Human breathing

With the process of cosmic breathing, applied to the human being, is meant 'all Man takes in' and this is not just inhaling and exhaling air into our lungs, but also the higher ethers, and everything we take in through our senses, see Process of perception.

In the interchange of carbon and oxygen we have a continuous interplay of the astral and the etheric (1921-04-13-GA313), Man continuously takes in astral and etheric streams, and the higher ethers are carried by the warmth that Man breathes in.

Man breathes in his 'I', see the Human 'I' (1906-10-02-GA266/1 and 1922-04-01-GA211, and FMC00.015A below).

The 'coarse' physical process of breathing air through the lungs is therefore a carrier of the life forces and the rhythms in Man's bodily structures. Through the breathing the astral-etheric streams get into the heart's two blood circuits through the lungs (see also Ganganda Greida).

As a result, a wide range of breathing techniques exist in all cultures as part of mindfullness, meditation, and initiation exercises.

Aspects

• in the spiritual scientific physiology of Man as a threefold being, the breathing process is part of the rhythmic subsystem
• Process of cosmic breathing:
  • Breathing is not only a physical oxygen process but also an astral-etheric process through which the human being is connected to cosmic streams. In other words, it is a process of warmth ether exchange .. on which are carried the light, sound and life ethers. These are again connected to the sum of what flows through all the human senses. (1924-09-14-GA318, See FMC00.015A below).
  • in-breathing: the air that is breathed in contains all kinds of substances in a state of exceedingly fine distribution, the latter have the tendency to assume floating ether-forms (just as mineral chrystals form shapes) that are of gigantic size and resemble the shapes of the human inner organs. In the first and second cultural ages there was deep knowledge about these related to the process of in-breathing these ether forms and the corresponding finely dissolved substances. (1922-09-22-GA216)
  • out-breathing: before exhalation (of carbon with carbonic acid) occurs, carbon becomes the benefactor of human nature as it "disperses through it an out-streaming of ether. In the process of exhalation something of the carbon taken up by the oxygen is left behind in his whole organism, namely ether. This ether penetrates into Man's etheric body, and it is this ether, continually being produced by the carbon, which makes the human organization capable of opening itself to spiritual influences, of absorbing astral-etheric forces from the cosmos which then in their turn work formatively upon Man and a.o. continuously permeate our senses (1923-11-09-GA230; see Working of substances and their forces#1923-11-09-GA230)
  • Man draws the substances he needs from the cosmos into his organism, they are present in the cosmos in a state of fine distribution For example Man does not only take in the iron with his breathing; it also makes its way into the body through the eyes and ears. (1924-01-19-GA352)
• In-breathing relates to past incarnation and karmic stream, out-breathing to future
  • out-breathing is different for every person (and related to the form of the head) and gives a picture of what took place in the soul between the last death and this birth; while in-breathing gives a picture of what will operate in and around the soul between death and the next conception or birth (1918-06-25-GA181)
  • finer inhalation carries karmic streams: The spirit of the sun is the substance of the finer breathing as the sun-being streams into us with every sense perception - the sun is a receptacle of past karma. The Moon works in the lymph and place in the organism where everything is alive and active that has not yet been drawn into the blood, this is where there is outgoing karma. (1924-09-15-GA318)
• oxygen being added through the lungs to the blood circuit, see the oxygen-rich and carbon-rich circuits passing through the organs on Schema FMC00.157 on The heart's two blood circuits
• Man's breathing contains elementals reflecting his moral or immoral behaviour that can be seen clairvoyantly in the etheric-astral content of his steamy breath. This will give rise to the beings on Future Jupiter (1915-01-03-GA275)
  • related: see study of 'sensitive flames' in the section on etheric formative forces, see Hints of future etheric force technology
  • to make the link, use Schema FMC00.473 and elementals

Physiological aspects underlying consciousness

• Rhythm of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) - through the breathing, Man is forever living in a rhythmic, downward-and-upward, upward-and-downward undulation of the cerebrospinal fluid (1919-12-30-GA320, 1922-05-15-GA212)
  • When we breathe-out the air we push our diaphragm upward which brings a relief of tension for the organic system beneath the diaphragm, and the cerebrospinal fluid in which the brain is swimming is driven downward. The CSF is like a somewhat condensed modification of the out-breathed air which brings about the process. It can imagined like the astral imprinting on the etheric.
  • When we breathe-in again, the cerebrospinal fluid is driven upward.
• the breathing rhythm as related to consciousness: our breathing induces a rhythmic wave of the brain in the brain fluid (1916-05-16-GA167, 1921-06-26-GA205 - more also on 1911-03-24-GA128)
  • when we breathe in, we lift up the diaphragm (which presses on the whole vein and ganglian system), the liquid gathered in the spinal canal is pushed up and rises into the brain, where the brain-fluid rises up
  • when we breathe out, the diaphragm goes down and the fluid descends out of the brain into the spinal column, in the brain the brain-fluid sinks down.
  • imaginations are always flowing into the human being, but it is the solid mineral permeated brain that opposes itself to this, and through the beating up of the solid brain mass on the brain fluid substance, you have an extraction out of the imagination of our conscious ideas. In waking consciousness there is a suppression of the consciousness of astral imaginations by our physical brain, as these are toned over by our waking concepts, just a strong light overpowers this week light.

Rhythm of breathing

• Equivalence of 18 breaths/min in microcosmic man with 18y lunar nutation period in macrocosmos (see also Eighteen year rhythm)
• 4:1 ratio between heart pulse and breathing rhythm
• Breath is basis for speaking (see topic page speech) and feeling, see also: rhythmic subsystem for the Greek hexameter

Breathing techniques

• As part of the initiation process
  1. Evolution of how it was for indian yogis - see pranayama
  2. Conscious breathing - see Initiation exercises#Conscious breathing and pore breathing
  3. Rhythmic process in rosecrucian path
  4. breathing not air but the prana flows of etheric life energy in kriya yoga
• breathing techniques
  • mindful breathing
  • breathwork such as Tummo and the Wim Hof method (WHM)

Evolutionary aspects

• in the first and second cultural ages (approx -8000 to -3000 BC, the process of in-breathing was extremely important: yoga breathing was a conscious process of perception. Through the process of in-breathing, spiritual Moon-beings were drawn into the human being, allowing stimulation of their activity in Man (1922-09-22-GA216)
• in the first cultural ages, the in-breathing was much more important and deeper than the out-breathing .. this evolved and by the third Greco-Latin cultural age, in-breathing and out-breathing became equally important ( 1922-09-22-GA216, see Rhythmic subsystem#Hexameter)

.

Inspirational quotes

1908-01-16-GA266

When inhaling, the forces of the human 'I' become active that connect Man with the powers of the universe, the forces that radiate outward from the heart .. and exhaling and holding the breath, those forces of the "I" become active, which push toward the middle point and create a solid center in the heart.

1921-04-13-GA313

The process of breathing that takes place between the outer world and the inner world cannot be understood at all without recourse to an understanding of the astral. In the interchange of carbon and oxygen we have a continuous interplay of the astral and the etheric.

1921-06-26-GA205

.. thought rides on the breath, which is transmitted to the cerebrospinal fluid, and this fluid in which the brain floats transmits the rhythmical beat of the breath directly to the brain. ... in this I-becoming/merging-with-the-world lies in essence what is expressed in the breathing rhythm.

Illustrations

FMC00.015 simply depicts the human breathing process, and shows that the regular air breathing is superimposed with a finer breathing of the higher ethers. Below in amber: breathing in air through the longs, above that in purple: the cosmic breathing process in terms of astral-etheric flows.

The exhalation of the upper (purple) 'fine breathing' (through which we take the higher ethers into our body via sense perception and the sense-nerve system) takes place through the nerve system into the lungs, and thus makes its way into the blood stream.

Notes:

• for the role of carbon (left behind in the body from the air breathed in) as a carrier for the ether, see 1923-11-09-GA230.
• in alchemy, warmth+air <-> sulphur and corresponds to the process of the light ether.
  

FMC00.015A shows threefold Man and how the three main intake processes lie at the basis of Thinking, Feeling and Willing (TFW). It shows also how the subsystem processes are linked (green arrows), and how at each stage part of the etheric flows is stopped et the exhalation stage (red line).

Furthermore the schema allows to contemplate Man: an integrated view with the matrix linkeage between fourfold Man (above, re: the four elements) and the Man as a threefold being (below, with three subsystems).

FMC00.463 shows the regular process of cosmic or fine breathing through the nadis or energy channels ida and pingala (see Schema FMC00.096), and through the reservoir of life energy in Man's base or root chakra (see also kundalini, eg Schema FMC00.353 on that page). Compare with the flow of the higher ethers ('life energy') on FMC00.015A above, showing how the organs and subsystems take up these energies as part of the fine breathing process. Diagram contents based on Shelly Trimmer.

The chandra chakra (moon) is also called 'mouth of God' and is like an antenna through which we draw in the life energy from the universe.

See also Etherization of blood for the two sun and moon chakras, (referenced by Rudolf Steiner through the pineal and pituitary glands), and The two etheric streams for the polarity of Moon and Sun influences.

FMC00.419 is an illustration from the lecture by Karl König where his description refers to the 1924-09-14-GA318 lecture (left), and also describes the flows in terms of chemical elements (right) and glands in the subsystems of Man.

Lecture coverage and references

1906-05-06-GA266

see also in another context: Kundalini#1906-05-06-GA266

A Man is always destroying living things. He kills when he breathes. No living creature could exist on earth if only men who exhale carbon dioxide lived on it. The gas that a man exhales pollutes the atmosphere. It is lethal for all living things. Plants exhale oxygen and thereby enable live things to exist.

[Old Moon]

When the Earth was still at the Old Moon stage there was no human kingdom such as the one we have. The whole Old Moon was a kind of a plant being like a peat bog, soft and alive. The beings who are now men developed out of this plant-mineral Earth. This plant porridge also contained present plants and animals. There was an intermediate kingdom between these two: animal-plants had sensation. There was a plant kingdom on Old Moon, higher than the present mineral kingdom, an animal-plant kingdom of sentient plants, and a kingdom of man-animals, higher than the present animal kingdom and lower than the present human kingdom.

Creatures on this Old Moon mainly lived in a nitrogen atmosphere. The Old Moon was surrounded by it, and it perished from an excess of nitrogen. The mushrooms that now still live on a more plantlike soil are remnants of the animal-plant kingdom that was present on old Moon. Since they contain much nitrogen they're not good for occult development. Parasitic mistletoe is another remnant of that kingdom.

After Old Moon had perished from its atmosphere everything went through a pralaya, re-emerged, and present earth evolution began. Then after awhile everything that wasn't favorable for further evolution split off and formed the present moon. Other kingdoms developed out of the Old Moon kingdoms on earth. So that present plants could arise, one part of the plant-mineral kingdom had to be pushed down a stage, and the present mineral kingdom gradually arose through consolidation and hardening of the same. Men had not been able to perceive the world objectively on Old Moon, but now that the plant-mineral kingdom had descended and the present mineral kingdom formed gradually it became objectively visible. It was only through the solidification that it could now reflect light and there was a world that became visible for physical eyes. This is what the biblical story about the creation of light refers to. All heavenly bodies that can be seen in a telescope have solidified to the mineral stage. But there are many more heavenly bodies than those we can see minerally.

Plants not only live from the mineral world, but also from the light that is reflected by the mineral kingdom. And just as plants live from this light, so men and animals live on the oxygen that plants exhale. The animal-plants of old Moon went down a step on one side and up a step on the other side. That's why animals can live from plants' oxygen. Physically oxygen is what otherwise lives in a plant as its etheric body.

Men-animals also split into two kingdoms, into the two sexes. This split gives rise to the human love that initially is still physical. Man can lift himself into the Gods' realm through this love. They lived from men's physical love just as men and animals live from the oxygen that plants emanate, and as plants live from light that's radiated back from the mineral kingdom. The nectar and ambrosia that the Gods feed on is the love of men and women. Man's ascent takes place through the overcoming of physical love, the regulation of the breathing process, and the development of kundalini light. First the overcoming of physical love. A separation of the previously unisexual man into two sexes was necessary so that the intellect could develop in man. Man was split into a higher spiritual nature and a lower animal one. It's an ascent when a man overcomes the forces of physical love and transforms them into higher, more spiritual forces through his own inner soul force.

Secondly, a man who wants to develop higher must give up the forces that he takes from plants. Man uses up the vital oxygen that plants exhale through his breathing process. The breath becomes purer through rhythmization of the breathing process and inner soul work, so that what a man exhales contains less carbon dioxide. Then the air around him isn't used up as fast, and he doesn't take away so much oxygen or vital substance from other living beings.

To attain this as much as possible Indian yogis withdraw into caves, where they breathe as little oxygen as possible. They can do that because their breath is so pure from soul work that they can live a long time without intake of outer air. The more spiritualized a man is the longer he can live in his own air and the less carbon dioxide he exhales. The breath of a materialist ruins much more air than that of an idealist. Modern materialists can't live without a continual supply of fresh air. A man out in the country brings a certain rhythm into his life through his life with nature. Thereby the air that he exhales becomes better, whereas the city air gets full of poison through men's immorality. Plants stream out pure air, oxygen. They're pure, selfless, without desire, and that's why a man feels good among plants. But a continual supply of fresh air actually has an unfavorable effect on occult development, because one thereby takes too much life from plants. An esoteric learns to control his breathing process, and thereby he can have moments when he doesn't participate in the destructive process that's brought about by breathing.

Thirdly a man learns to radiate back the light that the mineral kingdom reflects. He develops kundalini light and radiates it into the world, thereby giving light back to it — the light of the human kingdom. A man doesn't know what an important instrument he has in his organism. He knows the rest of the world better than he knows himself. He can in fact develop wonderful capacities.

[Conscious fine breathing - see: Initiation exercises#Conscious breathing]

A Man has an organ in himself that fills with air when he inhales and loses this air when he exhales. It fills up with outside air right into its finest branches on inhalation. But spirit lives in the air around us.

When a Man inhales he breathes spirit in, and when he exhales he puts some of the spirit that lives in him into the exhaled air.

The spirit develops in him ever more and also outside in the world through the rhythmicized, spirit-filled breath. The spiritual man's growth is promoted through breathing in and out. The most important thing is the spirit that a Man puts into his exhaled breath. The spirit is built up by thoughts. A Man builds up and streams out his spirit through every thought that he gives along with the exhalation.

[Evolutionary aspects of breathing]

Man didn't always have an organ to inhale air.

• Beings breathed fire instead of air on Old Moon. Just as we breathe oxygen in and out, so they breathed fire in and cold out.
• Future men will no longer breathe air. Just as a man prepares his warmth by feeding his warmth organ, the heart, with the blood circulation, through air streaming in from outside, so he will later have an inner air organ through which his organism will be supplied with what we now take in from the atmosphere. A man prepares his own warmth, that on old Moon had been directly sucked in from the environment by the beings there. A man will be able to elaborate the used up air in his interior.
• Later on he'll no longer live in an outer air. On Future Jupiter he will live in light and inhale light just as we inhale air now and inhaled warmth on Old Moon.

1906-11-30-GA097

see: Man past and future#1906-11-30-GA097

1908-01-16-GA266

for full lecture, see: Fear#1908-01-16-GA266

• When humans inhale, then the forces of the "I" become active, the forces that connect them with the powers of the universe, the forces that radiate outward from the heart.
• And when human beings exhale, and when they hold their breath, then those forces of the "I" become active, which push toward the middle point, toward the heart, and create for them there a solid center.

1915-01-03-GA275

for a longer extract, see: Future Jupiter#1915-01-03-GA275

this describes the creation of elementals that then evolve further into the next planetary stage of evolution (Schema FMC00.364)

Here the moral element corresponding to the ‘you shall’ appears to initiation science as something that hits you in the eye, spiritually, to put it rather crudely. If you look at a person — these truths which the materialistic outlook detests have to be told sometime — if you look at someone in certain temperature and weather conditions — you see this even better in horses, but we are not speaking about horses now — you will see him breathing out, and the breath becoming visible as vapour in the air.

Obviously as far as materialistic science is concerned, this breath a person exhales, disperses and dissolves and has no further significance.

But it has significance for a person who follows up the phenomena of life with initiation science, for he sees in the patterns of the breath the exact traces of the moral or immoral conduct of the person.

A person's moral or immoral behaviour can be seen in the steamy breath, and the breath of a person who is morally inclined is quite different from the breath of a person who is inclined to immorality. You know, with regard to various things in the human being, the more delicate qualities can only be seen in the more delicate parts of the etheric and astral aura. But Man's moral and immoral nature in the ordinary sense of the word is actually visible in the etheric-astral content of the steamy breath.

The physical part of it dissolves. But what is incorporated in it does not dissolve; for it contains a genie, which, in the case of steamy breath, has a physical, an etheric and an astral part, only the physical is not earthly, just watery. [editor: see Schema FMC00.473] Something that has an extremely differentiated form can be seen in this breath.

Deeds which arise out of love show something quite different from deeds which are done out of enthusiasm, a creative urge or the urge for perfection, for instance. But in every case the form in the breath reminds one of beings that do not exist on earth at all as yet. These beings are a preparation for the ones that will reach their human stage on Future Jupiter. Their forms are very changeable and will pass through further changes in the future, for these beings are the first advance shadow images of the beings who will reach the human level on Future Jupiter.

In a certain way we also owe our existence to the exhalation of the angels on Old Moon [editor: see Schema FMC00.238], and it is one of the moving experiences of spiritual life to know that Future Jupiter human beings of the future will evolve out of what we breathe out in present ages.

If we turn to the Bible with such knowledge in mind, and read the opening words, we can tell ourselves, ‘Now we begin to understand what is meant when it says that the Elohim formed earthly Man by breathing into him.’

I will confess that I would never have understood the part about the Elohim breathing the living being of Man into his mouth and nose, if I had not known beforehand that the breath of earthly human beings also contains the first germinal beginnings of the beings who will become human on Future Jupiter. But Jupiter human beings can only arise from the kind of breath that owes its existence to deeds that obey the ‘you shall’, and which are therefore moral actions.

1916-05-16-GA167

[on Old Moon]

One could also perceive the sounds of the Music of the Spheres on the Moon, the echoing and waving of the Music of the Spheres. You had these sounds outside and they continued to work down into the water. There was an apparatus in us from which our present larynx has been formed and this apparatus which had at that time harmonized sympathetically, it co-operated, it vibrated in harmony with that which was sounding in the old water. We had a certain swimming-moon brain in the old water in which all these sounds harmonized sympathetically. You can just imagine that all the Music which was weaving through the cosmic ocean would transform itself into pictures of imagination through an apparatus out of which our present larynx has developed; and these pictures of imagination would appear in Old Moon dream consciousness.

But today the Music of the Spheres is silent. Our larynx has developed which is surrounded by the lungs that which was taken up in the Moon sphere Music and our brain is now enclosed in a solid sheath. However, you have a reminder of the Old Moon situation when you know that our brain actually swims in fluid. You know, for example, that the brain has a weight of 1350 grams and if that were allowed to rest on the veins it would crush them. We already know from Archimedes' Law how the weight is lightened and therefore does not crush the veins in the brain. So you see the brain is still in the position in which it was upon Old Moon. In its present form it is an imitation except that there has been a transformation as a result of what has been developed according to the earth laws. Nevertheless the communication with the external world is still there.

When we breathe in, then we lift up the diaphragm. Now, through the fact that the diaphragm lifts itself up, it sort of presses on the whole vein system and on the ganglian system, and as a result of that, that which has gathered itself together as liquid in the spinal canal is pushed up into the brain.

Therefore

• when you breathe in, liquid rises up out of the spinal canal into the brain and
• when you breathe out the diaphragm goes down and then the fluid descends out of the brain into the spinal column.

So you see that we are continuously in connection with the wave movement which occurs in our relationship in our environment.

With every out-breathing, the brain water sinks down, with every in-breathing it rises up. You have a rising up and a descending of the brain fluid and the brain swims within that.

You have the complicated process through which man today is more now than he was upon Old Moon, who today as a human being, not as a mechanical tool, is in the position not only to have imaginations but also to be able to think. That which continually occurs in us is suppressed in the consciousness. Indeed, my dear friends, the following occurs continuously: We always have imaginations. However, they are toned over by our waking concepts, a strong light overpowers this week light. The imaginations are always there and are continuously in connection with the breathing out and the breathing in.

It is only because of the solid mineral permeated brain that it opposes itself to imagination, and through the beating up of the solid brain mass on the brain fluid substance, you have an extraction out of the imagination of our conscious ideas.

1918-06-25-GA181

To consider the breast man attentively is specially important. This part of his organism is the combined work of the forces which play their part in man's spiritual life before conception and after death between death and the next birth. What has been the soul's environment between the last death and this conception or birth, acts together with what will surround it between the next death and birth, (or conception). The two interweave. This interweaving of the two sets of forces works itself out in man's breast-organisation, and is principally noticeable in its most conspicuous activity, the process of breathing.

• Out-breathing gives a picture (here again we must use this word) of what took place in the soul between the last death and this birth; while
• in-breathing gives a picture of what will operate in and around the soul between death and the next conception or birth.

Here is a concrete fact. The procedure of ordinary anatomy and physiology is to put things down in a row: head, breast, limbs, and in the same way a collection of nerves and blood vessels. Supersensible perception discriminates between them, realising the essential differences of these members of the human form. Ordinary anatomy and physiology see merely the immediate realities.

Spiritual science sees

• in the shape of the head a picture of the deeds and feelings of the last incarnation:
• in the out-breathing, with its distinct individual form in each person (differing in each one according to the particular formation of his head) a picture of the forces surrounding the soul between the last death and rebirth;
• in the in-breathing, the forces to be met with by the soul between the present death and the next birth.
• The life of the limbs presents a picture of the next earth-life.

1919-11-30-GA194

(is called: The Ancient Yoga Culture and the New Yoga Will. The Michael Culture of the Future)

only sort extract below, see full lecture

You will remember that I have pointed to this important fact; I have pointed to it in [reference left out] where I seemingly dealt with these things in their importance for social life, but where I clearly pointed to the very necessity of finding something which the human being lays hold of within himself and which he, at the same time, recognizes as a process of the world.

We as modern human beings cannot attain this by going back to Yoga culture; that has passed. For the breathing process itself has changed. This, of course, you cannot prove clinically; but the breathing process has become a different one since the third post-Atlantean cultural age. Roughly speaking, we might say: In the third post-soul; today he breathes air. Not only our thoughts have become materialistic; reality itself has lost its soul.

I beg you, my dear friends, not to see something negligible in what I am now saying.

For just consider what it means that reality itself, in which mankind lives, has been transformed so that the air we breathe is something different from what it was four millennia ago.

Not only the consciousness of mankind has changed, oh no! there was soul in the atmosphere of the earth. The air was the soul.

This is it no longer today, or, rather, it is soul in a different way. The spiritual beings of elemental nature of whom I have spoken yesterday, they penetrate into you, they can be breathed if one practices Yoga breathing today. But that which was attainable in normal breathing three millennia ago cannot be brought back artificially. That it may be brought back is the great illusion of the Orientals. What I am stating here describes a reality. The ensouling of the air which belongs to the human being no longer exists. And therefore the beings of whom I spoke yesterday — I should like to call them the anti-Michaelic beings — are able to penetrate into the air and, through the air, into the human being, and in this way they enter into mankind, as I have described it yesterday. We are only able to drive them away if we put in the place of Yoga that which is the right thing for today. We must strive for this.

We can only strive for that which is the right thing for today if we become conscious of a much more subtle relation of man to the external world, so that in regard to our ether body something takes place which must enter our consciousness more and more, similar to the breathing process.

In the breathing process, we inhale fresh oxygen and exhale unusable carbon. A similar process takes place in all our sense perceptions.

Just think, my dear friends, that you see something — let us take a radical case — suppose you see a flame. There a process takes place that may be compared with inhalation, only it is much finer. If you then close your eyes — and you can make similar experiments with every one of your senses — you have the after-image of the flame which gradually changes — dies down, as Goethe said. Apart from the purely physical aspect, the human ether body is essentially engaged in this process of reception of the light impression and its eventual dying down. Something very significant is contained in this process: it contains the soul element which, three millennia ago, was breathed in and out with the air. And we must learn to realize the sense process, permeated by the soul element in a similar way we have realized the breathing process three millennia ago.

[Link to higher ethers]

.. this is connected with the fact that man, three millennia ago, lived in a night culture. Jehovah revealed himself through his prophets out of the dreams of the night. But we must endeavor to receive in our intimate intercourse with the world not merely sense perceptions, but also the spiritual element. It must become a certainty for us that with every ray of light, with every tone, with every sensation of heat and its dying down we enter into a soul-intercourse with the world, and this soul-intercourse must become significant for us. We can help ourselves to bring this about.

...

Just as it was self-evident for the man of the second and third pre-Christian millennium to think of the air as ensouled — so must it become self-evident for us to think of light as ensouled; we must arouse this ability in us when we consider light the general representative of sense perception. We must thoroughly do away with the habit of seeing in light that which our materialistic age is accustomed to see in it. We must entirely cease to believe that merely those vibrations emanate from the sun of which, out of the modern consciousness, physics and people in general speak.

We must become clear about the fact that the soul element penetrates through cosmic space upon the pinions of light; and we must realize, at the same time, that this was not the case in the period preceding our age.

That which approaches mankind today through light approached mankind of that former period through the air. You see here an objective difference in the earth process. Expressing this in a comprehensive concept, we may say, Air-soul-process, Light-soul-process.

This is what may be observed in the evolution of the earth. The Mystery of Golgotha signifies the transition from the one period to the other.

[editor note: this is a key statement. The transitions flips symmetrically around warmth/heat, which means: spiritualization instead of material-condensing]

...

It is a question of learning to say the following:

• there was a time prior to the Mystery of Golgotha when the earth had an atmosphere which contained the soul element that belongs to the soul of man.
• Today, the earth has an atmosphere which is devoid of this soul element. The same soul element that was previously in the air has now entered the light which embraces us from morning to evening.
• This was made possible through the fact that the Christ has united Himself with the earth.

Thus, also from the soul-spiritual aspect, air and light underwent a change in the course of the Earth evolution.

..it is a childish presentation that describes air and light in the same manner, purely materially, throughout the millennia in which Earth evolution unfolded. Air and light have changed inwardly. We live in an atmosphere and in a light sphere that are different from those in which our souls lived in previous earthly incarnations.

1922-04-01-GA211

is called: 'Investigating and formulating the cosmic word in inhalation and exhalation'

1922-05-27-GA212

Synopsis includes:

• The Yogi combined breathing and thinking into one process, thus obtaining his higher knowledge by means of the body.
• Modern man must do the opposite: separate thinking from breathing and with pure think­ing enter into the rhythms of the external world. All modern exercises in meditation aim at separating thinking from breathing (plant exercise in Knowledge of Higher Worlds).

1922-09-22-GA216

In the age of which I am speaking now (editor: Old Indian and Old Persian cultural age, so -8000 to -3000 BC, millennia before the Egyptian and Chaldean cultures), the process of inbreathing was extremely important.

The fact that through the exercises of Yoga, breathing became a conscious process, a process of perception, indicates the significance of the part played by breathing in those ancient times.

But the process of inbreathing was more important then than that of out-breathing.

[not just breathing air]

We do not realise today that besides, shall I say, the coarse inhaled with the air, all kinds of substances are present, but in a state of exceedingly delicate, fine distribution. Those substances, too, which in present earth-existence are in the solid, mineral condition, are contained in the air in fine, delicate distribution, and the human being breathes them in.

Now the peculiarity of these substances in their state of fine distribution through the air, is that they have the tendency to assume forms and shapes. Earthly substances too, of course, assume the forms we know as the mineral crystals. I am not here referring to the crystals but to substances finely distributed in the air, or one might also say, in the air-ether, inasmuch as this plays through the air.

These substances, too, build forms — forms that do not resemble those of the minerals but of the organs in man. This is a peculiarity of the ether, which pervades the air. When we can observe this ether with imaginative knowledge, we see within it floating forms, delicate ether-forms with the shape of lung, or liver, or stomach — at any rate, shapes of the inner organs of man. With trained etheric sight all these forms can be observed in the cosmic ether. In comparison with our physical organs, however, these cosmic forms are usually of gigantic dimensions. We see gigantic ether-forms, with the shapes of liver, lung, and so on, interpenetrating the cosmic space around us.

These forms, floating as it were in space, are breathed in by man — and it is good that this happens. For as man inbreathes these forms which enter into him with the air, they work beneficially and with healing effect upon his organs. Organs, after all, deteriorate as life progresses and, to speak colloquially, they are patched up again by what is inbreathed in this way. We well know how difficult it is for therapy to restore the physical organs, but this other kind of therapy works effectively and continuously upon the human being.

[process in first two cultural ages]

In those very early ages it was possible for men, without special training and merely through their dreamlike clairvoyance, to see these ether-forms and, above all, to realise what it means when, together with the finely dissolved, pepsin-like substances in the ether, the form of the stomach, let us say, is breathed in and received by the corresponding organ in the human body. In olden times a very great deal was known about this connection with the delicate organisation of the surrounding world, and the further back we go in time, the greater was the knowledge.

This process of breathing in the ether-form was not as if air were automatically pumped into a space emptied of air. Think of an ether-form that passed into the human being through his inbreathing. Spiritual beings were active as the cosmic forms sank into him. In recent lectures, some public and some given here, we have heard about certain spiritual beings and of their significance for man. I refer to those spiritual beings who have their physical reflection in the Moon and its light: the spiritual Moon-beings. It was these Moon-beings who, in the times of which I am now speaking, were able by way of these cosmic forms to pass from the cosmos into the human being. So that in those ancient times of historical evolution, men drew the spiritual Moon-Cosmos into themselves in the process of inbreathing, stimulating the spiritual Moon-beings to activity within them

1922-12-22-GA219

is called 'Inner Processes in the Human Organism. Sense-Perception, Breathing, Sleeping, Waking, Memory'

In this lecture, Steiner explains the process of sense-perceptions as a way how the astral body is in contact with the air breathing rhythm:

• sensory perception - senses: astral body in contact with air breathing rhythm (sphere of senses – angels)
• process of breathing (sphere of breathing – archangels)
• astral body during waking&sleeping – astral body in/out -> memory effect

1922-12-23-GA348

is called 'Concerning the Soul Life in the Breathing Process'

... Man lives through the process of breathing .. if you look for the reason why he is alive, you have to consider his breathing, because the breath is related to all aspects of life. In one respect, human beings breathe just as the higher animals do, although many animals do breathe differently. A fish, for instance, breathes while swimming and living under water.

[inhaling]

If we now look at human breathing we have first to consider the process of inhalation. The breathing process is initially one of inhalation. From the air around us we inhale the oxygen that is required for our existence. This then permeates our whole body, in which carbon in minute particles is deposited; or rather, in which it swims or floats. The carbon that we contain in our bodies is also found elsewhere in nature. As a matter of fact, carbon exists in a great many forms. For instance, carbon is found in coal and in every plant, which consists of carbon, mixed with water and so on, but carbon is the main component of the plant. The graphite in a pencil contains carbon, and the diamond, which is a valuable gem, is also carbon. The diamond is transparent carbon; hard coal is opaque carbon. It is rather interesting that something like coal exists in nature. It is certainly not elegant or attractive, yet is of the same substance as a valuable gem, which, depending on its size, for example, is fit for a crown. Coal and diamonds have the same substance in different forms. We, too, have in ourselves carbon of various forms.

When we breathe in oxygen it spreads out everywhere in our body and combines with the carbon. When oxygen combines with solid coal, a new gas, carbon dioxide, arises. This is a combination of oxygen and carbon, and it is this gas that we then exhale. Our life involves incorporating our body into the rest of the world by inhaling oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide.

If we inhaled only pure oxygen, however, we would have to contain an immense amount of carbon, and the carbon dioxide would have to remain in us. Yes, we would be forever expanding, finally becoming gigantic, as big as the earth itself. Then we could always be inhaling. But we do not possess that much carbon; it must be constantly renewed. We could not survive if we only inhaled. We have to exhale to acquire carbon anew, and the carbon dioxide we produce is lethal. Indeed, if oxygen is life for us, carbon dioxide is death. If this room were now filled with carbon dioxide, we would all perish. Our life alternates between the life-giving air of inhalation and the deadly air of exhalation. Life and death are constantly within us, and it is interesting to see how they initially enter into the human being.

... [read further online]

1924-01-19-GA352

In reality, man himself produces the substances he needs, drawing them from the Cosmos into his organism. All such substances are present in the Cosmos in a state of fine and very delicate distribution — iron, for example, Man does not only take in the iron with his breathing; it also makes its way into the body through the eyes and ears. The iron that a man actually consumes is merely a support, a supplement, and most of it is subsequently excreted. If as human beings we were not obliged to live on the earth between birth and death and to cope with earthly affairs, it would be unnecessary for us to eat at all, for we could draw our sustenance from the universe. But when we have manual work to do, when we have to move about, we need the support of this extra iron, for the body itself does not produce a sufficient quantity.

1924-02-03-GA234

is called 'Respiration, warmth and the I'

1924-09-14-GA318

(read full lecture, only short excerpt here)

The term 'spiritual breathing' is used in 1912-01-01-GA134 to point out that Man's functioning is not just breathing air, but breathing and as exchange with the environment, as microcosmos in the macrocosmos, and how the times require and will necessitate the spiritual element (and not just the physical material, as is predominant in society and culture):

How can this come about?

When we come to make a deep study of the spiritual meaning of earth evolution we discover that in the time when post-Atlantean man had still something left of ancient clairvoyance, Imaginations, Inspirations and Intuitions were communicated in great abundance to the spiritual atmosphere of the earth. That was a time when spiritual substance was given forth in large measure.

Since the fourth Postatlantean age, and especially from the present day onwards, we gradually send out less and less; what falls rather to us is to receive the old substance, for it is something with which we are intimately connected; we have the task to take up again into ourselves what has been sent out.

That means it is required of Man to replace an earlier spiritual outbreathing by a spiritual inbreathing. Man must grow ever more sensitive and receptive to the spiritual that is in the world. In ancient times that was not so necessary, for men of those olden times were able to put forth from them spiritual substance, they had, so to speak, a reserve store. But this reserve of spiritual substance has been so deeply drawn upon since the fourth Postatlantean age that in future Man will, in a sense, only be able to send out what he has first absorbed, what he has first inbreathed.

In order that Man may be able to take his place with full understanding in this new task in earth existence — to this end is anthroposophy or spiritual science there in the world. When a man feels drawn to anthroposophy it is not just that it takes his fancy as one among many other things in the world that take his fancy. He is drawn to anthroposophy because it is intimately and deeply bound up with the whole of Earth evolution, intimately bound up with the task that lies immediately before Man today in evolution, namely to develop understanding for the spiritual all around him. For from the present time onwards it will be the case that those who do not develop understanding for the spirit behind the senses, for the world of the spirit behind the world of the senses, will be like men whose breathing system is so injured that they cannot take in air and they suffer from difficulty in breathing.

1924-09-15-GA318

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 I, one would never reach the sun, with the human constitution as it is at the present time. When one is in the I 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 I 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 I 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.

[Sun and finer (in)-breathing of streams of past karma]

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.

[Moon – lymph and outgoing karma]

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.

Conscious thinking and rhythm of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF)

1919-12-30-GA320

Now let us go still farther down. We experience our own state-of-warmth by swimming with it in our environment-of-warmth. When we are warmer than our environment we feel the latter as if it were drawing, sucking at us; when we are colder we feel as though it were imparting something to us. But this grows different again when we consider how we are living in yet another element. Once more then: we have the faculty of living in what really underlies the light; we swim in the element of light. Then, in the way we have been explaining, we swim in the element of warmth. But we are also able to swim in the element of air, which of course we always have within us. We human beings, after all, are to a very small extent solid bodies. More than 90% of us is just a column of water, and — what matters most in this connection — the water in us is a kind of intermediary between the airy and the solid state. Now we can also experience ourselves quite consciously in the airy element, just as we can in the element of warmth. Our consciousness descends effectively into the airy element. Even as it enters into the element of light and into the element of warmth, so too it enters into the element of air. Here again, it can “converse”, it can communicate and come to terms with what is taking place in our environment of air. It is precisely this “conversation” which finds expression in the phenomena of sound or tone. You see from this: we must distinguish between different levels in our consciousness. One level of our consciousness is the one we live with in the element of light, inasmuch as we ourselves partake in this element. Quite another level of our consciousness is the one we live with in the element of warmth, inasmuch as we ourselves, once more, are partaking in it. And yet another level of our consciousness is the one we live with in the element of air, inasmuch as we ourselves partake also in this. Our consciousness is indeed able to dive down into the gaseous or airy element. Then are we living in the airy element of our environment and are thus able to perceive the phenomena of sound and of musical tone. Even as we ourselves with our own consciousness have to partake in the phenomena of light so that we swim in the light-phenomena of our environment; and as we have to partake in the element of warmth so that we swim also in this; so too must we partake in the element of air. We must ourselves have something of the airy element within us in a differentiated form so that we may be able to perceive — when, say, a pipe, a drum or a violin is resounding — the differentiated airy element outside us. In this respect, my dear Friends, our bodily nature is indeed of the greatest interest even to outward appearance.

There is our breathing process: we breathe-in the air and breathe it out again.

• When we breathe-out the air we push our diaphragm upward. This involves a relief of tension, a relaxation, for the whole of our organic system beneath the diaphragm. In that we raise the diaphragm as we breathe-out and thus relieve the organic system beneath the diaphragm, the cerebrospinal fluid in which the brain is swimming is driven downward. Here now the cerebrospinal fluid is none other than a somewhat condensed modification, so to speak, of the air, for it is really the out-breathed air which brings about the process.
• When I breathe-in again, the cerebrospinal fluid is driven upward.

I, through my breathing, am forever living in this rhythmic, downward-and-upward, upward-and-downward undulation of the cerebrospinal fluid, which is quite clearly an image of my whole breathing process. In that my bodily organism partakes in these oscillations of the breathing process, there is an inner differentiation, enabling me to perceive and experience the airy element in consciousness. Indeed by virtue of this process, of which admittedly I have been giving only a rather crude description, I am forever living in a rhythm-of-life which both in origin and in its further course consists in an inner differentiation of the air.

In that you breathe and bring about — not of course so crudely but in a manifold and differentiated way — this upward and downward oscillation of the rhythmic forces, there is produced within you what may itself be described as an organism of vibrations, highly complicated, forever coming into being and passing away again.

[hearing]

It is this inner organism of vibrations which in our ear we bring to bear upon what sounds towards us from without when, for example, the string of a musical instrument gives out a note. We make the one impinge upon the other. And just as when you plunge your hand into the lukewarm water you perceive the state-of-warmth of your own hand by the difference between the warmth of your hand and the warmth of the water, so too do you perceive the tone or sound by the impact and interaction of your own inner, wondrously constructed musical instrument with the sound or tone that comes to manifestation in the air outside you. The ear is in a way the bridge, by which your own inner “lyre of Apollo” finds its relation, in ever-balancing and compensating interplay, with the differentiated airy movement that comes to you from without. Such, in reality is hearing. The real process of hearing — hearing of the differentiated sound or tone — is, as you see, very far removed from the abstraction commonly presented. Something, they say, is going on in the space outside, this then affects my ear, and the effect upon my ear is perceived in some way as an effect on my subjective being. For the “subjective being” is at long last referred to — described in some kind of demonology — or rather, not described at all. We shall not get any further if we do not try to think out clearly, what is the underlying notion in this customary presentation. You simply cannot think these notions through to their conclusion, for what this school of Physics never does is to go simply into the given facts.

Thus in effect we have three stages in Man's relation to the outer world — I will describe them as the stage of Light, the stage of Warmth, and that of Tone or Sound. There is however a remarkable fact in this connection. Look open-mindedly at your relation to the element of light — your swimming in the element of light — and you will have to admit: It is only with your etheric body that you can live in what is there going on in the outer world. Not so when you are living in the element of warmth. You really live in the warmth-element of your environment with your whole bodily nature. Having thus contemplated how you live in light and warmth, look farther down — think how you live in the element of tone and sound — and you will recognize: Here you yourself are functioning as an airy body. You, as a living organism of air, live in the manifoldly formed and differentiated outer air. It is no longer the ether; it is external physical matter, namely air. Our living in the warmth-element is then a very significant border-line. Our life in the element of warmth is for our consciousness a kind of midway level — a niveau. You recognize it very clearly in the simple fact that for pure feeling and sensation you are scarcely able to distinguish outer warmth from inner warmth. Your life in the light-element however lies above this level:—

For light, you ascend as it were into a higher, into an etheric sphere, therein to live with your consciousness. On the other hand you go beneath this level, beneath this niveau, when in perceiving tone or sound you as a man-of-air converse and come to terms with the surrounding air. While upon this niveau itself (in the perceiving of warmth) you come to terms with the outer world in a comparatively simple way.

1919-12-31-GA320

But it will not seem so simple if you recall what I said recently of the whole rhythm of the ascending and descending cerebrospinal fluid and how it interacts with what is taking place more externally in the outer air.

Remember too what I was saying: a thing may look complete and self-contained when outwardly regarded, but we must not therefore take it to be a finished reality, for it need not be so at all. The rose I cut off from the shrub is no reality. It cannot be by itself. It can only come to existence by virtue of its connection with the whole rose-bush. If I think of it as a mere rose by itself, it is in truth an abstraction. I must go on to the totality — to the whole rose-bush at the very least.

too for hearing: the ear alone is no reality, though it is nearly always represented as such in this connection. What is transmitted inward through the ear must first interact in a certain way with the inner rhythm, manifested in the rise and fall of the cerebrospinal fluid. But we have still not reached the end. All this that takes its course in rhythm — and, as it were, includes the brain within its span — is also fundamental, in the real human being, to what appears in quite another part of our body, namely in the larynx and adjoining organs when we are speaking.

There is the act of speaking, — its instruments quite obviously inserted into the breathing process, to which the rhythmic rise and fall of the cerebrospinal fluid is also due.

In the whole rhythm which arises in you when you breathe, 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 only comes to manifestation in a more intelligent or perceptive way in your hearing and in a more volitional way in your speaking.

Once more, you only have a totality when you take together the more volitional element pulsating through the larynx and the more sensitive or intelligent that goes through the ear. To separate the ear on the one hand, the larynx on the other, is an abstraction; you have no real totality so long as you separate these two. The two belong together; this is a matter of fact and you need to see it. The physiological physicist or physical physiologist who studies the larynx and the ear apart from one-another proceeds as you would do if you cut up a human being so as to bring him to life instead of seeing things in living interaction.

1920-04-21-GA301

To clarify this, we can look at some part of life, say, music. The musical part of life is the best evidence (but only one among many we will encounter) of the particular relationship of feeling to the rhythmic life of the organism. The imaginative, thinking life connected with the nerve-sense organism perceives the rhythmic life connected with feeling. When we hear something musical, when we give ourselves over to a picture presented in tones, we quite obviously perceive through our senses. Those physiologists, however, who can observe in more subtle ways, notice that our breathing inwardly participates in the musical picture; how much our breathing has to do with what we experience; and how that musical picture appears as something to be aesthetically judged, something placed in the realm of art.

We need to be clear about the complicated process continuously going on within us. Let us look at our own organism.

The nerve-sense organism is centralized in the human brain in such a way that the brain is in a firm state only to a small extent. The whole brain swims in cerebrospinal fluid. We can clearly understand what occurs by noticing that if our brain did not swim in cerebrospinal fluid, it would rest upon the blood vessels at the base of our skull and continuously exert pressure upon them. Because our brain does swim in cerebrospinal fluid, it is subject to continuous upward pressure — we know this from Archimedes’ principle — so that of the 1300–1500-gram weight of the brain, only about 20 grams press upon the base of the skull. The brain is subject to a significant pressure from below, so that it presses only a little upon the base of the skull.

This cerebrospinal fluid participates in the entirety of our human experience no less than the firm part of the brain.

The cerebrospinal fluid continually moves up and down. The fluid moves up and down rhythmically from the brain through the spinal column. Then it radiates out into the abdominal cavity, where inhalation forces it back into the cerebral cavity, from whence it flows back out with exhaling. Our cerebrospinal fluid moves up and down in a continuous process that extends throughout the remainder of the organism; a continuous vibrating movement essentially fills the whole human being and is connected with breathing.

[experience of music]

When we hear a series of tones, we encounter them as breathing human beings. The cerebrospinal fluid is continuously moving up and down. When we listen to music, the inner rhythm of the liquid moving up and down encounters what occurs within our hearing organs as a result of the tones. Thus there is a continuous clash of the inner vibrating music of our breathing with what happens in the ear when listening to music. Our experience of music exists in the balance between our hearing and our rhythmic breathing. Someone who tries to connect our nerve processes directly with what occurs in our musical perception, which is filled with feeling, is on the wrong path. The nerve processes exist in musical perception only to connect it with what takes place deeper in our I, so that we can actually perceive the music and transform it into imagination.

1920-04-22-GA301

Everyone who attempts to form a picture of the human being from normal pedagogical texts or texts on psychology, who attempts to fill education with principles from natural science or psychology, ends up with the idea that a human being is just a collection of various forms. Such people would have the perspective that here we have a human organism, and within the skull there is a firm brain (or at least a semi-solid one). They would also think here are the other organs, the liver, the lungs, and so forth. If we look at things superficially or clinically, the drawings we see would convey the idea that these firmly delineated organs are the only things that exist within a human being. But remember that people consist of at least 80 percent fluid, that they are actually a column of fluid; therefore they consist of only a very small amount of something solid. Is it really possible to assume that a human being really consists only of sharply delineated individual organs? The human being is a column of fluid and is moreover filled with gases. Yet these texts describe the nervous system as more or less solid strands, or possibly as a somewhat softer solid. They have no awareness that these are in fact imbedded in liquid or even in gas, a gas that exists in the human organism in the form of vibrations or rhythmic movements.

Aside from the gaseous aspect, the human being is actually a liquid column and the brain is imbedded in cerebrospinal fluid; indeed much of the life of our organs is connected with the up-and- down motion of the cerebrospinal fluid as we inhale and exhale. If we become aware of these things, we will not ascribe parallel organic processes to spiritual and soul facts; we will not assume they are firmly delineated. Instead we will form a picture that describes how while I am thinking, while I am feeling or willing, the moving fluid portions of my organism take on certain liquid structures which again dissolve.

We need to ask ourselves why, for example, we should connect the process of thinking with some vibrations or similar processes in the nerves? Of course they are not.

Why shouldn’t they be connected with the vibrations within the liquid portion of the human being?

This is a question natural science, under the influence of our materialistic period, have not even asked.

1921-06-26-GA205

Take the following process quite concretely: you breathe in, and the air follows the well-known pathway to the lungs. In breathing in, however, the inhaled air presses upon the space containing the spinal cord and spinal fluid. This fluid surrounding the spinal cord rhythmically courses through the subarachnoid space of the brain. The cerebral fluid comes into activity, and this activity is the activity of thought.

In reality, thought rides on the breath, which is transmitted to the cerebrospinal fluid, and this fluid in which the brain floats transmits the rhythmical beat of the breath directly onto the brain.

In the brain live the impressions of the senses, the impressions of the eyes, the ears, through nerve-sense activity. The breathing rhythm comes into confrontation with what lives in the brain from the senses, and in this confrontation develops the interplay between sensation and thought activity, that formal thought activity which outwardly has its life in the animal forms. It is this thought activity, which is brought about by the breathing rhythm, transmitting itself to the cerebro-spinal fluid in the subarachnoid space, that commingles with what lives in the brain through the senses. Residing there is everything that becomes active in us in the form of ideas out of the rhythm.

What is essential .. is that you attempt gradually to penetrate into the way in which the spiritual plays into the physical world. The great cultural defect of our time is that we have a science that arrives at the spirit in abstract forms, in purely intellectual forms, whereas the spiritual must be conceived in its creative element, for otherwise the material world remains like something hard, unconquered, outside the spiritual. We must penetrate into how this element of the third and fourth lawfulnesses plays concretely into what we ourselves carry out.

It is one of the most sublime things that can become clear to us if we recognize the actual inner basis that can prevail in every breathing rhythm — what is not fulfilled but what could be fulfilled each time an inhalation plays into the cerebro-spinal fluid.

Now comes the recoil, the response: the cerebro-spinal fluid is again pressed down through the subarachnoid space of the spine, and there is an exhalation. This is a surrender once again to the world, a merging with the world.

However, in this I-becoming/merging-with-the-world lies in essence what is expressed in the breathing rhythm.

This is the way one must speak if one wishes to speak of the reality that is meant when speaking of the element of air ...

... Then what penetrates this organism so that it not only grows and is able to digest but unfolds itself continually in a rhythmical activity, in the pulse, in the breathing rhythm, comes from an extra-spatial world. We study this extra-spatial world in the air element, for that is where it reveals itself ..

1921-12-28-GA303

quote A

If we keep our images flexible and avoid becoming too simplistic by picturing the various organs in a static way — perhaps by making accurate, sharp illustrations — we are certain to be captivated by the multifarious relationships and constant interplay within these three members of the human being.

If we look at the rhythmic activity of breathing, we see

• how during inhalation the thrust is led to the cerebrospinal fluid. While receiving these breathing rhythms, this fluid passes the vibrations right up into the brain fluid, which fills the various cavities of the brain. This “lapping” against the brain, so to speak, caused by rhythmic breathing, stimulates the human being to become active in the nervous-sensory organization. The rhythms caused by the process of breathing are constantly passed on via the vertebral canal into the brain fluid. Thus the stimuli activated by breathing constantly strive toward the region of the head.

• If we look downward, we see how rhythmic breathing, in a certain sense, becomes more “pointed” and “excited” in the rhythm of the pulse and how the blood’s circulation affects the metabolism with each exhalation — that is, while the brain and cerebrospinal fluid push downward.

If we look with lively, artistically sensitive understanding at the breathing process and blood circulation, we can follow the effects of the pulsing blood upon both the nervous-sensory organization and the metabolic-limb system. We see how,

• on the one side, the processes of breathing and blood circulation reach up into the brain and the region of the head, and,
• on the other, in the opposite direction into the metabolic-limb system.

If we gradually gain a living picture of the human being in this way, we can make real progress in our research. We can form concepts that accord fully with the nature of the human central system. Such concepts must not be so simple that we can make them into diagrams; schemes and diagrams are always problematic when it comes to understanding the constant, elemental weaving and flowing of human nature.

quote B

Now, as we try to build mental images of how this rhythm between breathing and blood circulation becomes changed and transformed in the upper regions, we are led to the following idea, which I will sketch on the blackboard — not as a fixed scheme but merely as an indication (see drawing).

Let the thick line represent the mental image of some sort of rope, which will help us imagine, roughly, the processes in our breathing and blood circulation. This is one way we can get hold of what exists beyond the physical blood in a much finer and imponderable substance of the “etheric nerves.”

Now, using our imagination, we can go further by looking from the chest organization upward, feeling inwardly compelled, as it were, to “fray” our images and transform them into fine threads that interweave and form a delicate network. Thus we can grasp through mental images — turned upward and modified — something that occurs externally and physically. We find that we simply have to fray these thick cords into threads. Imagining this process, we gradually experience the white, fibrous brain substance under the grey matter. In our mental images we become as flexible as the very processes that pervade human nature.

Directing your image making in the opposite direction, downward, you will find it impossible to split up or fray your mental images into fine threads to be woven into some sort of texture, as seen externally in the nervous system; such threads simply vanish, and you lose all traces of them. Otherwise, you would be led astray into forming images that no longer correspond to external reality. If you follow the brain as it continues downward into the spinal cord through the twelve dorsal vertebrae — through the lumbar and sacral vertebrae and so on — you find that the nerve substance, which now is white on the outside and grey inside, gradually dissolves toward the region of the metabolism. Somehow it becomes impossible to imagine the nerves continuing downward. We cannot get a true and comprehensive picture of the human being unless our images are able to transform; we must keep our images flexible.

If we look upward, our mental pictures change from those we find when looking down. We can recreate in images the flexibility of human nature, and this is the beginning of an artistic activity that eventually leads researchers to what we find externally in the physical human being. So we avoid the schism caused by looking first at the outer physical world and forming abstract concepts about it. Rather, we dive right into human nature. Our concepts become lively and stay in harmony with what actually exists in the human being. There is no other way to understand the true nature of the human being, and this is an essential prerequisite in the art of education.

To know the human being, we have to become inwardly flexible, and then we can correctly discover these three members of the human organization and how they work together to create a healthy equilibrium. We will learn to recognize how a disturbance of this equilibrium leads to all kinds of illnesses and to discriminate, in a living way, between the causes of health and illness in human life. If you look at the creation of the human being with the reverence it deserves, you will not oversimplify this intricate human organization by calling it a natural unity. And, when looking at the chest region, if you imagine coarse, rope-like shapes that become more refined as you approach the region of the head, until they fray into simple threads, you begin to reach the material reality. You find your imagination confirmed outwardly by the physical nerve fibers and by the way they interweave.

1922-05-15-GA212

[introduction]

This leads to the recognition of something else that is not normally taken into account but is of great significance. The human being is usually regarded as if he were simply a phys­ical organism, a body built up of solid matter. That is just not true.

• The least part of the human body is solid, less than ten percent.
• The rest it is a water organism, an organism of liquid, so that in reality we must think of this organism built up in such a way that one tenth is solid (see drawing, white lines) and the solid saturated with water (blue lines).You only represent the human organism truly when you see it as a column of liquid in which the solid is deposited.

However, there is more to it.

• We must also picture the human organism as an organism of air. The air is outside, we breathe it in; a part of the outside air is now within us and we breathe it out again. So we are also an air organism. Let us draw that, too (red lines). It is just this air organism which is taken hold of by the astral body as we wake up. We breathe in the air, it goes through transformations the effect of which pours through the whole organism. The oxygen takes up the carbon and transforms it into carbonic acid. Thus, an air process continually takes place within us. As we wake up the air process is permeated by the astral body. The movement of the astral body follows the same path as the air through the organism. The air process con­sists solely of air when we sleep; when we are awake then the movements of the astral body, as it were, swim along within what lives in us as air processes.

But now depict to yourselves the following: the astral body draws into that which I have schematically drawn in red and carries out its movements, in fact, carries out its general activity, within the air organism. This all takes place within the watery organism, which is represented in the blue lines. When we are awake, these air processes are in reality processes of the astral body and they continually push against the watery organism.

Man's etheric body is within the watery organism both night and day. So you have simultaneously a reciprocal effect between the etheric body and the astral body, as well as between their physical counterparts which are the air pro­cesses and the water processes.

Thus, you can visualize these processes running their course within Man between his breathing and the movements of all the bodily fluids. Yet that is again merely a copy of what takes place between the astral and etheric bodies.

• The whole organism consisting of solid, fluid and air is also permeated with warmth (see drawing, yellow lines, page 38). The whole organism has its own warmth—i.e., its own warmth ether. On the gaseous waves moves astrality and in the warmth flowing through the body moves the ac­tual I of Man.

So you have the physical body as such, then the fluid body, which is also physical but differentiated from the solid physical body. The fluid physical body has an intimate con­nection with the etheric body. Then the gaseous organism which has an intimate connection with the astral body, and finally all the warmth processes—that is, the warmth ether in man, which has an intimate connection with the human I. Thus, one can say that in the various physical constituents of man we have a picture of the whole man. The solid part, so to speak, exists by itself; the fluid within the organism cannot exist by itself.

[key section]

Within the head we have very little solid and what there is swims in the cerebral fluid. Within this fluid is the etheric part of the head.

In the breathing process the following takes place:

• As we breathe in, the breath pushes inwards up through the spinal fluid towards the brain. In our waking state the astral also moves along this thrusting movement towards the etheric part of the head. We have then, on the one hand, an inter­action of the movement of the cerebral fluid with the move­ment of the breath, and, on the other, an interaction of the etheric part of the head—of which what takes place in the cerebral fluid is only an image—with the breathing process, which is again only an image of the astrality in man. We also have a continuous interplay of warmth; the movement of the blood mediates the warmth. On the waves of this sea of warmth our I also moves.

To become clear about these interactions within Man's bodily nature it is essential that we represent them vividly to ourselves. Only the solid organism can be observed by itself. The fluid organism does not have the possibility of moving in waves the way water moves in the external world. The play of movement in the fluid organism is an image of what takes place in the etheric body. Again, what takes place in the delicate processes of breathing is an image of what takes place in man's astral body. Keeping this in mind let us once more look at the cerebral fluid: within it certain movements take place copying movements of the etheric body. Man ac­quires the etheric body when he descends from spiritual worlds into the physical world. Within the spiritual world he does not yet possess it. But as man takes hold of his phys­ical body he also takes possession of his etheric body; he, as it were, draws out the ether from the cosmos. He can unite with the physical body, which he receives through heredity, only when he has drawn the ether from the cosmos. So that all that lives in the etheric body of man we bring with us when we take hold of the physical body.

The human embryo develops within the maternal body. Let us consider the fluid within the embryo. In general physiology only the solid components, or what appear to be solid components, are examined, not the fluid. Were this to be investigated it would be found that the cerebral fluid, in particular, contains an image of all that which was present already in the ether body, as the ether was drawn together, and which then slips into physical man.

If this is the physical body (see drawing) in which the physical human embryo develops—I do not draw the solid, only the fluid embryo (red lines)—then what as astral and 'I' is present descends from the spiritual world; what has been drawn together from the ether slips in (yellow lines). In fact, as he dives down into his physical body the fluid part of the organism absorbs what man brings with him. Therefore, if the movements within the cerebral fluid of the child were to be investigated they would be found to be like a photograph of what the human being had been before he united with the physical body. You see, it is very significant to realize that a photograph is to be found in the cerebral fluid, that is to say in the movements of the cerebral fluid, of what has taken place before conception.

It is fairly easy to understand that a kind of photograph of what existed before conception is to be found in the cere­bral fluid. But let us now consider the process of breathing. Breathing appears to be an out and out physical process because of the way our lungs function. Air is drawn in and, under the influence of the external world, the breathing takes place even when we are asleep—that is, even when the eternal part of our being is not united with the temporal part. Our breathing is not affected by whether we are awake or asleep. When we sleep the wave movements of the breath go through the organism; when we are awake they, in addi­tion, carry the astral body. In other words, they are able to carry the astral body but it is not incumbent on them to do so, for when we are asleep they do not.

What follows from this? It follows that the reason the cerebral fluid can carry on by itself is because it is isolated within man's inner being. It constitutes a kind of continua­tion of what existed before. On the other hand, nothing of what existed before can be continued in this intimate way within our breath. When we consider the human head we find within the cerebral fluid, that is, within the physical body itself, the actual continuation of pre-natal spiritual man; whereas when we consider the organization of the chest and the process of breathing we fmd a different situa­tion. The physical breath takes place by itself (see drawing, yellow lines); the spiritual is less strongly connected with the physical process (red lines). Therefore, one must say that in the head, spiritual man, the man of soul and spirit, is closely connected with physical man; they have become a unity. In the chest that is not the case—there the two are more apart; the physical organism is more by itself and so, too, the soul-spiritual.

Let us now compare this with the state of dreaming. When we dream the I and astral body are outside, they are separated from the sleeping body. However, for the chest man, that is to some extent always the case. The chest man—that is, the man of breath and heart, in short, rhythmic man —is the organism for feeling. Feelings run their course like dreams because the soul-spiritual is not so firmly connected with the physical organism, is not so completely within physical man. So you see, if one wants to consider the whole man one must take into account these different interactions of what pertains to the soul and what pertains to the body.

In our materialistic age the human being is considered only in the most external way. This is evident from the way modern science looks upon man as if he were nothing but a solid organism within which the soul is somehow active. On this basis it is impossible to visualize how, for example, an impulse of will, experienced purely within the soul, can lead to the lifting of the arms or legs. In fact, from the point of view of what we experience as the soul's part in an act of will, the human organism, as conceived by modern anatomy and physiology, is like a piece of wood, as alien to the soul as a piece of wood. What in physiology today is described as human legs is like a description of two pieces of wood. They are related to the soul as if they were wooden legs. As little as the soul could have any relationship with two pieces of wood lying about, just as little could it have any relationship with legs as described by modern physiology. However, human legs are penetrated by liquid. Here we already come upon something in which it is easier to understand that the spiritual can be active within it. Yet, it is still difficult.

Once we come to the gaseous, the airy element, then we are in a physical material so fine that it is much easier to visualize the soul element to be within it, and easier still when we come to warmth. Just think how close a connec­tion can come about between the warmth of the physical organism and the soul. You may at some time have had a terrible fright and grown quite hot. There you have an inner experience of the connection between the soul and the warmth in the physical organism. In fact, when we examine the solid, fluid, gaseous and warmth components of the whole organism, we gradually arrive at the soul.

[Solid = salt deposits, reflecting mirror is consciousness]

It can be said that the 'I' takes hold of the inner warmth; the astral body of the gaseous; the ether body of the fluid and only the solid remains untouched; in the solid nothing enters. Picture to yourselves the way the human organism functions: You have the human brain (see drawing, page 46) that has fluid in it and also solid parts into which, as I said, the soul does not enter. The solid parts are, in reality, salt deposits; whatever solid we have within us is always salt-like deposit. Our bones consist solely of such deposits. In the brain very fine deposits continually occur and again dis­solve. There is always a tendency in our brain to bone for­mation. The brain has a tendency to become quite bony. But it does not become bony because everything is in move­ment and is continually dissolved. When we examine the organism, especially the brain, we first find within it a con­dition of warmth, and within the warmth the air which is the bearer of the astral body and is continually playing into the cerebral fluid while being breathed in and out. We then have the cerebral fluid in which the ether body lives. Then we come to the solid into which the soul cannot enter be­cause it consists of deposited salt. Because of this salt forma­tion, which is less than ten percent of the total organism, we have within us something into which the soul cannot enter.

As human beings we have an organism; within this or­ganism there are warmth, gaseous and fluid elements, all of which the soul can penetrate. But there is something which the soul cannot penetrate. This is comparable to having ob­jects on which light falls but cannot penetrate and is there­fore thrown back. Let us say we have a mirror; light cannot go through it and is therefore reflected. Similarly, the soul cannot penetrate the solid salt organism and is, therefore, continually reflected.

If this were not the case there would be no consciousness at all. Your consciousness consists of soul experiences reflected from the salt organism. You are not aware of the soul life as it is absorbed by the warmth, gaseous and fluid organism; you experience it only because the soul life within the warmth, gaseous and fluid, is reflected everywhere by salt, just as sunbeams are reflected by a mirror. The out­come of this reflection is our mental pictures.

When someone deposits too much salt—salt always takes on forms—then he produces a lot of mental pictures; he becomes rich in thoughts. If too little salt is secreted the thoughts have vague outlines, like reflections from a faulty mirror. Or, said differently, when too much salt is secreted thoughts predominate and become very precise, and he who has them becomes pedantic. He is convinced of the right­ness of his thoughts because they arise from so much solid, he becomes materialistic. When too little salt is secreted, or perhaps too much in the rest of the organism but too little in the head, then the thoughts become indefinite and the per­son becomes fanciful or perhaps he becomes a mystic. Our soul life is dependent on the material processes taking place within us.

It may be necessary, when someone is too prone to fanci­ful ideas, to administer some remedy that will enable him to deposit more salt or else give better form to the salt he does deposit. He will then escape from his fantasies. However, one should not make too great an effort to cure a human be­ing by physical means of his fantasies or pedantry; not much

can be done anyway. To do something different is more im­portant and can be of great value—someone who knows how to observe human beings in regard to both soul and body will notice if there is too much sediment, whether in the head, or in the organs of the rhythmic or metabolic systems. He will notice it because the whole thought configuration becomes different. The manner in which a person alters his thoughts can contribute significantly to a diagnosis. But such delicate reactions are not often noticed. For example, someone may suddenly make mistakes repeatedly when speaking. He does not normally do so, but suddenly he makes mistakes again and again. It may last a few days and then cease. He has suffered a slight ailment, and the mis­takes in speaking are merely a symptom. Such instances can often be described quite exactly.

For example, someone may for a few days secrete too much gastric acid. Now what occurs? This gastric acid dis­solves certain substances in the stomach, which ought to pass on beyond the stomach. This means that the organism is deprived of these substances with the result that the per­son's inner mirror pictures lack the necessary sharpness. His thoughts become vague and he makes mistakes in speaking. You will have realized what must be done: One must provide a remedy that will ensure less acidity in the stomach, then the person's thoughts will again become ordered. His digestion is now in order and he ceases to make mistakes when speaking.

Or take the example of someone who absorbs gastric acid too intensely. This can occur if the spleen is abnormally ac­tive. When this happens the gastric acid is distributed throughout the body; the body, as it were, becomes all stomach. Such acid sediments are, in fact, the cause of many illnesses. A specific pricking pain may be felt or, if the head is affected, a feeling of dullness. When you look at such a person with insight it will often be found that the absorption of all the acidity has created in him a certain greediness. When someone is permeated with acidity his eyes may lose their friendly expression. If someone is suffer­ing from too much acidity his eyes will reveal it. It is sometimes possible to restore his friendly expression by ad­ministering an acid that can be digested in the stomach because it is of a kind that has no tendency to spread throughout the organism.

The reason I am saying all this is to show you that the science of the spirit meant here does not simply contemplate the human soul in a nebulous way. It recognizes the soul as the ruler and builder of the body, active within it everywhere.

The human organism is described nowadays as if it were solid through and through; the solid alone is taken into ac­count. It is impossible to arrive at any conception of how the soul actually exists within the body unless one also considers the fluid, gaseous and warmth elements of the organism. The soul does not live in the solid part of the organism; it does not enter the solid anymore than light penetrates a mir­ror. Light is thrown back from the mirror, the soul retreats everywhere from the salt.

The peculiarity of the soul is that it is deflected from the bones (see drawing, red lines). We carry our bones within us empty of soul. The soul is not within them, but is rayed back into the organism.

[drawing brain]

The bones in the skull are really ingeniously arranged. The soul rays out in all directions and is reflected into our inner being. We do exist within the skull bones but only as solid physical man. If we would make a comprehensive sketch of the head we would have to depict the soul as ray­ing out within the head (see drawing, red lines). If nothing else happened we would be in a dull unconscious condition. However, as the soul cannot enter the bones of the skull it is rayed back into our inner being (arrows, short red lines).

We experience the soul only when it is reflected into our in­ner being. So you see how matters stand: The reality is that you have the soul within you rayed back from the mirror of the skull bones.

Spiritual science does not exclude what is material; on the contrary, recognition of how the soul controls matter makes it, at last, comprehensible. After all one does not come to know that someone is a baker by the fact that he makes certain movements, but from knowing that the move­ments he makes shape the rolls and croissants. Neither does one come to know the soul through abstract considerations but by knowing that a reflection of the soul's activity is to be found in the physical organism. It is a question of under­standing the organism rightly and recognizing that it is an image of the soul. If we cannot make the effort to under­stand even man's physical nature we shall never learn to know the soul. We must have the goodwill to understand how human nature comes to expression through the physi­cal. What is usually spoken of as soul, by those who will not approach the physical with spiritual insight, is something utterly unreal. It is as unreal as if you had a tasty meal before you and, instead of eating it, tried to eat its reflection in a mirror standing beside it. One can become knowledge­able about the soul only by observing her creative activity and not by persisting to regard it as a mere abstraction. And one should certainly not adopt the view that to be a con­scientious spiritual scientist one must scorn the material. Rather should the material be understood spiritually; it will then reveal itself as spirit through and through. To do other­wise is to live in intellectual abstractions, and they obscure rather than elighten

Discussion notes

Various

• Hasslet mentions lecture S-1462 of 1907-01-15 in Kassel with title 'the occult significance of breath'. No notes on this lecture could be found (oa steinerdatenbank)

Related pages

• Three meetings

• Cosmic breathing

• Process of perception

• Ganganda Greida

• Human 'I'

• Speech

Further reading

There are of course a huge number of books on a topic such as breathing, here are a small selection:

• Swami Vivekananda: 'The Science of Breathing' (1900)

• Yogi Ramacharaka, pseud. William Atkinson: 'Science of Breath' (1904)

• Boyan Boev (1883-1963): The Master on Breathing (1942, research paper with info from Beinsa Douno)

• Thich Nhat Hanh: 'Breath, You are Alive' (1987)

• Dennis Lewis:

  • The TAO of natural breathing (1997, 2006)

  • Free your breath, free your life (2004)

and more recently:

• Danny Penman: 'The Art of Breathing: The Secret to Living Mindfully' (2018)
• James Nestor: 'Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art' (2020)

Breathing and vocal exercises

• Benno Max Leser-Lasario:
  • Die zehn Gebote des Atmens (1920)
  • Lehrbuch der Original-Gebärden-Atmung (1931)
  • Drei Vokal-Gebärden-Typ-Atmungs- Bücher mit hermetischen Anklang (2014)
• Annemarie Leser-Lasario: 'Die Atem-Massage für die inneren Organe'
  • The breathing massage for the internal organs goes back to the discovery of the Viennese doctor and concert singer Dr. Benno Max Leser-Lasario, who discovered the enormous effect of vocal resonances on internal organs and achieved unusual healing successes. His widow Annemarie developed this system further based on her experiences and created this book. Felix Fortini from the "Biotropikon" health school in Istria has updated and expanded this brochure and is able to present its great benefits for the internal organs, e.g. for coronary calcification, shortness of breath and digestive problems.
• Alpha und Omega : Sprachbetrachtungen (Herausgegeben von der Sektion für Wissenschaften) (1963)
• Georg Goelzer:
  • 'Alpha und Omega : Die meditative Alphabetkunst' (1997)
  • Feuerzunge : Der Lichtatmungsweg zur Logoszeugung : Das Wesen des Menschen im schaffenden Vollzug des 'Alpha und Omega' (mit Texten aus dem Werk von Mara Friederich) (1999)

Vocal breathing (esoteric - initiation exercises)

• Peryt Shou or Albert Christian Georg Schultz (1873-1953)
  • Der psychische Atem als Schlüssel zur Geheimlehre (1912)
  • Das Mantram und die Vokalatmung (1922)
• Karl Spiesberger (1904-1992): 'Das Mantra Buch' (published 1977)
  • subtitle: Wortkraft, Tongewalten, Macht der Gebärde : von der Vokaltiefatmung zum Mantra-Yoga
  • contains chapters on Vokalatmung