Pastoral Medicine

The Collegial Working of Doctors and

Priests

On-line since: 27th March, 2008

By Rudolf Steiner

Bn/GA 318

These documents treat the question of illnesses of the spirit that

manifest in certain physical problems. Particularly striking is the
description of the slow physical degeneration of certain mystics
who despite the deterioration of their organism have real
spiritual experiences. Perhaps the most significant aspect of the
book is the insight it gives into how Steiner laid the foundations Some editions and/or
for an esoteric path connected with a vocation. translations of this book are
available for purchase from:
These eleven lectures, translated from the German by Gladys  Steiner Verlag (German),
Hahn, were given in Dornach from September 8 to September
 Rudolf Steiner Press,
18, 1924. In the collected edition of Rudolf Steiner's works, the
 SteinerBooks
volume containing the German texts is entitled: Das
 Amazon
Zusammenwirken von Ärzten und Seelsorgen: Pastoral-
or,
Medizinischer Kurs (vol. 318 in the Bibliographic Survey).
search for related titles available
This volume is presented here with the kind permission of the for purchase
Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach, Switzerland. at Amazon.com! Find more
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Copyright © 1987
This e.Text edition is provided with the cooperation of: Search.
The Anthroposophic Press

Thanks to an anonymous donation, this lecture series is now available.

CONTENTS

Cover Sheet
Contents
Publisher's Forward

Lecture 1 September 08, 1924

Clear separation of the priest's profession from the physician's.
Historical aspects. The priest: pastoral care of the healthy and the
ill; hygienic importance of fasting, etc.; healing effect of the
sacraments. Relation of physician and priest to those ill in soul.
 Therapy working from life to consciousness; the sacraments from
consciousness to life. Working together of priest and physician,
each out of his own profession.
Lecture 2 September 09, 1924
Pathological changes in the physical body. Understanding of the
human organization from sculptural, musical views and through
comprehension of the Logos. Different ways that the four
members of the human being relate to one another. And the
consequences. Stages of spiritual experience; the Pythians; St.
Theresa. Transition of such conditions to organic illness.
Lecture 3 September 10, 1924
Four states of spiritual experience; their anthroposophical
explanation. Effect of such development on illness. St. Theresa.
How karma can become entangled. How free will and
responsibility can be judged.
Lecture 4 September 11, 1924
Human development from birth to young adulthood. Heredity
and the individuality. A child perceives spirit in his whole natural
environment. Formative forces work and are then freed: memory.
Intellectual forces develop. Sun forces in first seven years: etheric
forces forming the body. Moon forces in second seven years: astral
forces of reproduction. Sun in the child's soul-spiritual activity.
Planetary forces in third seven years. Change at beginning of 20's;
fourth seven years. Finally the human being deserted by cosmic
forces; significance of this point of time: freedom and
responsibility.
Lecture 5 September 12, 1924
Oddities of consciousness, of memory, speech, will; their causes.
Three stages of pathological development. Inability to adjust will
to the world. Memory devoid of logic. Mental handicap, idiocy,
paranoia. Congenital mental retardation. Premature reception of
ego organization = precociousness. Acquired idiocy. Danger of
bad pedagogical systems. Froebel.
Lecture 6 September 13, 1924
Illness from the point of view of karma. Belief in earlier ages:
illness the result of sin. In present age: sin the result of a sick
organism. Ferdinand Raimund. Earlier incarnations cause head
formation; life between death and rebirth causes formation of
breathing system. The handling of psychopathological cases.
Healing as a divine service.
Lecture 7 September 14, 1924
 The difference between processes outside man and in man.
Inhalation, creating the human being: activity of astral body.
Exhalation, activity of etheric body. Cosmic astrality active during
sleep. Nerve-sense process a finer breathing, taking place in
warmth element. Light, chemism, life breathed in with warmth
element, bringing about thinking, feeling, willing. Physical
circulatory systems the projection of the various spiritual
activities. Karma from the past, karma for the future.
Lecture 8 September 15, 1924
Forces of the universe: working of sun, moon, planets on the
plants. Life of the sun in relation to the human being. Instreaming
and outstreaming karma. Sun and moon in relation to each other:
Administering the sacraments out of this knowledge.
Lecture 9 September 16, 1924
Causes of illness originating in sleep. Search for the medicinal
remedy. Somnambulism. Temple sleep. Modern physician must
practice wise observation and deal directly with life. Materialism,
spiritualism. Cultural pathology and therapy. Priest must speak of
illness from knowledge of repeated earth-lives.
Lecture 10 September 17, 1924
Overcoming passive thinking by perceiving man's place in the
cosmos. The human ego between a day's breathing and a platonic
cosmic year. The cosmic year in relation to the breathing rhythm
of a day, of a lifetime. Waking-and-sleeping. Forces of winter and
summer creating the nerve-sense system and metabolic system.
The world according to measure, number, weight; the irrational
world. From “nomy” to “sophy.”
Lecture 11 September 18, 1924
Medicine in the ancient mysteries. Its renewal in this age.
Subnature, nature, supernature: Father, Christ, Spirit. Pathology
of evolving humanity. The death on Golgotha: the curative
process. Path of the physician; path of the priest.

Notes

Pastoral Medicine
Pastoral Medicine: Publisher's Forward
 On-line since: 27th March, 2008

Publisher's Foreword

This volume contains material which for many years was

circulated in manuscript form among priests and doctors. The
audience to whom the lectures were given was restricted to priests
and doctors as they really were intended to serve the esoteric needs of
these two professions. In this respect it gives insights into how
Steiner went about laying the foundations for an esoteric path
connected with a particular vocation. It is reasonable to assume that
had he lived longer he would have delivered similar courses to other
professional groups. Of particular significance is the giving of a
mantric verse for the support of the vocational activity (see last
lecture), a verse specific to the vocation. The receiving and working
with such a verse would presumably be connected with the task and
responsibilities an individual would assume when he or she worked
out of one of the Sections of the School for Spiritual Science in the
realm of a particular vocation.

Needless to say, the material assumes a certain maturity in

anthroposophy which at a minimum means a familiarity with the
basic books. Anyone attempting this cycle without such a background
is advised to do the necessary studies before trying to read this
volume.

Pastoral Medicine
Pastoral Medicine: Publisher's Forward

On-line since: 27th March, 2008

Publisher's Foreword
 This volume contains material which for many years was
circulated in manuscript form among priests and doctors. The
audience to whom the lectures were given was restricted to priests
and doctors as they really were intended to serve the esoteric needs of
these two professions. In this respect it gives insights into how
Steiner went about laying the foundations for an esoteric path
connected with a particular vocation. It is reasonable to assume that
had he lived longer he would have delivered similar courses to other
professional groups. Of particular significance is the giving of a
mantric verse for the support of the vocational activity (see last
lecture), a verse specific to the vocation. The receiving and working
with such a verse would presumably be connected with the task and
responsibilities an individual would assume when he or she worked
out of one of the Sections of the School for Spiritual Science in the
realm of a particular vocation.

Needless to say, the material assumes a certain maturity in

anthroposophy which at a minimum means a familiarity with the
basic books. Anyone attempting this cycle without such a background
is advised to do the necessary studies before trying to read this
volume.

Pastoral Medicine
Pastoral Medicine: Lecture 2

Schmidt Number: S-5908

On-line since: 27th March, 2008

LECTURE 2

Dear friends,
If we are going to consider the mutual concerns of priest and physician, we should
look first at certain phenomena in human life that easily slide over into the pathological
field. These phenomena require a physician's understanding, since they reach into
profound depths, even into the esoteric realm of religious life. We have to realize that
all branches of human knowledge must be liberated from a certain coarse attitude that
has come into them in this materialistic epoch. We need only recall how certain
phenomena that had been grouped together for some time under the heading “genius
and insanity” have recently been given a crass interpretation by Lombroso [Note 1] and
his school and also by others. I am not pointing to the research itself — that has its uses
— but rather to their way of looking at things, to what they brought out as “criminal
anthropology,” from studying the skulls of criminals. The opinions they voiced were not
only coarse but extraordinarily commonplace. Obviously the philistines all got together
and decided what the normal type of human being is. And it was as near as could
possibly be to a philistine! And whatever deviated from this type was pathological,
genius on one side, insanity on the other; each in its own way was pathological. Since it
is quite obvious to anyone with insight that every pathological characteristic also
expresses itself bodily, it is also obvious that symptoms can be found in bodily
characteristics pointing in one or the other direction. It is a matter of regarding the
symptoms in the proper way. Even an earlobe can under certain conditions clearly
reveal some psychological peculiarity, because such psychological peculiarities are
connected with the karma that works over from earlier incarnations.

The forces that build the physical organism in the first seven years of human life are
the same forces by which we think later. So it is important to consider certain
phenomena, not in the customary manner but in a really appropriate way. We will not
be regarding them as pathological (although they will lead us into aspects of pathology)
but rather will be using them to obtain a view of human life itself.

Let us for a moment review the picture of a human being that Anthroposophy gives
us. The human being stands before us in a physical body, which has a long evolution
behind it, three preparatory stages before it became an earthly body — as is described
in my book An Outline of Esoteric Science. [Note 2] This earthly body needs to be
understood much more than it is by today's anatomy and physiology. For the human
physical body as it is today is a true image of the etheric body, which is in its third stage
of development, and of the astral body, which is in its second stage, and even to a
certain degree of the ego organization that humans first received on earth, which
therefore is in its first stage of development. All of this is stamped like the stamp of a
seal upon the physical body — which makes the physical body extraordinarily
complicated. Only its purely mineral and physical nature can be understood with the
methods of knowledge that are brought to it today. What the etheric body impresses
upon it is not to be reached at all by those methods. It has to be observed with the eye
of a sculptor so that one obtains pictorial images of cosmic forces, images that can then
be recognized again in the form of the entire human being and in the forms of the
single organs.

The physical human being is also an image of the breathing and blood circulation.
But the entire dynamic activity that works and weaves through the blood circulation
and breathing system can only be understood if one thinks of it in musical forms. For
instance, there is a musical character to the formative forces that were poured into the
skeletal system and then became active in a finer capacity in the breathing and
circulation. We can perceive in eurythmy how the octave goes out from the shoulder
blade and proceeds along the bones of the arm. This bone formation of the arm cannot
be understood from a mechanical view of dynamics, but only from musical insight. We
find the interval of the prime extending from the shoulder blade to the bone of the
upper arm, the humerus, the interval of the second in the humerus, the third from the
elbow to the wrist. We find two bones there because there are two thirds in music, a
larger and a smaller. And so on. In short, if we want to find the impression of the astral
body upon the physical body, upon the breathing and blood circulation, we are obliged
to bring a musical understanding to it.

Still more difficult to understand is the ego organization. For this one needs to grasp
the meaning of the first verse of the Gospel of St. John: “In the beginning was the
Word.” “The Word” is meant there to be understood in a concrete sense, not abstractly,
as commentators of the Gospels usually present it. If this is applied concretely to the
real human being, it provides an explanation of how the ego organization penetrates
the human physical body. You can see that we ought to add much more to our studies if
they are to lead to a true understanding of the human being. However, I am convinced
that a tremendous amount of material could be eliminated not only from medical
courses but from theological courses too. If one would only assemble the really
essential material, the number of years medical students, for instance, must spend in
their course would not be lengthened but shortened. Naturally it is thought in
materialistic fashion today that if there's something new to be included, you must tack
another half-year onto the course!

Out of the knowledge that Anthroposophy gives us, we can say that the human
being stands before us in physical, etheric and astral bodies, and an ego organization.
In waking life these four members of the human organization are in close connection.
In sleep the physical body and etheric body are together on one side, and the ego
organization and astral body on the other side. With knowledge of this fact we are then
able to say that the greatest variety of irregularities can appear in the connection of ego
organization and astral body with etheric body and physical body. For instance, we can
have: physical body, etheric body, astral body, ego organization. (Plate I, 1) Then, in
the waking state, the so-called normal relation prevails among these four members of
the human organization.
 Plate I
Click image for large view

But it can also happen that the physical body and etheric body are in some kind of
normal connection and that the astral body sits within them comparatively normally,
but that the ego organization is somehow not properly sitting within the astral body.
(Plate I, 2) Then we have an irregularity that in the first place confronts us in the
waking condition. Such people are unable to come with their ego organization properly
into their astral body; therefore their feeling life is very much disturbed. They can even
form quite lively thoughts. For thoughts depend, in the main, upon a normal
connection of the astral body with the other bodies. But whether the sense impressions
will be grasped appropriately by the thoughts depends upon whether the ego
organization is united with the other parts in a normal fashion. If not, the sense
impressions become dim. And in the same measure that the sense impressions fade,
the thoughts become livelier. Sense impressions can appear almost ghostly, not clear as
we normally have them. The soul-life of such people is flowing away; their sense
impressions have something misty about them, they seem to be continually vanishing.
At the same time their thoughts have a lively quality and tend to become more intense,
more colored, almost as if they were sense impressions themselves.
 When such people sleep, their ego organization is not properly within the astral
body, so that now they have extraordinarily strong experiences, in fine detail, of the
external world around them. They have experiences, with their ego and astral body
both outside their physical and etheric bodies, of that part of the world in which they
live — for instance, the finer details of the plants or an orchard around their house. Not
what they see during the day, but the delicate flavor of the apples, and so forth. That is
really what they experience. And in addition, pale thoughts that are after-effects in the
astral body from their waking life.

You see, it is difficult if you have such a person before you. And you may encounter
such people in all variations in the most manifold circumstances of life. You may meet
them in your vocation as physician or as priest — or the whole congregation may
encounter them. You can find them in endless variety, for instance, in a town. Today
the physician who finds such a person in an early stage of life makes the diagnosis:
psychopathological impairment. To modern physicians that person is a
psychopathological impairment case who is at the borderline between health and
illness; whose nervous system, for instance, can be considered to be on a pathological
level. Priests, if they are well-schooled (let us say a Benedictine or Jesuit or Barnabite
or the like; ordinary parish priests are sometimes not so well-schooled), will know from
their esoteric background that the things such a person tells them can, if properly
interpreted, give genuine revelations from the spiritual world, just as one can have from
a really insane person. But the insane person is not able to interpret them; only
someone who comprehends the whole situation can do so. Thus you can encounter
such a person if you are a physician, and we will see how to regard this person
medically from an anthroposophical point of view. Thus you can also encounter such a
person if you are a priest — and even the entire congregation can have such an
encounter.

But now perhaps the person develops further; then something quite special appears.
The physical and etheric bodies still have their normal connection. But now there
begins to be a stronger pull of the ego organization, drawing the astral body to itself, so
that the ego organization and astral body are now more closely bound together. And
neither of them enters properly into the physical and etheric bodies. (Plate I, 3) Then
the following can take place: the person becomes unable to control the physical and
etheric bodies properly from the astral body and ego. The person is unable to push the
astral body and ego organization properly into the external senses, and therefore, every
now and then, becomes “senseless.” Sense impressions in general fade away and the
person falls into a kind of dizzy dream state. But then in the most varied way moral
impulses can appear with special strength. The person can be confused and also
extremely argumentative if the rest of the organism is as just described.
 Now physicians find in such a case that physical and biochemical changes have
taken place in the sense organs and the nerve substance. They will find, although they
may take slight notice of them, great abnormalities in the ductless glands and their
hormone secretion, in the adrenal glands, and the glands that are hidden in the neck as
small glands within the thyroid gland. In such a case there are changes particularly in
the pituitary gland and the pineal gland. These are more generally recognized than are
the changes in the nervous system and in the general area of the senses.

And now the priest comes in contact with such a person. The person confesses to
experiencing an especially strong feeling of sin, stronger than people normally have.
The priest can learn very much from such individuals, and Catholic priests do. They
learn what an extreme consciousness of sin can be like, something that is so weakly
developed in most human beings. Also in such a person the love of one's neighbor can
become tremendously intense, so much so that the person can get into great trouble
because of it, which will then be confessed to the priest.

The situation can develop still further. The physical body can remain comparatively
isolated because the etheric body — from time to time or even permanently — does not
entirely penetrate it, so that now the astral and etheric bodies and the ego organization
are closely united with one another and the physical organism is separate from them.
(Plate II) To use the current materialistic terms (which we are going to outgrow as the
present course of study progresses), such people are in most cases said to be severely
mentally retarded individuals. They are unable from their soul-spiritual individuality to
control their physical limbs in any direction, not even in the direction of their own will.
Such people pull their physical organism along, as it were, after themselves. A person
who is in this condition in early childhood, from birth, is also diagnosed as mentally
retarded. In the present stage of earth evolution, when all three members — ego
organization, astral organization, and etheric body — are separated from the physical,
and the lone physical body is dragged along after them, the person cannot perceive,
cannot be active, cannot be illumined by the ego organization, astral body, and etheric
body. So experiences are dim and the person goes about in a physical body as if it were
anesthetized. This is extreme mental retardation, and one has to think how at this stage
one can bring the other bodies down into the physical organism. Here it can be a matter
of educational measures, but also to a great extent of external therapeutic measures.
 Plate II
Click image for large view

But now the priest can be quite amazed at what such a person will confess. Priests
may consider themselves very clever, but even thoroughly educated priests — there
really are such men in Catholicism; one must not underestimate it — they pay attention
if a so-called sick person comes to them and says, “The things you pronounce from the
pulpit aren't worth much. They don't add up to anything, they don't reach up to the
dwelling place of God, they don't have any worth except external worth. One must
really rest in God with one's whole being.” That's the kind of thing such people say. In
every other area of their life they behave in such a way that one must consider them to
be extremely retarded, but in conversation with their priest they come out with such
speeches. They claim to know inner religious life more intimately than someone who
speaks of it professionally; they feel contempt for the professional. They call their
experience “rest in God.” And you can see that the priest must find ways and means to
relate to what such a person — one can say patient, or one can use other terms — to
what such a human being is experiencing within.

One has to have a sensitive understanding for the fact that pathological conditions
can be found in all spheres of life, for the fact that some people may be quite unable at
the present time to find their way in the physical-sense world, quite unable to be the
sort of human being that external life now requires all of us to be. We are all necessarily
to a certain degree philistines as regards external life. But such people as I am
describing are not in condition to travel along our philistine paths; they have to travel
other ways. Priests must be able to feel what they can give such a person, how to
connect what they can give out of themselves with what that other human being is
experiencing. Very often such a person is simply called “one of the queer ones.” This
demands an understanding of the subtle transition from illness to spirituality.

Our study can go further. Think what happens when a person goes through this
entire sequence in the course of life. At some period the person is in a condition (Plate
I, 2) where only the ego organization has loosened itself from the other members of the
organism. In a later period the person advances to a condition where neither ego nor
astral enter the physical or etheric bodies. Still later, (Plate I, 3) the person enters a
condition where the physical body separates from the other bodies. (Plate II) The
person only goes through this sequence if the first condition, perhaps in childhood,
which is still normal, already shows a tendency to lose the balance of the four members
of the organism. If the physician comes upon such a person destined to go through all
these four stages — the first very slightly abnormal, the others as I have pictured them
— the physician will find there is tremendous instability and something must be done
about it. Usually nothing can be done. Sometimes the physician prescribes intensive
treatment; it accomplishes nothing. Perhaps later the physician is again in contact with
this person and finds that the first unstable condition has advanced to the next, as I
described it with the sense impressions becoming vague and the thoughts highly
colored. Eventually the physician finds the excessively strong consciousness of sin;
naturally a physician does not want to take any notice of that, for now the symptoms
are beginning to play over into the soul realm. Usually it is at this time that the person
finally gets in touch with a priest, particularly when the fourth stage becomes apparent.

Individuals who go through these stages — it is connected with their karma, their
repeated earth lives — have purely out of their deep intuition developed a wonderful
terminology for all this. Especially if they have gone through the stages in sequence,
with the first stage almost normal, they are able to speak in a wonderful way about
what they experience. They say, for instance, when they are still quite young, if the
labile condition starts between seventeen and nineteen years: human beings must
know themselves. And they demand complete knowledge of themselves. Now with their
ego organization separated, they come of their own initiative to an active meditative
life. Very often they call this “active prayer,” “active meditation,” and they are grateful
when some well-schooled priest gives them instruction about prayer. Then they are
entirely absorbed in prayer, and they are experiencing in it what they now begin to
describe by a wonderful terminology. They look back at their first stage and call what
they perceive “the first dwelling place of God,” because their ego has not entirely
penetrated the other members of their organism, so to a certain extent they are seeing
themselves from within, not merely from without. This perception from within
increases; it becomes, as it were, a larger space: “the first dwelling place of God.”

What next appears, what I have described from another point of view, is richer; it is
more inwardly detailed. They see much more from within: “the second dwelling place
of God.” When the third stage is reached, the inner vision is extraordinarily beautiful,
and such a person says, “I see the third dwelling place of God; it is tremendously
magnificent, with spiritual beings moving within it.” This is inner vision, a powerful,
glorious vision of a world woven by spirit: “the third dwelling place of God,” or “the
House of God.” There are variations in the words used. When they reach the fourth
stage, they no longer want advice about active meditation, for usually they have reached
the view that everything will be given them through grace and they must wait. They talk
about passive prayer, passive meditation, that they must not pray out of their own
initiative, for it will come to them if God wants to give it to them. Here the priest must
have a fine instinct for recognizing when this stage passes over into the next. For now
these people speak of “rest-prayer,” during which they do nothing at all; they let God
hold sway in them. That is how they experience “the fourth dwelling place of God.”

Sometimes from the descriptions they give at this stage, from what — if we speak
medically — such “patients” say, priests can really learn a tremendous amount of
esoteric theology. If they are good interpreters, the theological detail becomes clear to
them — if they listen very carefully to what such “patients” tell them, to what they
know. Much of what is taught in theology, particularly Catholic pastoral theology, is
founded on what various enlightened, trained confessors have heard from certain
penitents who have undergone this sequence of development.

At this point ordinary conceptions of health and illness cease to have any meaning.
If such a man is hidden away in an office, or if such a woman becomes an housewife
who must spend her days in the kitchen or something similar in bourgeois everyday
life, these people become really insane, and behave outwardly in such a way that they
can only be regarded as insane. If a priest notices at the right moment how things are
developing and arranges for them to live in appropriate surroundings, they can develop
the four stages in proper order. Through such patients, the enlightened confessor is
able to look into the spiritual world in a modern way but similarly to the Greek priests,
who learned about the spiritual world from the Pythians, who imparted all kinds of
revelations concerning the spiritual world through earthly smoke and vapor. [Note 3]
What sense would there be today in writing a thesis on the pathological aspect of the
Greek Pythians? It could certainly be done and it would even be correct, but it would
have no meaning in a higher sense. For as a matter of fact, very much of what flowed in
a magnificent way from Greek theology into the entire cultural life of Greece originated
in the revelations of the Pythians. As a rule, the Pythians were individuals who had
come either to this third stage or even to the fourth stage.

But we can think of a personality in a later epoch who went through these stages
under the wise direction of her confessors, so that she could devote herself undisturbed
to her inner visions. Something very wonderful developed for her, which indeed also
remained to a certain degree pathological. Her life was not just a concern of the
physician or of the priest but a concern of the entire Church. The Church pronounced
her a saint after her death. This was St. Teresa. [Note 4] This was approximately her
path.

You see, one must examine such things as this if one wants to discover what will
give medicine and theology a real insight into human nature. One must be prepared to
go far beyond the usual category of ideas, for they lose their value. Otherwise one can
no longer differentiate between a saint and a fool, between a madman and a genius, and
can no longer distinguish any of the others except a normal dyed-in-the-wool average
citizen.

This is a view of the human being that must first be met with understanding; then it
can really lead to fundamental esoteric knowledge. But it can also be tremendously
enlightening in regard to psychological abnormalities as well as to physical
abnormalities and physical illnesses. Certain conditions are necessary for these stages
to appear. There has to be a certain consistency of the person's ego so that it does not
completely penetrate the organism. Also there must be a certain consistency of the
astral body: if it is not fine, as it was in St. Teresa, if it is coarse, the result will be
different. With St. Teresa, because of the delicacy of her ego organization and astral
body, certain physical organs in the lower body had been formed with the same fragile
quality.

But it can happen that the ego organization and astral body are quite coarse and yet
they have the same characteristic as above. Such an individual can be comparatively
normal and show only the physical correlation: then it is only a physical illness. One
could say, on the one hand there can be a St. Teresa constitution with its visions and
poetic beauty, and on the other hand its physical counterimage in diseased abdominal
organs, which in the course of this second person's life is not reflected in the ego and
astral organization.
 All these things must be spoken about and examined. For those who hold
responsibility as physicians or priests are confronted by these things, and they must be
equal to the challenge. Theological activity only begins to be effective if theologians are
prepared to cope with such phenomena. And physicians only begin to be healers if they
also are prepared to deal with such symptoms.

Pastoral Medicine
Pastoral Medicine: Lecture 3

Schmidt Number: S-5911

On-line since: 27th March, 2008

LECTURE 3

Dear friends,
We will obtain a deeper view of the total human being if we go a little further into
the matters we have been considering. In particular, we should see from such
symptoms how important the transition is from health to illness. I therefore would like
to speak further about something that lies between certain pathological trends that are
developing in human evolution and a kind of natural initiation that constitutes another
stream in human evolution. This phenomenon lies midway between the pathological
tendencies of human nature and the stream of initiation; it relates as much to one as to
the other.

Typical of such a path of development are such personalities as St. Teresa. One can
observe much more than I described if one makes a study of some of these individuals.
With them there is a kind of appearance of the spiritual world at the threshold of
perception. Naturally this is difficult to describe, because the words one has to use to
characterize these abnormal conditions do not have such meanings in our everyday
speech. What appears at the threshold of perception is the first stage for such people
and is called by them “entrance into the first dwelling place of God.” In the first stage
this is perceived only as “a presence.” These people experience the presence of some
spiritual being, but they have no precise vision of the being. If the experience comes to
a definite conclusion, they have a clear feeling that the being was there with them. That
is the first experience: an indefinite experience of a presence, of being together with
some spiritual being. As long as they are in this stage of development, these people are
even annoyed when someone else tells them of a vision, because these people think
their own experience is much more inward, much more intimate, more genuine. This
has been such a moving experience for them that they have the feeling: human beings
are not allowed to see the super-sensible world, but I have been given this vague
experience of its reality.

Then these people reach a second stage. They tell of actual, shaped perceptions of
the spiritual beings that were present. First they tell of the feeling of being touched, of
having spiritual hands laid upon them, even of their forehead being touched or
something similar, without yet having any visual experience. Then the condition is
raised to vision that is like optical perception. It can be so enhanced that they see Jesus,
for instance, standing before them as a real person. That is the usual second stage. It is
a peculiar fact that those advancing from the first to the second stage have only the
vaguest feeling that earlier they had become angry when others told them of their own
experiences in this second stage. Memory does not clearly connect the two stages.
These people live very intensely in the respective single stages.

The third stage they experience is remarkable. Their description of it is highly

colored in every detail. They tell how when it comes upon them they are seized by
tremendous pain. And indeed it is obviously intense, for at these moments they can be
heard groaning; other reactions can be observed such as occur with pain originating in
the physical and etheric bodies. But the strange thing is that they want this pain. They
want it because they regard it as natural that they should have it; they feel that they will
only reach the subsequent experience properly if first they suffer this pain.

Then they reach the stage where they transform the pain within themselves. This is
extraordinarily interesting, for actually the pain remains exactly the same, but now it is
enhanced into a feeling of joy, of bliss. The pain comes, its objective condition is still
there, but now the spiritual awareness goes further. If one were suddenly to pull such
people out of their spiritual state, they would feel the pain as sick people feel pain —
and indeed do so when they return from this highest stage of the experience. At this
highest stage they no longer have the feeling that spiritual beings come to them, but
that they themselves have risen into the spiritual world. At this stage the pain is
transformed — one might say subjectively, but the expression is not quite exact — into a
feeling of bliss. Then begins a symbolic objectifying of the pain. When they come out of
this experience and have a memory of it (and in most cases there is a very clear memory
of it afterward), then they describe how a seraph or a cherub stood beside them, and
the seraph or cherub had a sword that he plunged into the their intestines, which
caused excruciating pain. When the spiritual being pulled out the sword he pulled the
intestines out too, and then there came immediately an experience of profound bliss in
the presence of God.
 As a rule these three stages follow in succession. We can understand them clearly
through our anthroposophical knowledge. After the preparatory condition I have
described, the first stage consists of the ego organization drawing the astral body to
itself, so that they are united without penetrating the physical and etheric bodies as
deeply as they normally would. Something, therefore, is happening for such persons
that can never happen in ordinary consciousness: in half-waking or quarter-waking or
three-quarters waking condition they have conscious experience in their ego
organization and astral body, while at the same time experience in their etheric and
physical bodies continues with a certain independence. Thus parallel experiences are
there: a spiritual experience in the ego organization and astral body, and at the same
time a separate experience of the etheric and physical bodies. This is never the case in
normal consciousness: there, all four members of the human being are bound closely
together. In normal consciousness there is no such thing as experiences of
consciousness running parallel. In this experience I am describing, such people feel
themselves, know themselves in the most eminent sense to be entirely united with what
they are experiencing. They know this first of all, the inherent being-one-with the
happening. When the astral body is drawn to the ego organization and experiences
spiritual beings, these people experience them as simply a presence, as something that
is there. They experience this as one experiences one's own body. One does not
differentiate in the latter experience. One does not feel one's body as something
outside: one feels it as part of oneself. That is the first stage: the experience of “a
presence.”

Now let us go to the second stage. First, these people have all kinds of feelings of
being touched. Naturally these can be confused very easily by ordinary pathology with
familiar psychiatric symptoms, but they are not the same. Then they advance to actual
visions. This is the stage where the ego organization and astral organization draw the
etheric body out to be united with them. So again there is a parallel experience: the ego
organization, astral organization, and etheric body are all raised somewhat out of the
physical body; at the same time the physical body carries on its processes separately.
Something special comes about through this situation. In ordinary life, when we see, we
are stimulated by light from without and we receive the stimulus into ourselves. It goes
as far as the etheric body, and the etheric body creates the conscious experience. That is
how it is, for example, with the eyes. When you see, the external stimulation occurs first
in the ego; then it penetrates the astral body and penetrates the etheric body. It is then
the etheric body that communicates the whole conscious experience to you by pushing
in every direction, in a certain sense, against the physical organization. The conscious
experience lies in this pushing. That is the exact process. If presented in a diagram, it
would look like the drawing below.
 Diagram 1
Click image for large view

A stimulus is exerted. First it affects the ego, then it goes to the astral body, then to
the etheric body; in the etheric body it pushes into the physical body in every direction,
to all sides. The physical body pushes back, and the pushing back, the repulsion by the
physical body, is your actual eye experience. It is a constant play between the etheric
body and the choroid and retina. What the etheric body does in the choroid and in the
retina is what appears to ordinary consciousness as optical experience. This happens
similarly with every other sense perception. To anyone who understands these things,
the entire explanation in today's psychology textbooks, or even in epistemology, is
terribly childish.

But now, with such people as I am describing, the etheric body is seized directly in
this experience. The experience sits in the ego, astral body, etheric body, and does not
push out to the senses, but pushes from within to what is the nerve-sense system —
pushes first, actually, into the glandular system, then into the nervous system, and
finally from there streams into the senses. So the senses are taken hold of in a way that
is just the opposite of the way it happens in ordinary life. Instead of the experience of
consciousness being stimulated through the senses, it is colored, intensified, made vivid
by the fact that it streams from within to the senses. That is how the feeling of being
touched comes about in a sensation of the nerves: by the streaming from within
outward. This is then raised to vision. Now you know the whole inner process.

If there is a further development, it proceeds in the following way: the ego

organization, astral body, and etheric body take hold of the physical body from quite
another direction than would normally be the case. The physical body is accustomed to
being taken hold of from without, but now it is taken hold of from within. Now it is
taken hold of in the midst of life — the very process that otherwise only happens when
the human soul-spiritual entity comes down out of the soul-spiritual world into the
physical body, three weeks after conception. This event cannot otherwise happen in
ordinary life, because normally the etheric body is connected with the physical body.
But in this case the etheric body has been raised out by the ego organization and taken
hold of by the astral body. It is like birth, when the human being takes possession of a
physical body, but now the procedure is more complicated, possessing this physical
body from quite another direction. And that causes pain. For as a matter of fact, all pain
— in cases of illness, too — consists of the fact that the body is grasped hold of from
some other direction than the usual one. That is what happens at the moment when the
third stage is reached.

Now you need not be surprised that this third stage is objectified. It penetrates the
physical body and the physical body repels it. A physical body cannot be so seized
except in regular initiation; in any other situation the physical body exerts opposition,
and this causes pain. It pushes away in pain what it is experiencing. That is the first
part of the experience of the third stage. The physical body exerts resistance and the
resistance is experienced as pain. And what enters through the pain? The real spiritual
world. It comes through the pain. The spiritual world comes from the other direction.
Ordinary sense perception and ordinary thinking grasp hold of the physical world. The
spiritual world is grasped in the opposite way. The way to it is through pain. The
moment the physical body exerts resistance, intense pain is there. But the moment the
pain is taken hold of by the spiritual world, the moment the spiritual world enters, the
pain is transformed into ecstasy. It is really so. First there is pain in the organism; then
the spiritual world penetrates the pain, streams through the pain: a cherub or seraph
appears (this is what the imagination presents), the cherub plunges his sword in, draws
it out, and draws the intestines out with it. This means that the person becomes
independent of the physical body, of the ordinary connection to it. The person has no
experience in the lower organs and is led beyond it to an experience of the spiritual
world. The physical pain is transformed to bliss. Such people speak of the presence of
God, or if they make distinctions, of the presence of the spiritual world.

This last stage is experienced by individuals who are strong enough in their etheric
body to endure the entire happening. They have the foundation for it in their karma.
For instance, think of St. Teresa. She had an earlier incarnation in which her soul
became especially strong. She incarnates as St. Teresa. But before she incarnates in the
physical body, she takes possession of her etheric body very forcefully, and this etheric
body becomes inwardly stronger than is the case with the usual human being. She has
brought it with her into this life, this etheric body that is inwardly strong. Then this
strong etheric body leaves the physical body and unites itself firmly with the astral body
and ego, which are also especially strong from an earlier incarnation. And that is why
illnesses then appear, at least a certain variety of illness: because the etheric body is not
staying in the physical organs and providing them with its nourishing, vitalizing forces.
With the individuals I am describing, the moment they enter the third stage they
become really ill. At the same time their strong etheric body enables them to overcome
the illness as it is developing. The illness begins to develop and immediately an
automatic therapy arises within them from the strong etheric body. The entire process
is a latent illness and healing. This is one of the most interesting phenomena in the
realm of human evolution.

Precisely in the case of St. Teresa you see in the final stage of her development a
continual status nascendi of illness and the continual cure. This alternation, this
wonderful swing of a pendulum between the beginning of illness and the caring of it, is
not a natural happening in the physical world, for it is not brought about in the physical
world: it takes place in the spiritual world. We know that the etheric body is formed
before the earthly incarnation. And it is into that pre-earthly moment that such a
person as St. Teresa returns. When the pathological condition starts, when it is in statu
nascendi, she “swings” into the world where she was before birth, into the spiritual
world. The pendulum swings between the physical body and the spiritual world.
Spiritual world — physical world — spiritual world — physical world, but experiencing
the physical world as an exact opposite — such as normally human beings only
experience when they are just incarnating into it. This inner process of healing, this
therapy coming from the cosmos, is so intense that its effect can spread to sick people
who are in the neighborhood of such people, if their illness lies somewhat in the same
direction. In fact, the most wonderful cures can take place around such a person.

Indeed the influence can extend much further. In the former, better days of the
church, these things were used in a careful, esoteric way. Later this degenerated to a
superstitious worship of relics and belief in magic. But it is a fact that in better times of
religious evolution, vivid biographies of such individuals, including their own
imaginative descriptions, were given to the faithful, so that they could live through the
experiences of such people in their own imagination. And it could then happen that
when thoughtful pastors had the opportunity, they would simply put such a biography
into the hands of someone in ordinary life whose illness was going in a certain
direction. Perhaps also they strengthened the effect by their own words, and this was
able to start curative processes. Directing the sick individual's mind to the life of such a
saint could have a therapeutic effect.

You can see that studies that go so deeply into the human being will always lead
from health to illness, but also to states of super-sensible experience. If therefore you
advise someone in some connection or other to do exercises to gain entrance into the
super-sensible world, the exercises must be so oriented that they strengthen the ego
organization, astral body, and etheric body. Such a path as I described, given to
individuals simply through their karma, will in fact take its course properly. What takes
place in initiation itself can be learned by studying these processes, which border so
closely on the pathological. Therefore it is not unimportant for physicians to take the
time to study the lives of such people. Physicians will find in them what can only be
called a paradox: the healthy counterpart of a complex of pathological symptoms that
they are accustomed to meet here and there in everyday life. And for physicians, that is
the most beneficial thing possible: to see the healthy counterpart of a pathological
condition. That, more than anything else, will help physicians to make thoughtful,
conscientious decisions about their therapy. Moreover if physicians have some
knowledge of the substance that can be used as a remedy because of its affinity to
certain etheric forces — forces that automatically become active in the self-healing of
these abnormal individuals — they will know how St. Teresa's etheric body developed
its forces when her illnesses appeared in statu nascendi. And if physicians learn to
know the healing power to be found in the piercing activity of antimony, then they will
have learned the right therapy from Nature herself.

I would like to point out that in examining such experiences as these, one
encounters a remarkable paradox: one sees illness from another side. One sees illness
being treated not by human beings but by spiritual beings. One kind of treatment is the
kind human beings evolve: that is, treatment from the aspect of the earth. It consists of
restoring the previous condition through some therapy that breaks up the illness. The
spiritual beings that have to do with humanity treat illness differently. They weave an
illness into the fabric of karma. That is their task — a task that doesn't pile things
together as they are piled together here on earth by pathology. Here a seventeen-year-
old who is ill is not always cured by forty-five. But with the way karma is formed, an
illness in some incarnation, whether it is cured or not, may be woven into the human
being's karma three thousand years later. Time is measured quite differently in the
spiritual world. But one learns very much from those developments in which, from a
spiritual point of view, something can happen in the spiritual world and then can also
stream down into the physical world.

Diagram 2
Click image for large view
 Take, for example, such a form of karma as I have been describing. Perhaps it is
completely in the ordinary course of evolution in three thousand years. Let me show by
this line (see drawing above) that something that happens to a person today is so
shaped by spiritual beings that the other part belonging to it, the balance, the
compensation, appears in three thousand years' time. That is the normal course. You
see, in ordinary life people don't have a true knowledge of time. How do they think of it
ordinarily? As a line running from past infinity through the present into the future.
That is approximately how time is imagined — and indeed, the line has to be thick —
perhaps not even a line, but a thick rope, because it contains everything that is
perceived at any given moment in the whole world. That's the way people think of it if
they think of it at all — and most people don't think of it at all. From a spiritual point of
view time is not like that. And one finds little understanding for spiritual development
— which, after all, is present in all physical evolution — when time is thought of in that
conventional way. In reality, time is different. The line I drew on the board can be
tangled up into a ball (see drawing). The entire line of time is in that ball. Three
thousand years are in that ball. Time can be all tangled up; and if it is tangled up for
some development or other in evolution, then the tangle can be found in the life of
some individual. In the case of St. Teresa, a tangled ball of time was present in her
earthly life. We come upon a true mystery — that things that in someone's karma would
seem to be widely separate for some reason become entangled.

You see from such an example how a study of the inner spiritual, karmic
development must link up with the external pathological and therapeutic inquiry. You
can see how the pastoral care of some person by priests, who are basing their view of
the person on the karmic connections, the spiritual aspects, can relate to what is seen
from a medical view alone. For a comprehension of these things requires not only
theoretical knowledge but really living into the things. Physicians must live into them
on the pathological, physiological side that opens up for them. Priests must live into
them in the theological and karmic views that open up for them. And the harmony will
come from their working together out of these two different fields, not from interfering
in each other's field in a dilettantish fashion. This must be stressed again and again.

You must still see something else that is connected with these things, particularly in
our epoch. You know how distasteful it is to some people to accept the idea of free will
even though it is perfectly obvious to an unbiased person. The philosophers deny its
reality because their intellect can't make a connection with it. I said just now in regard
to sense perceptions that the explanations in physiology and psychology textbooks are
absolutely childish to someone who understands these things. But the chatter over free
will is far worse. For you must remember: a decision of free will is at every moment an
act of the whole human being — the whole human being — no matter how they appear
in this impulse: healthy or ill or half ill or abnormally healthy. The whole human being
is involved in an impulse of free will — and, all that can be known of the whole human
being, all the complications. One only learns to know human nature when one learns to
know it with all its complications. And please notice, something that in an abnormal
person shows too strong a color in one or another direction is neutralized, harmonized
in the ordinary human being. There's a trivial expression, but it's true: A cherub can
make friends with you, but the devil can too. And those processes where the devil can
squeeze in — we're going to study them too! This is all to be found in the ordinary
human being, but opposing forces are neutralized, because they develop equally
strongly in every direction. If there's an angel in every human, there's also a devil. But
when the angel and the devil are equally strong, they neutralize each other.

Diagram 3
Click image for large view

Now take a look at these scales (see drawing). There is one spot, one point right
here. You can lay weights there or there and then you have put the scales into
movement. But this spot always remains still. It has a name: the hypomochlion. It is
not affected by what you lay on the scale at the left, or what you lay on the scale at the
right. Of course, the scales must be built so that this spot will not need to be disturbed.
Now in the human being a similar spiritual hypomochlion is created by the opposing
forces. Therefore you can study human nature and you will never be able to call human
beings free, for by their very nature they are causally conditioned in all respects.

If you study the nature of human beings from the viewpoint of materialism, you do
not come to the idea of freedom. You come to causal conditioning. If you study human
beings from a spiritual viewpoint, you come to the determination of the will by God or
by spiritual beings; you do not come to free will. You can be a blockhead of a materialist
and deny freedom and do research on the natural causality of the will. Or you can be a
sophisticated person like Leibnitz and gaze out at a spiritual universe — and you come
to determinism. Naturally, as long as you are considering the scale at this left end of the
beam, you have to reckon with movement; so long as you are considering the scale at
this right end of the beam, again you have to reckon with movement. And it is the same
with human beings: whether you consider them from the point of view of nature or
from the point of view of spirit, you do not come to freedom. Freedom lies in the middle
at the point of balance between them.

That's theory, of course! In practice you have to decide when people come to you
with difficult life situations whether you can make them responsible for their actions.
Now this becomes a practical question: whether they can or cannot exercise free will.
How are you going to decide this? You decide by judging whether their spiritual and
physical constitutions are in balance. And in this the physicians and the priests are
equally involved. Therefore both physicians and priests must be trained to understand
the conditions under which a person is either in balance or not in balance between
spirit and nature.

Whether an individual has this sense of responsibility can only be decided out of a
deep knowledge of human nature. The problem of freedom in connection with
responsibility is one of the deepest problems imaginable.

Let us continue tomorrow. We will see what from one side leads to health and from
the other side leads to pathological conditions.

Pastoral Medicine
Pastoral Medicine: Lecture 4

Schmidt Number: S-5915

On-line since: 27th March, 2008

LECTURE 4

Dear friends,
Today I would like to insert into our studies a chapter of anthroposophy that we
need for our examination of healthy responsibility and pathological irresponsibility as
the physician and the priest must know them.
 First of all it is important that we look into the question: What is really inherited by
a human being? What is not inherited and must come to the human being in some
other way? In evaluating healthy and sick individuals, a great deal depends upon
whether one can differentiate between these two ingredients. Human beings come out
of the spiritual, super-sensible worlds into the sense world: that means, they combine
what is given them by heredity with what they bring from earlier earth lives and from
life between death and the new birth. Then we see how they develop as a children, from
day to day, from week to week. But if one does not perceive that they are four-
membered beings, with physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego organization,
one is not in a position to understand their development, for one does not see what part
each member is playing in this development. They have different origins; they come
from different worlds.

First, human beings have their physical organism. The most striking phenomenon
in the physical organism is that in the first period of life they have what we call “first
teeth,” which last until the time we call “change of teeth.” The teeth are only the most
obvious thing that is changed at this time. For the fact is that human beings only keep
the physical substance they received at birth until the change of teeth. They are
constantly stripping that physical material from their form.

The process is, of course, more complicated than is implied in the brief statement
that in the course of every seven or eight years a person pushes off all physical
substance and replaces it. The truth is near to that, but one need only look at the
change of teeth itself to realize that this picture must be modified somewhat. For if this
abstract assertion were correct, we would have new teeth every seven years. We get new
teeth only once. The teeth are changed once and do not undergo any other renewal.
They belong in this category in the most extreme sense. As a matter of fact, the course
of human life is such that the older one becomes, the more one retains of old physical
substance. A replacement of by far the greatest part of the substance does indeed take
place in seven- to eight-year periods; but we must distinguish what remains behind. At
the seventh year it is only the adult teeth that remain. After each subsequent period
there remain also certain parts of the substance that are not replaced, although the
greater part is indeed replaced in the course of seven or eight years. Thus a basic
statement can be made for the first seven years. Human beings strip away all the
physical substance they had when they were born, keeping none of it, keeping only the
forces that have lived and worked in it during those years. These forces have so
appropriated the fresh new substance that was constantly being aquired that at seven
the physical body has been completely renewed, even to the teeth. And from that
statement the understanding must follow that the principle of heredity as our current
natural science conceives of it really holds good only for the first seven years of life.
Only for those first seven years is it true that a person's characteristics come from
parents and grandparents. The physical body of those first seven years provides, in a
certain sense, a kind of model from which the artist working in the human being (who
consists now in these years of etheric body, astral body, and ego) fashions a new
physical body. We see how what we bring down from spiritual worlds — our
individuality, our own being — and what we receive from heredity work together in
artistic reciprocal activity. If a human being is an inwardly strong individual and brings
an intensely strong inner astrality and ego nature, which in turn makes the etheric body
strong, then we will see a young person shooting up who from inner strength keeps very
little to the model, only copies it for the general form. Naturally, the universal human
model must be preserved, and therefore an affinity is already there for the inherited
human form; features of it definitely remain beyond the change of teeth. Still, to
thoughtful observation it will be apparent that in the case of inwardly strong
individuals important changes come after the change of teeth because such individuals
follow only slightly the model they inherited.

If we investigate such an individual as St. Teresa, we find that these particularly

strong individualities resemble their parents very closely in the first seven years, but
then in the ninth and tenth years they develop in surprising ways. Then the real
individual is emerging. In the strongest sense of the word, heredity only holds good for
the first life period. What seems to appear later as heredity is not really heredity but
must be recognized as a copy of the inherited model. The copy may be more or less
exact; even so, it is not heredity; it is a copy of the inherited characteristics. The
ordinary natural scientist considers this to be simply the principle of heredity carried
further. But someone who really studies the nature of humanity will perceive that there
is a complete qualitative difference between the resemblance to parents before the
change of teeth and the resemblance after the change of teeth. Before, the forces of
heredity are active. After, the forces that copy the model are active. To be exact, one can
no more say that a human being has inherited what is carried between change of teeth
and puberty than one can say of an artist copying the Sistine Madonna in the Dresden
Gallery that the painting has caught the qualities of the Madonna through heredity!

You can see the particular kind of work the etheric body has to do. For in the years
up to the change of teeth, the astral body and ego organization participate very little.
The etheric body forms a new physical human body in accordance with the model.
Why? Because, like the child during the first seven years, it is not yet able to receive
other than a very special kind of impression from the outer world. Here we come upon
an important secret of human evolution, a secret that answers the question: What does
a child really perceive? The answer lies far away from present-day ideas.

We live, shall we say, between death and a new birth (or conception) in the spiritual
world. In the spiritual world we are surrounded by realities very different from those
found here in the physical world. We come out of that world into the physical world and
continue our life in a physical body that we receive. Now in this physical world the
same forces work further, although they are hidden from human sense perception. If
you look at a tree, the same spiritual forces are working in it as those you encounter
between death and new birth, only they are covered over, veiled, by the physical
material of the tree. Everywhere in the physical world in which we live between birth
and death, spiritual forces are active behind the sense-perceptible physical entities. We
can think of the activities of the spiritual world continuing into this world in which we
live between birth and death.

Now in the first seven years of life the child's whole being cannot unite with
anything except this spiritual reality in all the colors, all the forms, all warmth, all cold.
The child is fully aware when entering this physical world of the continuing spiritual
activity. This awareness gradually diminishes up to the change of teeth. A sense
impression is quite different to a child than to an adult. This fact is never recognized.
To a child the sense impression is something entirely spiritual. For this reason if a
child's father has a fit of anger, the child is not conscious of the angry gestures but of
the moral state behind the gestures. It is this that passes into the child's body. During
this time, therefore, the child is working with the forces that build a physical body in
accordance with the child's own model — the body that will now be the child's own —
and during this time is turned entirely toward spiritual foundations and works out of
spiritual forces.

What does that mean? What is really working when spiritual forces are working?
Obviously colors, forms, warmth, cold, roughness, smoothness work upon the sense
perceptions. But behind all that, what is the fundamental force that is working? In
reality, whatever has to do with an ego nature. Only invisible spiritual beings make an
impression on the child, beings who have something to do with an ego nature, above
all, beings of the spiritual hierarchies higher than human beings, but also the animal
group-souls, and the group-souls of the elemental beings. In reality, all this is working
upon the child. And out of these spiritual forces, out of these mighty spiritual dynamics
the child forms a second body from the original model. It grows and is finally present as
a complete second body when the change of teeth takes place. This is the body that the
human being has built for itself since birth, the first body that is it's very own, a
physical body built out of the spiritual world.

Thus we have in this first life period very special laws working within all that
activates the child, in all the awkwardness and uncertainty that are in the soul and with
which it moves. They come from the fact that constant adjustment is having to be made
to the physical world, since the child is still dreamily and half-consciously immersed in
the other surrounding world: the spiritual world. Someday when medicine reaches a
proper spiritual outlook, this interplay between the spiritual and physical worlds during
the first seven years of life will be seen as the true cause of the so-called “children's
diseases.” Then we will have the explanation for a problem that today is solved in the
medical books by empty words and formal elucidations that do not lead to any reality.
 The etheric body has a great deal to do in these first seven years of life. It works
quietly and steadily to develop the faculties that it will possess in the second seven-year
period: independent faculties of memory leading toward the intellect. Whoever has an
eye for it can see the greatest transformation in the child's soul-life when the first life
period goes over into the second. The etheric body is now relieved of the work it had to
accomplish — in the full sense of the word — to build the second body. It is relieved,
freed. How it is freed, one can only realize if one perceives that at fourteen years not
only the teeth remain but still more that had to be renewed, like the teeth, in the first
life period. This now remains in the physical-material substance. What remains frees
the etheric body — itself becomes free in the etheric body. Quantitatively it is a small
thing, but qualitatively it is something of tremendous importance. It is what now
becomes tremendously active as soul attributes, soul characteristics. What the human
being saves by not having to create a third set of teeth (and much else that is taken care
of by evolution in the same way as the teeth) enables something of the etheric body to
be “left over.” What flowed during the first seven years into the physical development
and is now “left over” from the physical development works now purely in the realm of
soul, its nature depending upon the individual. With the faculties upon which you call
as a teacher in school, the faculties you train, the child accomplished the great change
from milk teeth to second teeth, and much else. With the forces that are saved by not
having to form a third set of teeth, the child begins to develop soul faculties. This takes
place in the depths of human nature. During the first seven years these soul forces had
been entirely embedded in the physical development. We have to comprehend physical
development as a soul-spiritual activity just as much as a physical activity. We see a
spiritual entity active in the body in the first seven years of the human being, in the
fullest sense of the word.

How does this relate to general human evolution? Those forces with which the
human soul works in the first seven years of life are in the cosmos; they are sun forces.
It is not only physical-etheric rays that stream down from the sun: in those physical-
etheric sun rays, forces are streaming down from the sun that are identical with the
forces by which our etheric body renews our physical body in the first seven years of
life. It is the Sun Being (Sonnenentität) that works there. Look at the child — how the
child works at a second physical body, copying from the model! The child is absorbing
pure forces from the sunshine. One must understand that — how humanity stands
within the cosmos! And when the child has certain etheric forces released at the change
of teeth, they then work back upon the astral organization and ego organization. Then
in the second life period human beings have access to what could not reach them at all
in the first period. They now have access to the moon forces.

The etheric forces in the first seven years of life are sun forces. At the change of
teeth we have access to the moon forces; these are identical with the forces of our astral
body. Thus at the change of teeth human beings move from the sun sphere — in which,
however, we also still remain, for it remains active in us — into the moon sphere. And
now between change of teeth and puberty we work on ourselves with the moon forces.
With the moon forces we now build our second own body (the third earthly body), in
which not so much is replaced as in the first life period, but even so a great deal. Again
forces remain behind, but they are now of an astral nature, and they are now
transforming the soul. They were freed from their work on the body when we reached
puberty. We have now reached a period in which we manifest certain forces that are
now free in the soul, forces that had to work in the physical body between the ages of
seven and fourteen.

So we work entirely in the first life period with what comes to us from the sun. And
with the school child between change of teeth and puberty, it is sun forces that have
now become free for soul activity. That is the great powerful fact we find in human
evolution, that if one is educating a child's soul between change of teeth and puberty,
one has to do purely with sun forces. The child-soul is so intimately related to what
lives in the sunshine! One's heart can rejoice in such knowledge. The knowledge really
sheds light on the relation between humanity and cosmos.

Moon forces are active in this second life period in the bodily development; they are
not yet freed for the soul-life. They become free at puberty, and then they join the work
on the soul. The change that takes place in the soul-life at puberty is caused by the fact
that moon forces are now impressing themselves into the soul-life. So what a young
person does in all kinds of behavior after the onset of puberty is a working together of
sun and moon forces.

Thus we see into the depths of human evolution. We will stay clear of speaking of
heredity in the crude sense in which natural science speaks of it. We will look in the
opposite direction, to see what lives in the human activity of the child. It is the sun that
lives in all the human activity of the child, and in the child's human thinking.

It is the sun that streams to us from the stone — for a stone has no light of its own, it
can only reflect the sun's light to us. The natural researcher grants you that fact — but
that is the very smallest, the most abstract detail! The child also reflects the sun forces
back to us, between the seventh and fourteenth years. Just as we can designate the light
reflected from the stone as sunlight streamed back to us, so we can designate what the
child does in the second life period as “sun.” Sun is not merely there where it seems to
be concentrated. This physical notion, that the sun is only there is like the notion of
someone who looks at the soup in a soup bowl and sees a blob of fat floating on the top
of it and thinks that the blob of fat is the soup.

Yes, our physical ideas are often very childish, and if one uncovers them and shows
them for what they are, then people laugh. One could wish there were the same reaction
to much that is happening today in the name of science, because it is pretty laughable.
When someone takes the blob of fat to be the soup itself, that's the same as when that
gold ball up there above us is regarded as the entire sun. In reality the sun fills the
whole world.

Now let us look into the connection between the moon forces and the forces of
reproduction. The forces of reproduction now gradually form the child's own second
body that is built up between the seventh and fourteenth years and is finished when
puberty begins. The human being takes in the reproductive forces during this time; this
is plainly moon activity. These forces relate entirely to moon activity. They are the
result of moon activity.

And now we reach the life period in which we must form our own third body (the
fourth when counted from an external view), the time from puberty to the beginning of
the twenties. The division of time in the later years is no longer so exact as the time
between change of teeth and puberty. Now there is always more physical substance
remaining behind; it stays fixed in the human being, it becomes permanent structure.
Gradually a great deal of permanent structure accumulates. The older a person
becomes, the less material is stripped away from the bones and replaced. Also in the
rest of the organism certain parts need a longer time to separate off. And one can see a
simple fact in connection with the teeth: that once one has got one's second set of teeth,
whether one still has them later depends upon how long they last — just as with a knife,
one only has it as long as it lasts. The knife can't renew itself. Teeth can't renew
themselves either, really.

Obviously everything is in flow: there is renewal in the first place, but then it goes
over into the state of nonrenewal. The teeth maintain their life process at a much
slower tempo than the rest of the organism, so far as intensity is concerned. But
therefore in reverse, the tempo is faster so far as quality is concerned, for they actually
become bad before the other parts of the organism — for the reason that the other parts
can always renew themselves. If the teeth were subject to the same laws as many other
parts of the human organism, there wouldn't have to be any dentists. On the other
hand, if the other parts of the organism were subject to the same laws as the teeth, we
would all die young in this modern civilization of ours.

But now to go on. We are active in our organism in the first seven years of life with
the forces of the sun, in the second seven years with the forces of the moon. In this
second period the sun forces remain and the moon forces combine with them. In the
third seven-year period, from puberty into the twenties, much more delicate forces are
taken in, coming from the other planets. These other planetary forces appear in the
human growth process, and because they work much less strongly than the sun or
moon, their influence is outwardly much less visible. They had been working in the
body between the fourteenth and the twenty-first years. Now at twenty-one, although it
is hardly noticeable, they begin to work in the area of soul and spirit. Whoever has
insight can see this remarkable change. Up to that moment only sun and moon have
spoken out of human deeds. Now planetary forces modify that sun and moon activity.
Actually people's coarse methods of observation afford very little capacity for grasping
this change. But it is there.

Knowledge of these connections is necessary for someone concerned with the

human being in health and in illness. For what do we really know of a human being,
shall we say in the eleventh or twelfth year, if we don't know that the moon forces are
working there? After that period, even though there are continually fewer parts to be
renewed, the person must still renew them. Up to the twenty-first or twenty-second
year, the sun, moon, and planets are working in succession into human growth. Then
from the twenty-first to the twenty-eighth year the constellations of the fixed stars
work. To be sure, this escapes ordinary observation. Only mystery wisdom tells of the
entire zodiac playing into the human being between the beginning and the end of the
twenties. Then the world becomes severe. It no longer wants to work into a person; it
becomes harsh. Of this strange new relation of the human being to the world in the
twenty-eighth, twenty-ninth year — that the world hardens toward us — of this, today's
science hardly knows anything. Aristotle taught it to Alexander when he told him that
we push against the crystal heaven and find it hard. Thus “the crystal heaven,” beyond
the sphere of the fixed stars, acquires meaning for human comprehension. And one
begins to realize that when we come to the end of our twenties, we find no more forces
in the cosmos for our own renewal. Why do we not die, then, at twenty-eight years?
Well, the surrounding world does in fact let us die at twenty-eight. It is true. Whoever
sees humanity's relation to the world, whoever looks consciously out into the world,
must say, “O world, in reality you sustain me only until my twenty-eighth year!” Only
when one realizes this does one finally begin to understand the real nature of the
human being.

For now what happens when the world withdraws its formative forces — forces that
previously we had always been free to use to build ourself up? At this remarkable
moment, when in the twenty-eighth year we begin to show clearly that the earlier forces
of growth are now completely gone, some people begin to die off. Some hold on a little
longer to the forces of growth that are flowing away. But even Goethe had grown
smaller when he measured himself carefully. This was when he began to work again on
the second part of Faust. Earlier he had already begun to fade. From the moment when
the world deserts us, we have to manage our renewal ourselves, out of forces we have
received up to that moment. Certainly when the parts of our organism that can be
renewed are becoming fewer and fewer, we cannot work to give ourselves a new body in
the same glorious measure that children use up to the change of teeth, when they are
forming their first very own body from the model. But we have collected many, many
forces from sun and moon and stars which we are carrying within us and which we
need when at twenty-eight we have to begin to renew our physical-material body
ourselves. This is the moment in earth-life when we find that we are now given
complete responsibility for our human form. This moment of our life when we are put
entirely on our own is the point of time toward which we have been striving, and from
which we must go on. (Plate III, middle) We strive from childhood when we are
receiving many cosmic forces, strive more and more toward a point lying at the end of
our twenties, when we no longer build our growth out of cosmic forces. Whatever we do
after that moment, we do from forces out of our own body. In the middle is the point at
which we stop working with cosmic forces and begin to develop forces out of our own
body.

Plate III
Click image for large view

We often find a premature activity happening in some child from forces out of the
child's own body. We become aware of it from certain pathological symptoms the child
shows from the bones, for instance, becoming brittle, and particularly from becoming
fat. But the connection between these things is not easily seen. In every moment of life
a person is either striving toward this twenty-eighth-year point or away from it. You
must realize that it is a kind of zero point, a kind of hypomochlion, a zero moment in
time when we stand between ourselves and the world. Always in our inner dynamics we
are striving toward it or from it. Whatever is happening in us is a striving toward a zero
or away from a zero, something we do toward or away from nothingness. We are
striving toward the point where the world is no longer active and we are not yet active.
Between the two conditions is a kind of zero. There is something in us that is oriented
toward nothingness. It is this that makes us free beings; that is why we can hold
responsibility. It is rooted in the human constitution that we are responsible free
beings, because at the moment of transfer from the world to ourselves we go through a
point of zero. Just as the beam of a pair of scales goes through a point of zero from right
to left, from left to right, and that point does not follow the laws to which the rest of the
scales is subject. You can think when you have a pair of scales, (Plate III,
right) here the mechanical laws you have learned are in force; this gives the scales an
exact form — either this above and that below or the opposite. That is the law of scales,
the law of leverage. You can carry the scales around; their relation remains the same
everywhere, subject always to those mechanical laws wherever you take them — except
at this point. This point is free. You can carry the point around as if it were not
connected to a pair of scales: the scales remain unchanged. And so it is, when you take
hold of yourself in your soul experiences at that point toward which first you strive,
from which afterward you strive away: first the world is active, afterward you yourself,
and here nothing is active. With the tendency toward and the tendency from, here
where a hypomochlion sits, here can live freely that human capacity which is
determined neither by nature nor by the world. Here is the point of origin of human
freedom. Here is where responsibility is born.

If, therefore, one wants to be able to judge the degree of responsibility in, for
instance, a person thirty-five years old — and I mean professionally, not merely a
layman's opinion, or that of a dilettante — then one must ask oneself, has too much,
perhaps, worked over from this person's abnormal development up to the point at the
end of the twenties? Is the point moved more toward youth or more toward age? A
person is properly responsible if the point is normal, if judging the whole individual
from external life one can decide that the point is normal. If it lies too far back toward
youth — that is, if the world ceased too soon to give its forces to some person — one
may perhaps find that the person suffers easily, even though to a small degree, from
compulsive ideas. The soul is becoming rigid and cannot be held fully accountable for
its deeds.

If the point comes late, the question will be whether that person is hindered by his
or her inner nature from developing complete freedom of soul and is too rigid
physically, and for that reason cannot be held fully responsible. The physician and the
priest are the ones who are competent to form this judgment, in the finest sense of the
word. They will know that they can judge pretty accurately from people's appearance
what their development has been, whether they are in balance, whether their life-
hypomochlion is at the right spot, that is, at the right point of time, or is too early or too
late. We will discuss physical appearance later, for even an intensive study of
physiognomy belongs to pastoral medicine.
 These are things that in the old mystery wisdom were regarded as very important
for judgments of human life. They are things that have been forgotten and that must be
brought again into our knowledge of the human being if that knowledge is to have any
beneficial influence, if it is to be active in the right sense in medical and pastoral
activity.

More about this tomorrow.

Pastoral Medicine
Pastoral Medicine: Lecture 5

Schmidt Number: S-5919

On-line since: 27th March, 2008

LECTURE 5

Dear friends,
We must now go on from the knowledge we have gained in one direction, of
individuals who, although not exactly having intuition, do develop a perception of
the spiritual world and who show certain aspects of behavior that to a physician
may seem to be pathological but are in fact something quite different, something
more. For as you have seen, the pathological condition remains with them in statu
nascendi and there is continuous healing coming from the spirit. This is the case
with such personalities as St. Teresa and Mechthild of Magdeburg, [Note 5] as well
as with male visionaries.

When we study these individuals, we find that as a first stage the ego
organization separates from the rest of the human organism. It then draws the
astral body closely to it, in a certain sense away from the physical-etheric
organism. This is in the waking state. What is the consequence of this? You can
easily see that this puts the individual into a kind of dream condition. From a
spiritual-scientific point of view the ego, by drawing the astral body to itself, is not
allowing it to enter the physical and etheric bodies completely, and this brings
about a kind of dream condition. But because of the special karmic density, both
ego and astral body are strong, and they bring into the dream condition receptivity
for the perception of the spiritual world. Dream is transformed into a state in
which the individual is really able to see into the spiritual world and to feel the
presence of spiritual beings.

Now let us look at the extreme opposite condition. Here the ego is weak, and
the astral body draws it down too strongly into the rest of the organism — again in
the waking state. Then there is not illumination, as with visionaries like St. Teresa,
but the opposite: a darkening, a clouding, a lowering of consciousness — in the
waking state — to a dream condition.

One cannot learn to know this second type of person in the way I have indicated
for the first type. Individuals who feel the presence of spiritual beings, who come to
such final stages as St. Teresa or Mechthild of Magdeburg, are much more
numerous than one would think. One learns to know them if one has some
particular opportunity or if one has cultivated the corresponding faculties. One
learns to know them best by letting them tell about their conditions. They talk
more interestingly than our ordinary contemporaries. Their narratives are much
more interesting; above all, they speak of things one does not encounter in
everyday life. So they are already interesting in the first stage.

The opposite individuals, those whose astral body is drawing the ego down, are
also interesting if one lets them talk about themselves. To understand the first type
of person requires the soul depth of the priest. To understand this second type of
person — who often is even more interesting than the usual visionaries, who do not
develop very far — really requires the sensitivity of a physician who comprehends
the world with a good intelligence and a fair amount of intuition. For it is a matter
of understanding what they do not tell one: what they do tell one is of little value. It
is a matter of grasping what they say or do in such a way that one can think of it in
relation to the human organism. Such persons, if one asks them a question, show a
certain amount of stupidity, also unwillingness to answer a question. They begin to
talk about something quite foreign to what one is asking. But if one catches hold of
what they say about themselves — and some of them talk endlessly — one
sometimes has the feeling that they possess an inner source of speech that gives
them a special association of ideas such as the ordinary person does not have.
They'll tell you if you let them ramble on — you mustn't ask questions, you must
just snap up what they tell as it were by chance — For example a man might say:
“Sure, ten years ago I was in a farmer's house and the wife gave me some coffee.
The cup had red roses painted on it. She couldn't give me the coffee right away
because she'd forgotten the sugar was in the kitchen and she had to go and get it.
And she forgot the milk. She had to get the milk from down in the cellar. And then
she poured almost half a cup of milk into the coffee. And she said, ‘My coffee is
very good.’ And I said, ‘Yes, I think so too, farmer lady.’” And so he goes on and on.
He tells incidents from far in his past, and goes into the most unbelievable details.
You think, “If I only had a memory as good as his!” — forgetting that if you did
have as good a memory you would be just like him! Now of course I'm telling it this
way to portray a type, and to show a typical outcome. You must then think of the
corresponding lighter variations that you meet in life, which the physician
especially meets. I'm picturing an extreme case so that you can see the chief
characteristics.

So when the astral body draws the ego organization in, there comes about a
kind of power for reproducing details of memory as though automatically. It is
always ready to repeat them; it is indifferent to logical connections and just tells
things one after another. As a result one can't help wondering why the person hits
upon one thing at one moment and another thing at the next. His tale can go on
like this, for instance: “The farmer lady went to get the milk and while she was
gone I looked in the corner of the room and there was a Madonna picture and it
was the same one I'd seen thirty years earlier in another place but there I didn't
have coffee but a very good soup.” It can happen that he comes entirely away from
the first part of his narrative, but it can also happen that he returns to it again. One
sees that this is not a logical memory but a space-and-time memory,
extraordinarily exact, with a compulsive desire to tell everything. It is a memory in
which, when one studies it more closely, one sees something very remarkable —
one sees its deeper foundation. One notices that the person enjoys the sound of
certain words he had associated with certain events while he was experiencing the
events themselves, and now he takes pleasure in sounding these words again. He is
in fact going back to speech that was kept in his memory while thoughts were
pushed out — not completely, but almost so.

One also notices changes in the sphere of the will. To these one must pay
attention, for now the beginning of real pathological conditions can be found. One
will encounter the following — again, one must pay attention, for nothing much
can be acclomplished if, for instance, one approaches such people to do this or that
in order to observe them. For they become amazingly stubborn, they don't want to
cooperate, won't answer questions, won't do anything. But if one can obtain an
earlier case history and put those things together with what can be learned from
the person's neighbors or a similar source, then one discovers, for instance, that
such a person feels a terrific impulse at a definite time of the year to go wandering
off somewhere. Often it is to the same region each year. And this inner impulse of
will works so strongly that if one tries at such a moment to counteract it, just to
discover what state the person is in, one can, for instance, notice the following.

Take a gourmand (there are gourmands even among such people as these!).
Catch up with him while he is wandering and sit him down to a wonderful meal or
two — to what gives him his greatest joy in life. You'll find that he will only stay put
the first day, possibly a second day if he is still a good distance from the place he is
heading for. He becomes restless, for he would love another fine meal, and he
knows that the next place he'll reach has frightful food. He knows that, for his
memory is unusually well developed. He becomes anxious. He wants to go on, for
he cannot adapt his will to sudden external suggestions. Just as on the one hand he
cannot adapt himself to immediate sense impressions but brings out every possible
gem from his speech coffers, so on the other hand he cannot adapt himself to the
necessity of surrendering his will-limb system to life's external circumstances. He
wants just to follow his own will-impulses, which drive him from within in a very
definite manner. One sees that he has almost completely lost the faculty of the ego
organization that unites a human being with the outer world. His senses are
dulled; his will-impulses prevent him from having a normal relation to the world,
and he wants only to follow these will-impulses. This is the consequence of the ego
being drawn down into the astral body.

So you see, such people could be helped very much if our medical
understanding and the loving devotion of the theologians would work together —
not, however, by some instant therapy, but in the following way. With these people
one can observe a very definite situation. First we have to consider their life
between the change of teeth and puberty. In that period, from a superficial point of
view usually nothing abnormal is to be noticed. Everyone loves to see how clever
these children are, how frightfully clever, what clever answers they can give, “just
like an adult!” But one should be alert to this clever answering between the seventh
and the fourteenth year. The children who are so excessively clever at this age are
receiving something in this period before puberty that they should only have for
their development after puberty. That is how the condition that I have just been
describing comes about. The astral body should only be drawing the ego down after
puberty, so that then the ego can completely unfold by the beginning of the
twenties. With these children the astral body has already drawn the ego down after
the change of teeth or in the ninth, tenth, eleventh year. We observe the abnormal
cleverness and are delighted by it. By the time the late teens come, the eighteenth,
nineteenth, twentieth years, the ego is stuck too deeply in the astral body. Then the
condition is present that I have described, along with the symptoms that I
indicated. So now if a child worries us in those early years by premature cleverness,
it is a matter of giving certain kinds of treatment. First of all, there will be
situations where physician and priest will have to confer with the teacher, so that
the teacher will realize what should be done for that early life period. When we
have finished this general characterization, we will make several detailed
suggestions of what can actually be done. But first I'd like to carry this further, to
indicate certain clear connections between the various themes we've been
discussing.

Now the following can happen: the etheric body on its part can draw the astral
body and ego in too strongly, so that they snap to an excessive degree into the
physical and etheric bodies — again in the waking state. Then we have the situation
that, seen from within, there is too much astrality in the organs; it cannot unite
properly with them. This condition is the pathological mirror-picture of a visionary
state such as, for instance, that of St. Teresa, such as her “first stage” as I described
it, when she felt the presence of spiritual beings. We had there the bringing of
waking-sleep into clear consciousness. And now in such persons as I am describing
we have the opposite: dreams are carried over into waking life, with the
accompanying symptoms I have mentioned. For it really happens in waking life:
dreams do not appear, but an active “dream” life that discloses itself in the kind of
speech I described, and in that extreme turning inward of the will impulses. That is
the pathological mirror-picture of ordinary dreaming. Activity is there instead of
the passivity that is the normal condition of dreaming.

Then we have the second stage, the drawing down of the ego and astral
organization by the etheric body. The individual snaps too strongly with the ego,
astral body, and etheric body into the physical organism, and the physical
organism is not able to receive them into its single organs. Every possible organ
has excess astrality that could not unite properly with the organ. Now we have the
pathological mirror-picture of what we learned was the second stage for the
individuals in whom sense impressions were in a certain sense stimulated from
within. The direction was from within out to the senses. Now in this mirror-picture
the direction is the opposite: it goes inward to the organs, it takes hold of the
physical organism. And conditions appear that always appear when a physical or
etheric organ is flooded by the astral body and ego organization and they cannot
unite so that it could be called a proper saturation of the physical body by the
etheric and astral bodies. Something is left over in the physical organs from the
higher members of the organism. What in the other type of individuals poured into
visions similar to a sense perception, with colors like a sense perception, visions
that revealed the spiritual world, is in this case pouring itself inward, wanting to
seize a physical organ. In the former situation there was a reaching out more
externally, to the spiritual world beyond the sense world. In this case there is a
reaching inward to a physical organ, manifesting in so-called “seizures,” all the
different forms of real epilepsy or epileptoid symptoms (“temporal lobe seizures”).
It can be explained as the snapping down of the ego and astral organization too
strongly into the physical organism, which then succeeds in drawing the etheric
body to itself. We see how the first condition advances to this second condition.

Hereby we see something in modern life that could be prevented if a real

pastoral medicine would come about. People do not realize that the first condition
is pathological; they simply find it interesting. And they only become aware of the
second condition when seizures or other epileptic symptoms appear. The memory
is now no longer expanding into detail, and the inner will-impulses are no longer
increasing: now, since the astral and ego organizations are being pulled inward,
and therefore the astral organization is failing to relate properly to certain organs,
we find the memory is extinguished. Instead of the memory clinging to details as in
the previous condition (details with no logical relation, that were just a running
stream of unassociated pictures), now we find the memory disrupted, collapsed, a
memory with gaps in it. This can become so extreme that the person lives in a kind
of double consciousness. For instance, the memory clings to the upper organs —
for the whole human being participates in memory — it takes hold of the upper
organs, deserting the lower organs. Then this is reversed: the upper organs lose the
memory activity and the lower organs receive it again. There is a rhythmic
alteration. Such things can happen. And so these people have two streams of
consciousness flowing parallel to each other. In one stream they remember
everything that occurs when they are in the one condition; in the other stream they
remember all the other things. And they never know in one condition of
consciousness any of the content of the other condition of consciousness. Thus the
memory deteriorates to a pathological level.

There we have the pathological mirror-picture of what we found in the second

stage of the saint. Let us use that term, for modern medicine has no word for such
a thing. Saints have a world around them that is visionary but that has a spiritual
content. They reach into the spiritual world and receive inner impressions of it.
People with pathological conditions — because their karma has given them a weak
personality — are drawn down into the physical body. Instead of receiving visions
of spiritual things they have epileptic conditions, empty gaps in consciousness, a
lack of coherence in daily waking life, and so forth.

But now there can be still a third stage. This is the stage at which for karmic
reasons the physical body has become even weaker, along with all the other
members, so that earlier karmic forces no longer operate sufficiently in the
physical body. With such a person it now comes about, not that ego, astral, and
etheric body are pulled in by the physical body, but that something quite different
happens. I shall have to describe it in the following way.

Think how it is with those who are extremely sensitive in the other direction, in
the direction of the senses, that is, in the direction of the ego organization. How
painfully sensitive they can be to all that flows in through the senses, to strong
colors, lively sounds. Now precisely the opposite is the case with those whose
physical body is weak from karmic causes. Such people are not hypersensitive from
within outward, but are insensitive to their physical body and yield to an excessive
degree to everything from the other side, the side of the will, that is, from the outer
physical world. They succumb to heaviness, warmth, cold. All of this affects them
not as it normally affects organic beings, but as it affects inorganic things. This
then stifles the expression of the astral body and ego. They are hemmed in by the
world and because of a weak physical body they cannot confront it with the
necessary intensity; they are like a piece of the outer world although they are still
inside their physical body. This is clearly the exact opposite of what we described
as the third stage for the saint. The saint goes through pain that is then
transformed into bliss, and then further to an experience of the spiritual world in
its pure spirituality. This is called “rest in God” or “rest in the Spirit.”

But people who develop in the way I am now describing do not come to “rest in
God” or “rest in the Spirit.” They come, although they are not conscious of it, to
rest in the hidden occult forces of the physical world, forces against which they, as
human beings, should actually be maintaining their independence. They develop
the pathological mirror-picture of the third stage of the saint: the condition called
idiocy, in which the human personality is lost, in which a person rests in outer
nature, that is, in the hidden forces of nature. They can no longer manifest as a
human being. They live only in the natural processes that go on within them, in
what is a continuation of external natural processes, vegetable processes — eating
food, digesting food, moving about in whatever way digestion and the food
substances give an impulse to move. It is a complete waking sleep given over to the
bodily functions, which are not under the control of the weak physical body but are
active as processes in the outer world are active. Naturally, since these processes
are working in a human being they do give human-like impulses. But these people
are isolated from the normal human world because they are pushed into the
physical world to too great a degree. Here we have to do with everything that is a
pathological mirror-picture of the “rest in God.” We can call it “rest in Nature.” It
has to do with the various paranoid states, with what in everyday life is called
idiocy, while the previous conditions would be called mental retardation.

So we have seen the progression in the case of the saint from feeling the
presence of spiritual beings to a third stage, being present in the spiritual world.
And we have seen the opposite pathological states: first, psychopathological
impairment as the first stage. We can be particularly aware of this stage when we
encounter an abnormal wanderlust, as I described, connected with a memory that
lacks logic. We see this progress to states of insanity, of which the early stage will
still allow a person to pursue certain activities in external life. Then we see this
progress to the third stage — which could also have been present in early
childhood in statu nascendi.

The second stage can be due to the fact that no one has been able to recognize
and counteract certain conditions in the first life period, between birth and change
of teeth. Occasionally young children show, not exactly an excessive cleverness, but
rather an unusual desire to learn things — something that should only appear after
the change of teeth. This characteristic is normal between change of teeth and
puberty. When it appears in the first life period, however, we should be concerned
and we should find the means — physical, soul, and spiritual means — to cure what
is already pathological. It is of utmost importance to investigate how certain
capacities can be prevented from shining down into the first seven years of life that
should really only emerge during the second seven years.

The third stage can reveal itself in two ways. In most cases a person brings it
along as his or her karma — as you have seen from my descriptions. Already at
birth, the person is in an abnormal condition because of some unusual stress in
putting together the etheric body before entering the physical body. An etheric
body was formed that does not want to penetrate the physical body completely,
does not want to enter heart and stomach in the proper way but wants to flood
them: in other words, an etheric body that carries the astral body and ego
organization too strongly into the various organs. Already at birth or very soon
after, we see facial or bodily deformities that can give us deep concern. This is
called congenital mental retardation — but there is no such thing! There is only
karmic mental retardation, related to the child's entire destiny. We will also speak
about this more fully, so that you will see how an incarnation spent in such mental
dullness can, under certain conditions, even have a beneficial place in a human
being's karma, although it may mean misery in that one incarnation. There is need,
after all, to regard things not merely from the point of view of finite life, but sub
specie aeterni from the point of view of the immortal life of a human being. Then
we would have a compassionate charity (caritas) and a wise one as well.

On the other hand, the second stage I have described can progress to the third
stage in the following way. If in the first life period, between birth and change of
teeth, not only the second life period shines in but also the third — the period
between puberty and the twenties, when our organization should work into our
organism — then we see a child in their fourth or fifth year with capacities that
often delight the people. They say, “This child talks or acts like a twenty-year-old!”
But this is what is happening: the ego organization is developing too early and is
overpowering the physical body and making it weak. Idiocy will then appear in the
latter part of the person's life. In this case it is not brought on by karma but has
been acquired in this very life, and can only be balanced out karmically in later
lives. If we observe life intelligently and have a good pastoral medicine to support
us, we will be able to prevent it simply by providing the proper education for such a
person's early childhood.

Whoever is vocationally drawn to observe such things should do so not only as

individual symptoms — where, naturally, they should be studied with special love
— but should also cultivate an understanding for them as a general phenomenon.
Such a person should also develop an understanding for how these things are
brought about.

We have seen how much of the pedagogy of former decades that a healthy
pedagogy, such as the Waldorf school pedagogy wants to be, must definitely
oppose. Yet these things have become extraordinarily precious to people.
Sometimes our Waldorf school education must address certain things with
tremendous severity, for instance, the Froebel kindergarten work, which is taken
not from life but out of the intellect. Before the change of teeth it occupies children
with activities that are not an imitation of life but are invented out of people's
heads. This is putting into the child's first years of life something that should not
be there until the next period, between change of teeth and puberty. This brings on
the first stage of a pathological condition, a mild state of illness that often is not yet
regarded as pathological. Also it were better, perhaps, not to label it pathological,
otherwise so much else would have to be labeled pathological, which must in any
case be recognized as “cultural phenomena.” These things cannot merely be
criticized, they must be understood, so that one relates to them in the right way.

What we should see in front of us is wrong education in early childhood. The

second life period has been carried into the first. This is the underlying cause
creating a person's automatic speech and stirring the will from within outwards
without adjusting in any degree to the surrounding world. Think of a situation such
as I described as the first pathological stage: a slight tendency, caused by bad
education, education going the wrong way. Then what happens? Wanderlust. This
impulse is not entirely pathological, but it is characterized by the desire at a certain
age to follow none but one's own ideas, not to bother about the world, to get free
and away from one's surroundings, to wander at will! It is connected with other
contemporary phenomena that also have their origin in a pathological education,
or at least an education with a pathological tinge. You can observe this right now.
Look at some of these youth groups. Their very existence belongs to the lifestyle of
the last decades of the Kali Yuga. [Note 6] There is an affinity between this slightly
pathological condition and the kind of life that the Kali Yuga brought about. These
things all belong together. But they must be examined from these two aspects. If
you look, you will easily see tinges of what I have been describing. They reveal
themselves clearly in wanderlust, but that is an extreme symptom. Listen once in a
while to their conversations! One despairs at their indifference to what one says to
them. They repeat details eternally, details they describe as their “experience”; they
come back again and again to the same thing.

Please don't misunderstand me! I'm certainly not pointing to any of these
things in a trivial sense. My intention is to show you that such phenomena can only
be really understood if one grasps clearly the connection I've been pointing to
during these few days: that there is always a step into spiritual life and its extreme
opposite — a step into the physical body. A further step into the spiritual world for
the saint; a further step into the body, into seizures, for instance, for the
psychopath. And so on. That is the relationship. If you consider how in the external
world, in electricity and magnetism, one pole is always dependent upon the other,
 you will realize that in life too there can be such a relation between two poles of
human development.

This, of course, cannot be seized upon clumsily, as happens today so often with
the materialistic worldview. This fact, that there are polar opposites here and that
there is a connection between the two poles, must be approached with delicacy.
Then one will begin to see what can develop in the one and the other direction. One
will finally learn in this way to see into the nature of the human being.

We will continue tomorrow.

Pastoral Medicine
Pastoral Medicine: Lecture 6

Schmidt Number: S-5924

On-line since: 27th March, 2008

LECTURE 6

Dear friends,
So far we have been chiefly concerned with discovering how far a human being may
deviate in one or the other direction from what can be called “normal”: toward a
pathological condition or toward a connection to the real spiritual world.

Today I would like to go beyond the single earth-life to show — with the help of a
rather obvious example — how the karma that a human being carries through repeated
earth-lives must sometimes relate itself to entirely contrasting conditions, such as, for
instance, a capacity to reach into the spiritual world and, in the same human being, a
need to reach down into the bodily, natural realm.

If physicians want to practice not only with good external measures and with
intelligence but with their whole heart, with all their human capacities, they need to
stand within the spiritual world and look at this physical world from a spiritual point of
view. The human being journeys through successive earth-lives; causes reach over
spiritually from one earth-life and evoke consequences in a later one. Therefore karma
cannot remain a mere word to us. We must learn how to relate our healing activity to
karma. For this, we must first be fully aware of how karma works in relation to
pathological conditions and also to visionary capacities.

If priests want to enter into their parishioners' life situations in the right way, if they
want to be a real pastor to the souls in their care, they also need to appreciate the
spiritual significance of what confronts a human being in everyday life on this earth.
Only then will they be able to care for humanity properly from the standpoint of the
spirit.

In this connection we should consider something for a moment that some with a
modern, more “enlightened” point of view may regard with derision. If we, too,
presumed to take such an attitude, our descendants would surely magnify it a hundred-
fold in their estimation of us! For they will view us in future centuries as anyone living
today in our so-called scientific culture views our ancestors. You will see at once what I
mean.

In the course of human evolution a complete reversal has taken place in the
conception of illness. This became particularly obvious at the end of the nineteenth and
beginning of the twentieth century. If you go back two thousand years or so to the early
times of the Old Testament, you find a universal conviction that illness comes from
sinfulness, that illness has its original spiritual cause in sin. This was a serious belief.
There had to be a spiritual error or failure somewhere as the true cause when a physical
illness appeared. This idea was carried further. It was believed of a person in whom the
spiritual fault lay causing the illness, that the individual harbored some elemental
spiritual force that did not belong there, that somehow the person was “possessed.” In
those times all illness signified that a person was “possessed” by some spiritual entity
as the consequence of spiritual error or fault. Therapy was created accordingly. It was
based on finding the means to bring out of the ill person the alien elemental spirituality
that had entered through a spiritual offense. Basically this was the belief that one does
not understand an illness unless one knows its cause.

Now consider the belief that came later, pronouncing exactly the opposite view —
before psychoanalysis intervened in such a frightfully dilettantish fashion. The new
belief said that every sin can be traced to illness. People were convinced of it. If there
was a criminal, a “sinner” somewhere (the concept “sin” was defined rather
superficially, according to the legal code) they saw to it that in some way or other they
got hold of the brain after death, and could thus examine the physical organism. They
were looking for the defects. And they did find defects in many instances. In this
respect they have advanced quite a little. Clever, well-trained scientists have adopted
the view that a person who has a perfect physical organism doesn't sin. A person sins if
there is some bodily defect. Sin comes from disease. That's how evolution goes — not in
a straight line but by way of opposites. And the people who have now reached this last
view (not everyone today admits to it, but it is often fundamental even for those who do
not totally subscribe to it) look back with pity to olden times when it was believed that
illness comes from sin. For they know they themselves are right, that sin comes from
illness. And they know with absolute certainty that in the sick person there is some
material process or other that they have to combat, have to neutralize, have to get out of
the organism. In earlier times the healers worked to remove a host of elemental spirits.
To someone who sees the matter from a broader point of view there is really not very
much difference. From an inner standpoint there is no great difference between the
health spas that materialistic medicine considers correct and Lourdes. In the latter a
person is cured through religious beliefs, in the former through materialistic beliefs.
These things must simply be looked at without prejudice.

Influenced by such shortsighted ideas, one certainly will not perceive real
connections. Therefore I would like to describe a concrete case. It should reveal to you
the deeper connections to be found in this matter of human health. A certain person
lived in the nineteenth century. I'll speak of him presently as he was in the nineteenth
century, but first I want to take you back to one of his earlier incarnations that had
important consequences for his life in the nineteenth century. This person was
incarnated in a southeastern region of Asia where the people were extraordinarily fond
of animals. You know that oriental teachings include a great reverence and love for
animals; they extend what they call love of humanity and love of things, particularly to
love of animals. In ancient times it was natural for people in this region to love animals
intensely and to take very good care of them. But the man of whom I am speaking was
no friend of animals. There in the midst of an animal-loving people was a man who
treated them cruelly. Even as a boy he tormented them, he was mean to them; in later
life he tortured domestic animals in every possible way to an incredible degree. This
aroused violent anger in the people among whom he lived. He also experienced a deep
conflict between this compulsive mania (today, in materialistic terms, we would call it
perversion of the will) and on the other hand the spiritual teachings of the people. He
took these up with great fervor. He was able to relate himself to them completely; he
had a fine sense for everything the religion of that area taught. But he became involved
in violent conflicts with the most religious individuals around him because of his
torture of animals. It was especially the animals in his own house that he tortured, first
among his relatives, and later when he became a kind of farmhand. Orientals lavish
particularly good care on domestic animals, considering them as part of the family.
These were the ones he tortured most shockingly.

This man lived again in our age, in the first half of the nineteenth century, and in
this incarnation (which in a wider sense belongs to our own time) he was born as an
extremely fearful person, so that he chained dogs to himself. One could say this was
now a symptom of illness, this abnormal relation to animals. It did have an aspect of
disease about it through the fact that he did not develop any special love for the dogs,
only a feeling that he had to have them near him. It is clearly fantastic, the way he
related himself to them. It reveals an inner karmic compulsion from an earlier life.
 At the same time in this incarnation the man is extremely talented, carrying over
from his earlier life everything he had experienced of the oriental spiritual teachings, as
well as his own religious devotion. This is not just a feeling in him: it becomes his life
practice. In the course of this life he develops not only an astonishing capacity for
spiritual fantasy, but the ability to put into poetic form correct visionary images that
come to him in a matter-of-fact way. His poetry is about ordinary physical human life
into which elemental spiritual beings constantly play. He is a distinguished poet.
Moreover one may truly say he is the dramatist whom we Europeans would compare
most seriously with Shakespeare. He is Ferdinand Raimund [Note 7] — with his
fantastic personality, his giant talent — whose dramatic poems show how he has
brought from earlier incarnations his ability to portray spiritual things, to put spiritual
happenings into human life. One need only look at Der Alpenkönig und der
Menschenfeind (“The King of the Alps and the Misanthrope”) to be able to liken him to
Shakespeare. First of all, he is an important actor; this comes from his impulse to bring
both trivialities and non-trivialities from spiritual realms to the stage. On the stage he is
an incomparable actor, full of humor; in life he is completely overwhelmed by the
consequences of the animal torture that he formerly perpetrated. Genius and a
pathological condition are thoroughly mixed in him: the genius impelling him to create
with soul-spiritual dramatic instinct and Shakespearean power, the pathological
condition impelling him to inject a fantastic element into his external life.

Now we must look at a singular trait in Raimund. The animal torture had been a
“necessity” to him in that earlier incarnation; he experienced a kind of lust, he did it for
secret pleasure. During that earth-life he was not aware it was bad. He came to that
realization only after he went through the gate of death. Now the experience one has
when one goes through the gate of death and then further into the life between death
and a new birth is in the subsequent life expressed foremost (in a wide sense) in the
head organization. There lies the impulse one brings with one as talent. This, Raimund
brought with him in rich amount. But here also something is working that appears in
the rhythmic system, particularly the upper rhythmic or respiratory system. For the
human being is built like this (see drawing): metabolic-limb system, rhythmic system,
nerve-sense system. What comes from an earlier earth-life works over into the nerve-
sense system of the new life; what comes from the time between death and a new birth
works over into the rhythmic system; and what comes from the new earth-life works
alone in the metabolic-limb sytem.
 Diagram 4
Click image for large view

So all that this individual who is now Ferdinand Raimund experienced of bitter
remorse, of deeply crushing insight was working continually after that earlier
incarnation, in his life between death and a new birth, affecting his coming rhythmic
system. It worked right into the physical body. For in the physical organization of the
head we have the after-effect of the previous earth-life; in the physical organization of
the rhythmic system we have the after-effect of the life between death and a new birth.
These facts are obvious when one studies embryology even externally.

In Raimund's case, in his breathing system, the upper rhythmic system, we see
working in him all the bitter remorse and insight he had experienced when he went
through the gate of death from that previous earth-life. This experience led inevitably
to breathing irregularities in this life, to a meager intake of oxygen and a strong
saturation of carbon dioxide. Breathing irregularities — from a physical point of view —
bring on a variety of states of anxiety; they can be the carriers of elemental beings of
anxiety. The breathing irregularities do not allow the proper balance of oxygen and
carbon dioxide in the breathing process, and this draws in anxiety elementals. You can
see all this in The King of the Alps and the Misanthrope. It was well developed in
Raimund; he was predisposed to a breathing system that would be a carrier for anxiety
elementals.

Such elemental beings are not simply anxiety elementals. If at the same time there
is something such as Raimund had in his head system from earlier earth-lives, namely,
soul-spiritual ideas — which make his dramas so interesting — one sees that the
presence of these anxiety demons causes karma to develop in a very definite direction.
One sees clearly how they push in an unhealthy way to bring about karmic effects. They
stream into fanciful imaginations that even achieve visionary content — and Raimund's
dramas are built on such content. They stream into his visionary activity; they also
impel him to develop a fantastic element in his daily life. In this way a karmic stream
pushes through his life, a tremendous gift of genius that has to come to expression. One
branch of the stream flows in a special kind of spiritual creation. The other branch
flows parallel in a kind of life-fantasy that is not expressed externally but is directed
inward. For it lies in the rhythmic system, which is of course half inward, but which
also works in the lower organs in such a way that it affects a person's external life, and
then in turn influences the inner life again. So Raimund's genius is accompanied by a
truly pathological tendency. And this pathological tendency, which expresses itself
through the anxiety demons, is the vehicle for the fulfillment of his karma.

One can see Raimund's karma quite clearly. He has to keep a dog. He is a fantastic
person. He does what other men wouldn't do. One can understand that. One can even
sympathize with that. Indeed when I remember how some of our worthy citizens have
gorged themselves at court banquets when they were being given distinguished titles, I
have a certain sympathy for Raimund, with his wry humor as he sits on the floor and
eats with the dog out of the dog's bowl. You see how karma plays in from the animal
torture of his earlier incarnation. You see how this deed comes from the animal torture
and the remorse after death and is done as a fantastic atonement. But the atonement
has to be still more severe. Immediately after this, the anxiety demons appear and take
part in the playing-out of his karma. Raimund becomes obsessed by the thought: the
dog has rabies, I have been eating with him, now I am infected! Raimund is terrified.
While at other moments he can do the most talented things on the stage, the moment
he withdraws from his external life he succumbs to the compulsive fear that he is
infected with rabies.

Now he undertakes a journey with a friend. They go from Vienna to Salzburg, and
there the fear of madness so overwhelms him that he must return at once to Vienna to
get treatment. It is a tormenting journey both for him and for the friend. One sees his
pathological state always following at the heels of his genius. For now he is well taken
care of: people are delighted to entertain Ferdinand Raimund. Gradually he abandons
the rabies idea. Something like a cure takes place through life itself, through pleasure,
through the kindness he receives on every side — which he doesn't really want to accept
because he is still a hypochondriac. And the anxiety demons torment him; if not with
one trouble, then with another. So he is always swinging back and forth between
Raimund the humorist and Raimund the hypochondriac. But at least he has given up
the idea that he might go mad. That fear had obsessed him for years. Even so, he is still
bound to animals. After ten years he gets another dog, and now see what happens: he
plays with the dog and the dog really bites him. Again the thought of it overpowers him.
He is standing there, he is bitten by the dog, and the dog has rabies! (Actually, it was
established later that the dog did have rabies, but it was a very light case.) Now
Raimund travels to Pottenstein, shoots himself in the head; the bullet lodges in the
posterior cavity, far back. It can't be operated on. Raimund dies from the shot after
three days.

You see how Raimund had freed himself from the first obsession, but karma
continued to work. This is an example of karma working itself out completely, in a
remarkable way. For only think! Subjectively, it is not precisely a suicide, for Raimund
could not be called a fully responsible individual. Objectively, it is also not precisely a
suicide, for if they had been able in those days to operate on that part of the head,
Raimund would have been saved. At that time the operation was not possible and they
had to leave the bullet in the head, so that after three days death was inevitable. So it is
not a pure suicide, either subjectively or objectively. Thus one cannot say there will be
consequences in the karma because of suicide. The karma does not continue: it was
balanced out by what Raimund experienced in this incarnation up to his death, up to
the way his suicidal intention was carried out. One sees clearly how karma from his
earlier incarnation rises up and strikes him in this incarnation. One sees it reach across
the span of time to strike with strength.

So now, first, we have seen that there are individuals whose ego, astral body, and
etheric body develop, either suddenly or by stages, in such a way that they break into
the spiritual world with a visionary capacity: St. Teresa, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and
many others. There are such individuals who show an abnormality in one direction, the
direction of spiritual awareness. They have been given some karmic gift — which we are
only considering from the aspect of this particular earth-life. With these individuals we
do not need to enter into karmic details. Naturally it is a fulfillment of karma. But one
can understand the case from a single earth-life.

Then there are the individuals turned in the other direction. They develop
abnormally in their physical-etheric organism; they sink down into their physical body
and become pathological cases, as I showed you, in three stages. Their pathological
condition is induced by their karma. But one only needs to look at the general picture.
With such personalities as St. Teresa the individual became especially strong in earlier
earth-lives, while in the pathological cases the individual became especially weak,
causing the higher being to be drawn down into the lower organism. Again one needs
only to look at a few general characteristics of an individual, one need not examine the
karma in detail.

But now in Ferdinand Raimund we have an unusual personality. He developed not

only in the visionary direction but in the opposite direction also, and at the same time.
We have the two opposites constantly pitted against each other throughout his life.
Both the genius and the psychopath are in his personality; they play into each other,
wonderfully and tragically. Thus this case obliges us to study the concrete details of his
karma. We have to perceive how his karma works to create the two extremes, how it
holds them apart, sometimes letting them work into each other. You will find countless
places in Raimund's dramas where you can say his spiritual vision is active and at the
same time something is working in from the anxiety demons. Sometimes you see it in
the structure of the drama itself.

If we study human character in this way, we come inevitably to a consideration of

karma. And we must see on the one hand the one-sidedness of that abstract teaching
from certain ancient streams of civilization — namely, that illness comes from sin —
which means that only abnormal spirituality is active in the human being. Naturally
certain ideas can be expressed in this abstract way, but they remain theories even if one
treats people in accordance with them. The opposite assertion is just as abstract and
just as one-sided: that sin comes from illness, and that there are physical substances
and processes in some people to be combated. First of all we have to investigate the
concrete details of the total human organism, how its upper members relate to each
other, whether they are separated from each other, whether they distance themselves
from the lower members. Likewise, we must be able to see how karma is working in
such an interplay of genius and pathology as was the case with Raimund. Those who
achieve an understanding of these things will find opportunities in life to add
something more to what they are already accomplishing in the work of physical healing,
to add words that will make the healing process complete. They will reach the moment
when they are no longer bound merely to a physical healing process, seeking the why
and the wherefore of physical healing alone, for they will perceive how necessary it is in
many cases to add a moral dimension to it. This does not mean one becomes
sentimental and goes calling on a patient with all kinds of trifling consolations. Usually
such things have little effect. Sick people haven't much energy left for weepy callers —
or for hearty jollities either! They do have an amazing amount of energy left for what
lies in natural human relations, not the “what” of words but the “how” One finds a way
instinctively in such situations if one is able to express a view of the world and of life in
a way that relates them to spiritual connections — as it can if one takes seriously such
examples as I have described.

Spiritual activity cannot consist of talk, much less of religious tirades. Spiritual work
must relate to facts. If it takes hold of facts, then it will be useful first of all to make the
necessary connections with human beings. Then it can be used for healthy people and
sick people. One will develop an instinct for orienting oneself to any illness with this or
with that symptom. You will see that this extends to physical illnesses as well. But we
must first open up the way to see that these things apply to physical illnesses. You will
come to this if you study various examples of them, also the biographies of many
geniuses. But not from the standpoint of that arch-philistine Lombroso! What is so
disturbing about Lombroso's theory — his own great genius has to be acknowledged —
is the fact that he is a thorough philistine, that on every page you read commonplace
opinions. Science has fallen to that level! If one refuses to accept assertions from that
kind of standpoint, if one directs one's activity from a really thoughtful perception of
the world — that is, of physical and spiritual life — then if one needs to offer comfort to
a sick person, one will offer the comfort of religion with a true spiritual aura. But not
without clear understanding behind it. Whether one gives communion to sick people in
the right way, so that they begin to improve, so that during their convalescence their
soul is in no way injured, depends upon one's having an understanding for these things.

For certain convalescents, their physical healing will not be complete without the
sacrament of communion, so that what had been brought into disarray in their karma
can be put in order again. If one does not know that, one cannot carry it into the aura of
the sacrament. But if physicians also understand these things, if they recognize karma
working through the illness while keeping professional command of the healing
process, they will be able to relate themselves to it in the right way. They must observe
these things with their whole being from a broad worldview. Then something objective
will happen for them, if they work consciously with their whole soul to help the karmic
processes developing in the patient. Their healing mission will be the other half of
divine service; it will have a religious dimension. They will learn to regard themselves
as partners of the priests, standing beside the priests and administering the other half
of the divine service. Healing then becomes a divine service. Things that the
materialistic world conception has turned into nature worship — to dancing around the
golden calf — these things must be returned and transformed to a divine service,
through proper anthroposophical understanding. To transform everything in life and
art and religion into the service of God: that will be the ultimate task of a
comprehensive pastoral medicine that can be practiced within the anthroposophical
movement. But a beginning must be made. It must be initiated here; at least the
indications must be given for it to those who will carry the impulse forward, out of
spiritual foundations, for the two sides of a true divine service.

That is why pastoral medicine is first being presented to priests and physicians
within the anthroposophical movement. Those individuals will then find possibilities,
with their knowledge of nature and spirit, to pursue pastoral medicine further. But they
will also be able to use it to penetrate the specific regions of life that lie within their
mission.
 Pastoral Medicine
Pastoral Medicine: Lecture 7

Schmidt Number: S-5928

On-line since: 27th March, 2008

LECTURE 7

Dear friends,
If one had no other means of investigation than that provided by modern science,
one would never attain an understanding of the human being. Certainly it is not my
wish to belittle the accomplishments of this science in its own areas, for as far as its
methods allow it to go, it brilliantly explores whatever can have the slightest relevance
to it. But one cannot reach the human being by this means, because in human life in its
present form, physical-etheric body and soul-and-spirit are interwoven. Present earth
processes reach into the physical-etheric body from every direction. With modern
science we follow these physical-chemical processes of outer nature, that is, of nature
outside the human being. Comparatively speaking, this science is good for the world
outside us. People have simply accepted the idea that just as these chemical processes
occur in a physics or chemistry laboratory, or in some piece of the world that we are
able to observe as our immediate environment, so approximately they are also then
continued within the human being. For instance, combustion is described as the
combining of some substance or other with oxygen; then the thoughts about this are
continued unchanged when speaking of the process within the human body, and
combustion is still described as happening the same way within us. But one should
know that this is not possible. For the process in a human being that is analogous to
combustion is related to external combustion precisely as something living is related to
something dead. Combustion in the external world is inorganic, lifeless, while within a
human being we have a combustion that has become living. This fact is important for
all of science. External combustion, so far as the substance it affects is concerned, is
definitely subject to conditions of warmth. According to science, there is a definite so-
called flash point, and the heat of combustion always relates to this external condition.
This does not continue in the same way within the human organism. Externally, given a
certain temperature, any substance can combine with oxygen and produce combustion.
Within the human being the same temperature is not needed for that to happen; other
laws prevail. This is important for external science, because external science sets up
hypotheses that appear to be perfectly plausible. Earlier conditions are assumed from
the conditions that now exist on the earth. Preyer, the famous Jena physiologist, [Note
8] has done just that. He found the ordinary Kant-Laplace theory too stupid, so he went
back to certain dynamic fire processes from which evolution was supposed to have
originated. He also took it for granted that these must have happened at temperatures
that today are necessary for similar fire processes to happen. That was not necessarily
so. One can of course go in thought from the inorganic fire processes of this present age
to similar processes in this age in the human organism, although actually these latter
happen at an essentially lower temperature. But on this basis, even for a hypothetical
view of original earth conditions, one would get quite different results.

You can see that the ideas that become fashionable are particularly important when
one wants to acquire a comprehensive picture of the world. In short, with the means
that modern science provides it is not possible to gain an understanding of the external
world, either in its evolution or in its present state. Naturally this causes difficulties if a
certain attitude prevails.

I can speak of these difficulties because I myself have experienced them with
particular intensity. Truly, through my whole life there has been one foremost
characteristic — you will find it mentioned in my autobiography. [Note 9] I can only
describe it as the greatest possible respect for modern natural science. My respect has
never changed. Never at any time would I have criticized in a trivial sense — which
would be so easy to do — what natural science was bringing forward, whether in the
field of external chemical, of mechanical or physical research, or of medicine. And yet
at the same time evolution stood there before my eyes as a spiritual vision. And the
need arose to bring what was opening up for me spiritually — for instance, the
Atlantean time, or the Lemurian time, or something still further back, or further
forward — to bring that into harmony with what natural science was giving out. This
has not been too difficult with what natural science says about the immediate present.
But when it begins to exceed its bounds, to “go wild,” when it advances hypotheses that
reach from the present age to a time lying far in the past, we encounter the most severe
conflicts if we want to bring what we have seen spiritually into harmony with what
science is saying. We come into conflict with science just when we would like to be in
accord with it. Spiritual science would never choose to be in disagreement with natural
science. For surely one would not be so unintelligent as to oppose facts! All the more,
then, one comes into conflict with opinions. As long as natural researchers talk, that is
good. As soon as they begin writing, they really “go wild,” and then one can no longer
go along with what they say. This is a serious situation, and it must be reckoned with by
anyone who has to relate in any way to what modern science is able to give.

Natural science simply does not reach as far as the human being. Human beings
have a soul nature and a spiritual nature, and do not have just a physical organism with
physical processes that can be investigated externally — even to such phenomena as
those of aerodynamics or thermodynamics. We also have living in us our karma from
earlier earth-lives; we see it manifesting in our personality. We found this plainly
evident in such a person as Ferdinand Raimund. But there is no possibility of exploring
such connections if we only have the means of modern science at our disposal.

We must indeed advance to a new level. We must begin from the side of spiritual
science to look at what manifests as external human processes and relate them to what
we see as spiritual processes. We will be going in the right direction, for instance, if,
holding fast to the physiology of breathing and circulation as we already know it from
current natural science, we proceed further to examine how physical life is connected
with spiritual life.

Let us look at human inhalation. It consists of our taking in external gaseous

substance. But this is not just a passive happening, something being taken in by a
human being in a completed condition and elaborated within. It is not just changing
over from one process, inhalation, to another process, exhalation — from the inhaling
of oxygen to the forming of carbon dioxide. The inhalation process shows itself in
reality to be continuously creating the human being, working continuously to build the
human being, from without inwards. In the inhalation process we find there is a
constant building up, proceeding inward from the cosmos. Human beings do not
merely inhale amorphous oxygen. In the oxygen that we regard, mistakenly, simply as a
gaseous substance we inhale formative forces appropriate to our own being. If
sometimes we have shortness of breath, some alien elemental is lying across the path of
our breathing. That occurs in abnormal breathing. But in normal breathing, there is
always a human being coming into being. Continuously a human birth is occurring out
of the macrocosm; an air-human is being born into the human. The entire process is an
activity of the astral body. We must picture it in this way: We inhale. The inhaling is
activated by the astral body. The entire process is a continuous being-born. It takes
place in the element of air, in everything that is air within us. We have a perpetual
human birth in the element of air in the inhalation process.

But now we also breathe out. We breathe out carbon dioxide. At the conclusion of
other organic processes carbon dioxide is, in a certain sense, collected for outbreathing.
That too is commonly presented as a kind of passive reaction, or something similar.
People simply do the research they are able to do in this field with physical means, and
they don't arrive at a clear conception. Now the exhalation also is activated. It is not
just some passive human process. There is activity in it: activity of the etheric body. The
entire process occurs in the fluid element, the element that in earlier times was called
water, when everything that was fluid was called water. We can continue to use the
expression. This process takes place in the element of water.

Now there should come an important question: how is it during sleep? In sleep the
etheric body is first and foremost within the human organism; therefore for exhalation
there is no problem. But how can we inhale during sleep if the astral body is outside?
Well, the fact is that during sleep actually only the microcosmic part of the astral body
goes out of the physical organism; the macrocosmic astrality is all the more active at
that time. All the astrality of the macrocosm enters during sleep. Our breathing activity
during sleep is for this reason very different from our breathing activity while awake,
because it is regulated by the activity of the macrocosm. So there is an essential
difference between inhalation while awake and inhalation while asleep. The control of
our inhalation during sleep comes from outside. When we are awake we control our
inhalation ourselves through our astral body, from within outwards. While we are
asleep the cosmic astrality enters our organism to do this for us. Here you have an
important clue by which to approach questions of pathology. The cosmos has this
remarkable attribute. You find that it holds a healthy relation to earth conditions if you
go far enough above the earth. Close to the earth there are all kinds of influences
through climate and other circumstances that can make the cosmic astrality abnormal.
Similarly, through other processes that we have yet to learn about, the inner astrality of
the human being can become abnormal. There we have the source of a certain kind of
pathological condition, but the source is within, in soul and spirit. That is an essential
fact.

Now let us go further. The breathing process is comparatively coarse. We breathe

gaseous substance in and we breathe gaseous substance out. The whole process is
coarse as compared to all the other processes that occur in us as well as in the
macrocosm — for instance, those that have to do with the fluctuation of heat, with the
element of warmth inside and outside the human being. There are differentiations of
warmth inside the human being and differentiations outside the human being. We can
think away air, water, earth, and hold before us only these differences in warmth. To
physicists this makes no sense, because they regard warmth only as a condition of a
material substance. But spiritual science knows that in warmth one has to do with a
separate element. We can speak of warmth as an independent active element. Now
fundamental to our entire human life there is a receptive process that is finer than the
breathing process. It is the warmth process. When we examine the human lung region,
when we study the organization of the lungs, we are looking at the coarse breathing
process in the element of air. But when we come up higher to the region centered
primarily in the head (although it is present to a smaller degree in the entire human
organism), we come to a finer breathing process that occurs not in the element of air
but in the element of warmth. Therefore we can say: higher up, we come to a finer
process consisting of an extraordinarily fine reception of warmth from the macrocosm,
breathing-in of warmth and breathing-out of warmth. But now this is what we must
see: in the coarse inhalation-exhalation of the lungs, the human being is participating
in an active exchange with the outer world: breathing in, breathing out, breathing in,
breathing out, in, out, in, out. The process I am now describing is not like that. There is
indeed an “in,” but there is not an “out” in the same sense as in ordinary breathing. In
this warmth-breathing the exhalation actually takes place within the human being; it is
an inner process. What is exhaled by the nerve-sense system becomes united with what
is being inhaled by the lungs. Thus the nerve-sense system carries on a very fine
breathing process of which the inhalation is indeed a taking-in from outside, but what
is taken in is not released again to the outside. It is given over to the coarser breathing
process of the lungs, to the air inhalation, and is then by way of that air inhalation
carried farther into the organism.

We can perceive the following process: The cosmic warmth enters the human
organism by way of breathing. But not only warmth. The warmth carries with it light,
macrocosmic chemism, and macrocosmic life, vitality. Light ether, chemical ether, and
life ether from the macrocosm are carried by the inhalation of warmth into the human
organism. The element of warmth carries light, as well as the chemical and life
elements, into the human being, and gives them over to the air-inhalation process. This
entire process, which lies over the air-breathing process and which appears as a refined
(or even metamorphosed) breathing process, is not studied today in a real sense. It is
lacking entirely from physiology — well, a bit of it falls into physiology and works there
as a foreign body. This is an example of how one gets nowhere if one works separately
from the spirit on one side and from nature on the other. It is something entirely
foreign to the physiology of the senses as the latter is commonly presented, with the
various senses — seeing, hearing, sensation of warmth — totally differentiated. In
reality, they are only the limbs, the outer shoots of this other process that, to begin
with, is the taking-in of warmth and with it light; chemism, and life. This is different
from the sense process. As it is now, people know only the peripheral aspects of the
sense process, not this central activity; that's why the current physiology of the senses
is like a completely foreign body to them. Physiologists dabble around in the separate
senses and treat them in a dilettantish fashion. And they pile hypothesis upon
hypothesis. Of course this is bound to happen because they are looking at the single,
separate processes of seeing, hearing, and so forth, and are completely missing the fact
that all the senses flow in together, stream in together into the human being. No one
sees that all this flows in, is taken in together with the taking in of warmth and the
light, chemism, and life that warmth carries in with it from the macrocosm. Only after
that does one come to the breathing of the lungs.

There will only be a real physiology of the senses when the physiologist is able to
say: I follow the physical, physiological processes of the eye to the nerve, which then
carries the process inward; I come gradually to the path of the breathing, out of the
paths of the senses and thinking to the breathing. Then it will be understood how yoga
could come about in earth-life: that is, by disregarding the sense life that takes its
course at the periphery. In the practice of yoga, activity goes entirely into a conscious
inhalation process; what lies behind it, namely, sense perception, is made the object of
consciousness through the breathing activity. You see, in earlier world conceptions,
such things were known and put into practice instinctively. But modern science will
surely encounter riddles everywhere, because it is not able to see facts and make the
connection between them. It observes eye and ear; then it begins to speculate wildly
about what happens inside. And if it notices that the hypothesis it attempts as it follows
eye and ear inward leads to a blind alley — because it will not accept as fact the finer
breathing process that I have presented — then it says, “Why, of course, what goes on
inside is simply paralleling what goes on outside.” Parallelism — the processes occur at
the same time! Well, that's a very convenient way out!

This should provide firm ground for both priest and physician in connection with
contemporary knowledge, for they will no longer have to reject this knowledge. The
physiology of the senses has gathered tremendous treasures from all sides, but it is like
a man who has collected the most excellent building materials for a beautiful house and
carries them to a place and arrange them in an enormous pile, but then he can't build
the house. He can't possibly build the house. Everything that occurs in the senses has
been gathered together and arranged in a great pile, but no work starts. To start the
work, what goes on inside the human being has to be added to what has already been
researched externally. Inquiry must be made into the process of the finer breathing that
takes place in the etheric and astral bodies. From there one can go on to build the
house. Naturally, when the house can be built one would be a fool to say: The first thing
we have to do is to get rid of this great pile of building materials lying here. We will
certainly not say that. Now that it is all there, we can begin to build the house.

It would be just as foolish to do what many people do today who look at things in a
dilettantish way — that is, criticize natural science from the ground up and reject it. It
does not have to be rejected. Every piece of the building material can be used, it is all
valuable, and there will be a fine result if all that is given out today by the physiology of
the senses is used. But as it is now, it is just a pile of material. So we can say: We extend
our view from what takes place in ordinary breathing as the continuous creation of
present-day human beings to the finer breathing process that takes place higher up in
the element of warmth, into which the entire cosmic etheric world plays. That is what
we see if we study the upper human being.

But we can also look below in the air-breathing and study the lower human being.
Then, just as we reach in air inhalation a higher, finer process, so now in air exhalation
we reach a lower, coarser process. Below we gradually go from the inner activity of
forming carbon dioxide to the process of digestion. Above, we had to connect air
inhalation with that finer nerve-sense process that becomes a spiritual activity. Below
we have to connect air exhalation with the digestive process, where the human activity
gradually becomes purely physical, becomes altogether a metabolic activity of the
physical body — which is a modified exhalation. In a certain sense, the activity that
exhalation leaves behind within us is the metabolism. Just as what breathing takes in of
nerve-sense spirit activity becomes inner activity, so what remains behind of inner
activity from exhalation becomes the sum of forces forming metabolism. The
metabolism is active in the element that in earlier epochs was called earth, the name for
everything in the human organism that tends toward solidity. (Plate IV)
 Plate IV
Click image for large view

[It appears Plate IV and VI were mixed up in the original publication of the book ...
we have switched them (see date in lower-left of image) – e.Ed]

If we now study the entire process more closely, we find it has four parts. We have
the process that we have just characterized, of which we can say that exhalation really
goes into the human being. If we look at our ordinary external inhalation, we see a
union of what is inhaled with what comes down from above. With exhalation, we have
to say the opposite. Exhalation leaves forces behind for metabolism. It does not take
something up; it gives something away. So we have an inner inhalation as well as an
inner exhalation. The union of this inner inhalation with what the physical body does is
the actual metabolic digestive process.

And now if you look carefully at this fourfold differentiation, you will see the human
being in a new light, for the following facts also appear: (Plate IV) Here is the path of
the warmth element coming into the human being and bringing light, chemism, and
life. It connects itself with the breathing and gives chemism and life to it. But it does
not give light to the breathing. It holds that back. The light stays behind and floods the
human being as inner light, becoming thought activity.

Also, as inhalation and exhalation proceed, the macrocosmic chemism is given off
and becomes inner chemism — which is something different from the chemistry with
which we are acquainted in our ordinary laboratory work. Macrocosmic chemism is
introduced into the human being by this extension of the inner breathing process. So
we can say that here chemism is introduced. Also the life ether goes in and is taken up
by the human being through the interplay of exhalation and metabolism.

So if we follow the process from above to below, we have light coming in by way of
the warmth ether, and then coming to a stop. Where the breathing enters, it comes to a
“stop!” for the light. The light spreads itself out. It is not carried farther by the human
organism; it can spread out as light. We carry within us a pure light organism, a light
organism that thinks.

We follow the process farther inward to where inhalation borders on exhalation;

and we find the chemism is carried in to that point through the nerve-sense process.
Now the chemism comes to a stop. It is an inner chemism, a chemical organism in us
that feels.

Now let us go down further to where exhalation leaves the digestive-metabolic

process behind — not the external metabolic process of food consumption, but the
inner metabolic activity. There it is “stop!” for the life ether. The life ether forms a
human organism that wills. Thus thinking, feeling, and willing come about.

We can now follow the entire process as it is reflected in our physical body. Take
everything that is above: within, it manifests as thinking, but thinking is unsubstantial.
Behind it lies all I have described to you that happens along the nerve paths. They are
the external, physical paths for thinking.

Now go to the next process. You have this, the uppermost process in the human
being, taken in through the breathing; it manifests in physical reflection as the arterial
circulation. The arterial circulation is the second kind of path.

Then we come to the third process, which takes place between exhalation and
metabolism. This also has its own path, the veins. So the third path is the venous
circulation.

Now if we go still farther into the human being we find the process that provides a
path for itself from below, from outside. It is the process by which the life ether is taken
up. It must provide the life ether for itself from outside, from below. We find the
physical projection of this in the lymph formation and the lymph system. (Plate IV)
 So now you have the relation between outer and inner. Very much lies behind the
nerve-sense inhalation. It is an incoming activity, and in what lies behind it there is
much that remains unknown to us. Karma is active there, karma from the previous
earth-life. It is not perceptible, but it streams in. Karma streams in. If with spiritual
vision one investigates the nerve paths, if one investigates how they are formed in
relation to the senses, one finds on these paths: karma. Karma streams in. On the other
hand, in the lymph formation one does not only find a physical process: the fact that
lymph enters the organism by the lymph vessels lets one see how lymph goes into the
blood and takes care of us in that way Johannes Müller, the well-known physiologist,
[Note 10] has already said, “What is lymph? Lymph is blood without any red corpuscles.
And blood? Blood is lymph with red corpuscles.” This is, of course, a broad statement,
but it is correct in a certain way. We see in lymph everything that has not yet become
blood; we see in it also the living-weaving of developing karma. In the lymph process
new karma is forming. The lymph vessels are the beginning of the paths of future
karma. (Plate IV, right side)

So as you approach the human being from the world of spirit and perceive that
macrocosmic light, chemism, and life are brought on paths of warmth, as you come
from the light to the life paths and see the general cosmic life flowing in, you perceive
more and more the flowing-in of karma which then becomes active in the human
being's earth-life between birth and death. It works its way in through the nerves; it
moves forward through the modified arterial process, and then is held back, dammed
up in the venous process. When it reaches the venous process it pushes itself in on
mysterious waves. And as we form venous blood we get this piling-up of karma within
us, and then we act from karmic impulses.

A change in the blood can merely mean anger. On the other hand, what piles up
there because the past is not allowed down into the venous process leads to actions that
bring about the shaping of karma.

What the lymph does not allow to go over into the blood gathers deep in the
subconscious. It forms a seed in the subconscious, a seed that we carry out with us
through the gate of death when we throw off our physical body. It is the karma-to-be,
the karma still to be developed.

Above, in the breathing process one perceives the karma that comes out of the past.
Below the exhalation, in the circulation where the lymph has not yet become blood, one
sees the latent karma. It stays in the lymph. So one can say (Plate IV, left, yellow)
that karma flows into the human arterial process and stays behind; the venous process
is formed and karma comes into being again. We have here the borderline where karma
begins to pile up in the nerve-sense-arterial process.
 Below, corresponding to the process that goes from lymph to veins, we have
incoming karma. When we look with spiritual eyes at the lymph that has not yet
become blood, we see outgoing karma. Thus we have the connection between physical
and spiritual. Above, the human being qualitatively comes close to the spiritual and
touches karma. In between, the present life is dammed up. Below, in the lymph not yet
become blood, we see the new karma arising, beginning to be formed. Between past
karma and karma that is forming, in between stands the human earth-life, which —
looked at from this point of view — is a damming-up between the two. Thus we can
follow the procedure right into the physical process.

We will speak further about this tomorrow. You can realize that we are coming more
and more to see the spiritual working in the physical. Only this will perfect our practical
work.

Pastoral Medicine
Pastoral Medicine: Lecture 8

Schmidt Number: S-5932

On-line since: 27th March, 2008

LECTURE 8

Dear friends,
Yesterday we examined the human constitution as far as it can be seen in human
beings themselves or in connection with their immediate environment. Now we must
go out beyond humanity. For everywhere humanity stands in some relation to the
forces in the universe, and one can only understand these various relations if one
explores the immense diversity of the universe itself.

Just think, dear friends, how manifold the forces in the universe are! Look at a
growing plant, for instance. Follow the growth of its stem upward from the earth's
surface, and the growth of its root downward. Right there are two opposite tendencies
within the plant: a striving upward and a striving downward. And if today we were far
enough along in scientific research — so often used for less important matters — to use
it for such a thing as the growth of a stem upward and the growth of a root downward,
we would find the connections in the universe that would then finally explain the
totality: humanity and the world, microcosm and macrocosm. For we would find that
everything connected with the stem's upward growth has some relation to the
unfolding of the sun's forces in the course of the day, in the course of the year, even
beyond the year. And we would find that everything connected with the root's
downward growth has some relation to the moon's forces and the moon's changes. If
therefore we look at a plant properly, we already come to see through its form a relation
between sun and moon. We have, so to speak, to extract the simple image of a plant
from the whole universe, from all the forces in the universe.

Someone who is really observant will never see the root other than striving
downward into the earth and at the same time rounding itself. The root rounding itself
into the earth — that is the picture of the root that one must have, the rounding form
pushing into the ground. (Plate V, left) We must see the stem differently as it unfolds
in an upward direction. Someone who combines sensitivity with observation will have
the definite feeling that the stem strives to stream out as a line. The root wants to
unfold in a rounding, circular direction; the stem wants to unfold in a linear direction.
That is the archetypal form of the plant. And in the linear striving upward we must see
the presence of sun forces on the earth. In the root's striving toward roundness we must
see the presence of moon forces on the earth.
 Plate V
Click image for large view

Now let us look further. We think of the sun as being at a great height and of the
plant as streaming to reach it. But the plant does more than just reach upward; it
reaches out in width, it creates peripheries. And we find within its upward striving that
something else is active, at first just at its top in the blossoms we find the forces of
Venus working with the sun forces. Then as blossoms unfold below, as leaves come,
moving inward from the periphery, we find the forces of Mercury working. On the one
hand if we want to understand the structure of the plant as it pushes toward the Sun,
we must see that the sun forces are helped by the forces of Venus and Mercury.

On the other hand we must realize that these forces alone would not be able to form
the plant. With them alone, the plant-being would in a certain sense only attain a
compact, solid form. For it to unfold as one sees it, for instance, in the most extreme
example in a tree, there are forces working everywhere counter to the Venus and
Mercury forces: namely, the forces of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Thus in addition to the
basic polarity of sun activity and moon activity, there is also the activity of all the other
planets in the universe. (Plate V, left)
 In the plant you have the entire planetary system in front of you. It is right there on
the earth. And perhaps it is not so ridiculous that a scholar — a half or three-quarters
scholar as Paracelsus [Note 11] was — made such a statement as this: “When you eat a
plant you're eating the entire planetary system. For all those forces are contained in it.”
Paracelsus said it like this: With the plant you eat the whole heaven.” The world is
indeed formed in such manifold variety that one does have in one's immediate
environment the forces of the entire macrocosm — in growth, in structure, in the
disposition of all living things.

Now let us get back to the human being. We showed yesterday that one can go from
the area of lung breathing to a higher area where there is a finer inhalation. And we
discovered that this finer inhalation carries karmic streams in from the past. We can go
still further. If we have working into the human being what I would like for the moment
to call a refined breath stream, (Plate V, right) we can say the following: If one would
unfold only what lies in the astral body and ego, one would never reach the sun, with
the human constitution as it is at the present time. When one is in the ego and astral
body during sleep, one does not reach the sun sphere. There is only darkness. If one
were to live in the astral body and ego without any connection to the etheric and
physical bodies, one would not come to the sun. How, then, does this happen?

Let us consider first what the situation is when the astral body and ego approach the
etheric body. In clairvoyance one can bring this condition about fairly easily, by
strengthening thinking — strengthening it by very thorough, energetic meditation.
Then it is easy to come to this condition; it is the beginning of initiation. One slips
down into the etheric body but is not yet able to take hold of the physical body; one
remains in the etheric body. In this condition it is possible to think very, very well. One
sees nothing, hears nothing, but one can think very well. Thinking is not in the least
extinguished, but seeing, hearing, and the other sense activities are suppressed. At first,
thinking remains the same, except that one can think more than previously. One can
think such thoughts as we are expressing here, for instance thoughts about the
macrocosm. Thinking becomes wider. One knows clearly: “now I am in the etheric
world.” Thus when one is in the etheric body, one is truly in the world ether. One has
the clear experience of this: “I am in the spiritual world out of which the sense world
comes.” But one is not able to differentiate between spiritual world and sense world,
one is beyond a differentiated sense world. The sun no longer shines, the stars no
longer shine, there is no moonlight. There is no longer a clear distinction between the
kingdoms of nature on the earth. A person only has that faculty when down in the
physical body in normal life or in a higher stage of initiation. But in exchange for the
blurring of the contours of the sense world, there is a general spirituality, the weaving
life of the spirit.
 If one goes further, if one takes conscious hold of the physical body and begins to
live in the organs, the perceptions that had become dim or had vanished begin to
emerge again (with the exception of earthly forms) as spirit entities. Where earlier in
ordinary consciousness one had seen the sun and then it had become dark, foggy, but
had still been within the general weaving spirituality, now there appear beings of the
second hierarchy. Now one can differentiate in the spiritual world. Moon and stars
appear again, but in their spiritual aspect: they are now spiritual colonies — they can be
called that, or something similar. Now one understands how in ordinary everyday
consciousness humankind sees the sun, for instance, in its physical form, and the same
with other things, but when someone has entered consciously into a physical body, and
has actually taken hold of it in its spiritual dimension, the sun is seen as a spiritual
being, and the same with the whole world. Now we know that with each sun ray shining
down upon us during the day, spirit is also entering us. Through every sense experience
spirit is entering us. We have therefore to regard the higher, finer breathing as a
breathing that is continuously impregnated by spirit. And we perceive that the sun is
living in every sense perception that streams into us. It is indeed the spirit of the sun, or
the spirits of the sun. The sun is present in every sense perception. In our finer
breathing the sun force, the sun life is streaming straight into us.

So you see the relation humanity has to the sun. When a ray of light streams into
your eye, the sun spirit is streaming in with that ray of light. The spirit of the sun is the
substance of the finer breathing. With our sense perceptions we breathe in the
manifold ingredients of the spiritual sun. You have there an important view of the
human being from one direction. As one unfolds in an etheric body, (Plate V, yellow)
one develops in the etheric body thinking — the thoughts of the universe. These
thoughts of the universe in which one finds oneself when living consciously in an
etheric body are at first devoid of warmth or cold, devoid of tone. They are a kind of
vague feeling in which one's feeling of self merges with one's feeling of the macrocosm.
But if now one takes hold of the physical body, one enters into the spirit of the sense
perceptions. And the thoughts are infused from various sides: through the eyes, the sun
essence — thought — that is breathed in is infused with color; through the ear, thought
is tinted with tone; through the organ of warmth, thought is tinted with warmth or
cold. There you have the cosmic relation of thought to sense perception. Thought must
be understood as preceding the sense experience; then the sense experience comes
through infusion, tinted by the sun.

Humankind simply does not realize that the sun-being streams into us with every
sense perception. And on the path of the sun, past karma streams in too. It is by no
means a childish image to think of the sun as a receptacle of past karma. If we
understand the human head properly, we must say the spiritual sun rays stream in
invisibly and are transformed as they stream in into something physical, which then
appears as merely a physical attribute in the world of color, tone, warmth. And at the
same time, on the path of these sun rays that slip in through the senses into the nerves,
karma enters into us. That is one side of the human being.

Now let us look at the other side. Karma goes out at that place in the organism
where the lymph is, the place where everything is alive and active that has not yet been
drawn into the blood. There we find outgoing karma. What are the paths of outgoing
karma? To know that, we must acquaint ourselves through spiritual science with the
moon forces.

And now if we gradually come from the etheric world to which we have become
accustomed and take hold of the physical body in its periphery, the area of the senses,
then all the life streaming in from the sun and bringing our past karma with it appears
to be bringing reproach, and to be doing much to disturb us. But far more important
than the disturbing elements in our karma is this knowledge, this insight that we can
attain. It is by virtue of our past that we have become what we now are. The life of our
inner being is enriched by the perception of the sun entering on the paths of the senses
and nerves. If we can separate ourselves from our karma and concentrate on the
instreaming forces of the spiritual sun, we will experience an infinite happiness as we
receive them. We will wish that the sun element were in us perpetually; we cannot help
longing for it. The sun element enters into us lovingly if we wish it; it is what we know
in physical life in a weaker form as our active human love. This is the interplay of sun
activity with the human inner world, the loving penetration of the sun into humans and
into everything that wants to sprout and grow and thrive in humans. The living sun
rays enter lovingly. Here love is not merely a soul-spiritual force: it is the force that
calls everything physical to germinate and sprout and grow, everything that can be
beneficial to humans in every way when they value it. This is the force of which a
human being is aware through direct outer vision.

Now if one takes hold of the physical body in the other direction, in the direction of
the forces that develop the lymph and prepare it for entering into the blood, one
becomes aware of the activity of the moon. This is of quite a different character. On the
one hand we can say the spiritual sun is active in the way we have indicated; on the
other hand the moon is active. When we work to grasp the process of the lymph-blood
formation inwardly, we find we are entering into the activity of the moon. And we have
the constant feeling that the moon wants to take something away from us, to lift
something out of us. With the sun we had the feeling that it wants continually to give us
something. With the moon we have the feeling that it wants continually to take
something out of us. And if we are not alert while we are observing the moon's activity,
when we have consciously taken hold of the physical body and are engrossed in the
lymph-blood formation, if we are not absolutely alert and in complete control of our
vision, suddenly the continuity is broken and standing there before us is a spiritual
being similar to ourselves but distorted, almost a caricature of ourselves, a being we
have brought to birth. We would miss this emanation if we were not alert. But it does
not seem particularly strange to us as it separates from us and confronts us. It is hardly
more than an enhanced view of ourselves in a mirror. When we look at ourselves in an
ordinary mirror, that is the physical world. When we see ourselves reflected in the
etheric world by the moon forces, that is a higher kind of mirroring.

Let us review the whole process. There is nothing particularly amazing about it. But
it shows us that we are indeed connected with the universe. That the moon is
continually separating forces from us, which then it makes independent, forces that
were living in us and that then go out into the spiritual world, streaming out into the
macrocosm, constantly carrying images out of us into the macrocosm. But now think
how it could be if such an image, which the moon forces are continually producing in
humanity and which then they want to take out of us to carry into the distances of the
world, if such an image were held back in the human body and kept there. And not
merely an image, an abstraction, but a form permeated by forces.

How could such a form be retained in the human being? We have the moon forces
continually striving to pull and draw the human image out. How could this form be
held back? It can remain in humans if the sun forces are brought in deeply enough from
another side. Then the form remains in the human being; then an embryonic life
begins. Fructification consists of nothing else than that the sun forces are drawn down
to where the moon forces are active in the lymph. Thereby the image that would
otherwise go out takes hold of physical matter in the human body. What otherwise is a
mere image now takes on physical form. For this to happen, sun forces combine with
moon forces in the lymph system of the human organism. (Plate V)

Let us look at the other side. We can also investigate the moon forces higher up:
then we find that the opposite happens. Then the human being is not formed again in
the human body, but the sun macrocosm is given form in the human. Now we have a
different view of the macrocosm. When the embryo is formed, a physical world arises
within the human being that must come out. When on the other hand the moon forces
activate their desire nature — they want to capture and draw down the sun forces —
then the spirit in the universe comes into being within the human. The spirit of the
universe is engendered, a spiritual embryo. Then the possibility is given for forming
what must come in from the spiritual world, what has been in the spiritual world up to
the time of a new earth-life and now comes in as spirit embryo. Then, the union of the
two takes place in the human being.

If we explore these things, we come to see that they are completely interwoven.
Then we have the true explanation of the human being's relation to the universe.

Now help comes from every direction. The sun activity that is uniting here with the
moon activity has the help of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. What, then, are the tasks of
Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn? Recall, dear friends, what I said yesterday. When the sun
forces are going in, first they must stop for the light; second, they must stop for the
macrocosmic chemism; third, they must stop for the life. The Saturn forces bring about
the stop for the light, the Jupiter forces in their wisdom bring about the stop for the
world chemism, the Mars forces the stop for the life. There you have in detail the
drawing-in of the sun forces modified by the forces of the so-called outer planets.

From the opposite direction you have the moon forces modified. When they work
alone in their full strength, they bring about the formation of the embryo, that is, the
physical formation. When they are less strong, they do not enter into physical matter
but stay in the direction of the spirit, combining with the Venus forces of soul love.
They can be still weaker — when they unite with what comes from the other side, the
forces of Mercury, the divine messenger, who in ordinary everyday earth-life leads the
lower forces up to the higher.

Look at the two diagrams, right and left. (Plate V) If we look out at the plant world
spread as it is around us, we find the sun, moon, and stars everywhere. If we look
within the human being, the sun, moon, and stars are there too, in exact
correspondence. When something within is not in order, there is some trouble in the
inner collaboration of sun, moon, and stars. If we as therapists want to restore it to
order again, we must search in outer nature for a corresponding Saturn activity, for
instance, that will work therapeutically on an unhealthy moon activity — and so forth.
It is all out there. You see people will begin to have confidence in medicine again when
they see that in the inner constitution the human being comprises the whole world.
This is the knowledge we would like to bring to medicine again, knowledge it once had.
The world will only have its trust in medicine restored when these things are once again
understood.

But now let us look at the other side. Look first at the moon activity in human
beings. See how it is striving continually to draw the human element out, to carry it into
the universe. Let the picture stand before us — the human being striving to get out,
wanting to be carried into the universe. This must not be presented to humanity as an
abstraction, this shattering secret, but in picture form — the moon working continually
to lift human beings out of themselves, to show them their relation to the macrocosm.
The human being comes into earth-life as an embryo within another human being. But
when this moon activity is enhanced by Venus and Mercury activity, then the human
being is born not physically, but spiritually. If we add to the physical birth what we can
invoke of Mercury and Venus activity, we bring about a spiritual birth. The human
being is then born spiritually, outside, in the universe. We baptize the human being.

The working of the physical sun is always present in human beings. We can add to
that perception a consciousness that the spiritual sun also is active in us, that on the
paths of the physical-etheric sunlight, the light rays, chemical rays and life rays, the
spirit is also pouring in. Spirit enters humans by way of the same paths that the
physical-etheric sun activity enters: through the senses. In the same way that human
beings perceive in everyday physical life the physical-etheric activity of the sun, we
enable them to perceive the soul-spiritual activity of the sun. We give them
communion.

Going out from the communion, we find on the one hand what is related to the help
the sun is given: the darkening that relates to the light, the constant nearness of death
to life. We go to the outer planets that are connected with the sun, and we add to the
communion at the proper moment the anointing.

Or we go into human beings, and before they have any thought of the macrocosm,
we hold them fast in their inner life, wanting not merely to give them their place as
human beings in the macrocosm, but wanting to plant the macrocosm in them — in
picture form, so that it becomes a seed developing in them. We give them confirmation.

If individuals receiving the sacraments live in them with full consciousness, they
will be continually healed by them — healed of the universal illness to which they
succumb, or are in constant danger of succumbing in statu nascendi simply by reason
of their having incarnated in the physical material world. This is the priest's task.

It can also happen that an individual is by nature continually in statu nascendi of

wanting to be free in the spiritual world, wanting to get out of the physical world, yet is
obliged to remain in it during earth-life. And this causes in the organism not a state of
unspirituality but a state of superspirituality, that is, illness. Medical measures must be
prescribed, the opposite pole to the sacraments, when illness appears. This is the
physician's task.

Thus we see on the one side the spiritual healing of the priest, and on the other side
the priestly attitude of the physician, the physical healer. If we recognize how their
tasks can be coordinated, we have grasped the significant connection between pastoral
work and medical work. Then pastoral medicine is not just a theory, but embraces the
working together of human beings.

Pastoral Medicine
Pastoral Medicine: Lecture 9

Schmidt Number: S-5936

 On-line since: 27th March, 2008

LECTURE 9

Dear friends,
You have seen how necessary it is to relate a state of illness in a human being to his
or her spiritual life and experience. The understanding that should be brought to illness
by the two groups of people who have especially to do with pastoral medicine can really
only come from such a point of view. Therefore I would like once more to consider the
actual state of illness in connection with a person's spiritual life, this time from a
standpoint that I think will throw greatest light upon the nature of illness.

As human beings we alternate between waking and sleeping. You all know in
general what can be said from our perspective about these two conditions.

Today let us hold clearly in our minds what really happens in the human being
during sleep. The physical body and etheric body are by themselves; the astral body and
ego are also by themselves. Turning first to the physical and etheric bodies, we know
that by virtue of what these bodies are, certain processes go on that during the person's
sleep are independent of the activity of the astral body and ego. In the human organism
we find processes going on that are not at all suited to it in the way they must play
themselves out. The physical body has to do with physical processes. Physical processes
take their course outside in the mineral kingdom; they are suited to the mineral
kingdom. They are not at all suited to the constitution of the human physical body. And
yet while it is asleep this human body is, so to speak, subject to these physical processes
in the same way that the mineral kingdom is. We must be aware of this contradiction in
the human being precisely during sleep. During sleep the human being ought to be a
world of physically active forces and substances, but this is something that really
cannot be. That is why processes that go on in the physical body during sleep — unless
they are brought into balance — cause illness.

The general assertion that sleep is healthful is correct in a certain sense, but only
under certain conditions. And it must not prevent us from examining the true situation
without prejudice. Physical processes in the human physical body can only be healthful
when the ego and astral organization are down in the physical body, as is the normal
condition during waking life. It is constantly interrupted by the sleep condition.
Normally, however, even during sleep the catabolic process is still always going on in
the physical body; it must be there so that the soul-life and spiritual life as a whole can
really unfold. For the spiritual life is not connected with anabolic processes, only with
catabolic processes. During sleep, therefore, there must be just as much of the catabolic
processes as a person needs for waking life to unfold the next morning. If too many
catabolic processes are there because of some unhealthy sleep condition, a residue of
these processes piles up in the human organism, and then we have the inner cause for
an illness.

If we extend our investigation to the etheric body, we find that during sleep only the
processes can take place in the etheric body that can otherwise take place in the plant
kingdom. During daytime consciousness, when the astral body and ego are in the
etheric body, these processes are always raised to a higher level. But from the moment
of a person's going to sleep to the moment of waking, they take their course in the same
way that they do in the plant kingdom. Thus they too are not suited to the human
organism; they need to be balanced by the astral body and ego. If they create a residue,
this too is cause for illness. So we can say that sleep can show us how causes of illness
really originate in the human organism. For they are fundamentally the normal sleep
processes; at the same time they are the basis for human soul-spiritual life. And that
points to a secret of this world — that whenever one penetrates to reality, one finds it
has two sides! On one side, in the sleep condition of the human physical and etheric
bodies we find the basis for spiritual development; on the other side, in the very same
processes we find the basis for illnesses. Thereby illness is brought into direct
connection with human spiritual development. Thus if we study what is active during
sleep in the human physical and etheric bodies, we find the fundamental causes of
illness.

Now let us consider from this point of view those who during waking life do not go
down deeply enough into their physical and etheric bodies — which is what we have
found to be the case in the mentally retarded or the psychopath. With such people the
soul and spirit enter into processes of illness and live with them. Special value should
be laid on this knowledge, that psychopaths and the so-called mentally disturbed are
always closely involved in their inner lives with the causes of illness. You see, one has to
look at such things carefully.

But now let us go to the outer world. Let us start from the human physical body
(Plate VI, left) and consider the outer mineral world that relates to it. During sleep we
have processes in the human physical body from which the ego is missing. They go on
without really any inner working “motor.” But there is ego out there in the world in all
those mineral processes. In them is what we can call world-ego. So we have on the one
hand within the processes of the human physical body a condition of non-ego, a sum of
processes that are egoless, processes that lack ego. And we have on the other hand in
our outer environment a sum of mineral processes and mineral substances that are
permeated by ego — that means, by all the hierarchies who are to be identified with
ego. Mineral substance has ego.
 Plate VI
Click image for large view

[It appears Plate IV and VI were mixed up in the original publication of the book ...
we have switched them (see date in lower-left of image) – e.Ed]

Therefore let us assume that we observe in some person's physical body a process
that should not be there, a sick process. It lacks ego. What can we do if we want to cure
this condition? We can search outside in the mineral kingdom for that part of the ego
that the person lacks, to cure what is too much asleep, to cure what is still continuing to
sleep during waking life. Then we have the right remedy. If you give the substance that
has an affinity to the sick organ, the ego-force that the organ lacked is brought into the
organ. This is the principle underlying our search in inorganic nature around us for
medicinal remedies for the physical body of the sick person. We have to find the
corresponding substance that has ego-force; then it has a healing effect. Thus the
transition from pathology to therapy rests upon a correct insight into the relation
between the processes of the human physical body and the outer mineral world on the
one hand, and the relation of the human etheric body to the plant world on the other. If
we observe too exuberant a growth in the etheric body, we realize that the etheric body
is lacking proper penetration by the astral body. Then we must search in the plant
kingdom for the proper corresponding remedy. This is the direction our work must
take.
 One must recognize the spirit in nature, the spirit that is in the mineral and plant
kingdoms of the world. It is the spirit, not the substance, that one must know, because
in reality one heals the human being through the spirit that is in the mineral and in the
plant. In its nature substance is not truly governed by spirit, but even so it has spirit in
it. And those who want to heal without recognizing the spirit in stones and plants can
only grope their way through traditional theory. They can try one thing or another and
see whether it helps, but they will never know why it helps — because they will never
know just where the spirit is in possession of some mineral or how it is in possession of
it. To be a healer requires first and foremost a spiritual outlook on the world. And
indeed this is the greatest anomaly of our time: that it is medicine itself that has the
frightful disease of materialism. Medicine is seriously ill with materialism. It has
become blind and is falling asleep, and this is creating harmful soul substances in
science. It really needs to be healed. One can indeed say, the sickest entity of our time is
not Turkey, [Note 12] as was the case in nineteenth-century Europe, but the medical
profession. This is a fact that physicians should know — as well as the theologians, for
then perhaps the secret will remain among those to whom it has been entrusted!

Let us look at these things more closely. There are certain persons who are not
psychopathic or insane in the sense in which one is justified in using those terms, but
who nevertheless illustrate what I have been talking about during the last few days.
They descend into their physical and etheric bodies in such a way that they acquire a
certain perceptible connection to their sick condition, to sick processes. These are
sleepwalkers, whose peculiar state is not make-believe; it has often been described to
the general public, and every initiate knows it well. While they are in their
somnambulistic condition, they describe their illnesses. They go down into their
physical and etheric body. Now the normal human being in waking life has the physical
and etheric bodies completely saturated by the astral body and the ego. In the case of
these sick individuals, the ego and astral body do not combine with the etheric and
physical body in accordance (figuratively speaking) with their exact atomic weight.
Some of the ego and astral body is left out; it has not entirely sunk down. But then it is
this element that is able to perceive. Only that part of the ego and astral body perceives
that has not sunk down into the etheric and physical body. When some of the astral
body and ego is superfluous in such a person, then there is this inner perception, and
the person can describe his or her own illness.

But now there is another condition — a condition of the opposite kind, in which the
normal sleep condition is disturbed. In this case, when the ego and astral body are
outside the physical and etheric body and things happen in the ego and astral body that
do not belong in this soul-spiritual entity (as the things I was just describing did not
belong in that physical-etheric body), when too much spirit is experienced by the ego
and astral body during sleep (as too much nature was experienced in the opposite
condition by the physical-etheric body), then a clairvoyance comes about that borders
on a pathological state. The individual carries into sleep a certain power to perceive
spiritual things, then afterward carries back memories of spiritual perception into
waking consciousness. In particular, these abnormal spiritual perceptions appear in
lively dreams. And then, as every initiate knows, we observe that the dreams have the
following content.

Suppose the sick person, the physically sick person, is in the former condition I was
describing and dips down with the spirit and soul into the physical-etheric body and
then experiences the illness in a somnambulistic condition. The sick person experiences
a strong catabolic process going on in the physical-etheric body, a kind of reverse
process of nature. But now suppose the person is outside the physical body with the
astral body and ego. Then the person has experiences of the spiritual aspect of external
nature. Suppose the person experiences a sick organ inwardly — sick because it allows
some outer process to occur in an unhealthy way. This is experienced in the
somnambulistic state, and the inner process is described. If the person is in the
opposite condition, the somnambulism works into the ego and astral body when these
are farther out of the physical and etheric body. If the spiritual, elemental life of nature
comes into dreams, the person experiences what is spiritual in the minerals. And what
does the person dream about? The person dreams of the medicinal remedy. Here you
have the connection between many aspects of somnambulistic life. The somnambulist
alternates between two conditions, as I have described. In one condition dreaming of
the illness, in the other condition dreaming of the remedy. And generally speaking, that
is the way pathology and therapy were explored in the old mysteries.

In those times there was not so much experimenting as there is today. The sick
person was brought into the temple and put into a kind of somnambulistic condition by
trained temple priests. This condition was increased to the level at which the sick
person could describe the process of the illness. Then the opposite somnambulistic
condition was brought about, and the temple priest was told the dream that contained
the therapy. This was the manner of inquiry in the oldest mysteries; it led from disease
to cure. And so it was that medical science was cultivated in olden times, by seeking
knowledge of humanity through the human being itself.

We don't have to go back to those old methods. We have to move forward to

methods by which we are able to follow the course of an illness through imaginative
experience, and by which we are able to experience the healing process through an
intuitive activity that leads not into the human being, but outward. What has formerly
been a kind of experimentation in this field will now have to become careful
observation. You see the direction in which we are turning. In olden times external
physical science was a purely observing science; then it began to experiment and more
and more substituted experiment for pure observation. That was right. But medical
science did the same thing in imitation, and that was not right. It experimented on
human beings with the temple research. We must find the way to change over from
experimenting to observing, to an observation of life that is sustained by spiritual
knowledge and enriched by scientific research. For whoever really looks at life can
catch a view of illness everywhere. In the simplest form of everyday life that has
deviated only to the slightest degree from so-called normal, something can be seen that
will lead — if considered properly — to a recognition of complicated disease processes.
One has only to understand how things relate to one another.

But this shows us that physicians must more and more become really practical
individuals — again, the exact opposite of what recent materialistic development has
made them. They have gradually become pure scientists. And that makes no sense. A
physician should always be able to cope with natural laws in a living way, and not just
know them abstractly. With abstract knowledge of them one has not yet even begun to
work with them. That's the situation from one side.

Let us look at the other side, the side that the priest must see. We think of the
priest's mission as guiding human beings in their approach to the spiritual world, in
everything that will help their ego and astral body to find their way in the spiritual
world. If it is the physician's task to inquire into the nature of humanity from a spiritual
point of view, to explore pathological conditions from a spiritual point of view, then
what must the priest look for? The priest has to find what can lead human beings
toward the spiritual world; their attitude toward the spiritual world, whether they love
the spiritual world, how much they are permeated by the spiritual world — insofar as
these things are apparent in normal life. The priest must deal with all the normal or
abnormal symptoms that the human soul manifests in this regard in everyday life. For
the priest we have to point out the opposite course to that of the physician. We told the
physician that if somnambulists are allowed to describe their sick organ, they will also
describe the medicinal remedy for it from out of their dreams.

Let us look again at the priests in the ancient mysteries. They were not primarily
interested in discovering medicinal remedies, although of course they were intensely
interested in healing, for they were first and foremost a friend of humanity. But they
did not stop at healing; they were interested in more than that. They were interested in
the following: They saw that the somnambulist found his or her own remedy in dreams
while in the spiritual world with the ego and astral body. The priests paid particular
attention to this soul while it was in the spiritual world, and followed it back again into
the body. And what was found? Of course they found themselves again confronting the
sick organ. But now, from what they had perceived of that soul while it was out of the
body, they knew how the astral body and ego would work in this organ if it were
healthy. Upon returning again to the sick organ, they knew what the situation would be
under healthy conditions. Now they realized how the astral body and ego out of their
divine-spiritual powers take hold normally in the human organism, how they sit
normally within it. The priests learned to know them in their healthy normality through
the dreams in the spiritual world, and learned how they relate to the physical world
when they descend into the physical body. From this, the priests learned to know the
inner relation of humanity to the spiritual world.

This knowledge should influence priests as they enact the sacrament in which they
are carrying back the spiritual world. For the spiritual world is present in the sacrament
through the establishment of the ritual. The ritual unites spirit with physical substance
by virtue of deep insight into the relation of spirit to matter. Inspirited physical
substance is led back into human beings, and the relation is established in them that
unites their astral body and ego within their physical and etheric bodies with the
divine-spiritual being of the world. Everything in this relation depends upon the
priest's celebrating the sacraments with such an attitude. Everything depends upon our
permeating ourselves with such thoughts. For instance, the relation between experience
in the body and experience out of the body; secrets of pathology from observing the
body when it is left; secrets of therapy from observing abnormal life in the spiritual
world as compared to normal perception in the spiritual world. What was established
in ancient times in secret temple procedures by prominent somnambulists must now be
again established by human beings developing spiritual perception in themselves and
observing the connections. In this area, experiment must give way to observation.

Now it is important that the physicians and priests in the anthroposophical

movement are already united in their knowledge of such facts as these. That is what
really binds us together. We are permeated by a different kind of knowledge from what
others have. By contrast, the idea that some sort of union or association or group
should be formed is just an abstraction. What really binds us together is the possession
of certain knowledge. Those who possess this knowledge obviously belong together,
and should feel closely united to one another. Any external association should be an
expression of the inner union created by this knowledge.

Our time suffers very much in this respect. For instance, often when I speak today
to, say, a youth gathering, even though I fully appreciate their endeavor and even
though I myself have the very best intentions, it is extraordinarily difficult to experience
their response to the concrete truths that should be filling their souls. It is difficult
when I hear them say, “The first thing we must do is to join together!” Well, indeed,
everything in these last decades has been “joined together” — ad infinitum! People have
gone on and on joining together, but they've never yet got anything real for a result by
tacking zeros onto one another indefinitely — 00000000 and so on. One empty
consciousness to begin with, joined to another empty consciousness, joined to a third
consciousness, again empty — that all adds up to nothing. By contrast, you only have to
assume a content — a content that is, after all, the basis of all zeroes: one. Then you
have something. It doesn't have to be a human being, but it has to be some genuine
content. Interestingly enough, this assumes that there is something there to begin with.
It doesn't even have to be a human being. It can be real, living knowledge. These are
things we should think about in our time. For usually people are much too comfortable
to search for the concrete; they are content simply to put abstractions together. Joining
together is all right, of course, but it will come of itself if something concrete is there
first.

Perhaps this is something that should be understood before anything else by those
who work among modern humankind as physicians and priests. Today two conditions
can be observed throughout the world. Generally speaking, our ego and astral body do
not find properly our physical and etheric bodies, whatever our waking condition may
be. Also, truly, for those observing the world as it evolves, materialistic views don't
really worry them unduly! Let the monists and the others fight with one another.
Nothing is accomplished thereby. But that is certainly not the fundamental evil in the
evolution of humanity. If one is observing the evolutionary process, one is not
particularly interested to participate in these discussions of worldviews. For actually,
whether one thinks this or another thinks that, opinions are frightfully thin little things
in the human soul! They're just bubbles in the reality of this world. If one bubble hits
another, if one bursts, if another becomes a bit thicker from the bursting of another,
none of it matters. What does matter, what should be clearly realized, is that one does
not ever becomes a materialist if one is sitting with one's ego and astral body properly
in the physical and etheric bodies. In other words, to be a materialist means in a finer
sense to be ill. One must fill one's whole being with this knowledge. And it is not
surprising in the least that when others, those who are sitting properly inside their
physical and etheric bodies, encounter the sick materialists, they turn away to exactly
the opposite pole — to all the vague mist of spiritualism.

Here we come to a difficult area, because these things do not take place in those
parts of the world that still have a connection with one another; they happen where the
world has been thrown into chaos and its pieces lie scattered about. One thing no
longer reveals itself as a healing remedy for another, for they are falling away from each
other. So long as sick people speak of what is going on in their organs, their dreams will
still reveal the corresponding healing remedies in the outer world. But in our present
time people who are ill from materialism will not be describing sick inner organs; they
have broken free of their organism; they want to describe the external world, as a
materialist naturally would. Then they find not remedial dreams but the opposite —
false spiritualism, which is certainly not a remedy. On the contrary, it brings on the
illness more strongly than ever.

And so we find today in our time — if I may draw an analogy between medical work
for individuals and cultural pathology and therapy — we find that spiritualism does not
by any means offer a remedy for materialism, but corresponds to the somnambulist's
dream revealing his sick organs. Now sometimes a process that properly should have
taken hold of a person's inner organism pushes through the organism to the periphery,
to the outer world; there is then the pathological condition called a “rash.” This
corresponds exactly to what I've been telling you about. One sees with one's own eyes
that what had been inside and is now outside is nothing healthy. It is an aberration. The
physician should see clearly that materialism is a rash and needs to be regarded as a
medical problem.

This will build a bridge to the priest's observation on the other side. The priest sees
the symptoms that rise out of sick human souls, out of their need, out of their feelings.
Spiritualism is just such a symptom. One comes to realize that in the widest sense sick
life wants to sink down into the world, that all the disease in the present world outlook
does indeed work itself out fully — insofar as it rests on the will — by working into
people and sickening their inner life.

In the present epoch of human evolution it is impossible to see something that

could be seen clearly in former times, because people in those days had different
characteristics. We cannot see how a false direction of the will, a false worldview, a false
view of life — all of which were designated in olden times as sin — cause illness in the
organism. For they do not do so immediately in the ordinary way. We are only aware of
the connection in the rarest cases, cases that are an intermediate stage between the sin
and what can obviously be diagnosed as the resulting illness. These intermediate stages
may simply develop into morbid conditions. But in this modern epoch the sin and the
real illness are so detached from each other that now they even occur in separate
incarnations. In earlier epochs they were able to appear in close connection as cause
and effect, but as humanity developed they became separated so that sin appeared in
one incarnation, illness in a subsequent one.

Here, then, begins the domain of the priests. Priests may no longer merely continue
traditions of olden times, speaking of sin as the cause of illness. But if they have
knowledge of repeated earth lives, they can speak of sin from that point of view; then
they will again be speaking from the standpoint of truth. Much that priests in the world
today say about these things is no longer true; it no longer corresponds to fact. These
teachings originated in olden times, and today no one is interested in changing the
teachings to accord with what is demanded in our time.

We have to relate ourselves to all this. Then it will be possible to make our study of
pastoral medicine fruitful in both directions.

My intention is to give two more lectures for this course: tomorrow, and the day
after tomorrow. I am announcing this now so that you can make your plans
accordingly.

Pastoral Medicine
 Pastoral Medicine: Lecture 10

Schmidt Number: S-5940

On-line since: 27th March, 2008

LECTURE 10

Dear friends,
There is something that is always overlooked in this present age, something that has
to do with the working, and the wanting to work, of the spiritual world. It is this: that
total spiritual activity must include the creative activity to be found in human thought
and feeling. What really lies at their foundation has been completely forgotten in this
age of materialistic thought; today humankind is fundamentally entirely unaware of it.
That is why in this very field a kind of evil mischief is perpetrated throughout our
present civilization. You surely know that from every possible center, whatever it may
be called, all kinds of instructions go out to people telling how they can enhance their
thought power, how their thoughts can become powerful. In this way seeds are strewn
in every direction of something that in earlier spiritual life was called — and still is
called — “black magic.” Such things are the cause of both soul illnesses and bodily
illnesses, and the physician and priest must be aware of them in the course of their
work. If one is alert to these things, one already has a clearer perception of the illnesses
and symptoms of human soul-life. Moreover one can work to prevent them. This is all
of great importance. The intent of instruction about thought power is to give people a
power they would otherwise not possess, and this is often used for pernicious reasons.
There is every possible kind of instruction today with this intent — for instance, how
business executives can be successful in their financial transactions. In this area a
tremendous amount of mischief is perpetrated.

And what is at the bottom of it all? These things will simply become worse unless
clear knowledge of them is sought precisely in the field of medicine and in the field of
theology. For human thinking in recent times, particularly scientific thinking, has come
enormously under the influence of materialism. Often today people express their
satisfaction over the fact that materialism in science is on the decline, that the tendency
everywhere is to try to reach out beyond materialism. But truly this is slight satisfaction
for those who see through these things. In the eyes of such people, the scientists or the
theologians who want to overcome materialism in a modern manner are much worse
than the hard-shell materialists whose assertions gradually become untenable through
their very absurdity. And those who talk so glibly about spiritualism, idealism, and the
like are strewing sand in people's eyes — and it's going into their own eyes as well.

For what do Driesch [Note 13] and others do, for instance, when they want to
present something that is beyond physical-material events? They use exactly the same
thoughts that have been used for hundreds of years to think about the material world
alone, thoughts that indeed have no other capacity than to think about the material
world alone. These are the thoughts they use to think about something that is supposed
to be spiritual. But such thoughts do not have that capacity. For that, one has to go to
true spiritual science. That is why such strange things appear and today it is not even
noticed that they are strange. A person like Driesch, for instance, recognized officially
by the outer world but in reality a dilettante, holds forth to the effect that one must
accept the term “psychoid.” Well, if you want to ascribe to something a similarity to
something else, that something else must itself be around somewhere. You can't speak
of apelike creatures if there are no apes to start with. You can't speak of the “psychoid”
if you say there's no such thing as a soul! And this silly nonsense is accepted today as
science, honest science, science that is really striving to reach a higher level. These
things must be realized. And the individuals in the anthroposophical movement who
have had scientific training will be of some value in the evolution of our civilization if
they don't allow themselves to be blinded by the flaring-up of will-o'-the-wisps but
persist in observing carefully what is now essential to combat materialism.

Therefore the question must be asked: How is it possible for active, creative
thinking to arise out of today's passive thinking? How must priests and physicians work
so that creative impulses can now flow into the activity of individuals who are led and
who want to be led by the spirit? Thoughts that evolve in connection with material
processes leave the creative impulse outside in matter itself; the thoughts remain
totally passive. That is the peculiar characteristic of our modern thought world, that the
thoughts pervading the whole of science are quite passive, inactive, idle. This lack of
creative power in our thinking is connected with our education, which has been
completely submerged in the current passive science. Today human beings are
educated in such a way that they simply are not allowed to think a creative thought —
for fear that if they should actually entertain a creative thought they wouldn't be able to
keep it objective but would add some subjective quirk to it! These are things that must
be faced. But how can we come to creative thoughts? This can only happen if we really
develop our knowledge of the human being. Humans cannot be known by uncreative
thoughts, because by their very nature they themselves are creative. One must re-create
if one wants knowledge. With today's passive thinking one can only understand the
periphery of the human being; one has to ignore the inner being.

It is important that we really understand the place humanity has been given in this
world. Today therefore, let us put something before our souls as a kind of goal that lies
at the end of a long perspective, but that can make our thoughts creative — for it holds
the secret for making human thought creative.

Let us think of the universe in its changing and becoming — say in the form of a
circle. (Plate VII) We may picture it like this because actually the universe as it evolves
through time presents a kind of rhythmic repetition, upward and downward, with
respect to many phenomena. Everywhere in the universe we find rhythms like that of
day and night: other, greater rhythms that extend from one Ice Age to another, and so
forth. If first we confine our inquiry to the rhythm that has the largest intervals for
human perception, it will be the so-called Platonic year, which has always played an
important role in human thoughts and ideas about the world when these were filled
with more wisdom than they are now.

Plate VII
Click image for large view

We can come to the Platonic year if we begin by observing the place where the sun
rises on the first day of spring, the twenty-first of March of each year. At that moment
of time the sun rises at a definite spot in the sky. We can find this spot in some
constellation; attention has been given to it through all the ages, for it moves slightly
from year to year. If, for instance, in 1923 we had observed this point of spring, its place
in the sky in relation to the other stars, and now in 1924 observe it again, we find it is
not in the same place; it lies farther back on a line that can be drawn between the
constellation of Taurus and the constellation of Pisces. Every year the place where
spring begins moves back in the zodiac a little bit in that direction. This means that in
the course of time there is a gradual shift through all the constellations of the starry
world; it can be seen and recorded. If we now inquire what the sum of all these shifts
amounts to, we can see what the distance is from year to year. One year it is here, the
next year there, and so on — finally it has come back to the same spot. That means after
a certain period of time the place of spring's beginning must again be in the very same
spot of the heavens, and for the place of its rising the sun has traveled once around the
entire zodiac. When we reckon that up, it happens approximately every 25,920 years.
There we have found a rhythm that contains the largest time-interval possible for a
human being to perceive — the Platonic cosmic year, which stretches through
approximately 25,920 of our ordinary years.

There we have looked out into the distances of the cosmos. In a certain sense we
have pushed our thoughts against something from which the numbers we use bounce
back. We are pushing with our thoughts against a wall. Thinking can't go any further.
Clairvoyance must then come to our aid; that can go further. The whole of evolution
takes place in what is encircled by those 25,920 years. And we can very well conceive of
this circumference, if you will — which obviously is not a thing of space, but of space-
time — we can conceive of it as a kind of cosmic uterine wall. We can think of it as that
which surrounds us in farthest cosmic space. (Plate VII, red-yellow)

Now let us go from what envelops us in farthest cosmic space, from the rhythm that
has the largest interval of time that we possess, to what appears to us first of all as a
small interval, that is, the rhythm of our breathing. Now we find — again, of course, we
must use approximate numbers — we find eighteen breaths a minute. If we reckon how
many breaths a human being takes in a day, we come to 25,920 breaths a day. We find
the same rhythm in the smallest interval, in the human being the microcosm, as in the
largest interval, the macrocosm.

Thus the human being lives in a universe whose rhythm is the same as that of the
universe itself. But only the human being, not the animal; in just these finer details of
knowledge one finally sees the difference between the human and the animal. The
essential nature of the human physical body can only be realized if it is related to the
Platonic cosmic year; 25,920 years: in that span of time the nature of our physical body
is rooted. Take a look in An Outline of Esoteric Science at the tremendous time
periods, at first determined otherwise than by time and space as we know them,
through the metamorphosis of sun, moon, and earth. Look at all the things that had to
be brought together, but not in any quantitative way; then you can begin to understand
the present human physical body with all its elements.

And now let us go to the center of the circle, (Plate VII) where we have the 25,920
breaths that, so to speak, place humanity in the center of the cosmic uterus. Now we
have reached the ego. For in the breathing — and remember what I said about the
breathing, that in the upper human it becomes a finer breathing for our so-called
spiritual life — we find the expression of the individual human life on earth. Here, then,
we have the ego. Just as we must grasp the connection of our physical body to the large
time interval, the Platonic cosmic year, so we must grasp the connection of our ego —
which we can feel in every breathing irregularity — to the rhythm of our breathing.

So you see, our life on earth lies between these two things — our own breathing and
the cosmic year. Everything that is of any importance for the human ego is ruled by the
breath. And the life of our physical body lies within those colossal processes that are
ruled by the rhythm of 25,920 years. The activity that takes place in our physical body
in accordance with its laws is connected with the large rhythm of the Platonic year in
the same way that our ego activity is connected with the rhythm of our breathing.
Human life lies in between those two rhythms. Our human life is also enclosed within
physical-etheric body and astral body-ego. From a certain point of view we can say that
human life on earth lies between physical body-etheric body and astral body-ego; from
another point of view, from the divine, cosmic aspect, we can say human life on earth
lies between a day's breathing and the Platonic year. A day's breathing is in this sense a
totality; it relates to our whole human life.

But now let us consider from the cosmic standpoint what lies between human
breathing, that is, the weaving life of the ego, and the course of a Platonic year, that is,
the living force out in the macrocosm. As we maintain our rhythm of breathing through
an entire day of twenty-four hours, we meet regularly another rhythm, the day-and-
night rhythm, which is connected with how the sun stands in relation to the earth. The
daily sunrise and sunset as the sun travels over the arch of heaven, the darkening of the
sun by the earth, this daily circuit of the sun is what we meet with our breathing
rhythm. This is what we encounter in our human day of twenty-four hours.

So let us do some more arithmetic to see how we relate to the world with our
breathing, how we relate to the course of a macrocosmic day. We can figure it out in
this way: Start from one day; in a year there are 360 days. (It can be approximate.) Now
take a human life (again approximate) of seventy-two years, the so-called human life
span. And we get 25,920 days. So we have a life of seventy-two years as the normal
rhythm into which a human being is placed in this world, and we find it is the same
rhythm as that of the Platonic sun year.

So our breathing rhythm is placed into our entire life in the rhythm of 25,920. One
day of our life relates to the length of our entire life in the same rhythm as one of our
breaths relates to the total number of our breaths during one day. What is it, then, that
appears within the seventy-two years, the 25,920 days in the same way that a breath,
one inhalation-exhalation, appears within the whole breathing process? What do we
find there? First of all we have inbreathing-outbreathing, the first form of the rhythm.
Second, as we live our normal human life there is something that we experience 25,920
times. What is that? Sleeping and waking. Sleeping and waking are repeated 25,920
times in the course of a human life, just as inbreathing and outbreathing are repeated
25,920 times in the course of a human day. But now we must ask, what is this rhythm
of sleeping and waking? Every time we go to sleep we not only breathe carbon dioxide
out, but as physical human beings we breathe our astral body and ego out. When we
wake, we breathe them in again. That is a longer inbreathing-outbreathing: it takes
twenty-four hours, a whole day. That is a second form of breathing that has the same
rhythm. So we have a small breath, our ordinary inhalation-exhalation; and we have a
larger breath by which we go out into the world and back, the breath of sleeping-
waking.

But let us go further. Let us see how the average human life of seventy-two years fits
into the Platonic cosmic year. Let us count the seventy-two years as belonging to one
great year, a year consisting of days that are human lives. Let us reckon this great
cosmic year in which each single day is a whole human life. Then count the cosmic year
also as having 360 days, which would mean 360 human lives. Then we would get 360
human lives x 72 years = 25,920 years: the Platonic year.

What does this figure show us? We begin a life and die. What do we do when we
die? When we die, we breathe out more than our astral body and ego from our earthly
organism. We also breathe our etheric body out into the universe. I have often
indicated how the etheric body is breathed out, spread out into the universe. When we
come back to earth again, we breathe our etheric body in again. That is a giant breath.
An etheric inbreathing-outbreathing. Mornings we breathe in the astral element, while
with our physical breath we breathe in oxygen. With each earth-death we breathe the
etheric element out; with each earth-life we breathe the etheric element in.

So there we have the third form of breathing: life and death. If we count life to be
our life on earth, and death to be our life between death and a new birth, then we have
the largest form of breathing in the cosmic year:

1. Inhalation-exhalation, the smallest breath.

2. Sleeping-waking, a larger breath.
3. Life-death, the largest breath.

Thus we stand first and foremost in the world of the stars. Inwardly, we relate to our
ordinary breathing; outwardly, we relate to the Platonic year. In between, we live our
human life, and exactly the same rhythm is revealed in this human life itself.

But what comes into this space between the Platonic year and our breathing
rhythm? Like a painter who prepares a canvas and then paints on it, let us try painting
on the base we have prepared, that is, the rhythms we have found in numbers. With the
Platonic year as with smaller time rhythms, especially with the rhythm of the year, we
find that continual change goes on in the outer world. Also it is change that we
perceive; we perceive it most easily in temperatures: warmth and cold. We need only to
think of cold winter and warm summer — here again we could present numbers, but let
us take the qualitative aspect of warmth and cold. Human beings live life within this
alternation between warmth and cold. In the outer world the alternation is within the
element of time; and for so-called nature, changing in a time sequence from one to the
other is quite healthful. But human beings cannot do this. We have, in a certain sense,
to maintain a normal warmth — or a normal coldness, if you will — within ourselves.
We have to develop inner forces by which we save some summer warmth for winter and
some winter cold for summer. In other words, we must keep a proper balance within;
we must be so continually active in our organism that it maintains a balance between
warmth and cold no matter what is happening outside.

There are activities within the human organism of which we are quite unaware. We
carry summer within us in winter and winter within us in summer. When it is summer,
we carry within us what our organism experienced in the previous winter. We carry
winter within us through the beginning of spring until St. John's Day; then the change
comes. As autumn approaches, we begin to carry the summer within us, and we keep it
until Christmas, until December 21, when the balance shifts again. So we carry in us
this continual alternation of warmth and cold. But what are we doing in all this?

When we examine what we are doing, we find something extraordinarily

interesting. Let this be the human being (see drawing below).

Diagram 5
Click image for large view
 We realize from simple superficial observation that everything that enters the
human being as cold shows the tendency to go to the nerve-sense system. And today we
can point out that everything that works as cold, everything of a winter nature, works in
the building up of our head, of our nerve-sense organization. Everything of a summer
nature, everything that contains warmth, is given over to our metabolic-limb system. If
we look at our metabolic-limb system, we can see that we carry within it everything
summery. If we look at our nerve-sense functions, we can see that we carry in them
everything we receive out of the universe that is wintry. So in our head we always have
winter; in our metabolic-limb system we always have summer. And our rhythmic
system maintains the balance between the one and the other. Warmth-cold, warmth-
cold, metabolic system-head system, with a third system keeping them in balance.
Material warmth is only a result of warmth processes, and material cold the result of
cold processes. So we find a play of cosmic rhythm in the human organism. We can say
that winter in the macrocosm is the creative force in the human nerve-sense system
centered in the head. Summer in the macrocosm is the creative force in the human
metabolic-limb system.

This way of looking into the human organism is another example of the initiatic
medicine of which I spoke when I said it has a beginning in the book [Note 14] that Dr.
Wegman worked out with me. The beginning is there for what must more and more
become a part of science.

If we climb the rocks where the soil is so constituted that winter plants will grow in
it, we come to that part of the outer world that is related to the organization of the
human head. Let us suppose that we collect medicinal substances out in the world. We
want to make sure that the spiritual forces appearing in an illness that originates in the
nerve-sense system will be healed by the spirit in outer nature, so we climb very high in
the mountains to find minerals and plants and bring them down for medicines for head
illnesses. We are acting out of our creative thinking. It starts our legs moving toward
things we must find in the earth that correspond to our medical needs. The right
thoughts — and they come out of the cosmos — must impel us all the way to concrete
deeds. These thoughts can stir us without our knowledge. People, say, who work in an
office — they also have thoughts, at least they sometimes have them — now they are
impelled by some instinct to go off on all sorts of hikes. Only they don't know the real
reason — but that doesn't matter. It only becomes important if one observes such
people from a physician's or a priest's standpoint. But a true view of the world also
gives one inspiration for what one has to do in detail.

Now again, if we have to do with illnesses in the metabolic-limb system, we look for
low-growing plants and for minerals in the soil. We look for what occurs as sediment,
not for what grows above the earth in crystal form. Then we get the kind of mineral and
plant remedies we need. That is how observation of the connection between processes
in the macrocosm and processes in man lead one from pathology to therapy.

These connections must again be clearly understood. In olden times people knew
them well. Hippocrates was really a latecomer as far as ancient medicine is concerned.
But if you read a little of what he is supposed to have written, of what at any rate still
preserved his spirit, you will find this viewpoint throughout. All through his writings
you will find that the concrete details relate to broad knowledge and observation such
as we have been presenting. In later times, such things were no longer of any interest.
People came more and more to mere abstract, intellectual thinking and to an external
observation of nature that led to mere experimentation. We must find the way back
again to what was once vision of the relation between the human being and the world.

We live as human beings on the earth between our ego and our physical body,
between breathing and the Platonic year. With our breathing we have a direct relation
to the day. What do we relate to with our physical body? How do we relate physically to
the Platonic year? There we relate to totally external conditions in the evolution of large
natural processes — for instance, to climatic changes. In the course of the large natural
processes human beings change their form, so that, for instance, successive racial forms
appear, and so forth. We relate qualitatively to what happens in the shorter external
changes, to what successive years and days bring us. In short, we evolve as human
beings between these two farthest boundaries. But in between we can be free, because
in between, even in the macrocosm, a remarkable element intervenes.

One can be lost in wonder in pondering over this rhythm of 25,920 years. One is
awed by what happens between the universe and the human being. And as one
contemplates all this, one realizes that the whole world — including the human being —
is ordered according to measure, number, and weight. Everything is wonderfully
ordered — but it all happens to be human calculation! And at important moments when
we are explaining a calculation — even though it is correct — we always have to add that
curious word “approximately.” For our human calculation never comes out exactly
right. It is all absolutely logical; order and reason are in everything, they are alive and
active, everything “works,” as we say. And yet there is something in all of it, something
in the universe that is completely irrational. Something is there so that however
profound our awe may be, even as initiates, when we go for an afternoon walk we still
take an umbrella along. We take an umbrella because something could happen that is
irrational. Something can appear in the life of the universe that simply “doesn't come
out right” when numbers are applied to it. And so one has had to invent leap years,
intercalary months, all kinds of things. Such things have always had to be used for the
fixing of time. What is offered by a well-developed astronomy that has deepened into
astrology and astrosophy (for one can think of it in that way) is all destroyed for
immediate use by meteorology. This latter has not attained the rank of a rational
science; [This lecture was given in 1924.] it is more or less permeated by vision, and will be,
more and more. It takes an entirely different path; it consists of what is left over by the
other sciences. Modern astronomy itself lives only in names; it is really nothing more
than a system for giving names to stars. That is why even Serenissimus came to the end
of his knowledge when newly found stars had to have names. He would visit the
observatories in his country and let them show him various stars through the telescope,
then after seeing everything he would say, “Yes, I know all that — but how you know
what that star's name is, that very distant star, that's what I don't understand.” Yes, of
course it's obvious, the standpoint you've adopted at this moment when you laugh at
Serenissimus. But there's another standpoint: one could laugh at the astronomers. I'd
rather you'd laugh at the astronomers, because there's something very strange going on
in the world as it evolves.

If you want to inquire into the old way of naming things, Saturn and so forth, you
should think back to our speech course, [Note 15] and recall that in olden times names
were given from the feeling the astrologers and astrosophers had for the sound of some
particular star. All the old star names were God-given, spirit-given. The stars were
asked what their names were, because the tone of the star was always perceived and its
name was then given accordingly. Now, indeed, you come to a certain boundary line in
the development of astrosophy and astrology. Earlier they had to get the names from
heaven. When you come to more recent times when the great discoveries were made,
for instance, of the “little fellows” (Sternwichten), then everything is mixed up. One is
called Andromeda, another has another Greek name. Everything is mixed up in high-
handed fashion. One can't think that Neptune and Uranus are as truly characterized by
their names as Saturn was. Now there is only human arbitrariness. And Serenissimus
made one mistake. He believed the astronomers were carrying on their work similarly
to the ancient astrosophers. But this was not so. They possessed only a narrow human
knowledge, while the knowledge of the astrosophers of olden times, and astrologers of
still older times, came directly out of humanity's intercourse with the gods. However, if
today one would return from astronomy to astrology or astrosophy, and thereby have a
macrocosm to live in that is rational throughout, then one would reach Sophia. Then
one would find too that within this rationality and Sophia-wisdom meteoronomy,
meteorology, and meteorosophy are the things that “don't come out right” by our
human calculation, and one can only question them at their pleasure! That's another
variety of Lady! In ordinary everyday life, one calls a lady capricious. And the
meteorological Lady is capricious all the way from rainshowers to comets. But as one
gradually advances from meteorology to meteorosophy one discovers the finer
attributes of this world queen, attributes that do not come merely from caprice or
cosmic emotion, but from the Lady's warm heart. But nothing will be accomplished
unless in contrast to all the arithmetic, all the thinking, all that can be calculated
rationally one acquires a direct acquaintance with the beings of the cosmos and learns
to know them as they are. They are there; they do show themselves — shyly perhaps at
first, for they are not obtrusive. With calculations one can go further and further, but
then one is getting further and further away from the true nature of the world. For one
is only reaching deeds from the past.

If one advances from ordinary calculation to the calculating of rhythms as it was in

astrology for the harmony of the spheres, one goes on from the calculating of rhythms
to a view of the organization of the world in numbers, as we find them in astrosophy.
On the other hand one finds that the ruling world beings are rather shy. They do not
appear at once. First they only present a kind of Akasha photography, and one is not
sure of its source. One has the whole world to look at, but only in photographs
displayed in various parts of the cosmic ether. And one does not know where they come
from.

Then inspiration begins. Beings come out of the pictures and make themselves
known. We move out of “-nomy” - but just to “-logy.” Only when we push through all
the way to intuition does the being itself follow from inspiration and we come to
Sophia. But this is a path of personal development that requires the effort of the whole
human being. The whole human being must become acquainted with such a Lady, who
hides behind meteorology — in wind and weather, moon and sun insofar as they
intervene in the elements. Not just the head can be engaged as in “-logy,” but the whole
human being is needed.

Already there is a possibility of taking the wrong path in this endeavor. You can
even come to Anthroposophy through the head — by coming from anthroponomy,
which is today the supreme ruling science, to anthropology. There you just have
rationality, nothing more. But rationality is not alive. It describes only the traces, the
footprints, of life and it gives one no impulse to investigate details. Yet life really
consists of details and of the irrational element. What your head has grasped, you have
to take down into the whole human being, and then with the whole human being
progress from “-nomy” to “-logy,” finally to “-sophy,” which is Sophia.

We must have a feeling for all this if we want to enliven theology on the one side and
medicine on the other through what can truly enliven them both — pastoral medicine.
But the essential thing is that first of all, at the very outset of our approach to pastoral
medicine, we learn to know the direction it should take in its observation of the world.

Pastoral Medicine
Pastoral Medicine: Lecture 11
 Schmidt Number: S-5945

On-line since: 27th March, 2008

LECTURE 11

Dear friends,
Pastoral medicine as we think of it here will only be recognized as something from
spiritual research that has meaning when humankind once more possesses a common
consciousness of a spiritual realm containing positive, active forces. For naturally in an
age that has developed materialism, it is inconceivable to the ordinary human being
that anyone could have seen something worthy of notice in the spiritual world. But this
really happened in the old mysteries. Individuals saw into spiritual realms and found
knowledge there that led to valuable cures. And what we still have to say today to round
off our studies may perhaps provide a connection to that old mystery wisdom for the
medical stream that should now emanate from the Goetheanum.

Indeed this impulse is understood most correctly in its historical connection if what
is intended here is thought of as having developed out of the research methods
(although, of course, quite different in form) and the artistic healing practices of the old
mysteries. Obviously you will have to regard what has been offered in this short course
as just a stimulus, as in a certain sense just the first chapter, the beginning of a pastoral
medicine that will develop further through the work that is still to be done here by Dr.
Wegman and me.

So first I would like to point out how the initiates in the old mysteries described
their path of initiation, particularly that path that was pursued at the place where the
mysteries were most involved in the secrets of healing. Actually all the mysteries were
connected with secrets of healing, but some more than others. They were all connected
with them because healing was regarded as related to the entire evolution of human
civilization. There were deep reasons for this. People of those ancient times said: When
the human being comes down out of spiritual worlds into the physical-earth world
through conception and birth, the soul-spiritual entity undergoes a transformation by
which it is able to form a physical human body. We have described how this
achievement takes place for the first time through the activity of the individual during
the first seven years of life. The first body had been given through heredity, the body
that in the course of the first seven or eight years is entirely stripped off.

Thus it was conceived very exactly in the ancient mysteries how one came out of
spiritual worlds into the world of the physical senses. But there was a universal
recognition that a person does not in the first place unite with the physical body in the
way that was originally intended by the spiritual powers who direct humanity. It was
always believed that through some anomaly of the general evolution the forces that a
human being inherits overpower in a certain sense the forces that are brought through
the individuality from former earth-lives. This seemed to show a lack of harmony. It
was said: If there were complete harmony between soul-and-spirit and physical body in
earthly humans, death would not have the form it now has; nor would illness come in
the way it now comes. Illness and death were regarded as the symptoms that show that
human beings indeed have more to do with the physical-earth world than they were
originally meant to. Although today this can no longer be completely understood, still it
is an extremely profound idea in which there is very much truth. For the moment one
reaches a higher level of consciousness even to a slight degree, one sees at once that
death is quite different in character. It appears as a metamorphosis rather than the end
of a phase of life.

Therefore for the entire ancient consciousness the education of the human being
was related to healing. The entire educational process in very ancient times of human
evolution was thought of primarily from a medical point of view. Connected with this
was the recognition that the mysteries united the professions of physician and priest,
both of whom should be concerned with the healing of human beings on earth. Usually
in olden times physician and priest were united in one person. This could only happen
out of the old instinctive consciousness; today it would not be possible, at least not as
an accepted custom. This recognition of the importance of healing, which was strong
even in normally healthy persons, was related for every human being to their
knowledge that after the metamorphosis they would undergo through death, they
would be guided through their life between death and rebirth on their path to the sun
by souls who on earth had been physicians or priests. The first need of every human
being after death was to find the sun path — because there they would work out part of
what they had to experience between death and rebirth. And these first steps had to be
shown to them by a physician or a priest. So it was thought in ancient times. This was
included in the deepest mystery wisdom. For us today this wisdom must be regarded
differently because the old methods are no longer suitable for us. However, at this
present time they can be renewed. Indeed that renewal is to be attempted right here.

When ancient initiates described their initiation they would say that after they had
crossed the threshold they were first made acquainted with the activity of the elements.
In olden times, “elements” was the name given to what today would be called physical
conditions. That is, the solid, which was called “earth”; all fluids, which were called
“water”; everything gaseous, which was called “air”; and everything to do with
“warmth,” which was ascribed to the warmth ether and which was called an element.
Modern physicists deny all this. For them these four elements do not exist. For them
there are from sixty to eighty elements, which have qualities. Under certain conditions
one is fluid, another solid or gaseous. The condition of warmth belongs to all. What was
described as an element in olden times does not exist today. There are now only
qualities of things; the qualities have no existence of their own. What today are called
elements are actually only “real” in the coarse, tangible physical world. And what in
olden times were called elements were understood not as reaching down into tangible
matter itself, but only to the intangible, living activity of matter.

It was of no particular importance to an ancient physician whether something was

this or that substance with this or that name. Naturally this is important, but it only
becomes so after one has first obtained full view of something else, of the living,
weaving activity of the substance. Thus one can study a substance in a place where it is
exposed to weather conditions. The ancient physicians laid great value on studying a
substance while it was being exposed to the weather, to the whole earth process. Also
they took care that they did not simply take some substance out of the mineral kingdom
if it could be obtained from the plant kingdom. In other words, they looked at the
position the substance had in the world process by virtue of its living activity. But to
understand that, one needs to accept the concept of the four elements. For then it is of
prime importance in what temperature a substance becomes earth, for instance; in
what temperature it becomes solid, or fluid, or air. That was the important thing in
olden times, to observe what world process must happen so that some substance or
other would take on a particular form. That was the first requirement. After that, the
substance was examined without restriction. Today one starts out from the substance;
formerly one started out from the process. And in fact any substance is only a process
suspended at a certain stage. Formerly people were above all concerned with the whole
weaving life within the material substance. And so initiates described how they were led
to a vision of the weaving life of matter and of how it appeared to them as a fabric
woven of the four elements. That was the first experience.

The second description everyone gave, which presented the second step for them,
was this: they were led to a place where they could learn to know the “upper and lower
gods.” What does that mean? We have already described that, but in a modern way. I
told you that if the soul-spiritual entity enters too deeply into the physical and etheric
bodies, these bodies overpower the soul-spiritual entity, creating a pathological
condition — an aberration of the soul-spiritual entity in the physical-etheric organism.
There is, then, this pathological situation, that such people have descended more
deeply into the physical organism than they should in ordinary waking life, and down
below encounter nonhuman, subnatural activity. For only when we have a normal
relation between our soul and spirit and our physical-etheric organism do we live in the
natural world. The moment we descend too deeply, too intensely into physical
corporeality, we come into relation with the subnatural. We fall to a level at which
elemental beings, beings of higher hierarchies at various stages of their development,
are all active. We come into relation with those gods who are unfolding their activity
below the level of nature.

How would ancient initiates have spoken if they had wanted to use a more neutral
expression, veiling the facts so that no one would understand them except other
initiates? How could they have implied that they had been led to the lower gods? An
ancient initiate would have said: I have learned to know the nature of human illnesses.
For that leads to the lower gods.

Now look in the other direction, at the life of the saint: this also, as I have shown
you, can be at the borderline between normal and pathological. It can happen that the
soul-spiritual entity goes out farther than it should, enhancing the sleep condition. The
ancient initiates described their introduction to this state as meeting with the upper
gods. Put schematically (see drawing), this corresponds to the facts: nature, subnature,
supernature. Visionary life, through the clairvoyant faculty that leads an individual into
the spiritual world: the initiate called this “meeting with the upper gods.”

Diagram 6
Click image for large view

Now when we speak of upper and lower gods someone can very easily entertain the
false idea that it concerns rank. You must think of it in this way: if I simply say nature,
subnature, supernature, illness, visionary life, then I am tempted to think of the lower
gods as being of a lower order. But that is not true. In reality it is like the drawing
below.

Imagine we have nature; then above, it leads to a circle; below, it leads to a circle;
and what is above joins what is below. If we draw the circle larger and larger, and
continue to draw it larger, we finally get a straight line. A piece of circle that continues
on, after it has gone into infinity, comes back from the other side. This shows that the
terms “upper” and “lower” are not to be understood as signs of rank, but simply as
different ways that the gods come to human beings. They have been thought of as
working in equal rank with one another, of striving to unite at a point in infinity.
Therefore everything in olden times that was either illness or clairvoyance was thought
to show that those who gained an understanding of those two human conditions, would
then see into the spiritual world. One way to know about the spiritual world was to
become well acquainted with illness and with clairvoyance.

Diagram 7
Click image for large view

When we understand this, we are able to bring into our own modern age what was
present in human consciousness in olden times. If we ask what can be identified in
modern consciousness with the realm of the lower gods, the answer must be — the
Being whom we call the Father when we think of the divine Trinity. The Father belongs
in the most eminent sense to subnature. How are we to think about the Father God
with truly spiritual comprehension?

Let us consider human beings, first in day-waking consciousness, then in night-

sleeping consciousness, and let us compare the two states. We know that in full waking
consciousness individuals are living as they have been placed to live within the order of
this physical world. Just as the earth has had earlier stages of evolution — Saturn, Sun,
Moon — and will undergo further evolution, so must humans themselves be recognized
as the result of those earlier evolutionary periods. In this sense they belong in their
waking state to the earth; by their nature they stand within the sphere of the earth. In
waking condition they stand on a level with nature.

It is not the same when human beings sleep. When we are asleep our physical and
etheric bodies lie on the bed, and our astral body and ego are outside them. Let us look
at the physical and etheric bodies. Of what do we consist, lying there in our physical
and etheric bodies? We have — of course, at a more advanced stage — what we received
in the old Saturn evolution and the old Sun evolution. That is now further evolved; we
have the further development of our Saturn and Sun existence now during sleep. We do
not have our Moon existence in what lies there on the bed. Nature has progressed from
Moon existence to Earth existence. And the fact that the sleep condition is essential to
us means that nature preserves in the sleeping human being a nature that is now below,
a nature that only existed during the Saturn and Sun periods. That is subnature. That
lies at the foundation of all beings through the fact that there is a human race. Humans
fall during sleep into subnature, and from this fall illnesses appear. That is the realm of
the Father God. When we sleep we enter the realm of the Father God, we enter
subnature, the realm of the Father.

Human clairvoyance helps illuminate the members of the human being that during
sleep are outside the physical and etheric bodies: that is, the ego and astral body. When
we become conscious in them, we are in the opposite condition, the opposite pole to
illness and have entered the realm of the Spirit with the astral body and ego.

So we can see that the human being is organized on earth in such a way that one is
able to go out from nature in two directions, in the direction of subnature to the Father,
and in the direction of supernature to the Spirit. Since the Mystery of Golgotha, Christ
has been the mediator for both worlds. He is the one who permeates the world of
nature, the one who permeates normal human existence. He has always to create
harmony between subnature and supernature. Subnature is always kept in balance by
the normal course of sleeping and waking. Supernature is kept in balance by those seers
who are able to return to their ordinary human life at will. If someone is unable upon
waking from sleep to balance what is experienced in subnature, then there is illness in
the physical and etheric bodies. If someone is unable to bring back into the full waking
state, into the natural course of earth-life, what is experienced clairvoyantly in the
realm of the spirit, then there are soul illnesses or spiritual illnesses. This is the other
pole.

Let us now consider physical illness. What happens when the healing process
starts? The human being is led from the experience of subnature to the experience of
nature, from the Father to Christ. For Christ is the spiritual life in nature. That is in
reality what the physician does. It is the physician's task to know how a person fallen to
subnature is brought back to Christ, after the Father has given the leadership over to
Christ the Son. That puts into modern speech what mystery wisdom would express.
After initiates have attained a Christ-consciousness here on earth, they are led on the
one side to the Father, on the other side to the Spirit. If then they are aware how their
path leads from the Father to Christ, they will find all the healing processes on this
path.

Here the modern mystery begins, the mystery that creates a great test for real
medical science. It is this to which I must point at the conclusion of this pastoral
medicine course, so that there shall flow from it what should first of all bestow healing
upon physicians. We can assume that they will gradually learn the separate healing
measures that we have shown in this course by learning which are the defective organs
and then what in outer nature corresponds to them and will work with spiritual power.
Thus we introduce spirit as the healing agent into the human body. The physicians will
learn how it is done in a given case. This will all build up for them into a complete
knowledge. This living knowledge that they attain will be different from the current
conventional knowledge. If today you open your pathology text or a medical textbook
and study it thoroughly, at the end you are no further along than you were at the
beginning. Granted, you have digested the entire contents, but even while you worked
at it chapter after chapter, still you were making no progress in your general human
attitude. It is the nature of real knowledge that it impels one to grow in one's entire
human attitude.

If you take up medicine in this sense and as it was meant in this pastoral medicine
course, you will advance step by step. And the result will be nothing less than that you
can say to yourselves: Now that I have my medical training behind me, I understand all
that transpired at the Mystery of Golgotha, up to the moment when Christ went
through the gate of death. You will understand the passage of Christ from the Father to
the death on Golgotha. That is the mystery. One may not believe at first that medicine
is related to this mystery, but it is. It is so truly related that through your understanding
of the processes of healing, you will grasp what happened in the cosmos when the
Father sent the Son to undergo the death on Golgotha. You will see in the death on
Golgotha not death but the working together of all that happened at the death. That
was not a death but the overcoming of death and the healing of all mankind. That is the
path of the physician, from Father to Son until the Son dies on Golgotha. All separate
pieces of medical knowledge bring one a step further toward the final comprehension of
this Mystery.

Pastoral medicine is not only what the pastor and the physician are to practice
together, it is what is to be brought together so that first through the physician one part
of the Mystery of Golgotha can be really understood. That is the high point, the
ultimate achievement of medicine: to comprehend all human illness in such a way that
one sees the Mystery of Golgotha up to the death as a tremendous healing process. The
pathology of evolving humanity and the therapy, the dying on the cross — these will be
seen in their true connection when we have real medicine.

The priest has to follow all that is experienced by human beings when they leave
their body and enter the other world, the world of the spirit. Thereby priests become
more and more aware of the relation of a human being to the Spirit, to the spiritus
sanctus, the Holy Spirit. And their path is that of mediation between the Spirit and the
Son, the Christ, of developing theology so it will find the way from Christ to the Spirit,
from the Spirit to Christ. A great sum of knowledge and life experience can be acquired
on this path along which one has to lead one's fellow humans from the Spirit to Christ,
from Christ to the Spirit. Its highest service must be that the successive stages of
theology are able to clarify the meaning of Christ's path after the death on Golgotha.
For his going through the death on Golgotha was the great healing event. Then the
question arises: what faculty does this healing event create in human beings that will
help them to enter the spiritual world? Theology must have for its crowning endeavor
the comprehension of what is happening to the Christ individuality since He went
through the death on Golgotha.

Christ's path to Golgotha: the peak of the physician's path.

Christ's path after Golgotha: the peak of the priest's path.

For many contemporary theologians, the two paths seem to have no connection
whatever. There are theologians today who do not want to know anything about the
risen Spirit and the further activity of the Christ. But if we speak in the sense of a
renewal of the mysteries, then the event of Golgotha, the Mystery of Golgotha belongs
to it. And then we can say that the path by which the ancient initiate came to initiation
could be described in this way: I was led through the elements to the lower and higher
gods. The modern initiate would describe it as follows: I have been led through what
dissolves the elements into their active processes — the elements are now the chemical
elements, eighty of them, that dissolve when they enter into any process — and I am led
further, to the Father below and the Spirit above. I perceive the activity of Christ on
both paths.

If you would like to take a summary of this course with you for your esoteric study,
then take these words:
(Plate VIII)

I will follow the path

That dissolves the elements into activity,
And leads me down to the Father
Who sends illness to work out karma,
And leads me up to the Spirit
Who guides the erring soul toward freedom.
 The Christ leads downward and upward,
Creating Spirit-Man in earth humanity
In harmonious union.

Ich werde gehen den Weg,

Der die Elemente in Geschehen löst
Und mich führt nach unten zum Vater
Der die Krankheit schickt zum Ausgleich des Karma
Und mich führt nach oben zum Geiste
Der die Seele in Irrtum zum Erwerb der Freiheit leitet
Christus führt nach unten und nach oben
Harmonisch Geistesmensch in Erdenmenschen zeugend.

Plate VIII
Click image for large view

When you have become completely permeated by the content of this brief
meditation, you will have taken livingly into your spirit what I wanted to give in this
Pastoral Medicine course.
 Diagram 8

Pastoral Medicine
Pastoral Medicine: Notes

On-line since: 27th March, 2008

NOTES

1. Cesare Lombroso (1836–1909), Italian anthropologist.

Wrote Genius and Insanity (1864) and The Criminal: Anthropological,
Medical and Legal Aspects (1876).
2. Rudolf Steiner, An Outline of Esoteric Science (Hudson,
N.Y.: Anthroposophic Press, 1985).
3. Pythians: priestesses of Apollo who delivered the oracles at
Delphi.
4. Teresa of Avila (1515–1582), Carmelite nun. Reformed the
Carmelite Order in association with John of the Cross. Canonized by the
Catholic Church.
5. Mechthild von Magdeburg (1210–1286?). Cistercian nun. Her
chief work was The Flowing Light of the Godhead.
6. Kali Yuga, “the Dark Age,” reckoned from 3101 B.C. to A.D. 1899
in Steiner's esoteric chronology.
7. Ferdinand Raimund (1790–1836). Viennese dramatist.
Wrote Der Alpenkönig und der Menschenfeind (“King of the Alps and
the Misanthrope,” 1828).
8. Wilhelm Preyer (1811–1897). Professor of Physiology.
Wrote Hypotheses Concerning the Origin of Life in Scientific Facts and
Problems (1880).
9. Rudolf Steiner, Autobiography (Hudson, N.Y.:
Anthroposophic Press, 1999).
10. Johannes Müller (1801–1858). Berlin physiologist.
11. Paracelsus (1493–1541). Swiss physician and alchemist.
12. “The sickest entity ...” This refers to a European expression, “the
sick man of Europe,” applied to the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth
century.
13. Hans Driesch (1867–1941). Scientist and philosopher.
14. Rudolf Steiner and Ita Wegman, Extending Practical
Medicine (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1996).
15. Rudolf Steiner, Speech and Drama (Hudson, N.Y.:
Anthroposophic Press, 1986).