130. Natural Processes and Cures

One looks for illness in disruptions of the organism, which are caused by all kinds of effects on it, and to which it cannot adapt through its own activity. It is said that in this way, reduced life processes arise and the activities of the body parts are reduced.

As long as one only aims to get to know the phenomena that occur in the human physical body during the course of an illness, such a judgment will suffice. However, this is no longer the case if one wants to proceed to healing the disease. This is because there is nothing analogous to a healing process in the interaction of one physical substance with another. In the physical world, the effect of one substance on the other takes place. A change can then occur in the latter; the concept of healing is completely inapplicable to this.

This is due to the fact that even in a healthy organism, the substantial composition, form and mode of action of the whole and of the individual organs is not exhausted by the effect of the physical.

We can observe the physical body with the means available to us. But we cannot understand it through this. We can only understand it if we see the expression of spiritual processes in physical ones. What can be perceived by the senses through a physical organ is the manifestation of something behind it that can only be grasped spiritually.

A healthy organ is one in which the physical can be the perfect expression of what is behind it spiritually. If physical processes take place in the organ that are not the expression of the spiritual, or if the spiritual in it develops too strongly, so that the physical cannot follow, then illness occurs.

The sick organism must therefore be understood in the same way as the healthy one, in terms of the human spirit. This is not done in today's conventional medicine. Now, however, a medical method is coming to the public's attention that seeks to understand both the healthy and the sick organism in terms of the spiritual. Only in this way can a real understanding of the connection between illness and healing arise.

The prerequisite for this is to be willing to really recognize the spiritual in the human being. This does not mean the “spiritual” that is experienced in the soul. This has a relatively great independence from the body. Its laws are moral, aesthetic and logical. When it comes to these, one does not ask what is going on in the body, but one treats the soul as independent of the body.

But everything physical, human and non-human, is based on something spiritual. The fact that this is either not admitted at all for the physical nature, or that the spiritual in the physical is not considered appropriate for scientific treatment, stems only from the fact that at present scientific knowledge is taken almost exclusively from inanimate (inorganic) nature. And one also stops at this when considering the living, the sentient, the conscious. One simply seeks to recognize how the processes observable in the inorganic continue to work in the plant, animal, and human organism.

This leads to scientific illusions. It is true that in an inorganic substance one cannot initially discover a spiritual element. The inorganic substance alone has come into being. And if one looks in spirit at its origin, one also finds the spirit at work.

Take arsenic, for example. As it is found, it shows no spiritual element. It exists in itself in grape-like and kidney-shaped forms. As it appears there, it proves to be the result of processes that are the expression of a spiritual. This spiritual has been at work in the past in the formation of the earth. Only the physical form of the arsenic remains from this effect. It stands there like the memory of a past spiritual effect.

In the human organism, this spiritual effect is still present as a present one. It is as if the premature arsenic effect had been stored by the earth formation in this organism.

Certain organs, which take shape in the organism with certain outlines, develop out of the liquid and gaseous parts of the organism, in which they do not have fixed outlines. The power by which this happens is the same as that which was at work in the formation of the arsenic. These human organs are on the way to becoming what occurs in the inorganic world as the lifeless arsenic. They do not become such only because they are in the organism and thus do not complete the process of becoming arsenic.

Two things can now happen. On its way to becoming arsenic, an organ can lose its connection with the spiritual part of the organism. It then progresses too far in this process of becoming arsenic. If, under certain conditions, the organism is supplied with substances containing protein, for example, the connection between the physical process in the organ and the spiritual part of the organism can be restored. The protein-containing substance proves to be a remedy.

Or the spiritual can have too strong an effect on the organ. Then the organ does not progress far enough in its processes with regard to becoming arsenic. If arsenic is then introduced into the organism, this supports the becoming arsenic. It is deposited in the organ, so to speak, in a supportive way. The physical process that has been left behind is continued to the extent necessary for the organism. Arsenic proves to be a healing agent again. It pushes the spiritual away from the organ.

Without insights of the kind described above, it is impossible to arrive at an understanding of the disease process, much less at the choice of a remedy. Present-day natural science, which is entirely oriented towards the inorganic, can serve as a basis for technical work, but it cannot be such a basis for the healing of diseases. For the essence of being ill lies where the connection between the spiritual and the physical is. If one wants to claim that science, as the only possible science, cannot approach the spiritual because of its limitations, then one must also declare that there can be no real medicine. The inner courage that expands the passive powers of knowledge through the active ones is part of the knowledge of the spiritual. Present-day natural science has lost this courage because it searches everywhere for the sensory-perceptible foundations on which valid insights are to be developed. It cannot be the science on which medicine is based. Therefore, a medical method is developed here on the basis of an insight into the spiritual existence.