Three Major Steiner Works:

The human brain and spinal column can be differentiated into what is encased in the skull and the stalk or cord within the spinal canal. The fact that the animals closest to the human being have a brain and spinal cord does not prove that, in their deeper significance, they have the same task in both human and animal.

Goethe and others accurately observed that the brain looks like a transformed spinal cord. Steiner describes the mutations in the bone structures that account for this, so that the skull bones are in a certain respect reshaped vertebrae. Thus, the brain can be imagined as a differentiated spinal cord.

Which of the two, skull or vertebra, is younger? The one that shows the derived form cannot be. Rather it is the one with the original form. The spinal cord is at the original stage and is thus younger. The brain is at the second stage. The forces that built the brain are thus older forces.

When such a reformation of an organ takes place, the question arises whether the evolutionary process is progressive or retrogressive. Which is the case with the present spinal cord? If it is in a regressive stage, then it will not evolve into a brain as the brain did under the guidance of the former forces. Obviously, the former forces were progressive, for the brain actually developed. Observation discloses that the present spinal cord is in a retrogressive stage, for it proceeds downward to a point that indicates a conclusion.

The higher soul activities requiring reflection have the brain as their instrument while the more unconscious activities are directed by the spinal cord. Waking day consciousness is quite different from the chaotic phenomena of dream life, yet clearly both require our brain. In many other places Steiner shows that dream life has changed dramatically over the course of human evolution.²¹ Steiner indicates that his esoteric investigation shows that there is, inside the brain, a mysterious spinal cord that is the instrument of the dream life. It reveals what the brain once was, and the fact that we dream indicates that the brain has passed through a spinal cord stage; for the wide awake life of day is related to dream life in the same way that the perfected brain at the second stage of its evolution is related to the ancient spinal cord.

2. Human Duality

The human being comprises a duality. Initially, everything protectively enclosed within the bony structure of the brain and spinal column may be considered as a functional unit as against everything outside of them.

Leaving the brain and spinal column aside, the human being's three most important organ systems are the digestive, lymph and circulatory.

If we start with the circulatory system, we see that the heart is divided into two smaller upper chambers (atria) and two lower ones (ventricles), and that analogously it serves a duality in that its major circulation is to the lower organs and its smaller circulation is to the upper organs including the brain, while in both it carries away from the heart "red" blood and back to it "blue" blood.

The brain is inserted into the upper circulation while three particular organs of the digestive system are inserted into the lower, namely, the spleen, liver and gall bladder. A duality is presented in comparing the functions of the upper and lower in this regard. In the upper there is a working over of impressions received from the outer world. The blood flowing through it is transformed and sent back to the heart in this process. Is this in any way comparable to what occurs in the spleen, liver and gall bladder in transforming the blood that flows from the lower system back to the heart? Indeed. These three lower organs transform the nutritive substances coming in from the outside world in a manner comparable to how the brain transforms the impressions flowing in through its related senses. Both systems present a transformed outer world to the human organism.

We shall see later that these three lower organs are the compressed microcosmic offspring of three planetary forces within our solar system. Holding this understanding in our minds, it is as though the blood exposes itself like a tablet to the impressions of the outer world in the upper organism and then, in the lower organism, this compressed outer planetary world acts upon the blood from the other side of the tablet. We then have a pictorial scheme of the exterior and interior of the human organism.

Earlier I referred to I-27 showing the order in which the planets separated out from the original mass during the Earth Condition of Consciousness. Ignoring the Sun, which represents the central heart, the order was Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Moon, Venus and Mercury, the respective orbits shrinking as the Earth mass condensed (if we assign to the Moon its related Earth orbit). Now, if we examine the flow of the blood through the lower circulation we find that it follows the same order in flowing through or engaging the three organs, spleen, liver and gallbladder. Chart I-86 reflects that scheme insofar as these three organs are concerned (though it deals with a different duality insofar as what is taken in through the lungs is counterposed to the three lower organs—we shall get to that later). We shall see more fully under Lects. 4 and 5 below the individual correspondences that esotericism from of old has clairvoyantly assigned between the planetary forces and the human being's seven related organs.

A significant difference exists between what comes into the human organism from the upper circulation and what from the lower. The former relates to the conscious realm and the latter to the subconscious, in that the human being normally perceives the former but not the latter.

For now let us first note in I-14 the following correspondences:²²

The human being's blood everywhere presses upon its nervous system. And just as the nerve organs thus enter into relationship with the blood system, so do the inner soul facilities of the human's astral body enter into relationship with its Ego. Thus, in the same way that the nerve organs are the instrumentality and manifestation of the astral body, so also is the blood system the instrumentality and manifestation of the Ego.

At this point, we might plead with Steiner to let us rest from our contemplations. But he moves on in order to show us what happens physiologically when a human being is ready to move out into the spiritual world beyond its own Ego. In oversimplification, what happens between such human being's above nerve organ/blood system and astral body/Ego correspondences when steps are taken to move spiritually upward from the Ego stage to the "manna" or Spirit Self stage (see I-9)? I repeat, this is an oversimplification, and thus speaks only physiologically, with respect to what happens along the way when the spiritual path set out in How to Know Higher Worlds (HKHW) is tread (cf. Mt 7,14).

To illustrate, Steiner uses the sense of vision. Outer impressions act upon the eye, affecting the optic nerve and thus the astral body. So at the moment when the nerves and the blood interact, the parallel process takes place on the other side of the blood "tablet," and the astral body and the Ego (particularly the Sentient Soul, see I-9) mutually interact. We may use here the metaphor that when the nerve activity comes into contact with the blood the former inscribes itself in the blood, the instrument of the Ego, as on a tablet. The Ego then experiences the outer world as a result, sensing itself as independent thereof.

Next, Steiner points out that if the human being is artificially put in a condition so that the activity of the nerve is severed from the blood circulation, then they no longer act upon one another. This can be brought about when, for instance, a nerve is cut. No impression can be made (unless perhaps by external electric shock) upon the nerve, nor is the human being able to experience anything through the nerve.

But, and this is the point, there is another way of affecting the nerve in such a way that it cannot act upon the blood in this respect. This is done when a person practices the type of rigorous inner concentration discussed in HKHW to the extent that complete control over the nerve is gained, drawing it back from the course of the blood, from all external impressions and from all that the outside world brings about in the Ego. The person then has something in the soul that can have originated only in the consciousness and is the content of consciousness, and that makes a special demand upon the nerve and separates its activity then and there from its connection with the activity of the blood. Consequently whereas the nervous system had previously written its action upon the tablet of the blood, it now permits what it contains within itself as a working force to return into itself, and does not permit it to reach the blood. It is, therefore, possible purely through processes of inner concentration, to separate the blood system from the nervous system, and thereby to cause what, pictorially expressed, would otherwise have flowed into the Ego, to course back again into the nervous system.

One who does this through inward exertion of the soul has an entirely different sort of inner experience. One does not then live in the ordinary Ego nor say "I" in the same sense as before in ordinary consciousness. It is as if one had quite consciously lifted a portion of the real being out of oneself, as if something not ordinarily seen, which is supersensible and works in upon the nerves, now impresses itself neither upon the blood tablet nor upon the ordinary Ego. One feels oneself in another Ego, another self, which before this could at best be merely divined. One feels a supersensible world uplifted within. A world has opened of which the person previously had no intimation, for everything flows back again into the nervous system without going through the blood/Ego connection.

Physiologically, this is the move to the higher being, the Spirit Self (manas or manna) state, insofar as it can be experienced during the Earth Condition of Consciousness.