, bile. What the eye does with tears, the liver does for the whole organism in the secretion of bile. Only – the tear flows outwards and the tears are gone as soon as they are out of the eye; but the bile throughout the human organism does not disappear, because the liver does not look outwards but inwards. Here, the function of looking back is reduced, and the secretion, which can be compared to the secretion of tears, comes to the fore.

Yes, but, gentlemen, if what I am telling you is really true, then it must show up even more clearly in another area. It must be shown that those beings on earth who live more in their inner life, who live more in their inner thinking activity, that the animals do not think less than man, that the animals think more - thus less in their heads than man, they have an imperfect brain. But then they must observe more the liver life and the kidney life, must look more inward with the liver and think more inwardly with the kidneys. This is also the case with animals. There is external proof of this. Our human eyes are so constructed that the blue blood that enters them is actually very little, so little that today's science does not even talk about it. It used to talk about it. But in the case of animals, which live more in their inner being, the eyes do not just look, but the eyes think as well.

If one could say that the eyes are a kind of liver, one could now say that in animals the eye is much more liver than in humans. In humans, the eye has become more perfect and less liver-like. This can be seen in the eye. In the animal, it can be clearly demonstrated that there is not only what is found in humans: a glassy, watery body, then the lens of the eye, again a glassy, watery body – but in certain animals, the blood vessels go into the eye and form such a body in the eye (see drawing). The blood vessels go right into this vitreous humor, forming a body inside it called the fan, the eye fan. In these animals, it is... (gap in the transcript). Why? Because in these animals, the eye is even more liver. And just as the portal vein goes into the liver, so this fan goes into the eye. That is why it is so in animals: When the animal looks at something, the eye is already thinking; in humans, it only looks, and it thinks with the brain. In animals, the brain is small and imperfect. It does not think so much with the brain, but thinks in the eye, and it can think in the eye because it has this sickle-shaped projection, so that it can use the used blood, the carbonic acid blood, in the eye.

I can tell you something that will not really surprise you. You will not assume that the vulture, high up in the air with its damn small brain, would succeed in making the very clever decision to fall down right where the lamb is sitting! If the vulture's brain were important, it could starve to death. But the vulture has a thinking process in his eye that is only a continuation of his kidney thinking, and so he makes his decision and shoots down and catches the lamb. The vulture does not do it by saying to himself: There is a lamb down there, now I have to get into position; now I will fall down just right in that line, I will come across the lamb. — A brain would make this consideration. If there were a man up there, he would think about it; he would just not be able to carry it out. But with the vulture, even the eye thinks. The soul is already in the eye. He is not even aware of this, but he still thinks.

You see, I told you, the old Jew, who understood his Old Testament, knew what it means: God has plagued you by your kidneys in the night. - With that he wanted to express the reality of what appears to the soul as mere dreams. God has tormented you through your kidneys in the night - so he said, because he knew: There is not only a person who looks out through his eyes into the outer world, but there is a person who thinks through his kidneys and looks through his liver into the inner self.

And the ancient Romans knew that too. They knew that there are actually two people: the one who looks out through his eyes, and then the other, who has his liver in his stomach and looks into his own interior. Now it is the case that, with the liver – you can see this from the distribution of the blue veins – if you want to use the expression, you have to say that it actually looks backwards. This is why a person is so unaware of their insides; just as you are unaware of what is behind you, the liver is not consciously aware of what it is actually looking at. The ancient Romans knew this. They just expressed it in such a way that it is not immediately obvious. They imagined: a person has a head at the front, and in the lower body he has another head; but this is only an indistinct head that looks backwards. And then they took the two heads and put them together, forming something like this (see drawing): a head with two faces, one looking backwards and the other forwards. You can still find such statues today if you go to Italy. They are called Janus heads.

You see, the travelers who have the money go through Italy with their Baedeker, also look at these Janus heads, look in the Baedeker – but there is nothing sensible in it. Because, isn't it true, you have to ask yourself: how did these old Roman guys come to develop such a head? They weren't actually so stupid as to believe that if you travel across the sea somewhere, you'll find people with two heads on the ground. But the traveler, who is not educated by his eyes, must imagine something like that when he sees that the Romans have developed a head with two faces, one facing backwards and one facing forwards.

Yes, well, the Romans knew something through a certain natural thinking that all of later humanity did not know, and we will come to that now, come to it independently. So that we can now know again that the Romans were not stupid, but were clever! Janus-head means January. Why did they set it at the beginning of the year? That is also a special secret.

Yes, gentlemen, once you have come so far as to realize that the soul works not only in the head but also in the liver and kidneys, then you can also observe how it differs throughout the year. In summer, the warm season, the liver works very little. The liver and kidneys enter into a kind of sleep-like state of soul, performing only their external bodily functions, because the human being is more dependent on the warmth of the outside world. It begins to be more inactive within. The entire digestive system is quieter in midsummer than in winter; but in winter, this digestive system begins to be very mental and emotional. And when the Christmas season comes, the New Year season, when January comes and begins, the liver and kidneys are most active in the soul.

The Romans knew this too. That is why they called the people with the two faces the January people. When you independently come back to what is actually there, you no longer need to stare at things, but can understand them again. Today, people only stare at them because today's science is no longer there. You see, anthroposophy is really not impractical. It can explain not only everything that is human, but even everything that is historical; for example, it can explain why the Romans made these Janus faces! Actually, I am not saying this out of vanity. In fact, if people are to understand the world, they need to consult an anthroposophist in the guidebook, otherwise they will actually go through the world half asleep, just gawking at everything and unable to reflect.

Yes, gentlemen, as you can see, we are really serious when we say that we have to start with the physical in order to reach the soul. Well, I will continue speaking about the soul next Saturday. Then you can also think about what questions you want to ask. But you will have seen that it is really no laughing matter how one wants to get from the physical to the soul, but that it is a very serious science.

To give you, gentlemen, a more complete picture, I would like to take a closer look at what actually happens in the human body every day during certain processes. For one can only understand higher processes if one really recognizes certain lower processes. Therefore, today I would like to look again at the whole process of nutrition, both from the physical, material side and from the spiritual side.

We eat; when we eat, we first put the food in our mouths. We enjoy solid and liquid food, we take in air through breathing, through the lungs. So we enjoy solid and liquid food. But we can only use liquids in our bodies. Therefore, the solid food must be dissolved into a liquid in the mouth. This is done in the mouth. This can only be achieved in the mouth, on the palate, because small organs, known as glands, are found throughout the palate and in the oral cavity. These glands continuously produce saliva.

So you have to imagine that there are such small glands, for example, on the side of the tongue. These are small formations that are arranged in such a way that, when you look at them closely under the microscope, they look like small grapes; they are composed of cells in this way. These glands secrete saliva. The saliva dissolves the food and permeates it. The food must be salivated in the mouth, otherwise it is no good in the human organism.

Now, an activity is taking place – this salivating, this permeation of the food with saliva – and we perceive this activity, we grasp it in taste. We taste the food during the salivating through the sense of taste. Just as we perceive colors through the eye, we perceive the taste of the food through the sense of taste.

So we can say: the food is mixed with saliva in the mouth and tasted. Through taste, we become aware of the food. And through the mixing with saliva, the food is prepared so that it can be absorbed by the other body. But there must be a certain substance in the saliva of the mouth, otherwise food could not be prepared so that it is then suitable for the stomach. There must be a certain substance in it. This substance is actually present and is called ptyalin. So the ptyalin is expelled from the salivary glands in the mouth. And this ptyalin is the substance that first processes the food so that it can be used by the stomach.

Then, through the esophagus, through the throat, the food that has been salivated and processed by the ptyalin enters the stomach. In the stomach, they must be processed further. For this, there must be another substance in the stomach. This is secreted by the stomach, produced. Just as saliva with ptyalin is produced in the mouth, so too is a kind of saliva produced in the stomach. Only this gastric saliva already contains a slightly different substance. The gastric saliva once again coats the food in the stomach. So we can say that instead of ptyalin, the stomach contains pepsin.

Now, you see, in the stomach of an adult human being, and even in that of a seven-year-old child, no more taste develops. But the baby still tastes the food in the stomach just as the adult tastes the food in the mouth. So you have to go to the soul of the infant if you want to see through the human being. The adult, at most, gets an idea of this taste in the stomach when the stomach is already a bit ruined and the story from the stomach goes down instead of up. Then a person already gets an idea that there is a taste in the stomach. I assume that at least some of you have already gone through this, that something that has already been in the stomach comes back up into the mouth, and they will know that it really tastes worse than anything or at least most of the things you eat. And what would taste like what comes back from the stomach, you would certainly not find extraordinarily tasty. You don't eat things that would taste like what comes back from the stomach. But the taste that is in the chyme that comes back must have formed. It forms in the stomach. Right, in the mouth the food is only pepticized; in the stomach it is enteropepticized. And the consequence of that is that it tastes different. Taste is a very complicated thing.

Suppose you are very sensitive and you drink water. In general, if it is not contaminated water, it will not taste bad. But if you let a lot of sugar melt on your tongue, and your tongue is attuned to it, you may find that the water tastes sour. Taste is a very individual thing. But the way an adult experiences it is not formed in the mouth, but in the stomach. Of course, a child does not feel or think yet, so it does not know taste in the same way that an adult knows the taste of something in their mouth. Therefore, the child must be given foods that do not taste too bad in the stomach. And that is precisely the mother's milk or milk in general, because the child is related to the milk, and it does not get a taste that is too bad in the stomach. It is born out of the body that can produce milk. So the child feels related to the milk. Therefore, the milk does not taste bad to it. However, if the child were to receive other foods too early, it would find them disgusting. Adults no longer do this because their taste has become coarser. But the child would find it disgusting because it is not related to them, because they are external foods.

Now, you see, from the stomach, after the food has been mixed with saliva in the stomach with the pepsin, the food goes into the intestines, into the small intestine, large intestine and so on, and the food pulp spreads out in the intestines.

I can write here by the stomach: childish taste.

If the chyme were to spread and nothing were to happen to it, it would become a hard, stony mass in the intestines and would destroy the person. But something else is done to this chyme.

What is done there is done first by a gland. In the mouth we have glands, in the stomach glands, and now there is a large gland behind the stomach. So when the stomach is there, behind the stomach, if you look at the human being from the front, there is a fairly large gland, and in front of this gland is the stomach. So this gland is behind the stomach. And this gland, which is called the pancreas, now in turn secretes a kind of saliva, and the saliva goes through fine channels into the intestines. So that the food is mixed with saliva a third time in the intestines. And the substance that is secreted in this pancreas is even transformed in the human being. First, the pancreas secretes it. There it is almost like the pepsin of the stomach. But then, on its way into the intestines, it changes. It becomes sharper. The food must now be treated more sharply than before. And this sharper kind of salivary substance secreted by the pancreas is called trypsin. So, we have the pancreas as the third. It secretes trypsin – at least it secretes something that becomes the pungent juice of trypsin in the intestines. This means that the chyme is secreted a third time. So something new happens to it again.

This can no longer be perceived by the consciousness of the human being in the head, as I told you last time, but what arises from the chyme is now perceived, tasted or felt by the liver and thought by the kidneys. So everything that happens in the intestines is thought by the kidneys and perceived by the liver. There is therefore a soul in the kidneys and liver, and it perceives in the same way as a person perceives through the head. Only he knows nothing about it. At most, as I told you last time, when he dreams; then the story comes to consciousness in a pictorial form. The way the chyme winds its way through the intestines like a snake, always mixing with the trypsin, has a stimulating effect, and in the dream the person perceives it as snakes. So what the person perceives is a transposition into an unclear, unclear soul life.

Now, the liver perceives the story with the ptyalin, pepsin, trypsin – I have to say it that way because, unfortunately, science has given things such awful names. And if you are already being received quite unpleasantly by science if one wants to explain things clearly, then science would be turned upside down if one wanted to give things new names; one could do it, but in order to avoid turning science upside down unnecessarily, one does not do it, continues to use the old names ptyalin, pepsin, trypsin. So it is the case that the substances are now being secreted by the saliva for the third time. And this is based on liver feeling (see diagram on page 104).

What this has to do with the liver feeling, gentlemen, you can understand by remembering what it is like – if you have ever done it – to bring a very sharp onion to your nose. Right, the tears come. If you bring horseradish to your nose, the tears come too. Why is that? It is because the horseradish or the onion acts on the lacrimal glands, and the lacrimal glands then secrete bitter tears. Yes, you see, gentlemen, the chyme that passes through the intestines is about the same as the onion or horseradish, and the liver secretes bile just as the eyes secrete tears. The onion must be perceived if it is to produce tears; it must be felt. So the liver feels this chyme and secretes bile, which is added to it. This is the fourth.

Now, after the mouth has worked through the ptyalin, the stomach through the pepsin, and the pancreas through the trypsin, the bile is added to the chyme in the intestines by the liver. And only then does thinking come through the kidneys.

When the chyme has been prepared in this way, with saliva four times, it then passes through the intestinal walls into the lymphatic vessels and from there into the blood. So we can say that an extraordinarily complicated life process takes place in the human body. From the mouth to the blood, the chyme is constantly being transformed so that it can be digested in the right way, not only by the stomach but by the whole human body.

But now this is done in a different way. You can tell yourself, if you think about it, gentlemen, if you were to do all of this in a chemical laboratory, even if you were a very clever professor, you would not be able to do it if you first had to chew the food with your mouth saliva, then with your stomach saliva, then with your intestinal saliva and finally with your bile! All this happens inside you, you do it all the time every day. But if you were to do it in a laboratory, you wouldn't be able to. Although people have brains, what happens in their stomachs in an understandable way is much more intelligent than people on earth are. And it is a very wise, very intelligent process that takes place there. You can't easily imitate it.

But you will have even more respect for this process when I describe its details. What does a person eat? A person eats plant substances, animal substances, mineral substances, and thus he gets very different substances into his mouth and his stomach and his intestines, which have to be converted, changed by the saliva.

Imagine you are eating potatoes. What does a potato consist of? The potato consists mainly of what you have in starch. You also know that starch is prepared from potatoes. So you actually eat starch when you eat potatoes. That is one of the first things you eat; we eat starch. There are many starch-like things. The potato consists almost entirely of starch, only interspersed with a few liquids, namely water. And that is why the potato looks the way it does – because it is alive, not dead. The potato is actually living starch. But that is why, as I have told you, it has to be killed. So there it is, pure starch. There is starch in all plants; whatever you eat from the plant kingdom – it contains starch.

What else do you eat? Whether you take it from the plant kingdom or from the animal kingdom, you eat protein. You eat protein in the ordinary egg; there you have it as it is, only slightly killed. But you eat protein that is added to muscle meat or plants. You actually eat protein all the time. So the second is protein and protein-like substances.

And the third thing you eat, which is different from starch and protein, is fat. Fats are different substances from starch and protein. There are fewer fats in plants than in animals. There are so-called vegetable fats. Man needs fats either from the vegetable or from the animal kingdom if he is to nourish himself properly. So fats are the third thing in what man takes in as food.

And fourthly, there are the salts. Man must always either eat food that naturally has enough salts or at least contains salts, or you know, people put a salt shaker on the table, and depending on the situation, they take the salt out of the salt shaker either with their fingers or with the small horn spoon or with the tip of a knife and add it to the soup or to the other food. This is eaten. We need this. It is the fourth thing that is eaten; I have to write salts because there are different salts.

All of this enters the intestines, and all of it is changed in the intestines.

Now, gentlemen, what comes out of all this? The fact that the food is well prepared by the saliva of the mouth and the saliva of the stomach means that it can be mixed with saliva in the intestines for a third time, and it does not harden, but it transforms, it becomes something else.

What does starch become? Starch becomes sugar. So when you eat starch, your stomach converts it into sugar. We don't need to eat sugar if we have it in us, for the simple reason that we make it ourselves if we produce enough of it. But it is the case with humans that they cannot make everything, even though human nature is very capable. And so it develops too little sugar, and in some people even far too little sugar. And then extra sugar has to be added to the food, or it is added so that what would otherwise be prepared by the intestines in normal life actually enters the intestines already prepared. And the intestines make sugar out of starch. This is a great skill.

One more thing: you know that people with weak stomachs do better when they eat soft-center eggs than when they eat very hard eggs. And what's more, if the eggs have already gone a bit stinky, they go bad even more quickly. The egg white is a good food, but if we put it into the intestines in a stinky state, this egg white would also go stinky and unusable in us. We cannot use the protein in our intestines as it is out there. This protein must also be converted, and above all, it must be dissolved. If you put it in water, it will not dissolve. Something completely different must be present for it to dissolve. And trypsin dissolves protein particularly well. So protein is converted into liquid protein.

And while liquid protein is being formed, something else is formed in the human organism; through the action of this intestinal saliva of the pancreas, something else is formed. As much fun as it is, alcohol is formed. Man develops alcohol within himself. You don't need to drink any alcohol at all; you have a source of alcohol within yourself. Alcohol is formed in the intestines. And when people become drunkards, it is only because their liver becomes too greedy. It is not satisfied with the alcohol that is produced in the intestines; it demands more alcohol, and that is how people become drunkards.

You see, people who knew this even cited it as a reason for drinking wine and beer. They said: There are those who are anti-alcoholic; but a person cannot be anti-alcoholic because he makes alcohol in his own intestines. — Well, but that does not, of course, justify the fact that you have to become a drunkard and drink too much alcohol. Because if you now drink too much alcohol, that is, give in to the liver in its greed for alcohol, then it becomes sick, then it degenerates through it all, proliferates. The liver must be active. The liver enlarges and the small glands become bloated. And when the liver has to work to produce bile, it does not produce proper bile. The chyme is not properly permeated with bile in the intestines. It enters the lymph vessels and blood vessels as improper chyme. This enters the heart and also attacks the heart. That is why people who drink too much beer have a diseased liver, one that looks very different from those who drink little or even those who limit themselves to the little alcohol in the human intestines, which in itself is actually enough. The degenerated liver and the degenerated heart are a result of excessive alcohol consumption. Hence the beer heart that a large number of the Munich population have. But the liver is also always degenerate. You see, you understand the degeneration and the various diseases when you look in this way at the various stages of the chyme in the organism.

Now I have told you what happens when the egg white is liquefied. Alcohol penetrates into the protein and prevents it from becoming stinky. You know that when you want to store something alive, you also store it in alcohol, because alcohol, as they say, preserves the thing. It can sustain itself. The protein can also sustain itself in the organism by being placed in alcohol by the organism itself. This is extraordinarily clever.

But the processes that take place are so delicate that a human being could not do all this. If, let us say, he wants to preserve some human limb or a small organism, to preserve a small creature, he puts it in alcohol and displays it in his scientific cabinet. But trypsin does this in a much more delicate and ingenious way in the human intestine; it breaks down alcohol and converts the protein into alcohol.

And what happens to the fats? Yes, gentlemen, the fats go into the intestines and are converted again by what is secreted by the pancreas, in combination with the bile. And two substances are formed from the fat. One of these substances is glycerine. You know glycerine from the outside, but you produce it inside yourself every day. The other substance is acid. So fats are broken down into glycerol and acids, all kinds of fatty acids.

And only the salts that remain similar remain unchanged; at most they are dissolved so that they are made easier to digest. But they actually remain as they are absorbed. So the salts remain salts (see diagram on page 106).

So, with the corresponding foods, we eat starchy substances, protein-like substances, fatty substances and salt substances. And after we have digested, instead of starch and protein and fat, we have inside us: sugar, dissolved, liquid protein, glycerine, acids and salts.

And what happens to what we have eaten? We have something completely different inside us than what we ate. We have truly transformed the story.

You see, there was a doctor here in Switzerland a few centuries ago – but he travelled a lot – whom science today rather despises, but who still had an idea of all these processes. That was Paracelsus. He was a professor in Basel. But the guys threw him out because he knew more than they did. He is still generally reviled today. He fell off a rock and smashed his head, despite being a very clever person. He spent the last years of his life in Salzburg. He was a doctor. If he had been an honorable citizen, a city councilor of Salzburg, as they say today, they would have remembered him fondly. But he was a person who knew more than the others. And so they said: He was a drunkard, was drunk and fell over the rock. - Well, that is the way of the world. So he knew something about the world and always pointed out in a strong way how there is a transforming power inside man. But that has been forgotten for centuries since that time.

And what happens to all that is inside? Here science again succumbs to a great illusion. You see, science says: All that is now being produced as sugar, liquid protein, alcohol, glycerine, fatty acids and salts, all that goes into the blood vessels and from there into the heart, and from the heart it is driven through the blood vessels into the rest of the organism. Of course, I would like to say, with the thickest that is still there – everything is liquid, but even among liquids there are thick liquids – but with the thickest that is still there, it can be so, and it is so: it passes into the veins and from there supplies the body. But, gentlemen, haven't you noticed that when there was a glass of water and you put sugar in the glass and then drank it, that it is not only sweet at the bottom where the sugar was? The whole glass of water is sweet, isn't it! The sugar, when it is liquefied, dissolves in all the water. And the same goes for salt. In that glass of water in there, there are no veins for the sugar or salt to enter from all sides, but it is absorbed.

Now, some time ago I told you that a human being actually consists of 90 percent water, or at least fluid. It is living water, but it is water. Now, do the substances that are there all need the veins to pass into the whole body? When sugar is made in the intestines, does it first need the veins to pass into the whole body? Man consists of water so that the sugar can spread through him.

Yes, people have said: If a person becomes a drunkard, then all the alcohol a person consumes goes through the intestines to the heart and from there to the entire body.

So we can say: the chyme, which now consists of sugar, liquid protein, glycerine, acids, salts, passes into the whole body; only the thickest part passes through the veins into the whole body. And so it happens that salts are deposited in the head, that salts are deposited in all the other organs, which do not pass through the Blur at all, but go directly into these organs.

Now, you see, if it were the case that a person would constantly feel all the salt that is deposited in his head, then he would have a constant headache. Too much salt in the head gives headaches. Perhaps you have heard of migraine. I have spoken about it here before. One can explain things differently at different levels. What is migraine? Migraine consists of the fact that this whole distribution is out of order and too much salt, namely uric acid salts, is deposited in the head. Instead of the uric acid salts being excreted in the urine, they remain in the head during a migraine because the other foods are not properly prepared and retain the salts. Migraine is not such a noble disease at all, although it is usually noble people who suffer from it. Migraine is a very nasty disease. That which should be secreted in the urine remains on the right side of the head because it is already deteriorating in the stomach. So that which works on the left side of the organism works on the right side of the head. I will show why this is so in the near future.

And so it happens that the story, which should actually go out through the urine, is deposited on the right side of the head.

How much salt can a person take? Well, remember what I told you before. Remember that I said: the brain water is in the head. The mere fact that the brain water is inside makes the brain so light that it can exist in the human being at all. Because a body that is simply in the air has a certain heaviness, a certain weight. But when we put it in water, it becomes lighter. If that were not the case, one could not swim. And you see, the brain, if it were not in water, would weigh about 1500 grams. I have told you this before: because the brain floats in water, it weighs only 20 grams. That's how much lighter it is; 20 grams is the only thing it weighs! But the more salts that are deposited in the brain, the heavier it becomes, because the salts increase the weight of the brain. It then becomes just too heavy due to the salts.

Now we can say: In humans, when salts are deposited in the brain, the salt is made lighter – the whole brain is made lighter (by the buoyancy). But now think about how this is different in humans than in animals. You have to imagine that the human being has his head set on top of his whole organism. There the head has a proper supporting surface. It is different with animals. The head does not have this supporting surface; instead, the head is directed purely forward. What follows from this? Well, in humans, the pressure exerted by the head, although it is very light, is absorbed by the body. In animals, it is not absorbed by the body. You see, this is the main difference between humans and animals.

Naturalists are always pondering how man has developed from animals. It is all very well to think like that, but you can't look at man that way. You can't say: the animal has so and so many bones, and man has just as many bones. The monkey has so and so many bones, and man has just as many. So it's all the same. You can't say that. In the case of the ape, the head still hangs over at the front, however upright it walks, even if it is an orangutan or a gorilla. Man is already designed so that the head sits on the body, so that the entire pressure is absorbed by the body. What happens there?

Well, something very peculiar happens. We have sugar, liquid protein, glycerine, acids, salts in us. The salts go from the stomach up to the head and are deposited there, and then have to go back again, going back through the body if there are too many of them. But with regard to the other substances, something else has to happen in the body. And there, while the substances are going up, a new transformation takes place. This happens simply because the body intercepts the force of gravity. Some of the substances become lighter and lighter, while another part settles as a thick substance. Just as when you dissolve something, a sediment also settles; so, as it were, sediment forms everywhere on the way from the stomach to the head; the finest parts go up and are converted by this gravity, which has been made lighter. And what is created when the lightest parts of the food, which go up to the head, are converted? A kind of phosphorus is created from the food. And it is actually the case that a kind of phosphorus is produced from the food, so that the food does not simply penetrate into the head. A lot of it penetrates up, sugar, glycerine and so on, all kinds of things penetrate up, but some of it is converted into phosphorus before it comes up.

You see, gentlemen, in our heads we have salts that have been absorbed almost unchanged from the outside world, and we have phosphorus that has been spread out in a finely dispersed state, actually much finer than air. And these are the main substances found in the human head: salts and phosphorus. The others are only there so that he can survive as a living being. But the most important ones are salts and phosphorus. So we can say: in the human head, the most important things are salt and phosphorus.

Now, in a way that I will show you in a moment, it can be demonstrated that if a person does not have the right amount of salt in his head, he cannot think properly. You have to have the right amount of salt in your head so that you can think properly. Salt in the head is what you have to use to think. This is in addition to what I have already told you about thinking. Things in man are just complicated.

And if we simply have too much phosphorus in us, that is, eat too fiery foods, then we become a terrible fidget who wants to attack everything, who always wants to want. Because we have phosphorus, the will is there. And if we have too much phosphorus, then this will starts to fidget. And if the organism is such that it sends too much phosphorus up into the head through its entire composition, then the person not only starts fidgeting and, as they say, fidgets around nervously in the world – this has nothing to do with nerves, but with phosphorus – but he starts raging and becomes a madman, becomes raving mad. We need a little phosphorus in us so that we can want anything at all. But if we create too much phosphorus in ourselves, we go mad.

Now gentlemen, just think about it, when someone gives you salt, how you make it think. I would advise you to take a salt shaker and try to make it think! You do it all the time; in your mind you do use salt to think. And then, please rub off a little phosphorus from a match, rub it off a little so that it becomes very fine, then light it at the bottom and try to burn it. It should now want to burn, that is, it should evaporate, but it doesn't want to! But you do this to yourself all the time. Do you not now say to yourself that there is something in you that is truly more intelligent than our stupid head, which can do very little, which cannot turn salt into a thinking being or phosphorus into a volitional being? And that is the part of us that can be called the soul-spiritual. That is the living, weaving, what can be called the soul-spiritual. It is in there inside of us, uses the salt in the head for thinking, and uses the phosphorus, which rises like a smoke, very fine, to will.

In this way, one passes from the physical to the soul and into the spiritual if one observes correctly. But what does today's science do? It stops at the belly. At most, it knows that sugar and so forth are produced in the belly; but afterwards it loses track of things as they spread out further, and knows nothing of what happens next. That is why science cannot tell us anything about the soul and spirit. This science must be supplemented and expanded. We must not limit ourselves to the stomach and think of the head only as something that is put on. But one does not see how salts and phosphor have come up. One believes that it is the same in the head as in the stomach. The whole thing depends on the fact that today's science only knows something about the stomach, but only that something arises there, but does not know that the liver perceives and the kidneys think. It does not know that either. It does not know that because it does not know anything about the head either. So it does not look for it there, and considers what is on the dissecting table to be the complete liver. But it is not the complete liver, because the soul has lost it when it was in the state in which it was simply cut out of the body. As long as the soul is inside, you cannot cut it out of the body. So you see that a serious science must continue where today's science must stop. That is what matters. That is why we built the Goetheanum here, so that science does not just know something incomplete about the gut, but can explain something about the whole body. Then it will also be a real science.

Now, gentlemen, in order to understand the human being even better than we already do, let us also look at the earth for once. When people on earth come together, the life of the human being as a physical human life cannot really be considered in isolation; rather, one must also consider the earth.

When you visit a natural history museum, you sometimes find the remains of animals and plants that lived on earth a long time ago. You can imagine, of course, that all kinds of things happen in the earth until these old animals and plants are destroyed in a certain respect. You can also consider that, for example, of certain animals in the earth, only bones are preserved at most, whereas the muscles, soft tissues, heart and other vessels are lost or destroyed very quickly. Therefore, only the fossilized bones, that is, the bones that fill with other material after the death of the animals , that is, when mud gets into them, that therefore only these hardenings, these petrifications, can be found, dug up, and that, so to speak, from what one has there, which is mostly only bone remains, one has to form an idea of what the Earth once looked like. Because you can also imagine that today's conditions on Earth could not have existed at the time when completely different animals and plants lived, because otherwise today's would not have emerged. So the Earth must have looked quite different at one time. You will be able to deduce that from what I am telling you today.

You see, around 1810, a naturalist named Cuvier, who lived in the first half of the 19th century, was said to be able to visualize what the whole animal looked like when he was given a bone. If you really study the shape of the bones, for example if you only have a single forearm bone, you can get an idea of what the whole thing must have looked like, because every single bone shape changes immediately when the whole body changes. So even from the individual bones, one can determine what the whole body looked like. Apart from the fact that we sometimes have whole skeletons of animals that once lived on earth, we have such individual bones, and one can get an idea from them of what the earth must have looked like.

I will now begin to describe a state of the earth that existed on earth in very early times, many thousands of years ago. I will describe this state to you in narrative form. We will get to know the details more precisely later, but now I will simply tell you how it once looked on the earth that we walk on today. You all know it in its present state.

That was the case. Imagine the earth, I will draw a piece of it here (see drawing); but this earth did not yet have such solid mountains as it has today, but this earth was actually like the outermost surface of the earth is when it has rained for weeks on end, yes, much more muddy. So the surface of the earth was not as solid as it is today, but it was much more muddy. If there had been people of today's kind back then, they would have either had to swim – but then they would have been constantly in the mud, that is, terribly dirty – or they would have had to constantly sink. So people in their present form did not yet exist at that time. It was a muddy, very muddy earth, and all sorts of things were in the muddy earth.

If you go out there today and pick up a stone, a stone like the one Mr. Erbsmehl once brought, or if you go deeper into Switzerland and take even harder stones, you have to imagine that they were all dissolved in the muddy earth at that time, like when you dissolve salt in water. Because in this muddy soil were all kinds of acids that dissolved everything. So, in short, it was a very strange mud that made up this soil. And above this soil, there was not yet an air like today's, not an air that only contained oxygen and nitrogen, but one in which all kinds of acids were in a gaseous state. Even sulfuric acid was in it, sulfuric acid vapors and nitric acid vapors; that was all in this air. From this you can already see that man in his present form could not have lived there. Of course, these vapors were weak, but they were in this air. And this air also had the peculiarity that it was roughly the same as if you were to slip into an old oven today and feel the warmth that is being prepared for baking bread around you. So it would have been a bit uncomfortable for today's people if they had been inside this air, which also smelled of sulfuric acid and was quite warm.

But there was another air above that. It was a bit warmer than the air below and it formed clouds. These clouds that were formed there, they kept producing lightning and huge thunder because they also contained all kinds of sulfuric acid and nitric acid and all kinds of other substances. So it kept flashing with huge lightning. That was approximately the area around the earth.

I would like to call what was up there, because it was an awfully warm air, fire-air, because we have names. It was not glowing – that is only a false idea of today's science – it was not glowing, it was not warmer than such an oven. Such a fire temperature was up there; it then became a little cooler the further down you came. So I would just like to call this air up there fire air, and what was down there, earth mud.

This gives us a rough idea of what the earth was like in the beginning. Below was a greenish-brownish mud, which sometimes became as thick as a horse's hoof, but then it dissolved again. What is winter today was back then when the mud became so thick, almost like a horse's hoof, it solidified. And in summer, when the sun shone from the outside, it dissolved again and became liquid mud. And up there was just that warm air, which contained all sorts of things that later fell out. It was only later that the air cleared.

Now, another state has arisen from this state, in which very strange animals lived. So you see, all kinds of animals lived up there in the fire air. They looked like this: they had a scaly tail, but it was flat, so that the tail served them well for flying in the fire air. And then they had wings like a bat, and a head like that too. And they flew around up there in the air when the fire air no longer had such harmful vapors in it. These animals were particularly well suited for this – of course, when the storms were particularly severe, when there was terrible thunder and lightning, then they also felt uncomfortable; but when things became gentler, when there was just a little crackling up there and a soft lightning, they liked to live in this lightning, in this soft flashing. They flew around and were even capable of spreading something like an electrical emanation around them and sending it further down to earth. So that if a person had been down there, he would even have noticed from these electrical radiations: there is a flock of birds up there again. They were small dragon birds that spread electrical radiations around them and actually had their existence in the fire air in there.

You see, these birds, these dragon birds that were there, they were really very, very finely organized. They had very fine senses. The eagles and vultures that later emerged from them, after these guys had transformed, only retained the strong eyes from what these old guys had. But these guys sensed everything, especially with their bat-like wings, which were terribly sensitive, almost as sensitive as our eyes. With these wings they could perceive; they sensed everything that was going on. So, for example, when the moon was shining, they had such a sense of well-being in their wings that they moved their wings; just as a dog wags its tail when it is happy, so these guys moved their wings. They felt good in the moonlight. They roamed around and particularly liked making little fire clouds around themselves, as only the fireflies in the grass have preserved today. When the moon shone, they were up there like glowing clouds. And if there had been people back then, they would have seen such flocks of glowing balls and glowing clouds up there.

And when the sun shone – yes, back then it was the case that they then lost the desire to spread luminous bodies! They withdrew more into themselves, and then they actually processed what they had absorbed from the air – all the substances that they absorbed were still dissolved in the air. They nourished themselves by absorbing. They then digested this in the sun. They were just strange creatures. And they were once really present in the fire air of the earth.

If you now go further back in time, to the point where the earth started to form mud, you will find animals that are characterized by the fact that they were of gigantic size, gigantic... (gap in the text), when you consider these animals that once lived on the earth, half swimming and half wading in the mud. Now, there are already remains of these animals that can also be seen in natural science museums. These giants that once existed are called ichthyosaurs, fish dinosaurs. These ichthyosaurs were animals that can be said to have already lived on Earth. These ichthyosaurs looked particularly strange. They had a kind of head (it is drawn) like a dolphin, but the snout was not so hard - so it was a dolphin's head. Then they had a body like a huge, but slender lizard, with terribly thick scales. And in the head, they had huge teeth like a crocodile. They had crocodile teeth, like all these strange triangular crocodile teeth. Then they had something like whale fins – they moved half-swimming, half-walking; these were very soft, and they could also waddle and wade in the mud with them.

So they had something like whale fins, a huge body, then a head like a dolphin, with a pointed snout forward, crocodile teeth. And the strangest thing was that they had huge eyes that now glowed. One would have seen electrical points there in the clouds. The glowing birds flew especially in the moonlight. And when dusk came, if one could have seen it, one would have been able to make the encounter, which is highly unpleasant for today's people, with a giant light that would have come towards one, with a body larger than today's whales, with fins that swam on in this muddy water and sometimes stood up when it was harder. This muddy water sometimes became as hard as the hooves of horses. You could stand on it. They moved on like this: they formed these fins into hands; they were so internally mobile. They splashed over these horny layers, which were like deserts, and swam over them again where they were softer. Then they groped over them again, and afterwards, when they came to something softer again, they moved away by swimming. And if any human being had traveled in those days in any kind of boat – he couldn't have walked, it wouldn't have been possible – he might have encountered a giant animal like this, which he could have climbed up on with a ladder. It was like climbing a mountain today. You could have encountered a whole herd of cattle! There was something completely different there once.

All this can be seen; just as Cuvier recognized an entire animal from a single bone, today we can see how these ichthyosaurs, of which remains still exist, alive, and what they could do with their huge fins, that they had such a huge eye that shone like a giant lantern from afar, so that one could have avoided it. So they moved up and over the muddy earth and in the muddy earth.

And still a little deeper, so that they waded and bathed with real pleasure in the mud and always looked terribly dirty, so greenish-brownish dirty, were other animals. These other animals sometimes just stuck their huge heads out into the softer mud, but otherwise they waddled around in it, relying mainly on the mud having hardened a little. Only sometimes did they come to the surface, sticking their heads out. And that was something quite remarkable.

These other animals, those with the huge eye, are called ichthyosaurs today in their remains. But then there were those that were a bit more terrestrial, the plesiosaurs. The plesiosaurs also had a kind of whale-like, belly-like body, heads like lizards, so a kind of whale body and heads like lizards; but their eyes were more on the sides, while the ichthyosaurs had their huge glowing eyes right at the front. The plesiosaurs had a whale body, but it was also completely covered with scales. And the strange thing was that, because they were already more sluggish, they tended to settle more and more on what looked like somewhat firmer giant boats in the muddy earth. They already had four legs, clumsy four legs, with which they could even walk quite comfortably. They no longer had fins like the ichthyosaurs, on which they leaned. The ichthyosaurs braced themselves on their fins when they came upon something hard, and where they braced themselves, the fins spread out; so they used them as feet. But these plesiosaurs had hand-like feet. And from the remains, we can see that they must have had terribly strong ribs.

This was the state of things as they once were on Earth, how the plesiosaurs led a lazy life down there, how the ichthyosaurs swam around on the Earth and flew – for the animals with the fins could also fly quite low – and above them, in the twilight and in the moonlight, these ever-shining luminary clouds, which were actually dragon-bird stars. So that's what it looked like.

Now, the plesiosaurs were lazy creatures. But, you know, there was a reason for that. The Earth itself was lazier back then than it is today. Today, the Earth rotates around its axis in twenty-four hours. Back then, it took much longer; the Earth itself was lazier. It moved more slowly around itself, and that's how everything else came about. The fact that the air is so pure today depends entirely on our earth rotating on its own axis in twenty-four hours, which means that it has become more industrious over time.

The most uncomfortable time – if you judge it from today's human point of view – the most uncomfortable time should have been for these dragon-birds, because they had a hard time. They did not see it as a bad time, but they had a huge desire and longing for what you could actually understand when you hear it told today, as if these dragon-birds had had a very bad time. That was the case. Imagine the ichthyosaur with its huge eye crawling, flying, swimming through the very warm air; but the eye, it glowed very brightly. This glowing eye attracted these birds up there like a lamp attracts a midge. You have the same phenomenon on a small scale. If you light a lamp and there is a mosquito in the room, it flies towards it and is immediately burnt. Now, these birds up there were completely mesmerized by the giant eye of the ichthyosaurs, and they plunged down, and the ichthyosaurs could eat them. So the ichthyosaurs lived on what was buzzing around in the air above them.

If a person could have walked around on this strange earth in those days, they would have said: These are giant creatures and they eat fire. — Because that's what it looked like, exactly what it looked like, like giant creatures rushing around, flying around and eating fire that would have flown to them from the air.

And these plesiosaurs – I told you, they stuck their heads out like that; their eyes also glowed, and when a bird was swooping down, they also got something.

So it all fits together when you look at the reality. A dog that you feed poorly will also show you its strong ribs. The ichthyosaurs ate all the fire from the plesiosaurs; the plesiosaurs only got the worst firebirds and therefore had such prominent ribs. You can still see today that these plesiosaurs were poorly fed in ancient times.

But I said you would think: the birds up there, those beautiful, glowing birds – because they were beautiful – those beautiful glowing birds, they didn't have it comfortable. But that was what they liked, and they felt good when they could plunge into the jaws of an ichthyosaurus. That's what they considered bliss. Just as the Turks wanted to go to paradise, so these birds considered it their bliss to plunge into the jaws of an ichthyosaurus.

But really, gentlemen, I would say, it almost became more uncomfortable for the fire-eater itself – it had to eat them because it needed them for food – but it almost became more uncomfortable for the fire-eater itself than for the others that entered its belly. The firebirds plunged into it as if into their bliss; but the ichthyosaurus became quite uncomfortable in there in his belly because all kinds of electricity developed in there. And under the influence of this fire-eating and this electricity that developed in the giant stomach that almost filled the entire Ichthyosaurus—it had almost nothing else on the surface, mainly it was filled by a giant stomach—the Ichthyosaurs gradually became weak. It took quite a long time – even the fish nature can endure a lot; I said the other day about the human nature that it can endure a lot, but also the fish nature, especially an ichthyosaurus, can of course endure even more – but little by little the ichthyosaurs became more and more weak. They developed all kinds of weaknesses. Their eyes no longer shone as brightly. They were no longer as attracted to birds. And eating hurt them more and more. These ichthyosaurs got more and more stomach aches. What did that mean? In the world, everything means something.

You see, while these ichthyosaurs were developing on Earth and eating this fire, and this fire was being digested in their stomachs, their stomachs were transformed; eventually they were no longer a real stomach. And finally it came to the point that all these ichthyosaurs themselves took on a different form. They transformed.

Modern science will only tell you: There were once other animals, and they changed. That is no better than telling people: Once upon a time, a god came down and took a piece of earth and formed Adam out of it. You can understand one as well as the other.

But what I am telling you now is easy for you to understand. Because the fact that the ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs ate the dragon birds has completely transformed their insides and they have become different animals. This was also the case because the earth was turning faster and faster - not as fast as it is today, but faster than before, when it was very sluggish - and because the air was letting more and more harmful substances fall down, which were then combined with the earth. In particular, everything sulfurous was absorbed into the earth. The air became increasingly purer, not like today's air, but already considerably purer. It only became a kind of watery air in the later state, always interspersed with dense water vapors, with fog vapors. In the early days, the air was actually much purer because it was warmer. Later it cooled down and was terribly foggy. It was actually a fog over the earth that never really stopped, not even under the influence of the sun; it was a foggy layer over the earth. The mud gradually became a little thicker, and the later stones began to crystallize out. The mud became thicker, but it was still there. At the bottom there was still some thick stuff, and in between there was always some thin stuff, brownish-greenish muddy stuff, and above it was a foggy air.

In this foggy air, huge plants appeared, really huge plants. If you go into the forest today and look at the ferns, they are tiny today. But many, many thousands of years ago, similar to these ferns, there were huge plants, with weak roots in the muddy, spongy earth, plants that towered high and formed a kind of forest where the mud of the earth had already become somewhat thicker. So that later a state of the earth came, which was already a bit thicker. There were already all kinds of rocks – they had become solid, not very strong, a bit coarser, like wax – and in between there was mud everywhere, and out of that grew these huge fern trees, these giant trees. Where there was quite a bit of rock below, such giant forests with giant trees emerged. Then there was free space again – then it was different again. With these giant forests with huge trees that had emerged in nature for the Earth, the Ichthyosaurus and the Plesiosaurus would no longer have been able to do much. It was already too hard for the Plesiosaurus down there, and although it was still soft enough, it was too hard for the Ichthyosaurus and the Plesiosaurus would have become even more dirty: a crust would have formed around the scales. They could no longer have lived. But all these animals had already been contaminated by their fire-eating. When they came to this later Earth – but the later always means thousands and thousands of years – yes, it looked quite different. There were animals in the mud (it is drawn) that are also preserved in remains, so that we can get an idea of what these critters looked like. These critters, first of all, had a huge belly and a huge stomach, but they had a head that looked something like this, but much more clumsy, like the head of a modern-day seal. The eyes had already turned blackish, while the eyes of the earlier animals were luminous. They already had four feet, quite clumsy feet. But in addition, these creatures were completely covered with very fine hair, and the feet were actually more like clumsy hands.

And these critters led a strange life in this earth. They were on the solid earth at certain times, but deep down in the mud, and in this mud they moved. And mainly their breasts moved. They had huge breasts that were half lungs and half breasts. It was as if the lungs were still all the way out. At certain times they came and waddled and swam up to these forests and ate the fern trees. So the animals went from being fire-eaters to being plant-eaters. These animals were here (it is being drawn) and were covered as if by women's hair, they had giant heads, heads like clumsy seal heads. If you had gone for a walk back then, you could have seen these animals, as they always lived down there, breathing under water, always coming out, sitting on the banks, going to the forests. There they ate quite a lot with their huge mouths of what today you could not have eaten as food in one meal; they mainly ate a lot away from these giant forests. These are the animals that, as I said, are still around today and are called manatees today... (gap in the text).

And how did these animals actually come about? Yes, you see, it was because the earlier animals ate the air-breathing animals. And through the electrical forces, their bodies were transformed. The sea cows did not exactly develop from the ichthyosaurs I have described, but they did develop from similar animals. What they used to eat has become their outer form. What they took in internally has become their external form. Through eating, these animals have transformed.

This must now be said about today's natural science. You see, everything used to be much softer on the earth than it is today; these animals have taken on the forms that were formed in them by what they ate from the air animals.

And these dragon birds, for their part, had to change their shape again because the substances in the air were no longer the same as they used to be. They fell closer to the ground, and that is where the later birds gradually emerged.

But down below, another form has always emerged through eating. For example, from such an animal, as this Plesiosaurus was, an animal emerged that had four legs, like four huge columns (it is drawn), but on it there was also a huge belly, a head that was also similar to a seal head, Plump, it had a tail. It was also a giant animal. It was really very large. If you step on a very small wren with your feet, it is naturally underneath. This animal could have stepped on an ostrich, it was that large, it could have simply stepped on it to death. The largest animals of today would have behaved towards these animals then as the mice do now towards the larger animals. There are also remains of this animal. This animal is called Megatherium.

These animals also moved slowly, according to their constitution, just as one also moves on four pillars, and they fed on what happened to fly into their mouths, into those huge mouths, which also had crocodile teeth, but somewhat weaker ones. Some animals still survived, so there were still animals crawling around that looked like dinosaurs, like crocodiles. But these megatheriums simply trampled them to death when they came. Yes, that's how it once was!

And only now, after all this had happened, did the air gradually free itself from these water vapors - because everything that lived in water vapors - and the time came when the sun was actually sun could really have an effect on the earth, because the sun's rays were stopped earlier because the air was like an ocean, albeit a thin one, but it was like an ocean; the sun's rays were stopped. So that it was only in later times that the sun's rays came down on the earth.

Yes, gentlemen, you also have to look at this story a little more inwardly! These animals that were down there, ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs – later on, manatees, megatheriums – well, they were pretty stupid animals. The ichthyosaurus was still the smartest, but the others were actually really stupid. But you can't say that about these dragon birds that were up there. I have already told you: they had an extremely fine sense. You may say: we humans are clever, we would not fly into the jaws of the ichthyosaurs like those dragon birds. But I don't think so. If you had lived in the time of the dragon birds, you would have flown into it too. But these birds were intelligent. And these birds, they had a very fine sense of the moon and the sun, just like our eyes, and these dragon birds felt it with their whole body, especially with their wings, which - only on a small scale - are imitated today in the wings of bats, which are also extraordinarily sensitive.

Now, these animals perceived the sun and the moon; the moon, as I have already explained, in such a way that they created something like an electromagnetic shell around it that was luminous. And when the moon shone on this fiery air, they also began to shine, shimmer, and flicker in the air with their own luminosity, like a St. John's nightingale. But they felt all that. And you don't need to use your imagination, but can proceed quite scientifically and thus also know that these animals perceived the starry sky as something different than if there had been no stars. They felt so at home in the starry sky that they felt very comfortable in their wings when the stars shone on them, and that's how those wings became speckled.

Today, we can even verify this story to a certain extent if we pay close attention. Of course, very little of these birds, which had very soft bodies, has been preserved, and they are almost impossible to find in fossils; but wing imprints can be found. Those who are really good at studying fossils, especially limestone fossils, softer fossils, will find such wing imprints. But of course you have to be open-minded, not as uptight as a professor. So if it's a dragonfly wing that has made an impression – of course there's nothing left of the wing, but the imprint in the limestone – if you look more closely, you can see that there are all kinds of stars that have been imprinted. They are the traces of the impression made by the stars in the night sky on these bat wings. They sensed whether it was day or night.

Now I don't need to describe much more to you, so you will say to yourself: Yes, the whole story here looks an awful lot like what I recently described to you about the liver and kidneys! — Man still carries in his present belly a kind of replica of what has happened on the whole earth. And these dragon birds were like the eyes that the earth itself had. That is to say – I can only tell you this at the end today – the whole Earth was a fish, an animal, and all these giant animals lived in the Earth and walked around and waddled around, like the white blood cells in us. We are still such an Earth. The white blood corpuscles, which, by the way, although they are small, are not even dissimilar in shape to these animals in the past, sometimes look almost like these animals in their smallness. So the whole Earth was a giant fish, a giant animal, and these dragon birds were the movable eyes with which the Earth looked out into the space of the stars, the space of the sun, the space of the worlds and perceived it.

That the Earth is dead today is only a later development. Originally, the Earth was alive, as we are alive. And what I have described to you as megatheria, sea cows, plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs and so on, yes, that looked an awful lot like what goes around in our bodies today as white blood cells, only in giant sizes. And what I have described as dragon-birds, again looks very much like what goes on in our eyes, only it is immobile.

And so we can say: the Earth was once a giant animal that, in keeping with its size, was rather lazy, only turning slowly on its axis in space, but which looked out into space through these dragon birds, which were only movable eyes, and looked at all this. And what I have described to you, this fire-eating and so on, that also looks very similar to what happens in the stomach and intestines. And the dragon birds, they look very similar to the opposite of the white blood cells, the brain cells, as I have described them, which extend into the eyes.

In short, you can understand the earth if you see it as a dead animal. The earth is a dead animal. And only when the earth had lost its own life could the other beings, to which, as I will describe to you, man also came, live on earth.

It is just as if we as humans were to die and the white blood cells were to change into independent entities. That is how it was with this huge animal, with the earth, once. And today we stand before this huge corpse. You need not be surprised if today's geologists, who can only study the dead, merely study the corpse. Today's geologists only study the corpse of the earth. Science everywhere does the same, studying only the dead. It lays the corpse on the dissecting table. But if you want to understand something, you really have to go back to the living. The earth was once alive, flying through space, albeit very sluggishly, like a giant animal, and able to see out through the eyes it had everywhere, which were the mobile little kite birds. With them, it looked out into space.

We will continue our examination of this next time. It is a very interesting subject.

It will be necessary, gentlemen, to take a closer look at the subject we have been discussing. Last time, I was able to show you what strange creatures once populated the Earth and how these truly remarkable creatures behaved. I was finally able to point out to you that the whole Earth itself was once a living being.

You see, when we look at all the animals that once lived on Earth – last time I spoke to you about ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, megatheriums and sirenians – look at all these animals, of which remains are still present in the various museums, we find that they have one peculiarity: they are mostly covered on the outside with a scale armor and have powerful, thick forearms, paws. So, of course, you could not only have gone for a walk on such an animal – they were big enough for that – but you could also have beaten it with a mighty hammer, and the animal would not have been very uncomfortably affected by any of it, because the whole animal was surrounded by such a scale armor. In the small, however, only as very small dwarfs, only the turtles or crocodiles of these ancient animals have survived today. I would like to say that in the small format, turtles and crocodiles are what these animals once were in their huge size. So you have to imagine that these ancient animals had such a horn-like coat consisting of individual horn plates.

Now we have to get an idea of where these animals actually got this horn-like coat from. We have to study history from a very young age, not as a human being from a very young age, but how history develops from a very young age. Imagine that a dog wounds itself somewhere. The animals have strange healing instincts. You will have already seen what a dog does when it wounds itself somewhere. When a dog has a wound somewhere, the first thing it does is lick it; it covers it with saliva. And then, once it has covered it with saliva, it likes to lie in the sun and let the sun shine on it. And what happens then? A kind of scab forms over the wound. So that one can say: If this is the dog's wound (see drawing), then he covers it with saliva so that the wound is coated with saliva over its entire surface. Then he lets the sun shine on it, and the sun makes a hard crust out of what it brews there, together with the saliva, and underneath it heals. So the dog has a very strange healing instinct. It does the right thing based on its instinct.

Now we can expand a little on what we have observed. We can look at another strange phenomenon that will lead us to understand something like this wound healing here. You know, we breathe in the air. When we breathe in the air, we get oxygen inside. The oxygen spreads throughout our body. And when the oxygen spreads throughout our body, we can live. We would suffocate immediately if we could not get the oxygen. But what do we do for it? We are not exactly very grateful people for the air that gives us oxygen. We are actually quite ungrateful beings towards the air, because we combine carbon with this oxygen in ourselves, and that becomes carbonic acid, and we breathe that out again. This is actually quite ungrateful towards our environment, because we are constantly polluting the air. If someone were to stand in carbonic acid, they would suffocate. What is made of the beautiful, good breathing air inside us is what we use to pollute our environment. We constantly spread carbonic acid gas around us, in which no being – not a human being, but also not a living being that is animal-like – could live. So you see, animal life actually basically consists of the fact that it itself constantly draws what it needs to live from its surroundings, but returns the deadly substance to its surroundings. That is what animal life consists of.

However, with this animal life, things would soon go badly on the present earth if all creatures behaved as indecently as humans and animals. You see, humans and animals pollute the air. And if all creatures behaved as indecently as humans and animals, then our earth would have been destroyed long ago, with nothing left to live on; then our earth would have long since become one big cemetery. But the good thing is that plants don't behave indecently. They do the opposite. Just as we absorb oxygen and pollute the air all around, so plants absorb carbon dioxide and retain the carbon, while releasing the oxygen. So that actually only because there are plants and especially forests on earth, life on earth can exist. If there were no forests on earth, or if large companies - some of them are already doing it - were to cut down the forests, life on earth would become much less healthy. That is precisely the point, that we need the forests on earth. If we only look at the wood, then of course we are gradually making life on earth impossible by cutting down the forests. So we can say: on earth it is arranged in such a way that people and animals actually behave quite indecently, because they pollute everything, and the plants and the forests, in turn, make everything tidy.

Yes, you see, gentlemen, that is the way it is on Earth now, but it was not always like that on Earth. We just have to be clear about the fact that the Earth has changed, that it was quite different in the time I was talking about last Wednesday; you have realized that. Because when you go for a walk now, you won't come across an ichthyosaurus up on the Gempen, as you might have done back then. That is no longer the case. But the earth is constantly changing and will also look quite different in the future than it does today. But what can we see from all that we have learned now? We can say: That which is inside a person, what he gives of himself, cannot sustain him. He must get something else; on the present earth he must get what the plants give him in order to live. We cannot live on what we have inside us alone, it destroys us.

So you can see this quite clearly: that which is useful inside a person destroys us when it comes from outside. Inside, we would be quite ill if we had too much oxygen. But from the outside, oxygen must be supplied continuously.

So what is harmful on the inside is beneficial when it comes from the outside. What is beneficial on the inside is harmful when it comes from the outside. You see, gentlemen, it is so important to realize that what is beneficial internally is harmful when it comes from outside, and what is harmful internally is beneficial when it comes from outside. This is so important that if you do not understand this, you do not understand anything.

Now we can say: We now know from contemporary life that something completely different must approach us from the outside than we have within us. Something completely different must approach us from the outside.

Let us now go back to the old days, having acquired a few concepts from the present. Let us go back and imagine ourselves in the time when the ichthyosaurs walked on the earth, half walking, half swimming, and when the plesiosaurs hopped around on the earth. We place ourselves in this time. Yes, but that was also a time that was preceded by another. Now, what was it like on Earth in those ancient times, before there were ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs?

Yes, gentlemen, according to the remains we have from this ancient, very ancient time, the animals that existed back then were even clumsier than the later ones. You know, a plesiosaur – you can see this if you look at one in any museum – with its huge size, with its heavy scale armor, as heavy as a knight's armor in the Middle Ages, and with that it was a little uncomfortable to move, and with its clumsy legs – they were terribly clumsy creatures. So, you know, they weren't exactly nimble guys. But these clumsy creatures still had something that resembled feet, which were like fins that they could use to swim and even to hold on to something. So, after all, I would say that was already a kind of modern era. But the animals that existed before these clumsy ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs and megatheriums were much more clumsy, because actually didn't have much more than a soft body with all sorts of things thrown together in it: a bit at the front that looked a bit like a head, a fairly long tail at the back, and a huge, huge scaly armor over it.

If you have ever seen an oyster, for example, then you can imagine that a turtle is a bit like a dwarf. Inside it has only the whole mucus-like body, and a shell around it. Now, if you imagine the shell a little differently, the scales like those of a turtle and inside it also a soft oyster body, then you get roughly the animals that were once on Earth before the ichthyosaurs and megatheriums were on Earth.

The Earth was very thick then, much thicker than milk. Everything that is now mountains was dissolved. So it was a very thick thing. In this thick sauce - the whole Earth was an awfully thick sauce in space - swam such a giant oyster. Compared to it, our whole carpentry here would have been a dwarf. They were such giant oysters that if you had drawn today's France on its back, it would have comfortably fit on it. The oldest of these animals were so huge because the Earth was also still huge. So once upon a time there were giant animals that actually consisted only of a slimy mass and that could only move like oysters, except that the oysters must have been in much thinner water. And these slimy animals, which had a huge tortoise shell, swam in this thick earth.

So you see, the earth was really something like this, like if you imagine a huge thick soup today and dumplings in it. But you have to imagine the dumplings as being very thick on one side, so that you would break your teeth if you bit into them on that side, and very soft on the other. You could then lift one side of these dumplings off; then you would get something like a hat. And the other side, that would be very soft, you could eat that. This was much softer for these animals than the one they swam in, than this thick earth. Therefore, it was also the case with these animals, as it is today only certain very small animals have preserved themselves. You will have seen snails crawling before. When the snails crawl, you can follow the trail of these snails; it is full of this slime - you will have seen that - that the snail leaves behind. Today, the sun dries up the slime. Today it is not very important. But think of the ancient times, when the earth was not as solid. These animals also left this slime in the thick earth soup, and it mixed with this thick earth soup. So these animals have always been very useful in this thick earth soup.

Today, such things can only be traced in very small traces when you walk on the path and it has rained a lot. You can see this especially here at the Goetheanum: then the earthworms crawl out. You will have seen this already, during special rainy seasons the earthworms crawl out everywhere. Where are the earthworms otherwise? They are usually inside the earth, crawling inside the earth and making holes where they crawl through. You see, if it were not for these earthworms, our fields would be much less fertile. Because what these earthworms leave behind in the earth makes the soil fertile. We must not imagine that anything in nature is unnecessary.

And so it was with these giant oysters in ancient times. They constantly secreted what they gave off as mucus into the earth soup, and thereby always refreshed this earth soup, always, always refreshed it.

But the story is this: in today's soil – yes, however much the snails and earthworms mix in what they secrete – in today's soil, it dies again. What the earthworms provide in the form of dung is very useful in the arable soil, and in a sense what the snails provide in the form of dung is also useful in the arable soil. Not only in the arable soil, but in the meadows, what is on the earth, where the snail slime sinks in, is a very, very good fertilizer. But you see, what goes into the earth through today's animals does not come to life.

But in the time I am talking about now, when these giant oysters deposited their products in the earth soup, there really was something very strange – something like that still happens today. Right, fertilization in certain lower animals, even in fairly high animals, does not occur in the same way as in higher animals and in humans, but fertilization occurs, let's say, in certain fish-like or even amphibian-like or toad-like animals, in such a way that the eggs are laid, laid somewhere, so that there is a clump of eggs somewhere that the female has laid; and the male then simply drops his seminal fluid on top of them, outside the female, and only then are the eggs fertilized, outside the female. This still happens today. So you can say: the female lays the eggs somewhere and goes away. The male finds these eggs, fertilizes them, and also goes away. So fertilization takes place externally. But it cannot happen, nothing comes of it, unless the sun shines on these fertilized eggs. If the sun does not shine on them, then nothing comes of it, they die. But if the sun shines on these fertilized eggs, then new animals come of it. This still happens today.

In the time when these giant oysters swam around in the earth soup, this mucus, when it entered the earth, had the effect that such huge animals developed again and again from the earth itself. The old ones died, but the new animals developed out of the earth itself. The earth itself continually gave birth to such extremely clumsy but gigantic animals. So the earth was such that it was itself fertilized by what these animals secreted. So you can imagine: once there was one earth life; the earth was completely one living being. But this life had to be maintained by the mucus secreted by these animals up above. If this thick soup of the earth had been alone, these thick animals here would soon have died out too. They secreted, and through that the life of the earth was continually maintained, so that the earth continually drove such animals out of itself. They then fertilized the earth itself again, and it could now again grow such animals out of itself.

But these animals, they could not have secreted this slime if something else had not been there. You see, the earth was an awfully thick soup; but I told you: the slime of the animals was much thinner than this earth soup, much thinner. How did it come about that the animals could have such thin slime? That would have been quite impossible, that the animals could have a thinner slime than the earth itself. The earth was also a pulp, a slime, but a very thick one; but these thinner lumps of slime were constantly emerging. How did they come about?

You see, gentlemen, if you have only a glass of water and in it a liquid, water in which salt is dissolved, it can happen that the salt falls down. The salt collects as a sediment at the bottom; but then the water is thinner. Only when the salt was dissolved was the water thick. Now the water has become thinner because the salt is out. So later you have thinner water above, and much thicker salt water below. And if I could turn this glass over now – no, if I did that, of course all the salt water would just flow out, and the story would not have formed. But with these ancient animals, it was like that, it turned itself over. With these old critters, it was like this: there was the thick earth; something had formed there. There was the scale armor on top and slime further down. What was the scale armor? That was nothing other than what had separated out from the thick earthen mass. Just as salt separates downward from water, so this thick, very thick mass, which then formed a scale armor like that of turtles, separated upward from the thickness of the earthen mass, but upward, so that the thinner part remained below. And so this inverted glass, or head, could lift itself out of the water. Only the salt came to the top.

And what happened to this salt? Yes, gentlemen, now we go back to what the dog does when it has a wound. When the dog has a wound, it licks it off. Then it lets the sun shine on it; then it becomes thick and kills whatever is in the wound. Otherwise, bacteria would get in and the wound would get bigger, and the whole dog would be destroyed. You see, a scab forms, a scab of what is inside. The mucus that the dog brings to the wound is something internal; when the sun shines on it, it thickens the mucus through the warmth.

It was the same with these animals in those ancient times. The sun shone on this thick earth soup, and because the sun shone on it, such thickening occurred in some places as it occurs on a wound in a dog. These were the shells. And because a thickening formed, there was a thinner mass of mucus underneath. And so these giant oysters were formed. But, you see, these giant oysters could not have formed at all if the sun had not shone. It would have been impossible. So now we have the strange fact that we have the Earth – I will draw this very small now –; the Sun shines on the Earth during the day, and the Sun brings out these giant oysters from the Earth. So we can say: Once upon a time, the Earth was a thick soup, and because the Sun shone on it from the outside, such animals formed.

But all that would have been of no use at the time, because now the earth, when these animals left their thin slime behind them as they swam through the soup, could have been fertilized. That would have been of no use. Yes, so the earth must have been something else in its interior. It must have been similar to an egg. Only in this way could it have been fertilized. Is that not obvious? The earth was once, so to speak, like an egg. Only in this way could it have been fertilized.

We have to study what it is like with such an egg so that it can be fertilized, because we come to a state of the earth when there was a thick earth soup. The beings that could fertilize, I mean, the male beings, we found them in the old days; but if the earth should have been the generally female being – we have not yet found that, we now have to look for it again. We have to figure out how the earth could have such a huge egg.

You see, gentlemen, if you want to come up with something like that, it means looking at the world a little. And strangely enough, I will now have to draw your attention to a completely different area first, to something that still exists today, but really, I would say, in such a rarefied state that many people are not aware of it in their consciousness. But it is really not just out of a certain sense of mystery that poets, when they want to depict the development of love between two lovers, have them go out into the moonlight. There is something about moonlight that has an extraordinary effect on the human imagination.

You may think that this is not really part of it, but it is. Moonlight drives out the imagination of man. And you see, it is something quite remarkable that moonlight drives out the imagination of man. When people who are currently scholars sometimes have such a surge of cleverness, they sometimes come up with very cute things, nice things. For example, a while ago in Paris there was a scholar who said to himself: With all the medicines we now have in medicine, you can do so terribly little for people, and – it is really quite strange that a Parisian scholar has finally come up with it – if you wanted to make people healthier, you could do something different. And, gentlemen, be amazed: the scholar in Paris advised people to read Goethe's “Faust” a lot – it will make them healthier than absorbing all that stuff that only stimulates the mind – because Goethe's “Faust” stimulates the imagination, and imagination is healthy. Even a materialistic scholar has found reading Goethe's “Faust” so good because it stimulates the imagination that he said: Today's people are so clever, they only use their minds; but the mind actually makes you sick. But if people would read “Faust” and put themselves in all the images that are in “Faust,” they would be much healthier.

So the scholar wanted people to imbibe a little of the healthy power of growth. People should imbibe a little of the healthy power of growth! Yes, you see, that was a moment of insight, of which today's science has few. Today's science had a healthy moment. This is healthy because it encourages you to digest better. It is really true: a person digests better when they study Goethe's “Faust” than when they study all the learned works. There they ruin their stomachs. With Goethe's “Faust” the stomach becomes healthier and healthier; but so do the other organs. And what is the reason for this? Well, because Goethe's “Faust” comes from the imagination, not from the intellect.

Imagine, when a person lets themselves be inspired by the moon, then their imagination is stimulated. So, the moon stimulates the growth forces in humans. But today this is the case to a very small extent. Isn't it true that a person feels a little warmed inside, so he feels his growth forces stimulated inwardly when he goes for a moonwalk? That's true. But it doesn't come into consideration much.

But the moon is connected to everything that life means to a person. I can give you a small fact that shows extremely strongly how the moon is connected with life. You see, today, when people are paying attention to some things that people once knew - remember, for example, what I told you here about the Roman Janus head with the two faces - you can imagine that people used to know more than they do today. They may not have been “smarter,” but they knew more. Isn't that so? Today, when everything that people once knew has been buried by people's cleverness, today one says, “Well, a human child is carried for nine months.” But medicine, which sometimes, just as it has preserved the Latin language, has also preserved old ideas – today's doctors don't want to know anything about it, but sometimes these old ideas are still there – says: the child is carried for ten months. Where does that come from, gentlemen? Well, if you do the math: a lunar month has about 28 days; ten times 28 = 280 days. A month as we have it today, calculated at 30 days, if you take that nine times, you have about the same = 270 days. This means that the nine months we have today are ten lunar months. That is the same time. In the past, people used to count in lunar months when talking about the gestation period of a child in the womb.

Where did this come from, gentlemen? Because it was still known that the development of the child in the womb is connected to the moon. It is connected to the moon. It was once known and can now be established again through anthroposophical studies that it is the moon that causes the child to be able to develop as a living being in the first place.

But this moon only affects female beings in the human and animal kingdom because they are designed to be affected. The moon no longer has an effect on the earth. It no longer produces eggs there. And yet, if you study the matter properly, you come to the conclusion that it is not only in a subtle sense that the imagination is stimulated and that our growth forces and we are set in motion when we go for a walk on the moon. The moon has a revitalizing effect in us, but it has such a strong revitalizing effect in the human and animal female body that it actually equips the child or the animal with growth forces.

Yes, you see, the moon, shining down from the sky, does not cause the earth itself to grow, because the earth is already far too dead today. So this earth, which could once be fertilized, must have been more alive.

And now you remember that I told you that what is inside a person, when it comes in from the outside, is harmful. So the moon, which shines down on the earth today, can no longer bring forth life. Why? Because its light comes from the outside, just as when the air that we ourselves have given off comes from the outside. Then it can no longer invigorate us internally. Today, the moon can no longer do anything with the earth itself. Today, the moon can only do something in the animal and human body because it is protected.

But where must the moon have been at one time so that it could make the earth itself a living being? It cannot make it a living being outside of the earth. It must have been inside the earth! Just as carbonic acid, when it is outside, can no longer make us alive, but must be inside, must develop itself alive inside, so the moonlight must not have been outside once, but inside the earth.

So imagine, gentlemen: back then, when these beings were there, the moon was not outside the earth at all, but inside it, dissolved in the thick soup. It was not yet limited at all, but it was in there, an even thicker ball. It could make the whole earth into an egg. It just comes to mind that the moon, which today only affects the imagination and the female fertilized body, that the moon, which is up in the sky today, was once inside the earth.

But then it must also have come out at some time. And you see, gentlemen, here we come to the tremendously important moment in the evolution of the earth: the moon, which is always outside today, was once inside the earth. The earth excreted it. It now surrounds it from the outside.

If we study the entire body of the earth, something remarkable comes to light. If we study the body of the Earth, we actually see that the body of the Earth consists of water, and the continents, the land masses, are floating in this water, just as these giant animals once swam in it. Europe, Asia, Africa are floating in the water, just as these giant animals once swam in the Earth soup, in the thick Earth soup. And when we study what it looks like – you know, it doesn't look the same – then we can still see today from the hollowing out of the earth and the shifting of the continents that the moon once flew out of where the Pacific Ocean is today. The moon was once inside the earth, flew out. It first hardened on the outside.

We are now looking back at an ancient state of the earth. Then the earth still had its moon inside its body. The moon made it into a mother with its substance, and the paternal substance was evoked by the sun, because the sun continually produced such lumps of slime, which surrounded it on the outside with a thick coat of horn. That was caused by the sunbeam. And these floating lumps of slime have continually fertilized what was at the bottom of the earth soup and what was kept alive by the moon. So that the earth was a huge egg and was continually fertilized by what the sun had done.

Yes, gentlemen, if history had gone on like that, it would have created a rather uncomfortable situation on Earth. The moon would have flown out. The earth would have become barren, and eventually everything would have died. What has been done there? Although the moon's flight out has caused the earth to die, something of the old fertilizing has been preserved in the maternal animal and human body. Before that, there was no birth at all in the way that there is now, right? Just as when you make a new loaf of bread, you take some of the old yeast and then add it, so there is still some of the old substance that you took from the moon remaining in the female bodies, so that it can be fertilized. What is fertilized there, what becomes an egg inside, is only a replica of the old earth egg. So it is no wonder that when the child is born, the moon story still haunts it, and even the time during which the child is carried is determined by the moon. Isn't it true that the baron's son must also stretch himself according to the inheritance his father leaves him? The fertilized egg must do the same, which actually comes from the old moon soup. It must still be guided by the moon, because that is where the inheritance comes from.

In general, you see, in older times people knew much more about these things. I will give you the reasons why once more. In older times, people knew much more about these things, and they said: Sol, the sun, is masculine. It does, after all, represent the masculine. This is still the case in Latin. Sol, the sun, is masculine. Luna, the moon, is feminine; in Latin it is a feminine word. Sol, the solar, fertilizes Luna, the feminine. In the German language the story is completely reversed; we say the sun and the moon, whereas in reality the sun represents the masculine and the moon the feminine. That is how confused the story has become. If we wanted to speak correctly, we would actually have to say in German: der Sonn und die Mond.

But the ancient Latins already made a joke about it and said — this is just a joke with which I want to conclude today's reflection; I just wanted to give you something here that will be much more evident next time — the ancient Latins said: First we have such a moon (see drawing); then the moon always waxes, becoming like this, and then it waxes, becoming like this; then it wanes again, becoming like this. And you see, if we take these words in the Romance languages, for example in French, we can turn this (see drawing, waning crescent) into a C, and this ( waxing moon, first quarter) into a D; but then we get croitre = to wax. But when it is waning, the moon is not waxing when it makes a C! On the other hand, when it is decroitre = waning, it waxes. So that when we look up at the sky, the moon tells us, “I am waxing,” when it is actually waning, and vice versa. This is where the saying comes from: the moon is a liar. It lies to you.

But there is a deeper meaning to this. People gradually became embarrassed to talk about the moon-related because the moon-related is connected to the origin of man. It gradually became something that was not talked about. And people lost the ability to talk about the moon-related in the right way. That is why the moon also became a liar. When you looked at it, it no longer said anything to people that they could relate to. Doctors gradually stopped talking about the fact that a child remains in the mother's womb for ten lunar months and started talking about the nine solar months, which are then roughly the same length of time. But in reality it is ten lunar months, not nine solar months. This is connected with the moon and comes from the fact that the earth once carried the moon in its belly, gave birth to the moon and threw it out into space.

Now, gentlemen, think about this: after all, I am not telling you anything different from what someone would tell you today when they talk about an old nebula, about a vapor from which the Earth was separated, and from which the Moon emerged. But that is all just a mechanical, materialistic thought! No amount of vapors could ever give rise to anything living. But what I have told you is not an old vapor. You can create as much vapor in the boiler as you like and allow something to split off – but what I am telling you leads you back to reality. And that is the reality, not the vapor from which Jupiter is said to have split off and the Earth; and when the Earth was still the same as Jupiter, it threw out the Moon. The real moon is connected with the whole growth and even with the reproduction of man, as I said, and the earth once had its own power of reproduction in it, was maternal earth, and was fertilized by the animals that were up there with their shells, and by the sunshine. The moon force in the earth has been fertilized by the sunshine. Yes, you can see how we gradually move out of the earth into space.

Of course, I am making a bit of a demand on your attention, but you can see that you can actually learn something real from it.

Last time I talked to you about the moon flying out of the earth and how that is connected to life on earth in the first place. I can already imagine that you will have many questions. We can deal with them next Saturday. Think about some of them by then. But today I still have a few things to discuss. Some questions may arise.

We have said: As long as the moon was inside the earth, what can be called the reproductive power of animal beings was quite different than later, after the moon had flown out. I have told you that in the time when the moon was still inside the earth, the moon gave the earth those forces that are, so to speak, maternal forces, feminine forces. So we can imagine that there was a time when the moon was still inside the earth. I will sketch this out for you very schematically.

When the moon was still inside the earth, it was not in the center, but a little to the outside (see drawing, left). If you look at the Earth today, you will also notice that on one side, more towards where Australia is located, there is a lot of water on the Earth, while on the side where Europe and Asia are located, there is a lot of land. So the Earth actually does not have land and water equally distributed, but the Earth is such that on one side it actually has the most land and on the other side the most water. So the material on Earth is not evenly distributed (see drawing $.149, right). It was also not evenly distributed when the moon was still inside the Earth. The moon was just lying on the side where the Earth has the inclination to be heavy. Of course, if there is a solid material, it is heavy there. So I have to draw it the way I have marked it there with white chalk.

Now you have to imagine that at that time fertilization took place in such a way that the moon, which was inside the earth, gave these giant creatures the strength to, so to speak, provide reproductive material. You can't say that back then the animals would have laid real eggs. These giant oysters were actually just a slimy mass themselves, and they just secreted a piece of themselves. So that such a gigantic oyster, as I described to you last time, which could originally have been as large as the whole of France, had a mighty shell on which one could have walked around, and towards the interior of the earth a mass of slime. The lunar forces worked on this slime, and a piece of it was secreted. That then swam further into the earth. And when the sun shone on it again – I have explained this to you vividly using the example of the dog – an egg shell was formed, and because this egg shell was formed, the slimy mass of the oyster was again inclined to secrete a piece of itself, and then a new animal could arise. So the female forces came from the moon, which was in the earth, and the male forces from the sun, which shone on the earth from the outside. Now, gentlemen, I am describing a very specific time, the time when the moon was still inside the earth.

Now you have to imagine the following. Today, when the moon is outside, outside the earth, it has a completely different effect. You also know that when carbonic acid is inside a person – I told you this last time – it has a completely different effect than when it is outside, where it is a poison. If you recall animal reproduction today, you must say: the animals have to produce eggs, and these eggs must then be fertilized in some way. So what the moon used to give when it was inside the earth is now in the animals. The animals have these lunar forces within them.

And the moon also gives forces from the outside. I told you last time: even poets know that the moon gives forces to the earth. But these are forces that stimulate the imagination, that make you more alive inside. These are forces that no longer affect reproduction, but that radiate in from the outside and can no longer effect reproduction at all.

So you have to imagine it: what the moon was able to give the earth when it was still inside, these reproductive powers, the animals have appropriated them, inherited them, and now they plant them from one animal to another. So when you look at the eggs of the animals, you have to say to yourself: the lunar forces are inside. But those lunar forces are still inside that worked when the moon was still in the earth. Today the moon can no longer do much other than stimulate the head. So today the moon works on the head. But in those days it worked precisely on reproduction. You see, that is a considerable difference. It makes a big difference whether something is inside the earth or outside of it.

Reproduction is a very strange thing. But again, we have to say that all understanding of nature depends on understanding reproduction. Because through it, the individual animals and the individual plants still arise today. If it were not for reproduction, everything would have died long ago. If you want to understand anything about nature, you have to understand reproduction. But reproduction is something peculiar on earth.

Just imagine: the elephant has the peculiarity of only being able to produce a single young at around fifteen or sixteen years of age. Take an oyster, on the other hand; it is a small, slimy animal. If you imagine this as being huge, you will have roughly the same creatures that I showed you for that time. So, you can learn something from an oyster. But the oyster is not like the elephant, which has to wait so many years to produce a young one. A single oyster can produce a million oysters in a year. So an oyster has a different relationship to reproduction than an elephant.

Now, gentlemen, another interesting animal is the aphid. You know that it occurs on the leaves of trees and can be found as a rather harmful population of the plant world. People suffer a lot from it. An aphid is, as you know, much smaller than an elephant, but it can produce several thousand million offspring in just a few weeks – a single aphid! An elephant, for example, needs about fifteen or sixteen years to produce a single offspring, but the aphid can reproduce in just a few weeks to produce several million from a single individual.

And then there are tiny animals called vortices. If you look at them through a microscope, they are just a tiny lump of mucus, and they have a thread that they wriggle along. They are very interesting animals, but they consist only of a tiny lump of mucus, like if you took a thread out of an oyster, and they swim around like that. These little Vorticelles are now able to produce a hundred and forty trillion offspring in four days – a single one! – so many zeros would be needed to write it on the blackboard. The only thing that can compete with that now is Russian currency!

So you see, there is a considerable difference in reproductive capacity between an elephant, which has to wait fifteen or sixteen years to produce a single young, and such a small Vorticella, which in four days multiplies to such an extent that one hundred and forty trillion offspring grow.

So you see, there are really very significant natural secrets here. And there is a very interesting French tale, which on the surface doesn't have much to do with it, but inwardly it does. There was an important French poet — his name was Racine. And this Racine, it took him seven years to write a play like “Athalie”. So he wrote a play like 'Athalie' in seven years. And in his time there was another poet who was terribly proud compared to Racine and said: Racine needs seven years to write a play; I write seven plays in one year! And so he came up with a fable, a story, and this story, this fable goes: the pig and the lion were once arguing; and the pig, who was proud, said to the lion: I have seven young ones every year, but you, lion, you only produce one in a year. — Then the lion said: Yes, but the only one is a lion, and your seven are pigs. And with that, didn't Racine want to brush the poet aside. He didn't exactly want to tell him that his plays were pigs, but he compared them, because he said: Well, you do seven plays like that every year, but in seven years I do one Athalie – which is world-famous today.

You see, you can say: Even in a fable like that, in a story like that, there is something to be said for taking fifteen or sixteen years, like an elephant, to have a young one, rather than being a Vorticelle, which reproduces in four days to have a hundred and forty trillion young. People already talk a lot about the fact that rabbits have so many young; if they only started talking about the Vorticelle – it's impossible to imagine such a reproductive capacity!

Now, we have to find out why such tiny animals produce so many young, while it takes an elephant so long.

Now I have told you: the sun is the actual basis for fertilization. So, even today, we still need the sun for fertilization. And I have also told you: if there is a heavenly body outside, like the moon, it only affects the head at most, but no longer affects the abdominal organs, so no longer directly affects the reproductive powers. Today, the reproductive powers must be inherited from one being to another. But, gentlemen, in a certain sense, what happens in today's reproduction is still dependent on the moon. And I will explain this to you in the following way, by going back to the sun again.

You see, we have to ask ourselves: Why does an elephant need fifteen or sixteen years to develop its reproductive ability to the point where it can have a calf? Now you all know that the elephant is a pachyderm, and because it is a pachyderm, it takes so long. A thick skin allows the sun's forces to pass through it less strongly than if you were a plant louse and were very soft and the sun's forces could get in everywhere. So the elephant's low fertility is actually related to its thick skin.

You can also tell by the fact that Think back to those huge floating oysters. Yes, a second oyster would never come into being if it only depended on the sun shining on that scale armor, on that thick skin! But this oyster, as I told you, releases a little mucus; the mucus does not yet have an oyster shell, so the sun can come upon it. And by drying the mucus and thereby creating a new oyster, it has a fertilizing effect on that oyster. Yes, when the sun's rays come from the outside, gentlemen, they can only create shells. How is it that the forces of the sun can still have a fertilizing effect?

You see, we have to look at something else to help you understand how the story actually fits together. You may know that when the farmers have harvested the potatoes, they dig quite deep pits and put the potatoes in them. Then they cover the pits again. And then later, when the winter is over, they dig up the potatoes from these pits again, because they have remained good in there. If they had simply kept the potatoes in the cellar, they would have perished. They stay quite good in there.

Where does this actually come from? It is a very interesting thing. The farmers don't know much about it. But, gentlemen, if you were a potato yourself and were buried in this pit, you would actually feel extremely good in there, if you didn't need something to eat. You see, the warmth of the sun in summer remains in there, and what the sun shines on the earth in summer, that draws more and more downwards. And if you dig into the earth in January, the warmth of the sun and all the other solar forces from summer are still there at a depth of one and a half meters.

That is the strange thing. In summer, the sun is out and warms from the outside, and in winter, the sun's power moves down and can be found further down. But it cannot go very deep down; it flows back up again. If you were a potato and were lying down there, you would be quite comfortable; you wouldn't need to heat up, because first of all there is still the warmth from the summer inside, and secondly it comes up quite warmly from below because the solar forces radiate back again. And these potatoes are actually terribly comfortable. It is only there that they really enjoy the sun. In summer they don't get much of the sun, it's even unpleasant for them. If they had heads, they would get headaches when the sun shines on them; it is actually unpleasant for the potatoes. But in winter, when they are buried in the earth, they can really enjoy the sun.

From this you can see that the sun does not only work when it shines on something, but it continues to work when its energy is absorbed and stopped by something.

Yes, gentlemen, now a peculiarity occurs. I have told you: When a body is outside the earth, it has a killing effect, either - like carbonic acid - like a poison, or like the sun here, which produces dandruff when it shines on it; it hardens the living being on which it shines. But in winter, it is not true that the sun works from the outside; it works from inside the earth. There it leaves its strength behind, working in the interior of the earth. And there it also renews the reproductive forces in the interior of the earth, so that the reproductive forces today, in our time, also come from the sun, but not from direct sunlight, but from what remains in the earth and then radiates back in winter.

It is a very interesting thing. It is just like when we breathe in carbon dioxide: then it is a poison. But when the carbon dioxide is inside our body and goes through the blood, we need it. Because if we had no carbon, we would have nothing at all inside us. We need it inside; then it is beneficial; from the outside it is a poison. Sunlight from the outside causes peeling in animals; sunlight absorbed from within and reflected back generates life and makes the animals capable of reproduction.

But, gentlemen, now imagine that you are not a potato but an elephant. You would have an awfully thick skin and would only let a little of the warmth that the earth has from the sun in. That is why it would take you an awfully long time to produce an elephant calf if you were an elephant. But imagine you were a plant louse or an oyster; in that oyster you would be just a mass of mucus near the earth's surface. The elephant is not such a mass of mucus. The elephant is closed off on all sides by its skin, so it lets this warmth, which comes from below, into itself only very slowly.

Now, you see, it is like this: animals like aphids, which also live close to the ground and on plants, have no thick skin at all; they can absorb what evaporates from the earth with the spring with terrible ease, so their reproductive powers are always quickly refreshed. And the vortices even more so, because they live in the water and water retains the warmth of the sun much more intensely, so that the stored solar warmth in the vortices produces the hundred and forty billion at the right season; that is, when they have absorbed enough of what the warmth of the sun is in the water, they can reproduce themselves terribly quickly. So we can say: Today, the Earth gives its beings the ability to reproduce by storing the forces of the sun within itself during the winter.

Now let us move on from there to the plants. You see, with plants it is like this: you know that plants also reproduce through so-called cuttings. So when a plant grows out of the earth, you can cut a cutting somewhere. You have to cut it out properly, then you can plant it and it will grow into a plant. Certain plants reproduce in this way. Where does that come from? The reason why plants have the power to reproduce even through a piece of themselves is because they have the seed in the earth during the winter. That is a very important thing for plants. If you want to somehow encourage plants to grow properly, it is the case, isn't it, that they actually have to be in the ground during the winter. They have to grow out of the ground at all. There are summer fruits, and we could talk about them later. But in the main, the plants have to develop their seeds in the soil, and then they can grow. Sometimes you can also make bulbous plants grow in water, but you have to take special measures for that, don't you. In nature, it is mainly the case that plants have to be placed in the soil and have to get their strength to grow from there.

What happens, gentlemen, when a seed is placed in the earth? There this seed is really placed in the beneficence of absorbing these forces given by the sun to the earth. The plant seed, in particular, really absorbs these forces that come from the sun into the earth.

With animals, it is much more difficult. Those animals that are actually in the earth, such as earthworms and the like, also easily absorb this power. That is why they all reproduce very prolifically, all the animals that are either very close to the earth or in the earth. Worms are also such that they have an awful lot of offspring, and for example just such worms, which unfortunately can also get into the human intestines, produce an awful lot of offspring, and man must constantly exert his own powers so that these worms do not produce an awful lot of offspring. So that if you have worms inside you, you have to use almost all your vital forces to kill these horror stories that you have inside you.

Yes, but plants are able to grow out of the ground (see drawing); down there is the root, then they grow out of the ground, and then they have the leaves, then they develop the flowers and new seeds. But, gentlemen, you know very well that when the flower begins to develop, the plant no longer grows upwards. That is very interesting. The seed of the plant, the germ, is placed in the soil; the stalk grows out of it, leaves, green leaves, and then the flower comes. There the growth is stopped, and the plant now quickly produces the seed. If it did not produce the seed quickly, the sun would use all its strength on these petals, which would be infertile. The plant would get a huge, beautiful flower at the top, with many colors, but the seed would not be able to develop. The plant finally gathers all its strength to produce the seed quickly.

You see, the sun that comes from outside has the peculiarity of making plants beautiful. When we find beautiful plants in the meadow, it is the external sun with its rays that brings out these beautiful colors. But it would make the plants die with it, just as it makes the oyster die with the oyster shell, dries up.

That is why you can see this all over the world. You can see this effect of the sun particularly well when you come to hot, equatorial regions; there all the birds are in the most wonderful colors. That is the effect of the external sun. These feathers are all beautifully colored, but they no longer contain any life force. The life force is most dead in the feathers.

And so it is with the plant. When it grows out of the ground, it has abundant life force. Then it loses more and more of it and in the end it has to gather all its strength; it still puts the very little bit of life force into the seed. And the sun makes beautiful leaves, colorful flowers, but in doing so it kills the plant. There is nothing of reproductive capacity in the colored petals.

But what does the plant do when its seed is placed in the earth? It does not just allow itself to be placed in the earth, but it brings forth growth in the leaves; it brings that forth. If I draw something green, the forces of the sun, that is, warmth, light and so on, develop it. So the forces of the sun rise up in the plant. The plant takes these with it in the seed, while the solar forces that come from outside kill the plant, so that a very beautiful flower arises. But in the middle of it all there is still the seed, which comes from the solar warmth stored up in the middle of winter. The seed does not come from this year's sun. That is just a misconception. The beautiful blossom comes from this year's sun; but the seed comes from the solar warmth of the previous year, which still has the strength that the sun first gave to the earth. The plant carries this through its entire body.

This would not be so easy for animals. The animal depends on the fact that this solar warmth comes more from outside, more from the earth, and is only refreshed. This is because the animal does not absorb the forces of the sun as directly as the plant. But the plant carries the warmth of the previous year's sun through its own body up to the seed in the flower, which has accumulated in the earth.

If you look at this story correctly – it is extraordinarily interesting, wonderfully interesting – then you say to yourself: plants and animals reproduce. They could not reproduce if the sun did not work. If there were no sun, they could not reproduce. But the sun, which is out there in the sky, apart from the earth, it is precisely what kills the ability to reproduce. It is the same as with carbonic acid: when we inhale carbonic acid, it kills us; when we have it inside us, it invigorates us. When the earth receives the sun's rays from outside, its animals and plants are killed; when the earth can give the animals and plants from its interior what is in the sun, they are invigorated and stimulated to reproduce. You can see that in plants; they develop seeds capable of reproduction only from the power of the sun, which they take with them from before, from the previous summer. What makes the plant beautiful this year comes from this year's sun. It is like that in general: the inner life grows from the past, and one becomes beautiful through the present,

Now, gentlemen, the elephant with its thick skin, but the little warmth from the earth and the little sun inside, which he gets from the earth, would be of little use to him, because he is a pachyderm. These forces do not pass through him so easily. He must have stored up a great deal of his own semen from earlier. He has stored up lunar forces. He needs them, of course, for maternal, for female reproduction. He has stored them up. The moon has emerged from the earth, and the animals that reproduce have the lunar forces within them.

You see, there is something that must be taken into account. Of course, someone could come and say: There is such a stupid fellow who says about the former, the earlier lunar forces, that such old forces still live in the eggs, in the reproductive forces. This stupid fellow claims that the present reproductive forces are from the past. – I would simply say to that person: Have you never seen that something that is alive now has something in it that is from the past? – I would show him a boy who looks so much like his father that he is, as they say, the spitting image. Yes, if you then go back – the father could even have already died; someone could have known the father when the father himself was a boy as small as the boy is now, and the person in question could say: Yes, the boy is the spitting image of his father. – But he looks just like him, the way the father was when he himself was a little boy. What you saw there thirty or forty years ago is still in the little boy now! The forces of the past are always still in what lives in the present. And so it is with the reproductive forces. What is in the present comes from the past.

You know, it was considered a particularly strong superstition that the moon should affect the weather. Well, there is also a great deal of superstition in that. But once upon a time there were two scholars in Germany, at the University of Leipzig, one of whom – his name was Fechner – said to himself: perhaps there is a grain of truth in this superstition that the moon affects the weather. So he made a note of what the weather was like at full moon and what the weather was like at new moon, and found that There is a difference; it rains more when the moon is full than when it is new. That is what he found out. You don't have to believe that yet. Such notes are not very convincing. In real science, you have to work much, much more precisely. But he did say that you just have to continue such investigations and see if it doesn't come out that the moon affects the weather.

Now at the same University of Leipzig was another man who thought he was much cleverer – Schleiden was his name. He said: Now even my colleagues are starting to talk about the moon having an effect on the weather. Gosh, that's not true, we have to fight against that with all our might! – Then the Fechner said: Well, the dispute will remain between us men, but we also have women. – You see, that was still in earlier times. When the two university professors lived in Leipzig, the university professors' wives still had an old custom in the city. They put their troughs, their vats, in the rain to get water to wash in. They collected it because water was not easy to come by in old Leipzig. There were no water pipes back then. So Professor Fechner said: Yes, our wives should sort this out. Professor Schleiden and Professor Fechner should do it this way: so that they always get the same amount of rainwater, Professor Schleiden can put out her troughs at the new moon, and my wife can put out her troughs at the full moon! — He said to himself: according to my calculations, she will then get the most rainwater.

Well, you see, the women didn't go along with it. They didn't want to go along with their husbands' science. They couldn't be convinced at all. So it came about in a curious way that a person, even when science is in the form of a man, does not believe in it, like Mrs. Schleiden, and does not say to herself: I get just as much water at the new moon as at the full moon. Instead, she wanted to put out her watering troughs even at the full moon, despite her husband's terrible ranting against Fechner.

That is something that proves nothing. But, you see, it is strange that even today, high and low tides are still connected with the sun and moon. So that one can say: tides occur quite differently during one quarter of the moon than during any other quarter of the moon. That is connected. But, gentlemen, it does not happen because the moon shines on the sea somewhere and that causes a flood, but that is an old story.

When the moon was still inside the earth, it developed its powers and caused the tides. And the earth still has these remnants of the forces themselves, through which the tide arises. No wonder, the earth is already doing it independently. Today it is a superstition to believe that the moon has an effect on the earth. But it once had an effect on the earth when it was still inside, when everything still had an effect on the earth; and the earth is still in this context inside. That is why it determines the tides. But that is only seemingly the case. Just as I look at my watch, I also say: it throws me out at ten o'clock to the hall. — So today the phases of the moon coincide with the tides, because once they were interdependent.

And so it is with the reproductive powers, insofar as they depend on the moon, insofar as they are feminine. And so it is with the reproductive powers, insofar as they depend on the sun, that is, they come from the solar power that is inside the earth.

But all the animals that reproduce so prolifically, up to the trillions, that is, those that can use these solar forces stored up by the sun through the earth, are lower animals. The higher animals and humans have these reproductive powers protected within. Some of the solar power still comes in and constantly refreshes these powers. Without this refreshment, they would not be there either. But from what solar power is inside the earth today, they would not be able to have their reproductive powers properly.

The plant can have them because it carries what lives in the earth from winter into summer through its own body. The plant has the reproductive power from the previous year.

But the elephant cannot have them from the previous year. It has it from a time millions of years ago, and it has it in its reproductive seed, which it in turn inherits from the elephant father to the elephant son. There it is inside. But from what time does it have it inside! Well, just as the plant has the reproductive power of the previous year within it, so the elephant has the reproductive power of millions of years within it. That is why the plant and the lower animals can reproduce from it, because they can still use the power stored up by the earth. These are tremendously strong reproductive powers. Those animals that depend on storing very ancient forces within themselves can only reproduce weakly.

But let us now go back to the time when there were such giant oysters: No sooner had such an oyster reached the point of being illuminated by the sun than it lost its inner strength and could only use the one that came from the earth. But it could still use it because the oyster was open at the bottom. When this oyster was as large as present-day France, it was open at the bottom and could absorb the earth forces that came from the sun. When these animals had then transformed themselves into megatheriums, into ichthyosaurs, when the sun shone on them from above, and they were no longer open from below, they were dependent on the reproductive power that they had within themselves, which was at most refreshed by the sun.

Yes, gentlemen, there must have been a time when animals acquired reproductive powers that they could not get when the sun shines from outside. There must have been a time when the sun was inside the earth, when not just a little of the sun's energy came into the earth, which remains in the earth in winter, for example, for the potatoes; but there was a time when the whole sun was inside the earth.

Now you will say: But the physicists say that the sun is so terribly hot, and if the sun were inside the earth, it would have burned everything. — Yes, gentlemen, you only know that from the physicists. But the physicists would be extremely astonished if they could see what the sun really looks like. If they could build a balloon and go up there, they would not find that the sun is so hot, but the sun is full of life forces, and it develops heat as the sun's rays pass through air and everything. That's where it develops heat first. So when the sun was once inside the earth, it was full of life forces. It could not only give the little life force that it can give today, but when the sun was once inside the earth, these living beings, animals and plants that were there at the time, could get enough of what the sun gave them, because the sun was inside the earth itself. But then these oysters did not develop any shells either, but were just slime.

And now imagine: there was the Earth, the Moon in it, the Sun was inside the Earth, oysters developed that had no shells, but were slime. Mucus formed; it smeared off, separated, and an oyster formed again, and again an oyster formed, and so on. But they were so huge that they could not be distinguished from each other. They were adjacent to each other. What must the earth have looked like back then? It was similar to our brain, where the cells also lie next to each other. There, too, one cell lies next to the other; only that they die, whereas in the past, when the sun was inside the earth, oyster cells, huge cells, were one next to the other, and the sun developed its powers, which it was constantly developing because it was inside the earth. Yes, gentlemen, now consider this: there was the earth (see drawing), here a giant oyster, there another giant oyster, again one, all such giant slime balls next to each other, and they were always reproducing. And today's oysters reproduce so quickly that they can have a million offspring in a short time; the oysters of that time reproduced even more quickly. Gosh, no sooner had the old oyster arrived than the young were already there, and they had young of their own and so on. The old ones had to dissolve again. If someone had looked at it from the outside, how this huge lump of earth was there like a big brain, of course much softer, much slimier than a brain today, how a giant oyster reproduced so quickly - but each one could have had a million offspring again - he would have seen: everyone had to defend themselves against the others because they bumped into each other. And if someone had come, an especially curious one, and had watched from a foreign star, he would have seen: There below, floating in space, is a giant body, but it is all life, constantly producing life, not just consisting of millions of nested oysters, but constantly reproducing. And what would he have seen? Exactly the same thing – only on a gigantic scale – as can be seen today when a human being's tiny egg is examined in the early stages! There, too, it is only a very small-scale process. There are also these small cell mucus vesicles that multiply rapidly.

166 otherwise the human being would not be able to reach his size in the first few weeks in which he is carried. The cells are so small that they have to multiply very quickly. If you had looked at the earth at that time, you would have seen the image of the earth: a giant animal, and within it the forces of the sun and the moon, in the whole earth inside.

You see, I have now shown you how to go back to the time of the earth's development when the earth, sun and moon were still one body. But, gentlemen, I would like to say: in Faust, if you have read or ever read it, Gretchen, who is sixteen years old, says to Faust when he is explaining his religion: “The pastor also says something like that; but it is a little different.” So you could also say: “Yes, the professors also say something like that, but it is a little different.” You say: “Once the sun was one body with the earth and the moon.” — That's what they say; because they say, isn't it: This sun, it was a giant body; then it turned, and then the earth split off as it turned. Then the earth turned further, and then the moon split off again. —- So basically, they also say that all three were once one body.

Then people come and say: That can be proved; it is already being proved to schoolchildren. It can be demonstrated terribly nicely. You take a small drop of oil – which floats on water – and then you take a sheet of card and cut out a small circle, push a pin through the top; afterwards you put it into the water and turn the head of the pin. The little oltröpfelchen split off and go around like that. There you have it, they say, there you see it: that happened once in the world! There was a huge gas ball in the world, just gas; but the story turned, and it was mobile. And then the outer things were just split off, our earth from the sun, just as these oltröpfchen were split off. They can prove that in school. And the children, who believe in authority, say: It happened quite naturally; there was once a huge ball of gas that was rotating, and that's how the planets were split off. We saw it ourselves, how the droplets were split off.

But now you must also ask the children: Did you see the schoolmaster up there turning the pinhead? So you have to imagine a giant schoolmaster who turned the gas ball at that time, otherwise the planets would not have been able to split off! — The giant schoolmaster - in the Middle Ages he was depicted: that was the Lord God with the long beard. That was the giant schoolmaster, and these people forget him.

But it is no explanation to assume a giant gas ball that rotates, and that could only rotate if a giant world schoolmaster had once existed. That is no explanation. But, gentlemen, it is an explanation when you come to the conclusion that the sun and the moon were connected to the earth and that it moved itself. That could move. A ball of gas cannot move by itself. But what I have explained to you here could move. In those days it did not need a world school master, but it was alive in itself. The Earth was once a living being, and indeed one such as a seed is today, and it contained the Sun and the Moon. The Sun and the Moon emerged from the Earth, leaving their inheritance behind, so that today the germinating power, protected in the maternal and paternal bodies of the human being, these powers, which once could come directly from the Sun, still reproduce and today develop the animals, the seeds and eggs in themselves, carry the ancient solar power in their egg and seminal fluids, carry it within themselves as an inheritance from ancient times, from the times when the earth itself still had the sun and moon within it.

You see, that is a real explanation, and only if you understand it that way can you really understand. Then you realize that there was once a time when the moon flew out and the earth flew out of the sun with the moon. We will discuss this matter further next Saturday at nine o'clock. It will still be a bit difficult, but nevertheless I believe that history looks like this so that you can understand it.