Rhythms in the Cosmos and in the Human Being

GA 350 — 28 July 1923, Dornach

Lung and Kidney Knowledge

Good morning, gentlemen! Well, have you thought of any more questions? If not, then I would like to bring up something that follows on from the previous point, so that you can see how one can find evidence from all sides, so to speak, that the human physical organism, that is, the human physical body, is permeated by the soul. Today, let us look at the blood circulation in the human body from a certain point of view. As you know, blood flows through the veins of the human body. The blood goes from the lungs, where the blood vessels are and where it absorbs oxygen during breathing, to the heart. From the heart to the rest of the body, it is red the whole time. As it passes through the body, it turns , becomes bluish in color as it passes through the body, then returns to the heart and lungs as blue blood, is turned red again by oxygen, and so the blood circulates, as it were, throughout the body.

Let us assume that the blood flows through the body in a circle. Now let us visualize a very simple circulation of a liquid. Imagine a round tube (see illustration on p. 252). For the sake of clarity, we will put a red liquid into this round tube. Of course, if we have such an external tube, then we need some kind of pump somewhere if we want to set this liquid in motion. So let's imagine that we have some kind of pump here (arrow) that sets the red liquid in motion. If I leave it open at the top, the liquid will naturally squirt out. But I don't want that, so I'll put a tube on top. And now I'm going to set this liquid in motion so that it swirls around continuously. You can imagine that, can't you? — The liquid is driven around. Now imagine: if the liquid here is driven around by a pump, then some of the liquid will rise at this point (above). But when we move it around, it only goes a little way. If I put a lot of force into the pump, the liquid here will go up a little further; if I push gently, it will go up less. So I can measure the pressure in the swirling liquid by this height of the liquid.

You see, I can do something similar with human blood. If I insert a tube like this into a vein somewhere, the blood will rise a little way up it. So I can insert a tube into any vein – not into all of them. Imagine that I have some artery, for example in my arm, into which I insert a small ampoule-like tube. The blood flows from the artery a little way into the tube, passes through it and flows in it. This tube is now also such that, depending on the person, it has either a higher or lower blood level. There are people in whom the blood rises very high in the tube, and in others it rises less. It follows, therefore, that people have different blood pressures, because that is the pressure that is exerted and that is shown in the tube. So it is not true that if the blood presses a little harder on the veins, the blood rises higher in the tube, but if it presses less hard, it rises less high.

The materialists now imagine that man also needs such a pump to keep the blood circulating. But what I have drawn for you is only an external instrument. In fact, man has no such pump anywhere in his body, and the heart is not a pump either. Man has no pump, but the blood moves through something quite different. That is what we want to realize today. But first, let us realize that this column of blood, through which we measure blood pressure, is of varying height. In a healthy person, it always has a certain height. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that in a healthy person between the ages of thirty and fifty, this liquid is about 120 to 140 mm high. If this column of liquid is only 110 mm high in an instrument set up like this – you could call it a manometer – then the person is sick. If it were 160 mm, then the person would also be sick. If it is 160 mm, the blood pressure is too high; then the blood in the body presses too strongly. If it is only 110 mm, then his blood pressure is too weak, and the blood pressure is too weak. So you can see that we always need a certain blood pressure in our body. The blood must push with a certain strength. So we are completely filled with our blood pressure. If we climb a very high mountain, the air outside becomes thinner, and because the outer air becomes thinner, the pressure from within becomes very strong. Then the blood squirts out through the pores. That is mountain sickness. So you see, we have to go around in the world with a very specific blood pressure.

Let us first look at people who have low blood pressure. People who have low blood pressure become extremely weak, tired, pale, and their digestion suffers greatly. Such people become inwardly weak and cannot properly perform physical functions, and as a result they gradually decline. So low blood pressure makes people tired and weak and sick.

Now let us look at people who have high blood pressure. Sometimes very peculiar symptoms occur. You see, if you put something like this, which you insert into the skin – it has to be pointed at the front – if you insert it and you have high blood pressure, then you can be sure that, little by little, the kidneys of a person with high blood pressure will become unsuitable. The kidneys begin to form their vessels, that is, their veins, everything that is in the kidneys, in a way that is not supposed to be. They calcify, become swollen, and degenerate, as they say. They no longer have the form they should actually have. So that if you cut out the kidneys of people who had high blood pressure after they die, the kidney looks like a completely degenerate kidney.

Now the question is: where does all this come from? - Precisely this connection between blood pressure and kidney disease is completely unclear to the materialistically thinking person. You have to be clear about this: our astral body, of which I have told you as the supersensible body of man, lives in the pressure that we have within us, in this blood pressure. It is not true at all that the astral body lives in some kind of substance, in some kind of material, but it lives in a force, in the blood pressure, and the astral body is healthy when we have the right blood pressure, which in middle age is 120 to 140 mm. When we have the right blood pressure, then when we wake up our astral body enters our physical body and feels well. It can expand in all directions. So if the blood pressure is correct, about 120 mm, then the astral body expands in the blood pressure correctly, and when we wake up, the astral body can enter all parts of the physical body. And while we are awake, with this so-called normal blood pressure, the whole astral body is expanded everywhere.

You see, the astral body is what makes our organs always have the right shape and form. Gentlemen, if we were always asleep, that is, if the astral body were always outside, as it is in sleep, then our organs would very soon become fatty. We would not have proper organs. We need the astral body to stimulate the etheric body so that we always have healthy organs in the right shape. So the astral body must always find the right blood pressure so that it can spread.

Let us assume that when a person enters a room, it is not filled with air but with carbon dioxide. When a person enters such a room, they would fall over; they would not be able to breathe. In a body like that, where there is no proper blood pressure, the astral body and the ego cannot live. They have to keep coming out when you fall asleep. Let us assume that there is insufficient blood pressure. If there is insufficient blood pressure, the astral body does not properly enter the physical body when waking up. Then there is little astral activity in it; then the person feels something like a continuous fainting spell in their body. So if the blood pressure is too low, the person always feels something like a slight fainting spell, and as a result he becomes weak and his organs cannot be formed in the right way, because they always have to be newly formed. I have told you: every seven years the organs have to be newly formed. - Then the astral body must always be able to be active.

Let us assume that the blood pressure is too high. Yes, if the blood pressure is too high, what happens then? You see, I once told you that if the air had a different mixture of oxygen and nitrogen, our lives would be in trouble. There is 79 percent nitrogen in the air, and the rest is essentially oxygen. So there is little oxygen in the air. If there were more oxygen in the air, we would be old people by the age of twenty. We would age quickly. It also depends on the astral body whether the physical body ages early or late. If the blood pressure is too high, the astral body likes it inside the physical body. That is precisely its element, the blood pressure. It sits very deeply inside. And what is the result? The result is that at the age of thirty we already have kidneys that we should only have at the age of seventy. We then live too fast due to the high blood pressure. Because the kidneys are such sensitive organs, we develop degenerative kidneys early on. The thing about aging is that the organs become calcified more and more. Now, if the blood pressure is too high, then the sensitive organs calcify too early, and a kidney disease like the one that occurs with high blood pressure is actually a sign that the person has grown old too soon, that he has already made these sensitive kidneys in his youth as they should actually be in old age.

Now, you see, gentlemen, this whole explanation that I have given you shows you that in his physical body, man has something like a soul, which I call the astral body, that goes out at night. And so you can also say: Man lives in the forces that develop in his body. He lives in the forces, not in the substance, not in the material.

Therefore, we can see everywhere how materialistic science is quite powerless when faced with such an occurrence as I have just explained to you. It does not get to the bottom of what is going on. You will find it everywhere in the books: if someone has high blood pressure, there is always a risk that the person has kidney disease. But how it is actually connected – that's what it says in the books – we cannot explain. In reality, however, it means nothing other than: we do not want there to be something supernatural, something spiritual, something of the soul in man. We do not want that.

But without that, you just can't explain things. And that is what actually makes people today basically stand before the whole world not knowing what to do or how to react. Because actually, gentlemen, the external things that occur today, the increasing misery in the world, which will become much, much stronger in the near future because people absolutely do not want to take in anything spiritual with their thoughts - because first you have to know the matter - this misery comes from the fact that people simply do not want to engage in knowing anything about reality. And one cannot know about reality if one does not respond to the spiritual. In the course of the nineteenth century, it has come about that people have actually only been taught about external things. That they would have grasped something of the soul, of the spiritual, was no longer considered at all. And so people today go around and actually have no idea how the spiritual and soul actually exist in the world.

You see, gentlemen, something very important has happened as a result. When a lot of time has passed and people have then struggled through the force of circumstances to look at things spiritually again, then these people in the future will say: Yes, at the beginning of the 20th century something tremendously important in human history took place. Everything that can be told today about old wars is nothing compared to what actually took place among us. It is sometimes quite incredible how people do not even realize that all the wars mentioned in history books are actually trivial compared to what has happened from 1914 to the present day. What has happened in history is nothing compared to what has happened among people during the time in which we live. And you see, in order to understand what is at issue here, you have to look deeply into what really is. But people today do not do that.

For example, I have drawn your attention to the fact that the potato only came to Europe at a certain time. Yes, if you ask today what people eat most, they will say potatoes! And if you see hunger starting somewhere, the first thing you do is think about how to get potatoes. Today, people actually accept potatoes as if they had always been there. Yes, gentlemen, if you had lived five centuries ago, you would not have eaten potatoes at all in Europe, because they did not yet exist! You would have eaten something completely different. But if you know that everything depends on the spiritual, then you also know that eating potatoes or not eating potatoes depends on the spiritual. And as it is with the potato, it is with many other things. So terribly much has changed in the last few centuries of human history, and all the beating about the bush in theories, that is all of no value. Because one can still put up such beautiful theories: Rousseauist theories, Marxist theories, Leninist theories, whatever you want, they are all thoughts thought up, with which one can do nothing when one knows nothing. Thoughts only have value when you know how to use these thoughts. All these gentlemen who have put forward these beautiful thoughts were in reality ignorant through and through. And that is the characteristic of the present time, that people are actually ignorant through and through. They want to present theories to people about how to make the world a paradise, and they don't even know how the human body is affected when a person eats potatoes. That is what is so terribly important to people today, that people have no desire to know anything. Of course, the masses can't do it because the masses are persuaded that What the gentlemen at the universities know is already the right thing. And so they then found adult education centers and now they also want to know what the others know. But it is precisely those who should know something, who devote themselves to knowledge by profession, who in reality know nothing at all. And that is why people talk about all sorts of things today, but basically don't know anything.

Now, of course, it is not just the potato, there are many other factors, but I only mention the potato because it is a very stark example. A tremendous amount has happened in the last few centuries, which, I would say, has now come to a kind of discharge at the beginning of the 20th century, so that an enormous amount has happened. And today we want to point out something that has happened and that is extremely significant.

Gentlemen, I will point out something to you that you may laugh about at first, but the story is quite serious. Isn't it true that when a young badger goes to university or another institution of higher education today, he is led to the laboratory. Then he has to learn there - he also lazes around a lot in between - but doesn't he have to learn because he will be tested then? You can more or less imagine how this is done. But if we go back to the people I described to you last time, let us say the ancient Indians – you remember what I told you about them. Asia, these young badgers were not led into the laboratory or the clinic to be taught, but were instructed to patiently examine their inner selves above all. They had to sit down, cross their legs, and always look at the tip of their nose, not out into the world, always at the tip of their nose. Well, gentlemen, what happened as a result? That was of course already in the period when the matter was in decline. But there are still such people in Europe today; inwardly they want to become particularly clever and they imitate it. Today you get nowhere with that. But those old people, they just did this once. They closed themselves off from the whole outside world, because, don't you see, you don't see very much at the tip of a person's nose. If you always look at the tip of your nose, you just practise squinting your eyes. And if you don't walk but take all the weight off your legs, you don't have any heaviness either. So these people eliminated heaviness, eliminated all sensory impressions, stuffed their ears tightly and devoted themselves entirely to their own body. The idea was not to look at the tip of their nose, because that is not terribly interesting, but to shut themselves off from the outside world. But in so doing, they came to a completely different kind of breathing. What was different in these people was their breathing, their lungs. But because these people brought their lungs into particular activity through such a procedure, images arose in them inwardly. As a result, they actually acquired certain knowledge and were then able to tell people how things actually are. People already knew, for example, what happens to the plant as I have told you, because they have done this procedure. Today, the young badgers would thank their lucky stars if they were made to sit along the wall at university and were always supposed to look at the tip of their noses. Today, it would be considered nonsense. But it doesn't matter whether I do experiments on animals or on humans, the only difference is that when I do experiments in the laboratory, I get to know the material; when I do experiments on humans, I get to know the human being. These old people knew the human being better than today's people know him. But what did they particularly emphasize, these people? That their lungs should enter into a different activity from that to which they are accustomed in life. This was only a means to an end, to bring the lungs into a special activity. And the lungs in their turn stimulated the brain. So that in those ancient times the lungs were actually the source of all the beautiful knowledge of primeval wisdom.

You can say: When the lungs are inside the human being (see drawing), between the lungs is the heart, then in these ancient times the knowledge of the lungs went up into the head. That is the secret of knowledge, that the human head cannot actually do anything. The head does not really know much about the world, it only knows the inner being. Gentlemen, if we only had a head and not eyes and not ears, but only a head closed on all sides, then we would know a great deal about ourselves, but nothing about the outside world. And the most important thing that comes into us from the outside world is air. Air now also stimulates the head, already through our nose, but it also enters very thinly through our eyes, through our ears, everywhere. It is the air that sets the head in motion. So that one can say: If you go back very, very far in these millennia, of which I told you last time, six to eight thousand years, then people practiced breathing a great deal in order to gain knowledge. They knew that they had to force the air into their heads in a different way, and then they would gain knowledge.

Today, people only know that if they gasp for air, it invigorates them. But these ancient people knew that if they sucked in the air in a special way, if they looked at the tip of their nose, then the nasal muscles were compressed, the air was sucked in in a very special way, and then knowledge arose in the head.

But you see, it remained that way until the Middle Ages, indeed until very recent times. Then, four hundred years after the birth of Christ, people stopped knowing anything. Knowledge disappeared. But they still had memories in the books. That is precisely the difference between ancient times and the times that begin around the 8th or 9th century BC: In ancient times, people had heads for knowledge, and in later times they had books for knowledge. That is the difference. You know, the old educational institutions, which were called mysteries, did not care about writing down all knowledge, but trained people so that they could read in their heads. Whatever was out there in the wide expanse of the universe, a true scholar could read in his head. You could say that his head was a real book, but not in the same sense as we say it today about a bluestocking. Rather, his head had become, through breathing, a vessel from which wisdom could be drawn.

Then came the times when people's heads were no longer of any value. People still wore them, but they were empty, and everything was written down. There were still very, very many written records of the old wisdom several centuries before and at the time of the birth of Christ. These things were burned by the church, because they did not want this old wisdom, which people had drawn from their heads, to somehow reach their descendants. You see, this old wisdom was actually terribly hated by the church, it was eradicated. Anthroposophy, on the other hand, wants to give the human being a head so that he is not just an empty vessel. But that is something that the church actually hates terribly. Well, you can see that it doesn't like it very much! Gentlemen, it should again be possible for people to know something that you cannot find in books at all today, because the old knowledge has disappeared and been burned, and the new knowledge that people have written in books is only about external things.

Now, everything that people thought up until the 19th century is actually only the inheritance of ancient times. It is, if I may express it this way, inspired by the lungs. Lung knowledge, you could say. The head is inspired by the lungs, by breathing: lung knowledge.

You see, in the 19th century great scientific discoveries were made, but no thoughts were found. All the thoughts were taken from ancient times. In fact, thoughts have only existed in ancient times of mankind. The 19th century made great external discoveries, but it only thought with the old thoughts. So that was still the old lung knowledge. And it is very amusing that one could say: Yes, you modern scholar, you look down on the old Indian who sits down, crosses his legs and looks at the tip of his nose to get thoughts about the inside. You no longer do that, but you use his thoughts, which have been written down, to find the X-rays and so on! — It is also true that all this was discovered with the help of ancient thoughts.

Over the course of the 19th century, however, the lungs have become completely incapable of providing anything to the brain. The lungs of the human being underwent a major transformation in the 19th century, and what has become much more important than the lungs in the course of the 19th century is really what we call the kidneys, those organs that are closely related to the activity of the heart. The impulse has passed from the lungs to the organs that lie more towards the bottom in the human being, and as a result, humanity has come into such a huge confusion.

You see, the spiritual world still pays attention to the lungs, so to speak. When people had lung knowledge, they breathed in the air and through breathing in air they received inspiration for knowledge. Today people depend on getting their knowledge through the inspiration of the kidneys. But the kidneys do not give anything to the head independently. You have to make an effort, as I described to you in 'How to Know Higher Worlds'. There you must first say: Yes, when people still had the stimulation from the lungs for their head, they could attain knowledge because spiritual still flowed into the lungs. Spiritual flows into the kidneys only unconsciously, so that people cannot know anything about it unless they go through such spiritual things with full consciousness, as I have described in “How to Obtain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?”

What happens if people do not want to go through such things? Yes, gentlemen, then the lungs remain in such a state that they give no stimulus, and people are completely dependent for what they can know only on their belly, on their kidneys. And so, in the course of the 20th century, in the time in which we live, the transition from lung knowledge to kidney knowledge has occurred. Lung knowledge still had a spirituality. Kidneypowered knowledge has no spirituality for people unless spirituality is added.

So there has been a huge change in human beings. This change has taken place in the two decades that we have lived through. Nothing so important has ever happened in human nature that the whole apparatus of knowledge has slipped down from the lungs into the kidneys. And because the astral body found nothing in the kidneys, today there is confusion, a materialistic confusion in everyone's mind.

What would you say if you really wanted to describe the reality of why there were so many people in the 20th century who didn't know their way around the world, who didn't even know what to do, so that in the end, when people admitted it, they ended up sliding into this huge war? What actually happened there? The one who wants to find out what happened there has to describe the time before a little. You see, gentlemen, in the Middle Ages and later, an awful lot of people went to a certain place of pilgrimage, to Lourdes, or to places of pilgrimage that were modeled after it, because the clergy had persuaded them that they would get well if they went there, if they had the water of Lourdes. Well, only the name has changed; in the 19th century, the clergy persuaded people that they had to go to Lourdes to get well; in more recent times, doctors have persuaded people that they have to go to Karlsbad or Marienbad or Wiesbaden or some other place. What has all this actually amounted to? It has actually all amounted to the doctors telling people: Yes, my dear patients, your renal system is not in order; you have to drink as much Wiesbaden or Karlovy Vary or Marienbad water as possible – after all, it all goes through the kidneys! – you have to push through that. So that actually the state of health of many people consisted in their abandoning their kidney function in the winter, and the kidney function actually did the thinking for them; in the summer, on the other hand, they needed to go to Karlovy Vary or Marienbad or Wiesbaden because they couldn't actually do without mental stimulation – but they didn't want it – and that's where they improved their kidney system again. Little by little, this story, where only the abdomen was actually ever cured, has become a superstition. Isn't it true that what it should have been about was taking an interest in spiritual activity and spiritual stimulation. That is what one should have sought, because with no spiritual stimulus at all, the things that are out of order in the kidney area cannot be put right. And the situation in the 20th century was such that all the people who should really have thought through the soul, only thought through the kidney.

Gentlemen, the time will come when people will see more clearly, when the few who then retain clarity in the general confusion will say: What actually was this great war at the beginning of the 20th century? It was a kidney disease of humanity!

You see, what is important is to really find out how things are connected in reality. Then we will know how to educate young people, then we will know that it is quite impossible to teach young people only what we teach them today. Then we will know that we must use the beautiful years of youth, of childhood, to teach young people something quite different. But the 19th century became proud of the fact that it knew nothing of soul and spirit, and the consequence of this was that this giant kidney disease, which still lurks in the world today, emerged. So the future will one day say: What made humanity so befuddled at the beginning of the 20th century? An unnoticed kidney disease! — That is what strikes the heart today. And two things can be done: we can let things continue as they are, and then the doctors will indeed have a lot to do. People will become increasingly incapable of thinking rationally. They will become increasingly tired. They will think less and less about making progress through solid, sensible organization. What has actually flourished to a very great height today, this whole nonsensical activity, will reach the highest point. People will become weak, and doctors will examine the urine; they will find all kinds of wonderful things in it, won't they: protein, sugar and so on. They will only find that the kidney activity is out of order. Because if you find all these beautiful things in the urine, the kidney activity is out of order. And they will find: Yes, it is strange, the world has never produced as much sugar and as much protein as it does now! But no one will know what the connection is. At most, it will occur to some clever industrialist to use some of the sugar that is being produced in the industrialist's factory. That is the one way.

The other way is this: We must stop talking about all these external arrangements for the time being and reform the spiritual life of humanity, reform above all the school life, the spiritual life of humanity, and instill proper spiritual thoughts into people. Then people will find out how to live properly in the external world. For only when people have proper thoughts can we hope that they will be able to live in the right way in the external world.

But, gentlemen, this cannot be achieved by simply continuing the activities that have been pursued up to now. The issue here is to radically rethink. And the world will not become better through any external means, but only by beginning to know something. You see, the materialists imagine that they know so much about matter. But they know nothing about matter. That is precisely the strange thing, that the materialists know nothing about matter. The materialists say: Where did misery come from? Yes, misery, that has come from economic conditions, for example.

Yes, you see, that is just the same as when someone says: Where does poverty come from? Poverty comes from the poverty! - Not a different word. Economic misery is just another word for what we have. It is just beating about the bush, because of course people have created economic misery, and people experience economic misery because of what they are. Today, an enormous number of people simply have the urge to become, let us say, profiteers. But all this arises from the fact that the subordinate human organism, which is becoming decisive today, needs spiritual stimulation. The materialist merely tells people: Yes, this subordinate organism is important! But it is only by getting to know it in the spiritual that one can understand why it is important. And so materialism can measure blood pressure quite well, but it does not know what too low or too high blood pressure means, that too low blood pressure means: the astral body and the ego go too little into the physical body, and too high blood pressure: the astral body and the ego go too deeply into the physical body.

And indeed, it is the case today that blood pressure has slowly but surely become too high throughout the history of mankind, and people today suffer from high blood pressure. It is true: when a person wakes up today, he lives under too much blood pressure; then, so to speak, this too much blood pressure snaps at the astral body and the ego. The consequence of this is that the astral body and the ego enter completely into the physical body. This must be made good again by the human being receiving spiritual stimuli, by him really devoting himself to the spiritual with some interest.

This is not done by learning anthroposophical theories. If one merely learns anthroposophical theories, then that is just the way one learned to read in the 19th century, the way to memorize thoughts in an external way. That is not enough. What a person takes in must become such that it permeates him inwardly.

You see, gentlemen, when you go out into the fresh air from a stale atmosphere, you feel an inner joy. So you should have an inner joy, an inner interest, when you come out of all the stuff that is called knowledge today and into the fresh air of the soul, which in turn tells you about the spiritual. This inner joy, this deep interest, is what is needed for the spiritual life. And by permeating himself with interest, the blood that has become too heavy - after all, the blood has become too heavy in all people today - is lightened again. The kidneys become spiritualized, and the result of this will be that it will become better in the world when people again want to know something of that which has been taken from them for centuries. That is what must always be repeated, what I must say to you in all forms, because it is essential that we face the truth and not be blinded by what is pseudoscience. Therefore, I wanted to add a few things today to what I have told you in the previous lectures. There is still much to be said about these matters, but they will become clearer and clearer.

Now we have to take a short break in the series of lectures. I have to make a trip to England and will let you know when we can continue.

But that is what I wanted to make clear to you today, how the great events in human history are actually connected with what man is inwardly, and that one must start there, that therefore humanity must first be enlightened, but enlightened about realities, not about empty phrases. That is it.

The origin and significance of cults, nutrition issues.