The Life of Man on Earth and the Essence of Christianity

GA 349 — 14 April 1923, Dornach

IX. A Symptomatic Examination of the Astral Body

Today, gentlemen, I would like to start by telling you a very interesting story that took place in front of witnesses, so it cannot be scientifically challenged. There was once a fisherman who held his fishing rod, was annoyed after a while that absolutely nothing wanted to bite, until suddenly there was a terrible jolt. Something very heavy bit. He held out the fishing rod and was very happy that he had now caught a big fish. But what did he pull out? A very large turtle.

Well, this big turtle stayed on the fishing rod, because it had swallowed the fishhook. It was inside her belly, and the fisherman couldn't get it out. The turtle pulled her head back a little. He tried to persuade the turtle, but she wouldn't let go of the fishhook. So he had no choice but to hang her from a tree branch, cut off her head with his sharp knife, and let her fall to the ground.

You will all agree: if this had happened to a human being – let's say, for example, during the French Revolution or some other beheading – well, he would have been a corpse. What did the turtle do? The turtle straightened up, calmly marched back into the water and disappeared into it. It didn't bother her at all that her head was cut off.

So, as you can see, gentlemen, this turtle did not need its head at all to continue living. How long it lived after that was, of course, not recorded at the time, but anyway, you can see from this: for everything that has to do with walking, for example, the turtle does not need its head at all. It can walk without its head.

I have told you many stories about animals doing all kinds of things, terribly clever things, and from this story about the tortoise you can conclude that the animals are not doing it with their heads, because you can cut off a tortoise's head and it will continue to move around and do everything else as usual. The turtle did not run away blindly, but straight into the water from which it had come. It could not have done it differently, or better, with its head.

Now you might say: That is a unique case. But it is not a unique case, because these experiments have been done and people are doing the same thing now. Those who can grasp the whole thing spiritually do not actually need these experiments. But these experiments are constantly being cited to contradict the matter. They do not contradict it, but they do confirm it. The experiments I am going to tell you about have been conducted countless times. You take a frog and cut its head off with a razor. Now the frog is there without a head. You put it back on the table. At first, it behaves extremely impertinently without a head. It sinks down a bit at the front, and at the back, quite impertinently with the back body, it lifts itself up and hops from the spot. But if you now take a caustic acid and touch the frog a little on the side (it will draw) – the headless frog is then there, has its legs there, only it has no head – so if you touch it a little with a caustic acid, which otherwise hurts, the frog first takes its hind leg and scratches itself there, without a head. You can repeat this over and over – the frog will use its hind leg and scratch itself, without a head. And if you add more acid, then he also uses his front leg to help. Then, of course, he tilts to the side. If you add even more, he also uses the leg from the other side to help. Then, of course, he falls over. So you see, the headless frog does everything he would otherwise do, regardless of whether he has a head or no head.

Not true, so you can see from this: When we go down from mammals to lower animals, these lower animals without heads do exactly the same as humans with their heads and higher mammals with their heads.

Now, however, we must be quite clear about what is actually going on here. So something has been proven. It has been proven that, when we ourselves have pain here, we raise our hand and rub ourselves, we do not need our head for that, because the frog can do that without a head. So that has been proven, that you can do it without a head. So we certainly don't have a head for scratching ourselves; we don't have a head for walking, running. Because the tortoise or the frog, they walk without a head. So we don't need the head at all for walking. We can't quite fulfill the story of the fable, the one about the lazy Hans, who you know, was too lazy to walk, but was very diligent when eating. So someone advised him to walk with his mouth and eat with his feet, in order to acquire a different habit. Of course that doesn't work, but the fact is that we don't need our head at all for walking. We don't need our head for moving our hands either. So why do humans and higher animals need their head? What is the difference – now with regard to the head – between humans and higher animals compared to lower animals? Yes, the difference is that the higher animals and humans die if they don't have their heads, but the frog, the turtle and all the lower animals stay alive. If you take even lower animals, for example worms – you can cut them in half – each half starts to move on its own. So you see, you absolutely don't need the head for what the body actually does. But the bad thing is that you need your head to live as a higher animal or as a human being. You need it to live. And since you need it to live, you die if you no longer have it. It is not because you have no head that you no longer wash off the acid when you are smeared with it as a human being, but because you die without a head. Man no longer washes off the acid when he no longer has a head. Man would have behaved differently if he had swallowed a fish hook and had his head cut off. In any case, something would have happened differently than with the turtle.

So we can say: In higher animals and in humans, everything that is connected with the head is not the cause of our body's movements, but we only have the head to thank for being alive. If we no longer have it, we simply no longer live. So in the higher animals, the life is in the head. In the lower animals, the life is in all the individual parts of the body.

But now I want to tell you something else that shows you that there is also a great difference between the higher animals and between man in regard to everything that belongs to this head and this whole organization.

You have probably already encountered this somewhat unpleasant disease in children, which is called whooping cough; in some areas it is called spasmodic cough. Actually, whooping cough is not so bad for a child at that age, because it usually goes away. The bad thing is what remains if you don't behave properly – that is, the doctors or whoever is responsible – while whooping cough is there. That's when the following can happen. What does whooping cough consist of? Whooping cough consists in the fact that the inhalation always remains proper – you can have a child with whooping cough as severe as you like: it breathes in properly; you can see that when you examine the matter – but when the air wants to come out again when you breathe out, it gets stuck, it doesn't come out properly again, and that's when the coughing fit comes. And because the air cannot come out properly, no fresh air can come in, and that is how whooping cough occurs; that is what it consists of.

But what is the underlying cause of whooping cough in children? You see, the underlying cause is that the inner mucous membrane of the respiratory system, of these tubes that go in and out of the lungs, becomes terribly sensitive. When the air goes in, it also goes out over the sensitive areas, because the chest is empty inside, and you can always pour air into the void. You only have to think of the air pump. The air pump consists of having a glass dome here (it is drawn); you pump the air out of it. Now it is empty of air. Then you can have an opening to support it. If you now take out the plug, the air rushes in with a whistle. There is no need for anything else under the glass cover but empty space. When we have exhaled, there is airless space in our lungs; so the air rushes in by itself. There is nothing special to be done to get the air in. So it is no wonder that air rushes in through the sensitive windpipe, because the air does not feel it. But if you want to get the air out of the air pump again, you have to do something, you have to pump it out. Likewise, you have to push out the air that is inside the lungs. Now, however, the child's respiratory tubes have become sensitive. They are just as sensitive as if they were scratched somewhere. So the inside of the respiratory tubes is a little scratched, they are sensitive. Instead of the act of the will, which drives the air out and expels the air, it scratches the windpipe, and instead of expelling the air, it is concerned with scratching the sensitive spot. You see, while the child wants to scratch, it forgets to expel the air, and then the air stops inside. Then come these fits of whooping cough. Then the body wants to forcefully expel the air, while in life what I recently called the astral body expels the air. You can tell exactly where the physical body is and where the astral body is by looking at a child with spasmodic coughing. When the child does not have spasmodic coughing, the astral body expels the air; the body is not bothered at all. If it is whooping cough, there is a sensitive spot. The astral body wants to scratch away; the physical body first has to come into action and has to expel the air spasmodically. This can even cause a spasm, and from that a secondary illness can arise.

So you see, it is not at all the case that one can say that the physical body does everything. Then one can never understand whooping cough. When someone has whooping cough, something strange is going on. One has to ask: what has actually happened to his astral body? His astral body has become headless, namely, like the other part of the astral body in the frog! As the frog wets its leg, so the astral body wets the air pipes internally, and the physical body then has to get rid of the air. So you can distinguish this quite precisely.

But now you can say: Give us some proof that the astral body, the soul, is really involved. I will tell you what can happen when a child has had whooping cough and therefore has sensitive spots in the windpipes and the astral body wants to clean them, which is when the child has these seizures. Suppose, while the child had whooping cough, the parents had bought a cat, or a cat had come to live with them – I am telling you something that happens quite often. While the child had whooping cough, the parents bought a cat or a dog. This made the child sensitive to the exhaled air of dogs or cats. It would not have happened if it had not had this particular sensitivity. Now it has become sensitive during whooping cough. Well, the whooping cough heals, but sometimes something strange remains. If the child is not used to cats, and a cat comes into the house during the whooping cough of the child, it remains that the child in question gets something – when it has just been cured, it does not occur immediately, but later on what is called asthma occurs, a recurring shortness of breath.

Now, when this shortness of breath occurs - asthma is something that comes and goes periodically - then you can examine and sometimes you will find something strange. For example, a man is having asthma and at first you don't know where it's coming from. If you pay attention, you discover that when a cat is near him or in the room, he is once again afflicted with asthma. If you move the cat, the asthma goes away. There, you see, he is reminded, and he does not need his head for that. He does not need to know that the cat is in the room. The cat can be in the room, he knows nothing about it, but he gets the asthma.

Yes, I can tell you an even more amazing case, a case that is quite strange. There was once a child who had whooping cough, and during the time he had whooping cough, a lot of buckwheat was eaten in the house. As a result, the child became particularly sensitive to buckwheat and developed a tendency, a talent, so to speak, for asthma every time buckwheat was in the room, or even just in the house. And then something very strange happened when he was already a grown boy, already a medical student. He lived upstairs on the top floor. Downstairs, two floors lower, was the kitchen. Once the boy upstairs got asthma, terrible asthma. He had only ever had it when there was buckwheat in the house. Now, of course, they were terribly unhappy. They had forbidden all the cooks to make any food with buckwheat. Buckwheat was not supposed to come into the house at all. What had happened? A new cook was there who didn't know any better. She had buckwheat downstairs, and the young student upstairs on the second floor got asthma! Such things look like fairy tales. But they are absolutely true.

And now you will also understand how human health and illness are related to the whole environment. It does matter for our health whether or not there are rats in our environment. You see, the story I told you about cats is so well known – because the human respiratory organs are particularly sensitive to cats – that there is even a name for it in medicine. You will find the name “cat asthma” in medical books. This is the asthma that people get when cats are around. There are, of course, many types of asthma.

The fact of the matter is that one must say: For the normal person, a dog or a cat or even buckwheat is often something that is taken for granted when they are around. This only makes an impression on his soul. But if the soul is not in order somewhere, then it makes an impression on his soul unconsciously. What actually happens to a person who gets either cat or buckwheat asthma?

Well, you see, whooping cough can be cured again in the following way. Let us assume that you are a child and have a sensitive windpipe; the windpipe and the bronchial tubes and bronchioles have somehow been cut open by coal dust. This can immediately lead to whooping cough. Such things arise from very tiny little things. So the child has a cut windpipe. What happens when a part of the body is injured in this way? You can see what happens when you cut yourself. If it were only a physical body, it would not hurt you. Imagine taking off a rather thick glove finger. You can form the glove just like the skin. You can cut into it and it won't hurt you. But why does your hand hurt when you cut into it? Yes, your hand hurts because, in addition to the physical body being there, the astral body is also inside. The astral body is used to being inside. If you now cut into the physical body – you can't cut into the astral body; now it suddenly realizes: Gosh, there is no physical body! It doesn't fit together! It hurts. Because only the astral body can hurt you. It hurts until it has healed again.

So the story is that where something is injured, the astral body is left to itself. It comes out of the physical body.

Now imagine you get this crack, this fissure in the inside of your windpipe; the astral body becomes somewhat free in the windpipe. Now healing can take place if you are very careful: let us say you have a child with whooping cough. First of all you put the child to bed and let it sweat properly – you can observe this step by step – so you put the child to bed, and it gets hot. The astral body unites easily with heat, with cold it is difficult. If you let it run around outside or just in a cold room, the astral body cannot attach to the physical body because the warmth is not there. But if you wrap the child up very warmly – people do this instinctively; they often tie a stocking around the neck to keep the warmth in – the astral body begins to be attracted to the warmth. The astral body is not attracted by anything else, by water or air, but it is attracted by warmth. So if you have left the child lying in this position for a while, and the astral body has been attracted by the warmth, then it has straightened itself out again towards the limb here. Then you have to take a cloth and put a few drops of lemon juice in some warm water, and put the cloth around it. This pulls together what is cut open, and then takes up the astral body again, and you can heal whooping cough well. You just have to do everything in the right order.

When healing, it is important to be able to see through the whole person and to do things in the right order. And then, during the whole procedure, you have to make sure that the child does not get a fright. Because when the child gets a fright, the astral body always comes out a little, and that makes you undo the whole healing procedure again.

Now, if you heal properly, then the whooping cough can run its course and the child will not get asthma later on. But if you heal wrongly, then these “fissures” in the trachea and in the bronchi and bronchioles heal together, and the child appears to be healthy, but the astral body has not completely entered, always remains a little outside. If the person is very weak, if the child is a weakling, then it will immediately get asthma because it is not breathing out properly. The astral body is not sufficiently present. The astral body, which is outside, cannot properly participate in the exhalation. But when the child is a little stronger, it just uses the other part of the astral body, and the result is that only when a new illness occurs in life, for example when the child gets the flu later or something like that, the rest of the astral body proves to be too weak, and then the child gets asthma.

This is a good way to get inside a person. You can tell when the soul is involved and when it is not.

But now look at a person with asthma. The astral body is at work here. It constantly scratches internally, just as the frog scratches externally when it is wetted with acid. You see, there you have the story, gentlemen, there you have the astral body, which behaves like a frog, like a tortoise. We can actually study the behavior of our astral body in lower animals. If the head could be involved in this activity of the astral body, it would be quite different. We just can't get at it with our head. The fact is that we are not yet human with our astral body. We are human on earth with our physical body, but we are not human on earth with our astral body.

What happens as a result? Yes, as a result, this astral body also behaves like an imperfect being. It behaves in an animalistic way. So don't think you can educate a person by, say, constantly beating him. It is actually quite remarkable how widespread this kind of education still is. There is a person today who is otherwise not pleasant to me, he is boring to me, but he is very interesting. He has also traveled around Europe, he was also in Basel, Rabindranath Tagore, who captivates people today. Isn't it true, an Asian is something else; they go there! A European could do much more; but an Asian, that interests them, that's a rare animal! You see, he has now given his life story. The life story is actually boring too; but it is very important to read the first chapters of this life story. There he tells how he was actually always beaten by everyone. One person in particular, who is now one of the learned Asians, the learned Indians, traveling all over Europe, says that the whole education was actually based on constantly beating the children. So this is not just a European peculiarity. It is precisely from this biography that one sees that the Asians have also been terribly beaten.

Well, Tagore then became a poet, did all kinds of things, so that's no longer so clear. But when someone is constantly beaten as a child, it doesn't just affect the physical body – precisely because the child's mind is not constantly active – but it affects the astral body. And the result is that the astral body becomes like a beaten dog. You can tell a battered dog from a lovingly raised dog. But it is the same with people. When a person is beaten as a child, later life may make him a little more courageous, but his astral body remains beaten throughout his life because it is still at the animal level.

Yes, you see, gentlemen, but you realize how not only physical beatings go into this astral body. At most, the physical beatings create welts. It is not the physical impression that makes the astral body beaten up, but the moral impression. In this astral body, we carry our moral impression from our entire life on earth. And it is true: One person was beaten as a child; later on, his astral body is like that of a beaten dog. Another person beat his teachers (there are such people, too). His astral body is like that of a lion. You look like that inside – you could also say, spiritually, let's say astral, because spiritual has already become a very abstract word and people don't think anything of it anymore – you become so astral inside that you take on one or the other form, depending on the moral impressions you have had in life.

But that is the way it is in life. If a person has a slave nature, he takes everything in a different way than if he has a free, independent nature. If a person has a slave nature, he puts up with everything. Then his astral body becomes stooped, and as a result becomes something dog-like. If a person has a free nature, he does not put up with everything. His astral body becomes somewhat human-like as a result. We can see inside and see what is actually going on with a person during their life on earth.

But now, gentlemen, we die. We have made it clear to ourselves; only the physical body descends from us. It goes away. But this form, which I have described here, remains. With it you go through death. And the one who has acquired a higher knowledge through the means I have described, and which are particularly described in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds', can now distinguish exactly with what character a person passes through death. The moral impression of life is in it. Now you have to enter the world from which you form the next life on earth.

Yes, gentlemen, if you were to enter the world from which you form your next life with an astral body that has been created by the beatings of life, you could become a dog. But a human being cannot become a dog; that is the story. Through the moral impression of life, a human being comes out of death in such a way that he could become anything that comes from his moral impression. If someone has been brave, he could become a lion. Perhaps some people would like to be a lion in their next life. But a person cannot become a lion because he is not predisposed to it by the world, by the cosmos. Another person feels a bit like a cat; he would like to become a cat.

Don't the anthroposophists, after all, reproach the unintelligent people for thinking that the soul goes into the animals afterwards, and that the soul's migration should consist of the soul coming into the animals afterwards? That is nonsense, of course. What is true is that the soul retains an impression of it: one is lion-like, cat-like, tiger-like, crocodile-like, when one has died. And since one must become a human being again, one must first discard that. And one does just that during this one-third lifetime, which I told you about last time. If someone has reached the age of sixty, he needs twenty years for this. This is not plucked out of thin air; we know this because, curiously enough, a person becomes so when he falls asleep at night. He is only preparing for it then. And sleep lasts a total of one-third of life. He needs such a third of life, such a period of time, which thus takes up a third of his lifetime, to free himself from this moral impression.

But, gentlemen, when you are asleep, you are unaware of the whole story that you are going through between falling asleep and waking up. And that is good. Because as a result, the moral impression that you have only comes through a little as conscience. If you have to look at it all, it comes through much more strongly.

And why does it only come through a little as conscience after waking up from what you experienced during sleep? Because you submerge in the physical body, which obscures it. Otherwise, you would remember in the morning when you wake up what sleep has told you, what a horrible guy you are. During sleep you have experienced all of that. It sometimes haunts dreams. And such dreams are particularly interesting to study, in which something is haunted, which actually makes one a dreadful fellow. But in general one does not know that. But when one has no physical body after death, everything that is in the astral body enters into the ego, and in the ego one now has it inside. Now you have to go through the whole time. When you have discarded the astral body, then you have what you have discarded only in the ego. But now you can prepare yourself for the real physical body of the next life. That takes as long as I explained to you last time.

So you see, you just have to look at a person properly as they are now in their earthly life to get a very accurate idea of how these four parts of the human being – physical body, etheric body, astral body and I – are connected.

You see, gentlemen, I will tell you something else: Imagine there is a person's heart. It sits there. Two nerve cords go to the heart. They start from back there, go down there and go to the heart. One goes and then spreads out in the heart. Then another goes and also spreads out in the heart. Now imagine that I am passing an electric current through the nerve. I can observe something remarkable: the heart starts beating faster and faster. Why? Because the electric current excites the nerve, the heart starts beating faster and faster. The electric current excites the nerve.

Now imagine that I don't electrify this nerve, but I electrify the other nerve, the second one. Now you might think, a nerve is a nerve. I electrify it. And you might think, right, the heart starts beating faster and faster again. But it's not like that. When I electrify the nerve here (the first one), the heart beats faster and faster. But if I electrify this one (the second), the heart beats slower and slower. And if I electrify it very strongly, the heart stops beating altogether. I have to stop quickly, otherwise the person will die of a heart attack. It is the case that there is no difference in the construction between this one and that other nerve. They are both constructed in the same way. Yes, what is the matter here?

You see, it's like this: when this one is electrified, the astral body goes in, stimulates the heart to beat faster, because the electrical current takes over a task that the heart would otherwise have to do itself. So it can work faster in the heart. Now suppose, however, that the other nerve were to be electrified. Now the astral body wants to make the heart beat faster; but from the other side an obstacle is put in its way. As soon as it wants to start making the heart beat faster, it cannot through on the other side. This excitation (at the first nerve) is useful to it because it takes over a task from it. This excitement (the second) is harmful to him because it meets him halfway. If I could go into the heart and electrify it from there, it would also make the heart beat faster and faster. But if I electrify this nerve from the outside, the astral body cannot move the heart because there is more and more of an obstacle.

From this you can see that you can see very clearly how things actually work in the human body, how the astral body, on the one hand, intervenes just as it would if, let's say, I wanted to turn a wheel: I push it, turn it further; but if I turn it in the opposite direction, it doesn't work. It is the same with the heart, the same with the lungs, with every organ. Every organ is supplied from two sides with nerves; but what engages is the astral body.

Now you may say: But is it not perhaps the head that is at work in the astral body? No, gentlemen, if it were the head, you would have to electrify at the top of the head. But that would not help you at all; you have to start electrifying from there. If you cut off the head with the astral body, it still always hits the spot, as with the frog or the turtle. You have to electrify where the nerve is still located, which the frog also retains. This point is called the medulla oblongata, or extended marrow. You have to electrify there, and the head does not need to know anything about it.

Incidentally, it is also easy to see from other things that the head does not need to know anything. Yes, think, first of all, if you had to let your heart beat from your head, that would be a nice story. The heart would have to beat seventy-two times every minute, you would have to think about it seventy-two times every minute. So that wouldn't work. And when you sleep, your heart would have to stop. So with the head it is not yet done with these movements, which take place inside the person. They are carried out as they are in the frog or the turtle.

If we now have asthma, these internal movements are carried out in a pathological manner, while when we are healthy, they are carried out normally. You can see from this that everything that goes on inside a person in terms of movements and so on, goes on unconsciously, guided by the astral body.

And this astral body is the one that, after death, must first give up the moral impression that it has received from the world to the I, so to speak. Then the I can form a human life on earth again. These years after death, when the human being lives in such a way that he can discard this inner astral form that he has acquired during his life, are therefore such that he can prepare himself again for a new life on earth, where he can truly be human.

And how does one now bring what one had in the previous life into the new human life? Yes, you see, gentlemen, it is just that the child sleeps at the beginning of his life. If the child were conscious, it could not carry out what the ego has brought with it; after all, it has only unlearned from the astral body. In the astral body, the I is still inside; only the I does not need to work before conception, but the astral body has to work, the astral world has to work, as I told you the other day, from the stars. The child must come in asleep, learn to walk, learn to speak, learn to think. In this process, it pours into walking, speaking and thinking that which is the moral impulse from the previous life and seeks out. That is our destiny.

This does not affect our freedom. I think I already told you that. We carry our destiny within us, we prepare our destiny ourselves. But our freedom is not affected, just as little as our freedom is affected by the fact that we have black or blonde hair, brown or blue eyes, or cannot reach the moon. In the same way, our freedom is not affected by the fact that we bring something or other with us from our previous life on earth, being this or that as a human being. But people are different because they bring something or other with them from their previous life on earth.

Now you may say: But that leads us back to thinking that we will continue to return to further earthly lives forever. — No, gentlemen, there was once a time on earth when man did not progress at all, as a small child is today. In the beginning of the earth, in prehistoric times, he could not yet walk, could not yet speak, could not yet think. He was in such a state that, because the Earth – now remember what I have otherwise told you about the Earth – was still thick, he was not surrounded by air, but by a thick sauce, as I told you at the time, did not need to learn to walk. This thick sauce carried him. He was also more animal, more dependent on his astral body. In relation to the physical body, he has become human today. In relation to the astral body, he is still at the animal level at which he previously stood. He did not bring anything with him, but it gradually emerged. By learning to walk, speak and think, what is his destiny has also come into being. And when man now learns again to absorb something spiritual during his life, then he also gets out of the animal habit again, and then he gets used to a world in which he no longer lives in the way of walking, speaking and thinking, but again in a different way.

So there is a space between these two states, and in this space we come again and again in a certain life.

Now, you see, gentlemen, there is still a question. We will have to discuss that next time, next Wednesday at nine o'clock. That is this important question, which is raised again and again, that someone says: Well, it's easy for you to talk about your past life on earth, but I don't remember it. What I don't remember, I don't believe. Next time I will explain to you how it is with this remembering, and what the reason for it is. Then we will have come a little further again. Then we will have more or less dealt with the question for which we have prepared ourselves.