 Spiritual
Relations in the Human Organism
Three lectures by Rudolf Steiner
Spiritual Relations in the Human Organism consists of three
lectures given by Rudolf Steiner in Dornach in October of 1922. In
these lectures Steiner describes physical processes in the human
organism as expressions of activities and forces in the etheric and
astral bodies as well as of the human ego.
The first lecture examines what is taking place in the act of visual
perception, showing the eye as a meeting place for the interaction
of external optical forces and inner soul processes. The second
lecture describes the mysterious process of food consumption and
digestion, emphasising the difference and mutually exclusiveness
between outer nature and the inner world of the human organism. Here
we see how all etheric and astral elements of the food we eat must
be destroyed by our organism before it enters our blood stream and
how illness results if this is not sufficiently achieved. Steiner
then goes on to describe how the resultant “killed” substance is
then progressively re-enlivened through its progress in the blood
stream through the heart; how it is taken up further into our astral
organism through the kidney's processes; into our ego organisation
through the liver; and even taken as far as Spirit Self through the
spleen.
Based on an
understanding of these various organs and their activities as
expressions of soul functions, Steiner indicates avenues of medical
diagnosis and treatment. He also describes the difference in
therapeutic approaches to the treatment of inflammations on the one
hand and of tumours on the other.
The third
lecture puts the development of the healing arts in a historical
perspective, showing how earlier than the fifth millennium B.C. all
healing was addressed to the etheric body which could be perceived
in luminous detail in all living things. This was an age of “light”
as this luminous quality was perceptually present throughout our
environment and only since then has it faded and become
over-shadowed by an ever-sharpening ‘opaque’ physical perception.
This age of “darkness” which followed gave birth to our conceptual
consciousness and our strongly materialistic outlook. Steiner then
describes how since the beginning of the 20th Century, changes in
our organism are gradually allowing the first hints of a
re-awakening of this perception of the luminous etheric and how this
will increase over the coming millennia. With the addition of our
hard-won objective consciousness, we can once again apply our
medical emphasis not just to the physiological end results of health
and disease but to the causes as they are expressed in the harmony
or irregularities within the etheric body.
Mercury
Press
3 lectures, Dornach 20 - 23 October 1922, GA218
65pp; paperback
ISBN: 0-936132-11-6
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Spiritual Relations in the Human
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