7. The Conscious Life of the Human Being

This lecture presents a dizzying array of dualities, or polar opposites. Most all that have previously been suggested are included along with many others. Together they form a pyramidal base, so to speak, from which Steiner works upward to a summit. That summit is the blood.

The blood embodies within its own nature all of the dualities. It serves as the meeting point for their larger counterparts that work inward from opposite directions within the human organism. And that organism itself reflects the same duality for it represents the embodied meeting place of the sensible and supersensible worlds.

The lecture culminates by illustrating that only in knowing these things can therapeutic treatment be administered to address a disease-causing imbalance somewhere in this maze.

For example, as Steiner points out, one of the most common and serious human ailments is hypertension (high blood pressure), for which doctors almost universally recommend reduction of salt intake. No simple explanation is given for why salt must be reduced in these cases, nor can any be given that is applicable in all cases. However, he does show certain phenomena that would seem to bear on the matter, but in ways that vary widely from person to person.

Let us start with a simple observation. Suppose we add salt to plain tap water that is sufficiently warm to permit full dissolution. By then allowing the water to cool, we note that the salt crystallizes. We may thus say that the cooling process is salt producing, in this sense.

He then looks at the three human activities, thinking, feeling and willing (related to the human nervous, circulatory and metabolic systems). Pure thinking (independent of the senses, as in mathematics) is a cold process, feeling is intermediate, and willing (which includes the limbs) is hot. Blood is fairly high in saline solution. Thus, pure thinking, a cold process, is a salt-producing process, meaning that there is crystallization and thus less salt in the blood solution. Steiner points out that sleep, so essential to one's daytime consciousness (which, as the polar opposite, can be maintained only so long without sleep), dissolves again the crystals. But we must surmise that willing (e.g., exercise), a hot process, also dissolves the salt crystals. And presumably excess crystallization is periodically carried off in the excretory system (sweat or other eliminative processes) so that under certain circumstances salt intake must even be increased to maintain balance in the blood. Whether one must increase or reduce salt intake must surely thus depend upon the interaction of these factors.

But what is also fascinating is how the salt-producing process of pure thinking is the balancing polarity with our bony skeletal system. For as previously explained, our Ego (I Am), which finds its home in our blood, has less effect upon our bones than upon any other part of our body. Our Ego represents pure consciousness, and thinking is life's most conscious activity. But this thinking produces salt deposits, essentially the same thing as our bones. Steiner points out that our bones consist of phosphate of lime and calcium carbonate, that is, salt-deposits.

But our fascination is not yet complete at this point. For what we then notice is that it is the contrast (the duality/polarity) of the Ego's activity during earthly life on the one hand (i.e., the consciousness of pure brain thinking) that produces salt deposits, while it is the Ego's activity between lives on the other hand that builds up the bony system, composed largely of salt-deposits, over which the earthly Ego has very little control. Consequently, as Steiner asserted in Lect. 6, the human skeleton, particularly the configuration of the skull (the thinking arena) is proof of reincarnation, of the activity of the Ego consciousness before birth corresponding to the supreme exercise of that Ego consciousness (in pure thinking) during earthly life.³²

8. The Human Form and Its Coordination of Forces

This lecture seems to be primarily one of pulling together what has been said before. For that reason, it will not be further dealt with here.

1. Four Essential Moods of Soul

Four moods of soul are essential if one is to progress on the path to clairvoyance:

(a) Wonder
(b) Veneration/reverence
(c) Feeling oneself in wisdom-filled harmony with the laws of the world
(d) Devotion/self-surrender

2. Human Thinking Contrasted with Divine Thinking³³

Contrast human thinking with divine thinking. When divine thinking thinks correctly, something happens. When it thinks falsely, something is destroyed—annihilated. What follows when this correct thinking is combined with will is Creative Word (Jn 1,1). But when this thinking is incorrect, there is destruction. Consider what happened to the spiritual light of Lucifer as a result of his falsity.³⁴ Carry these thoughts over into Lects. 3 and 4, especially 4.

3. Four Imbalances in the Human Being

Four imbalances in the human being resulting from Luciferic influence are:

(a) Preponderance of physical body over etheric body (the sense world)
(b) Preponderance of etheric body over astral body (the whole feeling of the body)
(c) Preponderance of astral body over etheric body (normal bodily organic processes)
(d) Preponderance of Ego over astral body

Lucifer and Ahriman meet at (b). The order of occurrence in the evolution of the human being is reversed from above; thus (d) came first.