Rhythms in the Cosmos and in the Human Being

GA 350 — 2 June 1923, Dornach

The Work of the Ethereal and Astral in Man and on Earth

Good morning! Actually, today I would like to add something to what I presented last time. I believe that we will increasingly know better what the human being actually is in the context of the world when we look at precisely such things. So today I would like to add to what we discussed last time how things actually behave in reality when something like a cataract or a black cataract comes over the eye. The eye then becomes useless. At first, the person gets the impression that there is something flickering before their eyes. Then it becomes more and more unclear and unclear before the eyes, and then they can no longer see what they had just seen.

Now, what is this eye disease caused by? It is due to something in the eye, which should be transparent, like glass, becoming opaque. If you put opaque paper or a cardboard cover instead of transparent glass on a window, you can no longer see through it. The same is true of a severely strabismic eye. There is something there that should be transparent but has become opaque.

Let's make this very clear. I have drawn the eye for you several times. It grows out of the brain (see drawing), out of the skull; this is a side view. There is something at the front with a protrusion, and inside the eye, blood vessels and the optic nerve expand. So blood vessels and the optic nerve come together.

But then there is something else in the eye, which is a kind of muscle attachment. This muscle attachment carries what is called the lens. So inside the eye, a very small transparent, lens-shaped body is carried by the muscle. If you imagine a small lens that is transparent, it is suspended inside the eye. And you have to see through this lens. When viewed from the front, this lens looks like this (see drawing), and you have to be able to see through it. From this alone you can see that it is a matter of our having to have a transparent eye if we are to see. The eye must be transparent. If you think about it properly, you will say to yourself: It cannot be the eye that sees, because the eye must turn away, make itself transparent, so that it can see. If you smear these window panes, for example, so that you cannot see through them, you no longer see out. Yes, it is you who see through the glasses. The glasses cannot see, but you yourself see. Likewise, it is not the eye that sees, but there is something in man that sees through the transparent eye.

Now, what happens when a person becomes seriously ill? When a person becomes seriously ill, this lens in the eye becomes opaque. It is very small, this lens, but when you have it out of your eye and see through it, it is transparent. But a lens from a seriously ill person is white, milky, not transparent. So I would have to draw the beautiful transparent lens of the healthy eye like this, and the opaque lens like that. So the lens has become cloudy and opaque.

You see, it always helps in these matters that the individual parts of the human body are elastic, elastic in many respects. So if you have a very sick eye and you cut into it in a certain direction, then this muscle asserts its elasticity here, and the lens, which is otherwise held by the muscle, pops out when you make a hole here. So you imagine that you have a very sick eye. You cut into it in a certain way. The operations are relatively very simple because the body comes to their aid everywhere. The lens pops out. You have it in your hand, put it in the dissecting glass, the lens that has become opaque. Now, of course, the person cannot see at all when the lens is out, because he needs the lens to see. I will show you in a moment why he needs the lens to see.

So if you have operated on a person in this way, by removing their lens, it will become light around them again, whereas before they saw nothing at all. He can already see out, but if he is operated on now, when the lens is removed, he will only see objects that are very far away. But the vision is still not good enough. So we have been given an unusable eye. The vision is not good enough for us to see what we could see here with the lens removed, for example. The eye has become unusable.

Now, after such an operation, a person is given glasses. You see, this is an artificial lens. He used to have a lens inside his eye and now he has an artificial lens. Now, the artificial lens is used to redirect the visual rays, which used to go so that he could only see things very far away before the lens was removed, so that he can see things close up again. That is what this glass in front of his eye does. So the lens that was inside his eye can be replaced by a transparent glass. Of course, it is less perfect because it is not alive. The lens in the eye is alive, it can be moved, and that naturally has its advantages. But in any case, in an emergency, you can see if you simply take out the lens that has become opaque and replace it with glasses for cataracts. Then the person can see again.

In this way, one is able to see exactly how the matter of seeing actually lies: that one has an apparatus in the eye, a tool for seeing, because one can even replace a small part of the eye, precisely by means of an external tool, namely the cataract glasses. That the living glasses, that is, the lenses, have an advantage over these cataract glasses, these replacements, may be clear to you from the fact that the lens, which is like this (a drawing is shown), when you want to see something very far away, has to be made a little thinner. Then you see something further away. So when the hunter aims and wants to shoot something further away, he has to make his lens thin. The muscle that sits here (pointing to the drawing, $. 35) does that; it makes it thinner. If you want to see something very close up, to read something small, then you have to make the lens thicker. Again, the muscle does that. Of course, this cannot be done with cataract glasses, because otherwise you would always have to put on a different pair. That is what you do sometimes. There are already people today who need two different pairs of glasses, for near and for far. But because the lens in the eye is alive, you can adjust it internally and see near and far.

Now you can also see why, if I have removed the lens completely, only distant objects can be seen, because it is as if I had made the lens completely flat when I removed it. Then I can see things that are very far away again. But then again, my eyesight is not good enough.

Behind the lens is a slimy substance called the vitreous humor. This can also become opaque. If it has become opaque, it cannot be operated on because it cannot be replaced in any way.

When you look into the eye from the outside, it is black. There is the lens, behind this black pupil. And it is black because you are looking at the background of the eye. You look through the entire lens and through everything [the vitreous body].

But now we have to ask ourselves: what actually happens when the lens becomes opaque? Imagine the glass. When the glass is transparent, the light passes through. If you have something opaque, it means that the light does not pass through, that the light is stopped. Now, in the eye, light has to go in and out through the lens. You see, light belongs to the ether. It does not belong to matter, to the substance of heaviness, which is outside, but light belongs to the ether.

Now I have told you that, in addition to his physical body, a person also has an etheric body. And what does it mean that the lens is transparent? That the lens is transparent means that the etheric body of the person, which passes through everything – I am now drawing it in red – can simply pass through the lens. If the lens is perfectly transparent, the etheric body can pass through the lens. This means that at the point where the lens is, the person has a small piece of etheric body. If the lens becomes opaque, it is because the substance in the lens clumps together. If salt or something similar settles in the lens, then it becomes opaque. It is just like when you have dissolved salt in a glass of water. As long as the salt is dissolved, you have an almost transparent salt solution. When the salt settles down there (it is drawn),

then it becomes opaque down there. That means the substance does not let the light through. So when salty particles settle, the lens becomes opaque. With age, such salty particles settle. The transparent parts of the human being become opaque.

So in serious illness, the transparent lens can become opaque. What is the consequence of this? The consequence is that the etheric body of the human being can no longer enter the opaque lens. Now there is a small hole. The human being has his etheric body everywhere, and when he is healthy, this etheric body fills everything. When the lens becomes diseased and opaque, the etheric body cannot enter the place where the lens is. Now you have no etheric body at the place where the lens is. So we have to say: what is the disease of weakness? The disease of weakness is that the person has no etheric body at the place where the lens has become opaque in the eye.

But you can't actually see with the etheric body alone. If you could see with the etheric body, you would always see at night, because you also have the etheric body in bed at night, only the astral body is outside. So you don't see with the etheric body. You see with the soul. But you need the etheric body to see. The astral body is also still there – it is the third that a person has – and it in turn fills everything. If this astral body now wants to see at the point where there is no etheric body, it cannot, because the etheric body is missing at that point. And so we can say: How does something like this happen, that we see? It is because our astral body is inside our etheric body. — But if the etheric body is eliminated at a point, pushed aside because the lens and the eye are opaque, we cannot see. The astral body cannot see there. Is that understandable?

It is confirmed: Yes!

This is how our astral body becomes able to see that the etheric body can enter at the point where the lens is, where it is most needed. If you understand something like the disease of weakness correctly, you can really see from it how the human being has an etheric body and an astral body.

If a person is at the beginning of such a severe illness, it can be said that this severe illness comes from the fact that the salts deposited in the eye, in the lens, do not allow the etheric body to enter the eye. Now something would have to be done to make this lens transparent. If the matter is very advanced, if the lens is already completely permeated with salts, and has therefore become opaque, then there is nothing left to do but to operate it out and replace it with cataract glasses. But the thing is that if the cataract is at the very beginning, there is still something else that can be done. And this is precisely where I want to show you how the human being is connected to his environment.

Take the earth, for instance. Plants grow out of the earth. You see, a plant like this naturally has a physical body. We can touch it, look at it. But this plant also has an etheric body, because it is alive, and everything that is alive has an etheric body. If the plant had no etheric body, it would be a stone. It has an etheric body, it is alive. But the plant cannot feel or sense. It has no astral body. But the astral substance is everywhere in the environment of the earth. The astral is everywhere. We have an astral body within us, but the astral is also everywhere in the environment of the earth. I will tell you how one can come to the conclusion that the astral is everywhere. We will have to draw on a rather remote fact that seemingly does not belong to this at all.

You all know that fire-breathing mountains occasionally, well, just come into spitting, as one says, that glowing masses fly out. I will describe such a fire-breathing mountain to you a little. First, there is the ground at the bottom, filled with ordinary rock. If we look at Vesuvius, for example, which is in Italy near Naples, the ground there, the basic ground, consists of Apennine rock, as it is called. So we have the usual rock down there, which is also found in the surrounding area. But then somewhat different layers are piled up there. It is layered like this (see drawing). At the point where, for example, Vesuvius erupts, there is a crevice in the earth. And when Vesuvius erupts, ash and water first come out of this crevice; then rock-like bombs come out. All of this is hurled up to the surface. Sometimes it is liquid, sometimes bomb-like. Then it runs down, runs further down. And everywhere there are these rocks that are thrown out like bombs. They flow down again. In between, there is rain mixed with mud. All this then piles up to form such a mountain. So first, hot water mixed with ash is ejected from the interior of the earth. When it runs down, it turns into a very viscous mud. Then, a little later, come these bomb-like chunks that rush up and are hurled around everywhere. In this way, such fire-breathing mountains are raised.

Now, gentlemen, I would like to tell you how science usually behaves in the face of such a phenomenon as fire-breathing mountains. Science says: Yes, all sorts of things that are under the earth come rushing out. The fire-breathing mountains are usually near water. - Certainly, that is also true. There are few fire-breathing mountains in the middle of the country; they are usually near the shore, near the water. —- So there, because there is a crevice in the ground anyway, the water could get in, and the water that is there then boils because of the heat inside the earth. And this boiling water then pushes out all the substances that are down there. – So now first of all one of the scholars says, writes a book about it and in this way explains the formation of the fire-breathing mountains, as they say.

Now someone else comes along and says: Yes, but we have reasons to assume that these fissures are not wide enough for water to get in. We cannot assume that the water, even if the fire-breathing mountains are also near the water, can enter through these cracks in the earth. So what the first scholar said is not entirely correct. You have to explain the matter in a different way.

Now, there comes the and says: Yes, inside the earth, the thing is not the same as outside, but inside the earth the metals are liquid. Like the iron in the furnace, when it is processed, is liquid, so are the metals liquid inside the earth. There are liquid metals inside. - Well - names are easy to find - these liquid metals are then called magma. So there is magma inside it – well, liquid metals. And now, when this liquid metal, this magma, comes to a place where it can more easily escape – here it is too hard for it to escape everywhere, otherwise it spews out everywhere – when it comes to a place where it can more easily escape, then it just escapes there, and that's where it comes out. – So says the other. So it happens, says the other, because of the unevenness in the density of the earth; the magma radiates in one direction or another.

Then a third or a fourth comes along and says: Yes, but the magma can't have the strong power to throw the bombs out so powerfully! That can't be the explanation either. Then a few others come along who say something else. And then it is written in the ordinary books that are for the people. They write: Actually, we still don't know the reason why the fire-breathing mountains arise. — That's about the state of affairs today. Usually you will find: one person claimed this, the other that — but we don't really know what the cause is. For the most important things, we don't know what the cause is!

But now I will tell you something. The thing is this: when you come to the area where Vesuvius is very close, in the neighborhood of fire-breathing mountains, there is a very beautiful phenomenon. If you take a piece of paper and light it, then suddenly the earth begins to smoke. So you have the earth here (it is drawn), light a piece of paper here, now that is burning (red), and now the earth starts to smoke everywhere under the paper flame, all by itself, and you can gradually be surrounded by the rising smoke as you burn a large piece of paper. This is, of course, a very beautiful phenomenon. Tourists guides show people traveling in Italy how the smoke comes out of the ground when you just light a piece of paper.

Now, what does that mean anyway? Yes, you see, gentlemen: at that point in there, there is a certain accumulation of water vapor. There in the earth - at the point where this vapor comes out - it has accumulated inside. It cannot get out if the air above it has a certain density. The air keeps this vapor in. Now, you all know that when air is warmed, it becomes thinner. When you heat a room, the air also becomes thinner. Warm air is always thinner than cold air. So when you light a fire here, the air becomes thinner. The thinner air can no longer hold the vapor down, and so it escapes. Of course, it must first be down there. There must be something down there for it to flow out. Yes, but, gentlemen, think about what you have done! You have not been down there and blown the steam up. You did not do that, but you lured the steam out from the outside by lighting a piece of paper. So if you light something up here above the ground, you can lure the steam out. Because you make the air thinner, you lure the steam out.

You see, the learned gentlemen are now constantly searching for the causes of water vapor coming out of the volcano, of bombs even flying out; they are looking for these causes, yes, they are looking for them underground. But they are not there at all, just as the causes of the water vapor coming out when you light a paper are not under the ground, but the causes are outside, outside the earth.

You just have to be able to understand the things that are facts in the right way, then you will understand the things. So just as little as you are in here and blow the steam out of the earth, but lure it out through the thin, heated air, so something lures out everything that is down there. And you see, you can't get solid rock out of there by just lighting a piece of paper, otherwise those curious Englishmen who were traveling around here would not only be enveloped in smoke if they lit a piece of paper near Naples, but they would also get a good whack in the nose from all kinds of stones! You don't get that there, but only the rarefaction of the air and the steam rising. But here, above Vesuvius, when it begins to spew, to erupt, everything that lies above it in the astral is rarefied. And this astral is rarefied by the far-out forces of the stars, the planets. So when a certain constellation of stars is above Vesuvius, as it often is – it doesn't usually occur that way, it occurs precisely at this point – then, just as here through the paper, here through the constellation of stars, because the astral is thinned above, that which is below is torn out.

So you show a small eruption of Vesuvius when you see the sulfur fumes – not only water vapor but also sulfur vapor – coming out. It's called the Solfatara. So wherever these mighty volcanic eruptions take place, it is not what is down there that is active, but what is outside, what comes straight from the star constellations.

Of course, sometimes there is a bit of, how should I say, meddling, self-importance in such things. So someone once came up with the idea that certain such things come from the star constellations, from the position of the sun and moon, for example. That was Falb. Perhaps the older ones among you have already heard of the famous Falb theory. Falb did not just say that earthquakes, but also volcanic eruptions, for example, come from the star constellations. That was true. But he was also a terribly vain man and liked to act important about the matter.

Now he has come up with something else that is also important. You know, in mines, a terrible plague is the so-called firedamp. Something happens in the mines because the gases ignite as they flow powerfully through the mine. Now Falb has said: This particularity of the gases also does not come from the earth's underground, but from the position of the sun and moon, for example. And Falb, after what he had thought up, even compiled prophecies of earthquakes and of striking weather in mines. Well, that was often not true, sometimes it was true. The way it is, of course, is that sometimes unforeseen things happen during natural events; then the story is not true. But Falb then published a calendar throughout the year. He indicated the so-called critical days. When special star constellations occurred, when there were special positions of the sun and moon, he said: “There must be firedamp on that day” or “There must be an earthquake.

Once upon a time – it was a long time ago, more than thirty years – I was at a lecture by Falb. Falb, who was a tall, slender man, presented his theories convincingly, that is, he presented how – he knew nothing of the astral, but believed that it only came from this heat thinning -, how the heat is thinned and how it is then lured up from below, just like with such solfataras, the gases from mines either become firedamp or something like that. Now that was a large hall. Falb was standing up there. He explained it, explained it well. There was a lot of truth in his explanation. Suddenly, in the middle of his explanation, he says: So a certain position of the sun and moon causes a change in the air, firedamp must form, it is lured out – bang, it knocks on the door. A newspaper boy from the “Neue Freie Presse” enters, brings a telegram, and lays it on the lecture table. Falb is just not refined, says: It must be something important! - opens the telegram during the lecture, reads: In the and the mine, major explosions have just occurred. - Now Falb had just prophesied these explosions in his lecture and had contacted the “Neue Freie Presse”: If something comes in, send it to me in the lecture hall! Falb often worked with such things; he was just a bit vain. But it did happen, gentlemen. Just as Falb had explained that something like a kind of firedamp had to come again, the newspaper boy brought him the telegram. And he said, “You see, ladies and gentlemen, that's how the evidence is delivered to the table!”

Well, of course that was a bit of a boast. But there was a great deal of truth behind such things, especially with Falb. The fact is that you have to say: these thick, heavy masses are not thrown out from below by pushes, as the scholars always say, but lured out from above, by the position of the stars. Only, I would like to say, when the steam rises from this burning paper and you are completely immersed in this steam, the air is a little thinner. It cannot be so severely thinned that the solid masses can be hurled upwards by the mere air; the ether must be thinned and then the astral. This leads us to the conclusion, when we have correct explanations for our fire-breathing mountains, that our Earth is everywhere enveloped not only by the substance of the Earth, but also by the astral. Today's science simply has no courage to explain such things in a truly appropriate way. It has no courage!

So when we imagine the earth, we have to think of it as being surrounded everywhere, first by the ether, but then also by the astral. Now, however, the astral also penetrates everywhere. But plants generally do not take in the astral. They only have an etheric body. They only take in the ether, they do not take in the astral. But there are certain plants that do take in the astral. These are the poisonous plants. And that is the difference between the non-poisonous plants and the poisonous plants: the non-poisonous plants have no astral in them, and the poisonous plants have an astral in them.

Now, what does that mean? You see, one of the most poisonous plants is the deadly nightshade. If you have a deadly nightshade here, it is so black because the astral is absorbed into it. So the deadly nightshade absorbs the astral. But because belladonna takes in the astral — it does not actually destroy itself completely — it has the power within itself to continually destroy physical matter. Belladonna is very sharp on the inside; it wants to destroy physical matter. Therefore, when we eat a deadly nightshade berry, the deadly nightshade juice, as soon as it is inside us, immediately begins to destroy our inner matter. We must perish under the deadly nightshade. The deadly nightshade has the inner power to destroy physical matter.

Do you think that we can now introduce the diluted, properly diluted deadly nightshade juice into a person's blood in the right way by inoculation? Then, when the lens starts to get salts, to become cloudy, we can fight this cataract with the deadly juice of the deadly nightshade, if it is properly diluted, has become so weak that it no longer has a toxic effect, and disperse what has arisen as a deposit. I have drawn the sentence for you here (on the board). So if we have brought the destructive juice of the deadly nightshade, which everywhere drives everything else apart, by means of a correct vaccination here on the lens, then it also drives apart the salts that have deposited there, and the lens can possibly be cured.

Of course, if the cataract is already too far advanced, you can't rely on this story too much. But if you notice the condition in a person at the right time, when the cataract is not yet so advanced, you can still fight the cataract without having to operate to remove the lens later.

Therefore, it is usually not how homeopathic doctors do it. They administer the diluted deadly nightshade. It works, but not very strongly; the problem always comes back. So, you can't usually achieve anything in this way. But you can achieve a great deal by administering it into the blood. The blood then goes everywhere, and also enters the eye.

This also shows you something else. Namely, you see this: if we have a poison like that of the deadly nightshade, if we eat a lot of the deadly nightshade – of course a little is enough, but that is a lot in this case – if we eat a relatively large amount of the deadly nightshade, it destroys us from the stomach, already from the pharynx, our physical matter. We can no longer live. If we dilute this deadly nightshade juice more and more, the physical parts are no longer attacked, but the deadly nightshade juice is digested and still attacks the head very strongly. One can then use the deadly nightshade juice to correct people when they have become very nervous, when they have become dizzy, by giving them highly diluted deadly nightshade juice to eat, which expels what has settled there.

expels. But if you take it so thinly that it no longer affects the head, then it still works on the eye. The eye is the organ that is sensitive to the thinnest amounts of belladonna. Belladonna, “the beautiful woman”, is called the belladonna because it has such beautiful black eyes. So the eye is still receptive to the smallest amounts of belladonna juice. It is remarkable that our human being is receptive to the various substances in the environment in the most diverse ways. As already mentioned, too much belladonna juice destroys the entire eye, but in dilution the eye is receptive to the belladonna juice. Other organs are receptive to other juices. So that for each substance something in our body is particularly receptive and causes different things.

Take the human liver, for example. Yes, it is the case that the human liver actually has an awful lot to do. I have already told you how it is an inner observer. It has an awful lot to do in the process of digestion. In particular, the liver in the human body has to do a great service in processing fatty substances. If the liver cannot work properly, then all the fat that a person has accumulates and migrates around the body in the most diverse ways. Fat migrates instead of being processed in the liver. The fat that a person consumes also has a special relationship to the liver. Just as good substances have a relationship to the limbs of the human body, so too do toxins have a certain relationship to all parts of the human being.

And so we can say: We can, so to speak, make the lens in the eye bright again when it has darkened, thereby sending the astral body back into this piece of the human being when we instill something into the person from the environment that particularly attacks the eye. This is, for example, the appropriate dilution of deadly nightshade juice. From this you can see that in deadly nightshade juice we have something that attracts the astral element in the eye, so that the person can see through the astral; it draws in the astral, and the astral then in turn draws in the etheric.

Therefore, I would also like to say: even if the deadly nightshade grows outside, it attracts the astral. The etheric is already inside, it does not need to be attracted. If one can properly study this fine process that occurs in the deadly nightshade healing in the case of strongly wandering eyes, then one also understands what is going on outside in the deadly nightshade. The excluded astral is drawn in by the belladonna juice. So the belladonna juice also draws in the astral from the world. The belladonna juice is an attraction for the astral. And when we are poisoned with belladonna, too much astral is drawn into us, this astral begins to boil and this boiling destroys our physical.

But when too much physical matter is destroyed – in the badly stricken eye it is destroyed because too much has been deposited – then we have to remove it again. Away with it! Then one could indeed hope, gentlemen, that one could also heal with belladonna, with deadly nightshade, when salts or similar substances are deposited elsewhere in the body. If, for example, a person develops gallstones or urinary stones, then something solid is deposited, which should not actually be there. Then one would have to hope that if one can cure this in the lens of the severely stricken eye with belladonna, one could also cure the gallstones and the bladder stones with belladonna. This can be done if one only uses the substance correctly. It can be done!

So you can see that things all fit together, and if you understand nature correctly, you can also understand people correctly. Now we have come back to the etheric and astral body from this side, just as we came to the etheric and astral body last time when turning around. If you simply look at things in the right way, you will come across these supersensible parts of the human being everywhere. These things are really not made up, but are based on a science that goes further than ordinary science in every respect.

Next Wednesday, if you don't have any questions prepared, we will continue talking about these things.