The Human Being as Body, Soul and Spirit

GA 347 — 5 August 1922, Dornach

II. The Life Body of a Human Being – Brain and Thought

Good morning, gentlemen! Today, too, I will have to continue with what we have discussed, because the reason is that the matter can only be fully understood if one penetrates further and further into it.

You see, it depends on the human being, as you have seen, that he takes his nourishment from the earth, thereby feeding himself – that he takes care of his breathing from what surrounds the earth, from the air, only through this does he actually come to life, only through this is he able to become a sentient and feeling being -, and as we have seen, he takes forces from the whole world, only through this does he become a thinking being and only through this does he actually become a complete human.

So man must be able to nourish himself, man must be able to breathe, thereby becoming a sentient being - and he must be able to take the forces from the universe to thereby become a thinking being. He does not become a thinking being by himself, just as he cannot speak by himself. Man cannot think himself, just as he cannot eat himself.

Now let us take a closer look at how these things actually happen. Let us begin by clarifying how this process actually occurs when we absorb nutrients, have them in a dead state, so to speak, within our intestinal organism, and then they are revived again by the lymph glands and transferred by the lymph into the blood, the blood is renewed through breathing. The blood, or rather the force of the blood, the breath, then rises through the spinal cord into the brain and connects there with that which is brain activity.

You only have to consider how a child's nutrition differs from that of an adult to gain a great deal of insight into the human being as a whole. As you know, a child must drink a lot of milk in the very earliest period of life. At first, it feeds exclusively on milk. What does it actually mean for a child to feed exclusively on milk? We can visualize this if we consider what milk actually consists of.

Milk consists of 87 percent water. So when we drink milk as children, we actually drink 87 percent water, and only the last 13 percent is something else. Of these last 13 percent, only 4 percent is protein; 4 percent is fat in milk, and then there are some residual other substances, salts and so on. But essentially, that is what the child absorbs with the milk. So it is actually mainly water that it absorbs.

Now I have already told you that a human being consists mainly of fluid. The child must always increase this fluid. It must grow and therefore needs a great deal of water, which it takes in with the milk.

You may say: It would be the same if we gave the child only this 13 percent nutrition and the rest as water. Yes, you see, the human body is not designed for that. What we get with milk is not 13 ordinary percent of protein and fat and so on, but all of that, protein and fat, is dissolved in milk, dissolved in water, if it is milk. So it is the case that when the child drinks the milk, it gets the substances it needs in a dissolved state. And that is different from when the body first has to do the work that occurs during dissolution.

If you recall what I have already said about nutrition, you will say: we also have to dissolve the nutrients that we take in through our mouths first. We actually only have permission from nature to get solid nutrients into our mouths; then we dissolve them with our own fluids. The rest of the body, stomach, intestines and so on, can only use what has been dissolved. The child must first acquire this ability to dissolve; it must first develop it. So it cannot do it itself from the beginning. So it is dissolved beforehand. You can see this best from the fact that if a child is fed too much with any artificial food that is composed, it will still stunted.

Now you might say: What if I could create artificial milk after all, what if I could combine the 13 percent of protein, fat and so on contained in water with the water in such a way that it would be similar to milk on the outside, would that be a milk that would be just as good for the child as the milk it usually gets? Yes, you see, gentlemen, that is simply not the case. The child would waste away if it were given such artificial milk. And since people can only produce according to need, we will also have to refrain from producing such milk. It would be a means of corrupting humanity.

For who can supply, as a solvent, what the child needs? You see, only life itself can do that. Animals could do it in a makeshift way, but not all animals. But for the very early days, when the child depends on it – because it cannot yet dissolve properly itself – these nutrients, protein and fat, can only be properly digested if they are already properly dissolved, and the child can only be properly nourished with human milk itself.

And of other milks, donkey milk is the one most similar to human milk, and so, if there is no way to feed the child through self-breastfeeding or breastfeeding at all, the child can still be fed to the greatest extent with donkey milk. This is admittedly very strange, but donkey's milk is actually most similar to human milk, so that if the right human breast cannot be provided, then in a pinch, breastfeeding could also be provided by keeping a donkey and a she-donkey and in this way providing the child with milk. But of course this is only something I say as a hypothesis, so that you can see how things are connected in nature.

If you now compare milk, for example, with the chicken egg as food, you will find that the chicken egg contains about 14 percent protein, which is actually four times more than what milk contains. If we begin to give the child food containing more albumen, then the child must already have the power of dissolving. It must already be able to dissolve.

You can see from this how necessary it is for the child to receive liquid nourishment. But what kind of liquid nourishment? A liquid nourishment that has already passed through life and, since the child is nursed directly at the mother's breast, is still alive.

In the case of a child, it can be clearly seen that when it drinks milk and the milk passes through the mouth and oesophagus into the stomach – only then is it killed in the human body – that it can then be revitalized in the intestines. So we see directly from the child that the life must first be killed. And because the life is still little changed, the child needs less strength to revive when it drinks milk than when it enjoys something else. So you see how close man is to life.

But it shows something else as well. If you really think about it, what do you actually come to? Start thinking correctly about this point right now. You see, if we say to ourselves: The child must therefore take in living food that it can kill and revive itself, and we then say: the human being consists for the most part of fluid – may we then say that the human being consists of water, of the water that we find outside in nature, in inanimate nature? Then this water, which we find in inanimate nature, should be able to work in the child in the same way as it works in the adult, who has already accumulated more vital forces!

From this, however, you can see that the water we carry in us as our almost 90 percent water is not ordinary, lifeless water, but that it is revitalized water. So there is something else that a person carries within them: they carry revitalized water. And this revitalized water is the same water that we have out there in inanimate nature, permeated with what permeates the whole world as life, only asserting itself just as little in inanimate water as human thinking asserts itself in a dead corpse. So when you say: water – here I have water in the stream and water in the human body, you can understand this in the same way as when you say: here I have a corpse and here I have a living person; the water in the stream is the corpse of the water that is in the human body.

That is why we say: Man not only has this dead part in him, this physical part, but he also has a life body, a life body within him. This is what real thinking really gives: man has this life body within him. And how this continues to work in man, we can realize if we really observe man in connection with nature. But then we must actually visualize that we first look out into nature and then look into the human being. When we look out into nature, we find the components, the parts of which the human being consists, only that the human being processes these parts from nature in his own way.

So, to understand this, let us go to the very smallest animals. You will notice, as I talk, how I have already spoken similarly about what is in man in the same way that I now have to speak about the smallest and lowest living creatures out in nature. You see, there are very small animal creatures in the water, in the seawater. These little creatures are actually just little lumps of mucus, usually so small that they can only be seen through a strong magnifying glass. I am now drawing them enlarged (see drawing, left). These little lumps of mucus swim in the surrounding water, in the liquid.

If there were nothing else but a lump of mucus and water all around, the lump of mucus would remain at rest. But if, let's say, some small grain of some substance floats by, for example such a small one (see drawing, right) floats by, then this animal, without anything else being there, spreads its mucus so far that now this grain is inside its mucus. And of course it has to spread this mucus by pulling itself away. This makes the little lump move. So it is because this little creature, this little mucus of life, surrounds a grain with its own mucus that we see it moving at the same time. But the other grain there is now dissolved inside it. It dissolves and the little animal has eaten this grain.

Now, however, such an animal can also eat several such grains. Imagine there is this little animal, there a grain, there also a grain, there and there also a grain (see drawing), then the little animal extends its feelers here, there, and there, and where it has extended them the most, where the grain was largest, it then pulls itself along and pulls the others with it. So this little animal moves in such a way that it feeds at the same time.

Now, gentlemen, when I describe to you how these little lumps of mucus swim around in the sea and feed at the same time, you will remember how I described the so-called white blood cells in humans. They are initially exactly the same in humans. Such small animals also swim around in human blood and feed and move in this way. We come to an understanding of what is actually swimming around in human blood by looking at what is swimming around out there in the sea in the form of such small animals. We therefore carry this within us.

And now that we have remembered how we actually have, in a sense, such creatures swimming around in our blood, creatures that are spread out in nature, living in our blood on all sides, let us try to understand how our nervous system, namely our brain, is constructed. Our brain also consists of the smallest parts. If I draw these smallest parts for you, you will see that they also represent a kind of lumpy, thick mucus. Rays emanate from this mucus (see drawing), which consist of the same substance as the mucus. You see, there is a cell, as it is called, from the brain. It has a neighboring cell. It stretches out its little feet or arms here, and touches the others there. There is a third such cell; it stretches out its little feet here, touches there. They can become very long. Some go almost through half the body. It borders on another cell. When we look at our brain through the microscope, it appears to consist of such dots, where the mucus is more concentrated. And then thick tree branches extend from here; they repeatedly enter into one another. If you would imagine a dense forest with thick treetops that have widely spreading branches that would touch one another, you would have an idea of what the brain looks like under the microscope, under the magnifying glass.

But, gentlemen, you can say now: So he has described these white blood cells that live in the blood. And what is described as the brain is quite similar; lots of little bodies settle there that are in the blood. If I could take all the white blood corpuscles out of a person without killing him, and then put them into the skullcap, after I had first taken out his brain, then I would have made a brain out of his white blood corpuscles.

But the strange thing is that before we could make a brain out of his white blood cells, these white blood cells would have to die halfway. That is the difference between the white blood cells and the brain cells. The white blood cells are full of life. They are always moving around each other in the human blood. I told you that they surge like blood through the veins. That's where they come out. As I explained, they become gourmets and go up to the body's surface. They crawl all over the body.

But if you look at the brain, these cells, these corpuscles, remain in place. They are at rest. They only stretch out their branches and always touch the next one. So the ones that are in the body and are in full motion, they come to rest in the brain and are indeed half dead.

Imagine this little animal crawling around in the sea, eating one time too many. If it eats too much, then the story goes like this: Then it stretches out its arm, its branch, takes this and that, and has eaten too much. It cannot tolerate this; now it splits in two, diverges, and we have two instead of one. It has multiplied. Our white blood cells also have this ability to multiply. Some always die and others are created by multiplication.

In this way, the brain cells that I have drawn for you cannot multiply – our white blood cells within us are fully independent and alive. The brain cells that interlock in this way cannot multiply; two brain cells will never develop from one brain cell. When a person gets a bigger brain, when the brain grows, cells from the rest of the body must always migrate into the brain. The cells must grow into it. It is not that this ever happens in the brain, that the brain cells multiply; they just accumulate. And as we grow, new cells must always migrate in from the rest of the body so that when we are adults, we have a brain that is large enough.

And from the fact that these brain cells cannot reproduce, you can see that they are half dead. They are always dying, these brain cells, always, always dying. If we really look at this properly, we see that human beings have a wonderful contrast: in their blood they carry cells full of vitality in the white blood cells, which want to live forever, and in their brain they carry cells that actually want to die forever, that are always on the path to dying. This is also true: through his brain, man is always on the path to dying; the brain is actually always in danger of dying.

Now, gentlemen, you will have heard, or perhaps experienced yourself – it is always unpleasant when you experience it yourself – that people can also faint. When people faint, they enter into a state as if they were about to fall. They lose consciousness.

What actually happens in a person when they lose consciousness in this way? You will also know that, for example, people who are quite pale, such as girls who are anemic, are most likely to faint. Why? Well, they faint because they have too many white blood cells in relation to the red blood cells. A person must have a very precise ratio, as I have indicated, between white blood cells and red blood cells in order to be consciously aware in the right way. So what does it mean when we become unconscious? For example, when we faint, but also when we sleep, we become unconscious. This means that the activity of the white blood cells is much too active, much too strong. When the white blood corpuscles are too active, when a person has too much life in him, then he loses consciousness. So it is very good that a person has cells in his head that constantly want to die; because if these white blood corpuscles in the brain were still alive, then we would not be able to have any consciousness at all, then we would always be sleeping beings. We would always be sleeping.

And so you may ask: why do plants sleep all the time? — Plants sleep all the time simply because they do not have such living beings, because they actually have no blood at all, because they do not have this life that exists in our inner being as an independent life.

If we want to compare our brain with something in nature outside, we again have to compare our brain only with plants. The brain, which basically continually undermines our own life, and in doing so creates consciousness. So we get a completely contradictory concept for the brain. It is contradictory: the plant does not get consciousness, the human being gets consciousness. This is something that we still have to explain through long deliberation, and we now want to set out to be able to explain it.

We become unconscious every night when we sleep. So something must be going on in our body that we now have to learn to understand. What is going on in our body then? Yes, you see, gentlemen, if everything in our body were the same when we are sleeping as when we are awake, we would not sleep. When we sleep, our brain cells begin to live a little more than they do when we are awake. So they become more similar to the cells that have their own life in us. So you can imagine: When we are awake, these brain cells are very quiet; but when we sleep, these brain cells cannot move very far from their location because they are already localized, because they are held in place from the outside; they cannot move around very well, they cannot swim around very well because they would immediately bump into something else, but they acquire a kind of will to move. The brain becomes restless internally. This is how we enter into an unconscious state, because the brain is inwardly restless.

Now we have to ask: where does this thinking actually come from in us humans? That is, how is it that we can absorb forces from the whole wide universe into ourselves? With our organs of nutrition, we can only absorb earthly forces with the substances. With our respiratory organs, we can only absorb air, namely with oxygen. In order to absorb all the forces from the wide world with our head, it is necessary that it is very quiet inside, that the brain is completely calm. But when we sleep, the brain begins to become active; then we absorb fewer of these forces that are out there in the wide universe, and we become unconscious.

But now the story is like this: Imagine that work is being done in two places; here, let's say, work is being done by five workers, and there by two workers. These are then combined, these works, and each batch continues to do a part of the work. But suppose it becomes necessary to stop work for a bit because too many parts of one kind have been made and not enough of the other. What do we do then? We ask one of the five laborers to go over to the two laborers. Now we have three workers there and four of the five here. We transfer the work from one side to the other if we do not want to increase anything. Man has only a very limited amount of strength. He has to distribute it. So when the brain becomes more active during sleep at night, when it works more, that strength has to be drawn from the rest of the body. This work has to be taken from there. Now, where is it taken from? Yes, you see, it is taken from some of the white blood cells. Some of the white blood cells begin to live less during the night than during the day. The brain lives more. Some of the white blood cells live less. That is the compensation.

But now I have told you: the fact that the brain slows down a bit and becomes calm is how a person begins to think. So when these white blood cells become calm at night, then the person should begin to think wherever the white blood cells become calm. He should begin to think with his body.

Now let us ask ourselves: Does a person perhaps think with his body at night? — That is a ticklish question, isn't it, whether a person perhaps thinks with his body at night! Well, he knows nothing about it. For the time being he can only say that he knows nothing about it. But the fact that I know nothing about something is no proof that it is not there. Otherwise, everything that people have not yet seen would have to be denied. Just because I don't know something, that is no proof that it is not there. The human body could indeed think at night, and one simply knows nothing about it and therefore believes that it does not think.

Now we have to examine whether man perhaps has signs that while he thinks with his head during the day, at night he begins to think with his liver and his stomach and his other organs, and perhaps even with his intestines.

We have certain indications of this. Every person has indications that this is the case. Because just imagine where it comes from, that something is there and yet we know nothing about it. Imagine I am standing there, talking to you, and I am turning my attention to you, that is, I am not seeing what is behind me.

Strange things can happen. For example, I may be accustomed to sitting down here on the chair from time to time while I am talking. Now I turn my attention to you, and during that time someone takes the chair away from me. I didn't see the whole thing, but it happened anyway, and I notice the consequences when I want to sit down now.

You see, the thing is that one must not judge merely according to what one usually knows, but one must judge according to what one might be able to know in a completely indirect way. If I had looked around quickly, I probably wouldn't have settled on the ground. If I had looked around, I would have prevented it.

Now let us take a look at human thinking in the body. You see, natural scientists like to talk about the limits of human knowledge. What do they actually mean by that? When natural scientists talk about the limits of knowledge, they mean that what they have not yet seen – whether through a microscope or a telescope or at all – is not there. But with knowledge, people just keep settling on the ground, because not seeing something is no proof that it is not there. That is the case.

Now, that which I am to become aware of must not only be conceived by me, but I must also observe the conceived. Thinking could be a process that always happens, sometimes in the head, sometimes in the whole body. But when I am awake, I have my eyes open. The eyes not only see outwards, but the eyes also perceive inwards. Likewise, when I taste something, I not only taste what is on the outside, but I also perceive inside, for example, if, let's say, I am sick all over, and what tastes pleasant to someone else becomes disgusting to me. So the inside always determines. The inner perception must also be there.

Now imagine we wake up quite normally. Our brain cells slowly calm down. They come to rest very slowly, and the thing is that I gradually learn to use my senses, that is, I use my senses again. The waking up process follows the cycle of life quite appropriately. That can be the one case.

But the other case can also be that I calm my brain cells too quickly due to some circumstance. I calm them down much too quickly. Now something else happens when I calm them down too quickly. Let's say that if one of the five workers directs the movement, as I said, he takes the fifth one away and puts him over there. If one of them directs it, it may go very smoothly. But suppose one of them has to take it away from one person and put it back with another, then all sorts of trouble can arise, especially if the two of them start arguing about whether it is right or not. If the brain cells in my brain now start to calm down too quickly, then the white blood cells that have now come to rest during sleep will not be able to get moving again so quickly. And it will happen that while I am already calm in my brain, while I have already calmed all my movement in my brain that was there during sleep, the white blood cells down there in the blood will not want to get up yet. They will still want to persist in their calm. They don't want to get up.

It would be truly wonderful if we could perceive these still-lazy blood cells – I am speaking only figuratively, of course – that still want to remain in bed. If we could, they would look at each other just as the quiet brain cells look at each other, and we would perceive the most wonderful thoughts. Just at the moment when we wake up too quickly, we would perceive the most wonderful thoughts. You can easily understand that, gentlemen, if you understand the whole story of the connection between man and nature. If you were to wake up quickly, if nothing else were to prevent it, you would be able to perceive the most wonderful thoughts in your body. But you can't. Why is that not possible? Well, you see, between these lazy, still-sleeping white blood corpuscles, and between that with which we perceive them, which we can only do with our heads, that is where all the breathing is going on. The red blood corpuscles are in there. Breathing is going on, and we have to look at this thought process that is going on in us through the whole breathing process.

Imagine I wake up; this calms my brain. Down there (it is drawn), the white blood cells are somewhere in the blood. I would also perceive them as calm, and I would see the most beautiful thoughts in there. Yes, but now in between there is the whole breathing process. It is just as if I want to look at something and I look at it through cloudy glass; then I see it indistinctly, everything becomes blurred. This breathing process is like cloudy glass. All the thinking that is down there in the body becomes blurred to me. And what arises from it? Dreams. Dreams arise from it: indistinct thoughts that I perceive when the brain activity in my body calms down too quickly.

And again when falling asleep, if I have an irregularity, so if the brain comes into activity too slowly when falling asleep, then the story happens in such a way that I, due to the fact that the brain comes into activity too slowly, still has the ability to perceive something – that I can observe the thinking that already begins down there during sleep, when falling asleep. And so it happens that a person perceives in dreams what actually remains unobserved by him throughout the night, when he is waking up and falling asleep.

We actually only perceive dreams at the moment of waking up. You can very easily visualize the fact that we only perceive dreams at the moment of waking up by taking a good look at a dream. Suppose I am sleeping and there is a chair next to my bed. Now I can dream the following: I am a student and meet another student somewhere, to whom I say some rude word. The other student has to react to it – it's called a 'comment' – and then he has to react to this rude word, and it comes to the point that he challenges me. Sometimes it can be something very trivial, that's how students have to challenge each other.

Now, everything is dreamt: the seconds are chosen, you go out into the forest in a dream, and you have arrived outside; you start shooting. The first one shoots. I still hear the shot in my dream, but I wake up and have just knocked over the chair with my arm next to the bed. That was the shot!

Yes, gentlemen, if I had not pushed the chair over, I would not have had the dream at all, the dream would not have existed! The fact that the dream became precisely such an image only happened at the moment of waking up, because the pushed-over chair was what woke me up in the first place. So in this single moment of waking up, the image arose, what is going on in me became unclear. From this you can see that what is pictorial in the dream is only formed in the single moment in which I wake up, just as what is pictorial in the dream must be formed in the single moment of falling asleep.

But if such images form, and if I can perceive something with such images, then thoughts must be there for it. What do we come to then? We come to understand sleeping and waking a little. So let's ask ourselves: What is it like to sleep? When we sleep, our brain is more active than when we are awake; when we are awake, our brain calms down. Yes, gentlemen, if we could say that our brain becomes more active when we are awake, then, you see, we could be materialists, because then the physical activity of the brain would mean thinking. But if we are reasonable people, we cannot say that the brain is more active when we are awake than when we are sleeping. It must just calm down when we are awake.

So physical activity cannot give us thought. If physical activity gave us thought, that thought would have to consist in stronger physical activity than non-thought. But non-thought consists in stronger physical activity. So you can say: I have lungs; the lungs would be lazy if the external oxygen did not come over them and set them in motion. But my brain becomes lazy during the day; so something external must come for the brain that sets it in motion. And so we have to recognize that in the world — just as oxygen sets the lungs in motion or sets them in action — during the day the brain is brought to thinking by something that is not in the body itself, that does not belong to the body itself.

We must therefore say to ourselves: If we do real science, we are led to assume something incorporeal, something soul-like. We see that it is there. We see it, so to speak, flying in when we wake up, because what is thinking cannot come out of the body. If it came out of the body, one would think better at night. We would have to lie down and fall asleep, and then thinking would arise in our brain. But we don't. So we see, as it were, what our soul and spiritual being flies in.

So that one can say: Science has indeed made great strides in recent times, but it has only come to know that which is not actually suited to life and to thinking, while it has not grasped life itself, and has grasped thinking even less. And so, if you really do natural science, you are led, not by superstition, but precisely by this real natural science, to say: just as there must be oxygen for breathing, so there must be something spiritual for thinking.

More about this next time, because it cannot be decided so easily. There will still be all kinds of counterforces in many of you against what I have said. But it must be said that anyone who does not talk like this simply does not understand the whole story in man. So it is not a matter of spreading superstition, but of creating complete clarity. That is what it is about.