My inner development research Yesterday I shared a thought as to how we come to meet the forms of the outer world and also their relationship to the inner world. I used the term ‘platelets’ as for me that could describe an image for how pictures individually, like a film strip image one by one, come together in the blood wherein the “I” begins to enter into the sheaths, our super sensible bodies, meaning the ones we cannot see and also the ones that are unfolding within man. I had not met this in Rudolf Steiner’s work yet and could only speak off an experience I had many years ago during what I consider a time of Christian Initiation during my early 30s. Now out of new experiences in my spiritual research I can bring what I am meeting now to fullness within. This night unable to really sleep well I find myself at my mentor’s place of old, Cantors, and in An Occult Physiology. So I’d like to share further this picture of how it is that the ‘lower ego’ and the higher ‘ego’ or ‘I’, work together in our daily lives towards the future out of the past while in the present. One can see in this work how it could be said that Isis of old would say ‘I am the past, present and the future, no man has lifted my veil’ and how in today’s time through a training indeed the words now heard are ‘I am the past, present and future, all men must lift my veil’. In Rudolf Steiner’s work this Isis of old has come through three evolutionary periods, Theosophy, Philosophy, Anthroposophy. This is the ongoing evolution of the Being Sophia, known as Wisdom in the Bible and Shekinah in the Torah, and in our language the Soul forces of man working through the Intellectual soul, Feeling Soul, Consciousness Soul: Three in One as in the Three Marys. In the Sixth Epoch lecture Rudolf Steiner speaks of the necessity to be able to meet our daily events very consciously and calmly no matter what is taking place. Ultimately this can mean to not let oneself be taken over by suffering or stress or illness and to look it in the eye and resolve how one can best meet what is taking place in the life. This builds a force in the soul for the future meetings in the spirit evolution where the ‘gnashing’ of teeth, where we shall experience the pain and the hunger in our own being. This force in the soul works out of finding equanimity in all situations to the best of one’s ability. This force grows as we begin to expand our capacity for suffering or for the stress that can meet us in life. He shares that if we do not ‘take ourselves in hand’ in these moments that in the future we will find ourselves overwhelmed completely by the pain and hunger of the other and be taken under and away from our own strivings out of our wish to serve our fellow man in his own pain and hunger. What he shares below shows how it can be that when the upper and the lower meet and if we have not transformed or have begun to transform our own ‘I’ then there is almost this ‘blowout’ anxiety, inability to meet what seems most extreme so that we can see not only our own selves out of what is taking place but also assist our brothers. “We now find, however, through observation of the soul life attained through exercises of the soul, that in the moment when we have developed our soul life far enough to be able to store up mental pictures in the memory we are not working with our soul experiences only in our ego. We first confront the outside world with our ego, take impressions from it into our ego, and work these over in our astral body. But, were we to work them over only in the astral body, we should straightaway forget them. When we draw conclusions we are at work in our astral bodies; but when we fix impressions within us so firmly that, after some little time has passed, or indeed after only a few minutes, we can again recall them, we have impressed upon our ether body these impressions received through our ego and worked over in our astral body. In these memory pictures, accordingly, we have drawn out of our ego down into our ether body that which we have lived over inwardly as activity of soul in our contact with the outer world. Now, if we have something which impresses upon the ether body our memory pictures taken, as it were, from the soul, and if from the other side we recognize the ether body as that super sensible expression of our organism which is nearest to the physical, the question then arises: How does this imprinting come about? In other words, when the human being works over external impressions, makes them into memory pictures, and in doing so thrusts them into his ether body, how does it happen that he does actually bring down into the ether body what the astral body has first worked over and what now presses against the ether body? How does he transfer it? This transfer takes place in a very remarkable way. If we observe the blood – let us now imagine ourselves within the human ether body – quite schematically as it courses through the heart, and think of it as the external physical expression of the human ego, we thereby see how this ego works, how it receives impressions corresponding with the outer world and condenses these to memory pictures. We see, furthermore, not only that our blood is active in this process, but also that, throughout its course, especially in the upward direction, somewhat less in the downward, it stirs up the ether body, so that we see currents developing everywhere in the ether body, taking a very definite course, as if they would join the blood flowing upward form the heart and to up to the head. And in the head these currents come together, in about the same way, to use a comparison belonging to the external world, as do currents of electricity when they rush toward a point which is opposed by another point, so as to neutralize the positive and the negative. When we observe with a soul trained in occult methods, we see at this point ether forces compressed as if under a very powerful tension, those ether forces which are called forth through the impressions that now desire to become definite concepts, memory pictures, and to stamp themselves upon the ether body. I shall, therefore, draw here the last out-streamings of these ether-currents, as they flow up toward, the brain, and show their crowding together somewhat as this would actually appear. We see here a very powerful tension which concentrates at one point, and announces: “I will now enter into the ether-body!” just as when positive and negative electricity are impelled to neutralise each other. We then see how, in opposition to these, other currents flow from that portion of the ether-body which belongs to the rest of the bodily organisation. These currents go out for the most part from the lower part of the breast, but also from the lymph vessels and other organs, and come together in such a way that they oppose these other currents. Thus we have in the brain, whenever a memory-picture wishes to form itself, two ether-currents, one coming from below and one from above, which oppose each other under the greatest possible tension, just as two electric currents oppose each other. If a balance is brought about between these two currents, then a concept has become a memory-picture and has incorporated itself in the ether-body. Such super-sensible currents in the human organism always express themselves by creating for themselves also a physical sense-organ, which we must first look upon as a sense-manifestation. Thus we have within us an organ, situated in the centre of the brain, which is the physical sense-expression for that which wishes to take the form of a memory-picture; and opposite to this is situated still another organ in the brain. These two organs in the human brain are the physical-sensible expression of the two currents in the human ether-body; they are, one might say, something like the ultimate indication of the fact that there are such currents in the ether-body. These currents condense themselves with such force that they seize the human bodily substance and consolidate it into these organs. We thus actually get an impression of bright etheric light-currents streaming across from the one to the other of these organs, and pouring themselves out over the human ether-body. These organs are actually present in the human organism. One of them is the pineal gland; the other, the so-called pituitary body: the “epiphysis” and the “hypophysis” respectively. We have here, at a definite point in the human physical organism, the external physical expression of the co-operation of soul and body!” Rudolf Steiner Man’s Inner Cosmic System March 23, 1911
Posted on: Wed, 15 Oct 2014 14:04:28 +0000
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