All this that takes its course in rhythm is also fundamental in the human being to what appears in the larynx and adjoining organs when we are speaking. For these are inserted into the breathing process to which the rhythmic rise and fall of the cerebro-spinal fluid is also due. In the whole rhythm of breathing you can therefore insert on the one hand your active speaking and on the other hand your hearing. Then you will have a totality. It manifests intelligently in hearing and volitionally in speaking. To separate the ear and the larynx is thus an abstraction. You have no real totality, for the two belong together.

Consider what is left of the eye if I first take away the vitreous body, retina, optic nerve and cerebral connection—only the ciliary muscle, lens and aqueous humor, and cornea or outer integument. What is left would be an organ that could never compare with the ear but only with the larynx. It is a metamorphosis not of the ear but of the larynx. For just as the muscles of the larynx take hold of the vocal chords, widening or narrowing the aperture between them, so do the ciliary muscles with the lens. And now if I reinsert the retina, vitreous body and other inward instruments, I shall truly be able to relate to the ear. Thus, at one level in the human body I have the eye. In its more inward parts it is a metamorphosed ear, enveloped from without by a metamorphosed larynx. If we take larynx and ear together as a single whole, we have a metamorphosed eye upon another level.

The ear can be compared only to the part of the eye behind the lens. We can then no longer conceive as parallel, without more ado, all that goes on in the phenomena of sound on the one hand and light on the other. My seeing is fundamentally different from my hearing. When I am seeing, the same thing happens in my eye as happens when I hear and speak at the same time. In the eye we have a kind of monologue. The eye always proceeds as you would do if you were listening intently and, to understand what you were hearing, you first repeated it aloud. Etherically we are talking to ourselves when we are seeing. With hearing alone, we have but a single factor of the dual process.

Sound is already in existence, only it is outside of space—not yet in space. The conditions for it to enter space are not given until I (or some agency) make them. The outer air waves (oscillations connected with sounds) can be compared to the vacuum inside a sealed and evacuated jar, and what becomes audible can be compared to what penetrates—the vacuum from outside when the conditions have been created for this to happen. In essence the air waves have no more to do with sound than that; where they are, a process like suction has been produced to draw the sound from its nonspatial realm into the spatial. So the processes of sound have their external image in the observed processes of oscillation.

Where We Are Asleep

Steiner then reviews the discovery and development of electricity; telling how the search for an abstract, single unitary principle applicable to all "forces of nature" led to the idea that electricity traveled in "waves" the same as light was thought to do; and how these ideas about electricity had to be changed, first by giving up the "wave" theory in favor of "radiant matter"( material particles shooting through space attracted by magnetic force), then by giving up any idea that "matter" was involved in favor of the belief that electricity just "flowed." But then came the discovery of the X-ray and then of the radiations of "alpha, beta and gamma rays" from radium in metamorphosis.

The latter "rays" were said to go off in different directions, "beta" to the right, "gamma" straight ahead, and "alpha" to the left. Interestingly, all three had different velocities, that of "beta" rays being about nine-tenths that of light, while that of "alpha" only one-tenth—very striking differences of velocity!⁴⁹

Recall that the real thing in space is velocity, and then think what it signifies that one element moves nine times as fast as the other. Steiner sees the three different velocities as representing how the three different spiritual activities, the normal (the Christ), the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic, work into one another. He indicates that the scientific pathway is thus compelling even physics, though unconsciously, to go into differences of velocity in a way very similar to the way spiritual science has to do for the great all-embracing agencies of cosmic evolution. (Anthroposophy sees the deep truth of these three agencies represented by the three crucified victims on Golgotha's hill in Luke's Gospel, Lk 23,32-33,39-43; see The Burning Bush at pp. 117, 332 and 456.)

All these phenomena in the electrical domain have one property in common, namely, their relation to us differs fundamentally from our relation to the phenomena of sound or light or warmth. In light, sound and warmth we ourselves are swimming. The same cannot be said of our relation to the electrical phenomenon. We do not perceive it as a specific quality in the way we perceive light, for instance. Electricity is obliged to reveal itself by means of a phenomenon of light. (It is also interesting in that it moves closer to us through the element of fire.) But light has built in the human being the eye, sound the ear, and warmth the total organ, but for electricity there is nothing analogous. We can perceive it only indirectly.⁵⁰

Remember that we are threefold beings, of thinking, feeling and willing. We are awake in our thinking, dreaming in our feeling, and asleep in our willing (a reality we need to hold in mind as we consider the biblical meaning of "sleep"). And now remember, too, that wherever we write the formula involving m for mass, we are in fact going beyond mere arithmetic, mere movement, space and time. We are including what is no longer kinematical and corresponds to the consciousness of sleep. We must admit that our experience of light, sound and warmth belongs to a high degree to our sensory and thinking life, especially light. On the other hand, in mass we are approaching those forces that develop in us when we are sleeping. And we are going in precisely the same direction when we descend from the realm of light, sound and warmth into that of electrical phenomena. (Charts relevant to the threefold human activities include I-66, I-70 and I-80.⁵¹ )

We have no direct experience of the phenomena of our own will (cf. I-40). It is likewise with the electrical phenomena of nature. We only experience what they deliver into the realms of light, sound and warmth. Light, sound and warmth thus relate to our conscious life, while electricity and magnetism relate to our unconscious life of will.

When we go down into the realm of electrical phenomena we are entering the same realm as that of mass. When we study electricity and magnetism we are studying matter in all reality. (See again the tree of life in I-22, and the idea of the "flaming sword" of the Seraphim. ⁵² How descriptive this is of lightning, which reveals itself only through light and then fire. See also I-29, I-32 and I-27.)

In concluding his lecture on electricity and magnetism, Steiner says, "In fact our scientists have taken the first step—they only do not yet admit it—towards the overcoming of matter."

And he opens the next (Lect. 10) by saying the last three decades, i.e., 1890-1920, had in fact been revolutionary. Physics had suffered no less a loss than the concept of matter itself in its old form. The entities (like radium) that emit rays of three kinds, to begin with, alpha, beta and gamma, show different properties. Moreover the chemical element itself (radium) in sending out its radiation is transmuted into helium. We have to do no longer with stable and enduring matter but with a complete metamorphosis of phenomena. Electricity has become manifest to some extent, as a form of phenomena in the outer world, but the "ether" refuses to turn up. It was not given to nineteenth-century thinking to penetrate into the phenomena. But this is just what physics will require from now on.

What science relied upon most was that it could explain the phenomena so beautifully by means of arithmetic and geometry. But calculations have begun to fail us if applied in the same abstract way as in the old wave theory. Something of the way that theory first began is illustrated by the assumption that it can be proved that the triangle has one hundred eighty degrees as the sum of its three internal angles. The proof of this was based upon drawing parallel lines, one along the longest side and the other touching the opposite vertex. However, what we are taking for granted is that the upper line is truly parallel to the lower one, for this alone enables us to carry out the proof. But in the whole of Euclid's geometry there is no way of proving that the two lines are really parallel.

There is no guarantee that what is going on in the outer world does really work in such a way that we can fully grasp it with the Euclidean geometry that we ourselves think out. Might it not be—the facts alone can tell—that the processes outside are governed by quite another geometry? He does not here pursue this point to conclusion in the Light Course, but it is implied and actually came into the picture in the Warmth Course (in "Fire" above), and will be more fully demonstrated in the "Astronomy Course" in the illustration of the Cassini curve where Euclidean geometry fails us in that we have to "go out of space" on the line of the equation that is used (and that is incorporated into the human structure). We look at the "Astronomy Course" in the last essay herein, "What is Man?"