The Human Being as Body, Soul and Spirit

GA 347 — 16 September 1922, Dornach

VI. The Process of Nutrition, Considered Physically, Materially, Mentally and Spiritually

To give you, gentlemen, a more complete picture, I would like to take a closer look at what actually happens in the human body every day during certain processes. For one can only understand higher processes if one really recognizes certain lower processes. Therefore, today I would like to look again at the whole process of nutrition, both from the physical, material side and from the spiritual side.

We eat; when we eat, we first put the food in our mouths. We enjoy solid and liquid food, we take in air through breathing, through the lungs. So we enjoy solid and liquid food. But we can only use liquids in our bodies. Therefore, the solid food must be dissolved into a liquid in the mouth. This is done in the mouth. This can only be achieved in the mouth, on the palate, because small organs, known as glands, are found throughout the palate and in the oral cavity. These glands continuously produce saliva.

So you have to imagine that there are such small glands, for example, on the side of the tongue. These are small formations that are arranged in such a way that, when you look at them closely under the microscope, they look like small grapes; they are composed of cells in this way. These glands secrete saliva. The saliva dissolves the food and permeates it. The food must be salivated in the mouth, otherwise it is no good in the human organism.

Now, an activity is taking place – this salivating, this permeation of the food with saliva – and we perceive this activity, we grasp it in taste. We taste the food during the salivating through the sense of taste. Just as we perceive colors through the eye, we perceive the taste of the food through the sense of taste.

So we can say: the food is mixed with saliva in the mouth and tasted. Through taste, we become aware of the food. And through the mixing with saliva, the food is prepared so that it can be absorbed by the other body. But there must be a certain substance in the saliva of the mouth, otherwise food could not be prepared so that it is then suitable for the stomach. There must be a certain substance in it. This substance is actually present and is called ptyalin. So the ptyalin is expelled from the salivary glands in the mouth. And this ptyalin is the substance that first processes the food so that it can be used by the stomach.

Then, through the esophagus, through the throat, the food that has been salivated and processed by the ptyalin enters the stomach. In the stomach, they must be processed further. For this, there must be another substance in the stomach. This is secreted by the stomach, produced. Just as saliva with ptyalin is produced in the mouth, so too is a kind of saliva produced in the stomach. Only this gastric saliva already contains a slightly different substance. The gastric saliva once again coats the food in the stomach. So we can say that instead of ptyalin, the stomach contains pepsin.

Now, you see, in the stomach of an adult human being, and even in that of a seven-year-old child, no more taste develops. But the baby still tastes the food in the stomach just as the adult tastes the food in the mouth. So you have to go to the soul of the infant if you want to see through the human being. The adult, at most, gets an idea of this taste in the stomach when the stomach is already a bit ruined and the story from the stomach goes down instead of up. Then a person already gets an idea that there is a taste in the stomach. I assume that at least some of you have already gone through this, that something that has already been in the stomach comes back up into the mouth, and they will know that it really tastes worse than anything or at least most of the things you eat. And what would taste like what comes back from the stomach, you would certainly not find extraordinarily tasty. You don't eat things that would taste like what comes back from the stomach. But the taste that is in the chyme that comes back must have formed. It forms in the stomach. Right, in the mouth the food is only pepticized; in the stomach it is enteropepticized. And the consequence of that is that it tastes different. Taste is a very complicated thing.

Suppose you are very sensitive and you drink water. In general, if it is not contaminated water, it will not taste bad. But if you let a lot of sugar melt on your tongue, and your tongue is attuned to it, you may find that the water tastes sour. Taste is a very individual thing. But the way an adult experiences it is not formed in the mouth, but in the stomach. Of course, a child does not feel or think yet, so it does not know taste in the same way that an adult knows the taste of something in their mouth. Therefore, the child must be given foods that do not taste too bad in the stomach. And that is precisely the mother's milk or milk in general, because the child is related to the milk, and it does not get a taste that is too bad in the stomach. It is born out of the body that can produce milk. So the child feels related to the milk. Therefore, the milk does not taste bad to it. However, if the child were to receive other foods too early, it would find them disgusting. Adults no longer do this because their taste has become coarser. But the child would find it disgusting because it is not related to them, because they are external foods.

Now, you see, from the stomach, after the food has been mixed with saliva in the stomach with the pepsin, the food goes into the intestines, into the small intestine, large intestine and so on, and the food pulp spreads out in the intestines.

I can write here by the stomach: childish taste.

If the chyme were to spread and nothing were to happen to it, it would become a hard, stony mass in the intestines and would destroy the person. But something else is done to this chyme.

What is done there is done first by a gland. In the mouth we have glands, in the stomach glands, and now there is a large gland behind the stomach. So when the stomach is there, behind the stomach, if you look at the human being from the front, there is a fairly large gland, and in front of this gland is the stomach. So this gland is behind the stomach. And this gland, which is called the pancreas, now in turn secretes a kind of saliva, and the saliva goes through fine channels into the intestines. So that the food is mixed with saliva a third time in the intestines. And the substance that is secreted in this pancreas is even transformed in the human being. First, the pancreas secretes it. There it is almost like the pepsin of the stomach. But then, on its way into the intestines, it changes. It becomes sharper. The food must now be treated more sharply than before. And this sharper kind of salivary substance secreted by the pancreas is called trypsin. So, we have the pancreas as the third. It secretes trypsin – at least it secretes something that becomes the pungent juice of trypsin in the intestines. This means that the chyme is secreted a third time. So something new happens to it again.

This can no longer be perceived by the consciousness of the human being in the head, as I told you last time, but what arises from the chyme is now perceived, tasted or felt by the liver and thought by the kidneys. So everything that happens in the intestines is thought by the kidneys and perceived by the liver. There is therefore a soul in the kidneys and liver, and it perceives in the same way as a person perceives through the head. Only he knows nothing about it. At most, as I told you last time, when he dreams; then the story comes to consciousness in a pictorial form. The way the chyme winds its way through the intestines like a snake, always mixing with the trypsin, has a stimulating effect, and in the dream the person perceives it as snakes. So what the person perceives is a transposition into an unclear, unclear soul life.

Now, the liver perceives the story with the ptyalin, pepsin, trypsin – I have to say it that way because, unfortunately, science has given things such awful names. And if you are already being received quite unpleasantly by science if one wants to explain things clearly, then science would be turned upside down if one wanted to give things new names; one could do it, but in order to avoid turning science upside down unnecessarily, one does not do it, continues to use the old names ptyalin, pepsin, trypsin. So it is the case that the substances are now being secreted by the saliva for the third time. And this is based on liver feeling (see diagram on page 104).

What this has to do with the liver feeling, gentlemen, you can understand by remembering what it is like – if you have ever done it – to bring a very sharp onion to your nose. Right, the tears come. If you bring horseradish to your nose, the tears come too. Why is that? It is because the horseradish or the onion acts on the lacrimal glands, and the lacrimal glands then secrete bitter tears. Yes, you see, gentlemen, the chyme that passes through the intestines is about the same as the onion or horseradish, and the liver secretes bile just as the eyes secrete tears. The onion must be perceived if it is to produce tears; it must be felt. So the liver feels this chyme and secretes bile, which is added to it. This is the fourth.

Now, after the mouth has worked through the ptyalin, the stomach through the pepsin, and the pancreas through the trypsin, the bile is added to the chyme in the intestines by the liver. And only then does thinking come through the kidneys.

When the chyme has been prepared in this way, with saliva four times, it then passes through the intestinal walls into the lymphatic vessels and from there into the blood. So we can say that an extraordinarily complicated life process takes place in the human body. From the mouth to the blood, the chyme is constantly being transformed so that it can be digested in the right way, not only by the stomach but by the whole human body.

But now this is done in a different way. You can tell yourself, if you think about it, gentlemen, if you were to do all of this in a chemical laboratory, even if you were a very clever professor, you would not be able to do it if you first had to chew the food with your mouth saliva, then with your stomach saliva, then with your intestinal saliva and finally with your bile! All this happens inside you, you do it all the time every day. But if you were to do it in a laboratory, you wouldn't be able to. Although people have brains, what happens in their stomachs in an understandable way is much more intelligent than people on earth are. And it is a very wise, very intelligent process that takes place there. You can't easily imitate it.

But you will have even more respect for this process when I describe its details. What does a person eat? A person eats plant substances, animal substances, mineral substances, and thus he gets very different substances into his mouth and his stomach and his intestines, which have to be converted, changed by the saliva.

Imagine you are eating potatoes. What does a potato consist of? The potato consists mainly of what you have in starch. You also know that starch is prepared from potatoes. So you actually eat starch when you eat potatoes. That is one of the first things you eat; we eat starch. There are many starch-like things. The potato consists almost entirely of starch, only interspersed with a few liquids, namely water. And that is why the potato looks the way it does – because it is alive, not dead. The potato is actually living starch. But that is why, as I have told you, it has to be killed. So there it is, pure starch. There is starch in all plants; whatever you eat from the plant kingdom – it contains starch.

What else do you eat? Whether you take it from the plant kingdom or from the animal kingdom, you eat protein. You eat protein in the ordinary egg; there you have it as it is, only slightly killed. But you eat protein that is added to muscle meat or plants. You actually eat protein all the time. So the second is protein and protein-like substances.

And the third thing you eat, which is different from starch and protein, is fat. Fats are different substances from starch and protein. There are fewer fats in plants than in animals. There are so-called vegetable fats. Man needs fats either from the vegetable or from the animal kingdom if he is to nourish himself properly. So fats are the third thing in what man takes in as food.

And fourthly, there are the salts. Man must always either eat food that naturally has enough salts or at least contains salts, or you know, people put a salt shaker on the table, and depending on the situation, they take the salt out of the salt shaker either with their fingers or with the small horn spoon or with the tip of a knife and add it to the soup or to the other food. This is eaten. We need this. It is the fourth thing that is eaten; I have to write salts because there are different salts.

All of this enters the intestines, and all of it is changed in the intestines.

Now, gentlemen, what comes out of all this? The fact that the food is well prepared by the saliva of the mouth and the saliva of the stomach means that it can be mixed with saliva in the intestines for a third time, and it does not harden, but it transforms, it becomes something else.

What does starch become? Starch becomes sugar. So when you eat starch, your stomach converts it into sugar. We don't need to eat sugar if we have it in us, for the simple reason that we make it ourselves if we produce enough of it. But it is the case with humans that they cannot make everything, even though human nature is very capable. And so it develops too little sugar, and in some people even far too little sugar. And then extra sugar has to be added to the food, or it is added so that what would otherwise be prepared by the intestines in normal life actually enters the intestines already prepared. And the intestines make sugar out of starch. This is a great skill.

One more thing: you know that people with weak stomachs do better when they eat soft-center eggs than when they eat very hard eggs. And what's more, if the eggs have already gone a bit stinky, they go bad even more quickly. The egg white is a good food, but if we put it into the intestines in a stinky state, this egg white would also go stinky and unusable in us. We cannot use the protein in our intestines as it is out there. This protein must also be converted, and above all, it must be dissolved. If you put it in water, it will not dissolve. Something completely different must be present for it to dissolve. And trypsin dissolves protein particularly well. So protein is converted into liquid protein.

And while liquid protein is being formed, something else is formed in the human organism; through the action of this intestinal saliva of the pancreas, something else is formed. As much fun as it is, alcohol is formed. Man develops alcohol within himself. You don't need to drink any alcohol at all; you have a source of alcohol within yourself. Alcohol is formed in the intestines. And when people become drunkards, it is only because their liver becomes too greedy. It is not satisfied with the alcohol that is produced in the intestines; it demands more alcohol, and that is how people become drunkards.

You see, people who knew this even cited it as a reason for drinking wine and beer. They said: There are those who are anti-alcoholic; but a person cannot be anti-alcoholic because he makes alcohol in his own intestines. — Well, but that does not, of course, justify the fact that you have to become a drunkard and drink too much alcohol. Because if you now drink too much alcohol, that is, give in to the liver in its greed for alcohol, then it becomes sick, then it degenerates through it all, proliferates. The liver must be active. The liver enlarges and the small glands become bloated. And when the liver has to work to produce bile, it does not produce proper bile. The chyme is not properly permeated with bile in the intestines. It enters the lymph vessels and blood vessels as improper chyme. This enters the heart and also attacks the heart. That is why people who drink too much beer have a diseased liver, one that looks very different from those who drink little or even those who limit themselves to the little alcohol in the human intestines, which in itself is actually enough. The degenerated liver and the degenerated heart are a result of excessive alcohol consumption. Hence the beer heart that a large number of the Munich population have. But the liver is also always degenerate. You see, you understand the degeneration and the various diseases when you look in this way at the various stages of the chyme in the organism.

Now I have told you what happens when the egg white is liquefied. Alcohol penetrates into the protein and prevents it from becoming stinky. You know that when you want to store something alive, you also store it in alcohol, because alcohol, as they say, preserves the thing. It can sustain itself. The protein can also sustain itself in the organism by being placed in alcohol by the organism itself. This is extraordinarily clever.

But the processes that take place are so delicate that a human being could not do all this. If, let us say, he wants to preserve some human limb or a small organism, to preserve a small creature, he puts it in alcohol and displays it in his scientific cabinet. But trypsin does this in a much more delicate and ingenious way in the human intestine; it breaks down alcohol and converts the protein into alcohol.

And what happens to the fats? Yes, gentlemen, the fats go into the intestines and are converted again by what is secreted by the pancreas, in combination with the bile. And two substances are formed from the fat. One of these substances is glycerine. You know glycerine from the outside, but you produce it inside yourself every day. The other substance is acid. So fats are broken down into glycerol and acids, all kinds of fatty acids.

And only the salts that remain similar remain unchanged; at most they are dissolved so that they are made easier to digest. But they actually remain as they are absorbed. So the salts remain salts (see diagram on page 106).

So, with the corresponding foods, we eat starchy substances, protein-like substances, fatty substances and salt substances. And after we have digested, instead of starch and protein and fat, we have inside us: sugar, dissolved, liquid protein, glycerine, acids and salts.

And what happens to what we have eaten? We have something completely different inside us than what we ate. We have truly transformed the story.

You see, there was a doctor here in Switzerland a few centuries ago – but he travelled a lot – whom science today rather despises, but who still had an idea of all these processes. That was Paracelsus. He was a professor in Basel. But the guys threw him out because he knew more than they did. He is still generally reviled today. He fell off a rock and smashed his head, despite being a very clever person. He spent the last years of his life in Salzburg. He was a doctor. If he had been an honorable citizen, a city councilor of Salzburg, as they say today, they would have remembered him fondly. But he was a person who knew more than the others. And so they said: He was a drunkard, was drunk and fell over the rock. - Well, that is the way of the world. So he knew something about the world and always pointed out in a strong way how there is a transforming power inside man. But that has been forgotten for centuries since that time.

And what happens to all that is inside? Here science again succumbs to a great illusion. You see, science says: All that is now being produced as sugar, liquid protein, alcohol, glycerine, fatty acids and salts, all that goes into the blood vessels and from there into the heart, and from the heart it is driven through the blood vessels into the rest of the organism. Of course, I would like to say, with the thickest that is still there – everything is liquid, but even among liquids there are thick liquids – but with the thickest that is still there, it can be so, and it is so: it passes into the veins and from there supplies the body. But, gentlemen, haven't you noticed that when there was a glass of water and you put sugar in the glass and then drank it, that it is not only sweet at the bottom where the sugar was? The whole glass of water is sweet, isn't it! The sugar, when it is liquefied, dissolves in all the water. And the same goes for salt. In that glass of water in there, there are no veins for the sugar or salt to enter from all sides, but it is absorbed.

Now, some time ago I told you that a human being actually consists of 90 percent water, or at least fluid. It is living water, but it is water. Now, do the substances that are there all need the veins to pass into the whole body? When sugar is made in the intestines, does it first need the veins to pass into the whole body? Man consists of water so that the sugar can spread through him.

Yes, people have said: If a person becomes a drunkard, then all the alcohol a person consumes goes through the intestines to the heart and from there to the entire body.

I can assure you, gentlemen, that if all the alcohol that such a drunkard drinks were to pass through the heart, he would not perish from alcohol after years, but after days. It can be proved that what is consumed in liquid form in this way does not first pass through the veins into the whole body, but passes into the body in the same way that sugar in a glass of water passes into the whole glass of water. If someone with a fairly healthy organism drinks a glass of water and drinks it out of thirst, this first glass of water is now really processed by the intestines, added to the chyme and from there it actually goes into the veins and through the heart into the body. But once the veins and heart have had enough, you can drink as much water as you want: it no longer passes through the veins because you don't need it. If you drink one or one and a half glasses of water, only as much as you need to quench your thirst, then your body is unaffected; but if you drink too much water, even as little as three or four glasses, the water quickly leaves the body in the form of urine. It does not take time to pass through the heart, but simply goes through the urine because man is a column of water and it would be too much water. Just think about what happens when people sit together at the regulars' table and it comes to the third or fourth glass of beer; you can see how one or the other starts to walk! This beer has not even had time to enter the heart, it leaves again by a much shorter route, because the human body is a liquid.

So we can say: the chyme, which now consists of sugar, liquid protein, glycerine, acids, salts, passes into the whole body; only the thickest part passes through the veins into the whole body. And so it happens that salts are deposited in the head, that salts are deposited in all the other organs, which do not pass through the Blur at all, but go directly into these organs.

Now, you see, if it were the case that a person would constantly feel all the salt that is deposited in his head, then he would have a constant headache. Too much salt in the head gives headaches. Perhaps you have heard of migraine. I have spoken about it here before. One can explain things differently at different levels. What is migraine? Migraine consists of the fact that this whole distribution is out of order and too much salt, namely uric acid salts, is deposited in the head. Instead of the uric acid salts being excreted in the urine, they remain in the head during a migraine because the other foods are not properly prepared and retain the salts. Migraine is not such a noble disease at all, although it is usually noble people who suffer from it. Migraine is a very nasty disease. That which should be secreted in the urine remains on the right side of the head because it is already deteriorating in the stomach. So that which works on the left side of the organism works on the right side of the head. I will show why this is so in the near future.

And so it happens that the story, which should actually go out through the urine, is deposited on the right side of the head.

How much salt can a person take? Well, remember what I told you before. Remember that I said: the brain water is in the head. The mere fact that the brain water is inside makes the brain so light that it can exist in the human being at all. Because a body that is simply in the air has a certain heaviness, a certain weight. But when we put it in water, it becomes lighter. If that were not the case, one could not swim. And you see, the brain, if it were not in water, would weigh about 1500 grams. I have told you this before: because the brain floats in water, it weighs only 20 grams. That's how much lighter it is; 20 grams is the only thing it weighs! But the more salts that are deposited in the brain, the heavier it becomes, because the salts increase the weight of the brain. It then becomes just too heavy due to the salts.

Now we can say: In humans, when salts are deposited in the brain, the salt is made lighter – the whole brain is made lighter (by the buoyancy). But now think about how this is different in humans than in animals. You have to imagine that the human being has his head set on top of his whole organism. There the head has a proper supporting surface. It is different with animals. The head does not have this supporting surface; instead, the head is directed purely forward. What follows from this? Well, in humans, the pressure exerted by the head, although it is very light, is absorbed by the body. In animals, it is not absorbed by the body. You see, this is the main difference between humans and animals.

Naturalists are always pondering how man has developed from animals. It is all very well to think like that, but you can't look at man that way. You can't say: the animal has so and so many bones, and man has just as many bones. The monkey has so and so many bones, and man has just as many. So it's all the same. You can't say that. In the case of the ape, the head still hangs over at the front, however upright it walks, even if it is an orangutan or a gorilla. Man is already designed so that the head sits on the body, so that the entire pressure is absorbed by the body. What happens there?

Well, something very peculiar happens. We have sugar, liquid protein, glycerine, acids, salts in us. The salts go from the stomach up to the head and are deposited there, and then have to go back again, going back through the body if there are too many of them. But with regard to the other substances, something else has to happen in the body. And there, while the substances are going up, a new transformation takes place. This happens simply because the body intercepts the force of gravity. Some of the substances become lighter and lighter, while another part settles as a thick substance. Just as when you dissolve something, a sediment also settles; so, as it were, sediment forms everywhere on the way from the stomach to the head; the finest parts go up and are converted by this gravity, which has been made lighter. And what is created when the lightest parts of the food, which go up to the head, are converted? A kind of phosphorus is created from the food. And it is actually the case that a kind of phosphorus is produced from the food, so that the food does not simply penetrate into the head. A lot of it penetrates up, sugar, glycerine and so on, all kinds of things penetrate up, but some of it is converted into phosphorus before it comes up.

You see, gentlemen, in our heads we have salts that have been absorbed almost unchanged from the outside world, and we have phosphorus that has been spread out in a finely dispersed state, actually much finer than air. And these are the main substances found in the human head: salts and phosphorus. The others are only there so that he can survive as a living being. But the most important ones are salts and phosphorus. So we can say: in the human head, the most important things are salt and phosphorus.

Now, in a way that I will show you in a moment, it can be demonstrated that if a person does not have the right amount of salt in his head, he cannot think properly. You have to have the right amount of salt in your head so that you can think properly. Salt in the head is what you have to use to think. This is in addition to what I have already told you about thinking. Things in man are just complicated.

And if we simply have too much phosphorus in us, that is, eat too fiery foods, then we become a terrible fidget who wants to attack everything, who always wants to want. Because we have phosphorus, the will is there. And if we have too much phosphorus, then this will starts to fidget. And if the organism is such that it sends too much phosphorus up into the head through its entire composition, then the person not only starts fidgeting and, as they say, fidgets around nervously in the world – this has nothing to do with nerves, but with phosphorus – but he starts raging and becomes a madman, becomes raving mad. We need a little phosphorus in us so that we can want anything at all. But if we create too much phosphorus in ourselves, we go mad.

Now gentlemen, just think about it, when someone gives you salt, how you make it think. I would advise you to take a salt shaker and try to make it think! You do it all the time; in your mind you do use salt to think. And then, please rub off a little phosphorus from a match, rub it off a little so that it becomes very fine, then light it at the bottom and try to burn it. It should now want to burn, that is, it should evaporate, but it doesn't want to! But you do this to yourself all the time. Do you not now say to yourself that there is something in you that is truly more intelligent than our stupid head, which can do very little, which cannot turn salt into a thinking being or phosphorus into a volitional being? And that is the part of us that can be called the soul-spiritual. That is the living, weaving, what can be called the soul-spiritual. It is in there inside of us, uses the salt in the head for thinking, and uses the phosphorus, which rises like a smoke, very fine, to will.

In this way, one passes from the physical to the soul and into the spiritual if one observes correctly. But what does today's science do? It stops at the belly. At most, it knows that sugar and so forth are produced in the belly; but afterwards it loses track of things as they spread out further, and knows nothing of what happens next. That is why science cannot tell us anything about the soul and spirit. This science must be supplemented and expanded. We must not limit ourselves to the stomach and think of the head only as something that is put on. But one does not see how salts and phosphor have come up. One believes that it is the same in the head as in the stomach. The whole thing depends on the fact that today's science only knows something about the stomach, but only that something arises there, but does not know that the liver perceives and the kidneys think. It does not know that either. It does not know that because it does not know anything about the head either. So it does not look for it there, and considers what is on the dissecting table to be the complete liver. But it is not the complete liver, because the soul has lost it when it was in the state in which it was simply cut out of the body. As long as the soul is inside, you cannot cut it out of the body. So you see that a serious science must continue where today's science must stop. That is what matters. That is why we built the Goetheanum here, so that science does not just know something incomplete about the gut, but can explain something about the whole body. Then it will also be a real science.