The Circular Flow of Man's Life within the World Of Sense, Soul And Spirit

GA 68b — 21 January 1907, Nuremberg

7. How Do We Understand Illness and Death?

We speak of the mysteries of the world. Fundamentally, man is surrounded by such mysteries [of existence everywhere]; [and] we can ask questions about every thing and every being that lead deep, deep into the depths of life and being. But there are certain individual, particularly towering pillars within this mysteriousness of existence, and among these are undoubtedly those that are designated by the two words that are to be the subject of our consideration today: illness and death.

If life is a mystery to many people – illness and death intrude into this life to make it quite mysterious to us, with death as that which confronts life as its opposite, and illness as a troublemaker. And not only in this respect are these two things mysteries of life, in that they encourage us to reflect, but they are mysterious because they cause us worry, and for many people fear and trepidation. Therefore, we should not be surprised that illness and death have always, since time immemorial, challenged the research instinct of all those who have wanted to reflect on existence, on the world. A long list of great thinkers would have to be cited here if I wanted to tell you everything that has been said about the two concepts of illness and, in particular, death. That cannot be my task. We want to penetrate into these two questions in the sense of spiritual science.

Just so that you can see what a beautiful task awaits us, let us look at a few things that have been taught by important people in order to approach these things more closely. Schopenhauer, the philosopher of pessimism, who reflected on the suffering of life and was touched by it, said that life is an unfortunate thing and that he first wanted to get to the bottom of it by thinking about it. He has put forward a variety of ideas about death. But if we look at them just a little, we see that even a deep thinker can easily fail on these questions. One thing seems grotesque to us: Schopenhauer tried to open up a kind of emotional understanding of humanity towards death. He said: Man is afraid of death. Truly, since life is such a bad thing, he does not need it, because death is a release. If one feels that life is a painful thing, then death is consoling. One can say to oneself, it puts an end to it. — Thus Schopenhauer saw in the bad sides of life a consolation in the face of death, and in death a consolation in the face of the bad thing of life.

In another part of his writings, he attempts to express himself on the necessity of death in a manner that is not so grotesque, but not much more fortunate. There he lets the earth spirit speak. [He says:] I need space for my many living creatures, so I have to clear them away, so I need death. Thus, for the guiding spirit of the earth, death is merely a matter of space.

Eduard von Hartmann says in his last book: It is in the nature of living beings, [and] especially of man.

I would like to point out that today we will only be talking about humans in the sense of spiritual science when it comes to death and illness. The world's mysteries are so diverse, and only those who want to put everything in the same category can apply what has been researched about one thing to something else. For the genuine spiritual researcher, things that appear to be the same, such as illness and death, are so very different for different beings. Hartmann says that man is so constituted that at a certain time in his life he loses his understanding of his environment, and a younger generation must follow that has this understanding. Man would be a stranger within the world if he were not taken away. — You see, again nothing substantial! What are we to make of this?

But one word shines through the ages, which for thousands and thousands of people has contained a kind of solution to the problem of death, albeit a word that is not even understood in its literal sense today; it comes from Paul and is:

Death is the wages of sin. (Rom 6:23)

It is understandable that a person with today's concepts and ideas, who has little knowledge of spiritual science, cannot become familiar with such a word. He has learned to see death and illness as natural processes, and it is completely foreign to him to see something [purely] natural that takes place within the world of purely natural processes as an effect of something moral, of something that depends on the arbitrariness and free will of man, of sin. That something moral can be the cause of something organic is far removed from the thinking of our time. If the apostle's word were correctly understood according to the wording, it would be quite futile to talk about it to our contemporaries. But it is not even understood correctly according to the wording. The Bible is a strange book of secrets, and those who think they understand it best usually penetrate its spirit the least.

We shall gain a better insight into our subject and a better understanding of it if we first try to understand it entirely from the mind of its author and from the thinking of the people from whose circle the Apostle Paul grew, the ancient Hebrew scholars.

In this context, “sin” means something quite different from what we call moral transgression today. And anyone who understands sin in the way that it is understood in today's church doctrine does not understand this word. We arrive at an understanding if we imagine what Paul called a doctrine of development. I would like to tell you about it not in a scholarly way, but only in outline. It is a superstition of modern science that the word “development” was only discovered in the last few centuries. People have always talked and thought about development, about the emergence of the perfect from the imperfect. It is just that the secret scientists of the time from which Paul grew up said: living beings represent a sequence of stages, from the most imperfect being up to the most perfect being. The human organism was literally thought of as a goal towards which all other living beings strive. They become more and more perfect in order to become like the human organism.

But what is the point of the human organism being structured in this way and the other living beings having it as their goal? For Paul, it makes sense that the human body should contain a soul with independence. He said: If a soul is to live, if it can find within itself the impulse to act, to make decisions out of itself, which is expressed in the word “freedom” or “arbitrariness” as a center of the being, then it must have just such a body. Therefore, the whole series of living beings would have to take this path under the influence of this freedom. The human organism is organized in such a way that a free soul can express itself independently within it.

What is an independent soul? Look at the universe, the cosmos. Look at the living beings! They are all connected to their environment; this connection becomes looser the higher we go in the evolutionary scale. The living beings become more independent, and humans are the most independent of all. He confronts the cosmos as a being that can act independently. But he, too, has outgrown this universe. Is it not the case that we can make the whole thing clear to ourselves through a very simple comparison? Take a glass of water; there are many drops in it. Each drop is contained in this mass of water without us being able to distinguish it from the mass. But if you single it out, if it becomes independent, then it presents itself as something independent of the whole, and if it were to develop forces within itself, then we could compare its position to the position of man in the cosmos. As long as the drop is in the whole of the water in it, it expresses those currents that come out of the mass. Having become independent, it has an effect back, like an opposing force on the mass.

It is the same with human beings, that is, to be “independent”. But if everything were to stand out as something special, it would destroy the whole harmony, and it must destroy it if harmony is not found again. Thus, from a certain point of view, the human being does go through the universe, opposing it. In other words, it is rooted in Paul's theory of development that the human being, in order to achieve independence, enters into a kind of hostile relationship with the universe. Paul says: independence and freedom must arise out of egoism. If man had never been led to egoism, he could not become free. A being that was always being led by the hand could never become an egoist and could never become free.

This liberation, which is built on the basis of egoism, this acceptance of selfishness by a being, is what Paul calls sin. For him, selfishness is the original sin. And so it was connected with the being of man, which developed into sin, that a body was organized through which the whole process of development led to this sin. But such a body could not help being mortal because of its detachment. So the essence of man requires a mortal body for its independence. Whoever penetrates into this will see that what has been said completely coincides with Paul's view. And that will give us the mood for what we have to consider.

Another person has also said a beautiful word about death: Goethe. In the essay: “Nature, we are surrounded and embraced by it” — there is also the word: Nature is alive everywhere, it has invented death in order to have much life. — These are to be introductory words to give you an indication of the direction from which we now want to penetrate our topic in the sense of spiritual science.

If we want to understand these two important events of human life, illness and death, we have to look at the essence and nature of the human being; and so, with your permission, I will repeat what this essence of the human being is. I can only do this very briefly. What the naturalistic [materialistic] thinker, the sensory perception, regards as the whole of the human being, his physical body, is for spiritual science only a part of the human being. Man has this physical body in common with all so-called inanimate beings that surround us. In this physical body, all substances and forces are found together, or precisely such forces as are at work out there in the so-called inanimate world. It is the same as the mineral.

At the end of the eighteenth century and in the first half of the nineteenth century, it was also scientifically accepted to say in a certain direction: That which lives is not merely a combination of substances and forces, but rather that which lives has a special power within itself, which brings the substances and forces of the inanimate world into very specific combinations, brings them into inner activity, kindles them into life; and this was called the vital force. Thus, it was said, humans, animals, and plants have vital force within them. And this makes it so that not only a chemical process takes place in the stomach and in the blood mixture, but that the whole thing is alive. The word “vital force” has become a term that could only be pronounced in the second half of the nineteenth century, and from a certain direction one was regarded as backward, as a fool.

But today, for a number of years, one is not such a great fool [before science] when one utters this word. For those who today consider the somewhat advanced state of the science of life phenomena cannot help but say to themselves: there is more to beings than a mere chemical-physical process. And many are of the opinion that they are speaking of a life force. They know that this is speculation. Spiritual science does not take this speculative point of view. It takes the view that there is a higher experience, that man is able to see more when certain powers slumbering in his soul are awakened. Comparison with the man born blind and the man who has received sight: the one who does not see can never decide whether something is there or not, but the one who sees it can. There is no possibility of speaking of limits to knowledge. For man makes the discovery that he has as many worlds around him as he has organs to perceive them. This is how spiritual science differs from what is called science today: it starts from discussing things that enter our existence as something new through the awakening of organs.

Imagine there is a piano here, a player is playing, and a deaf person is sitting next to it. They cannot hear anything that the player draws from the strings. But there is a method of making them perceptible to him, these things that are happening. You put paper tabs on the strings, they are thrown off by playing, and he can get a certain idea of what the others hear. The relationship between the world of sounds as perceived by the deaf man, who can only hear them indirectly through the little tags, and the world of the hearing, is the same as that between what is investigated within the material world and what can be experienced by those with higher organs. And the only thing that this claims as its assertion is the truth that there have always been people who had such higher organs and saw another world. Not through speculation, but through a higher perception, spiritual science comes upon what it now calls the life body or ether body, similar to the speculated life force. This is what brings the inanimate substances, the mere chemical-physical processes, to life and what man has in common with the plant and animal world.

The third link in the human being is the so-called astral body. It is the carrier of all that we call pleasure and suffering, joy and pain, affects, passions, drives and so on. Plants do not yet have this astral body, only animals and humans. The being that has it relates to the outside world differently. Today, even scholars often blur the difference between plants and animals by saying that plants also have certain sensations, and [they] refer to the fact that certain plants contract their leaves when a stimulus is applied. This is amateurish talk compared to spiritual science. If it only mattered that a being responds with a movement from within when it is stimulated, one could also claim that blotting paper, which absorbs ink, is a sentient being.

These are things that, because they occur, are highly dangerous because they confuse the senses of man when they are put forward by authorities, as they are today. What is true is only that what belongs to feeling is a reflection of the external stimulus, not what only moves and gives an answer. Not only must the being do something under the influence of a stimulus, but a reflection of the stimulus must take place in the innermost being. Not only must the tip of a needle touch us and we must defend ourselves against it, but the pricking must be linked to an inner process - pain or pleasure; that is part of it. A being that has such inner processes has an astral body. Man has this in common with the animal.

Man has become the pride of creation by being able to say “I” to himself. The “I”, that power that enables him to do so - let us say the “ego body” - is the fourth link in the human being, so that we initially recognize four links in the human being. We can disregard the higher links. We will understand the conditions that arise in the course of a human life, as well as illness and death, if we get to know the relationships between these four members a little better. Both today's lecture and tomorrow's are based on a correct presentation of the different members of the human being. We can do this by following human development. This can only be done sketchily here; it is intended as a suggestion.

We start from the physical birth of the human being and realize what this represents. Before this birth, the human germ is closed off from the outside world. It rests in the mother's body; the physical human body is surrounded on all sides by another physical matter, and birth means that this enveloping matter is pushed back and that which has developed as organs in the human body is directly exposed to the external physical world. Thus, physical birth is a pushing back of the physical shell and a free emergence of the human body into the physical environment.

Spiritual science does not just speak of this birth of man, but also of others; and this must be understood. Until this physical birth, the physical human body is surrounded by an outer physical shell that nourishes and protects it, sending its juices into it. What happens to the physical human body until physical birth happens to the etheric body until a certain point in human development. Even after the human being has been physically born, the etheric body is still enveloped by a protective motherly shell of etheric matter for the initiate. When the human being is physically born, he is not yet born eterally.

The birth of the etheric body does not take place as quickly as the physical birth; it happens gradually; little by little [the etheric body pushes the etheric covers away from itself, little by little] it emerges, at the time when the young person is undergoing the so-called change of teeth, towards the seventh year. Just as the physical body is surrounded by the physical sheath until physical birth, so the etheric body is surrounded by the protective etheric sheath until the birth of the etheric body. For spiritual science, the change of teeth is something very similar to the physical birth as seen from the outside.

And when the etheric body is born, the astral body has not yet lost its protective shell; and a third birth takes place. The third birth of the protective shell takes place in a similar way to the reining back of the etheric shell with the maturing of the human being in a sexual way, with sexual maturity. This is a third birth. Just as the physical body is exposed on all sides to physical impressions, so the etheric body in its nature and the astral body in its nature are exposed to their external world.

We have to take these facts of [spiritual science] as a basis if we want to understand human development. Therefore, we will recognize that the time from birth to the seventh year is a particularly important one for the development of the physical body. Not because the physical body does not develop afterwards. But the physical body develops in a very specific direction up to the seventh year, to a very specific point. [And] something happens in terms of physical human development that is characteristic: this is the hardening, [the] consolidation of the physical body. The human physical body is characterized by undergoing a process of hardening. The solid parts that serve as its support are bones. And from the softest parts to the solid bone system, there is a process of solidification, and this process of solidification goes through its main characteristics up to the seventh year; and the change of teeth, the acquisition of one's own teeth, is the conclusion of the solidification. There the power of solidification has reached its conclusion, has put out what it can work into the physical body in terms of solidification.

This is important. One must realize that this working into the solid structure happens more and more, and with the pushing out of one's own teeth, it reaches a kind of conclusion. The power that gives us teeth works within us. The previous teeth are inherited; what lies within us, in our own personality, in terms of creative power, is expressed [in the end] in our own teeth. When this point has been reached, the life force at work in the human being no longer has the constraint that it would have to have. Now the etheric body pushes back the protective etheric covering, becomes free and works differently. Now it mainly does the things in the body alone that are its task: growth, enlargement of the body and so on, whereas before it was busy creating forms. Now what is predisposed is increased. Now, in fact, until sexual maturity, the etheric body is the dominant factor in human development, the etheric body that has become free. It again puts a full stop, it pushes the power of forming, of growing, to the point where growth transcends itself.

Just as the power of solidification has been fulfilled in the teeth, so the power of the etheric body, in the maturing individual, reaches its potential in the moment of sexual reproduction. And at that moment the astral body is born. It is now free, no longer constrained. Human development is indeed so complicated when we look at the four elements that compose it.

We must now realize how these limbs, [whether they are more or less bound as] before the individual births; [or whether] they are free, [how they actually work in man]. First, let us look at the etheric body. We see that the etheric body is that which works in the human being, the power of growth, nutrition, reproduction; the etheric body is the carrier of this.

But that which brings the human being into a relationship with his surroundings, [which] enables him to enter into an interaction, that is his astral body.

While the etheric body of the human being works mainly within, enlarging the organs, working from [within] outwards in reproduction, the astral body is what is there to make the outside accessible to the inside and connect it to it. This happens all the time. Every ray of light, every piece of nourishment that a person takes in, is an interaction between the person's inner being and the outside world. The regulator is the astral body, and essentially the relationship is regulated by needs, by pleasure and pain, by desire. What a person desires, he appropriates, and the faculty of desire is the expression of the astral body. [This is what man demands of his environment.] You see, then, that man fulfills various tasks through his limbs. This now requires a significant distinction to be made with regard to the limbs in the whole of human life. This distinction will become clear to us when we consider the nature of sleep. When a person sleeps, all desire and suffering, all interaction with the outside world, everything that the astral body conveys, has sunk down. No sensible person will say that a person decays in the evening and is reborn in the morning. His astral body is there, but not as it is during the day. While during the day this astral body dwells in the physical body and allows the things of the outside world to flow out through the organs of the physical body and processes them, at night it is separated from the physical body, it does not touch the physical body. This is not the case with the etheric body. What it has to do continues during sleep.

When a person sleeps, the physical body and the etheric body lie in bed. The astral body with the ego has stepped out. What does this astral body do at night? If we look at this, it sheds light on the nature of the entire human activity in the world. The spiritual scientist knows that the astral body, if it remains within the physical body, could never remove that which finds its expression in fatigue. Call it an accumulation of fatigue substances or something else, it is there and must be removed. Where does the fatigue come from? How is it removed?

Fatigue is a by-product of what the astral body does in the physical body. As long as the astral body is in the physical body and uses the physical organs, the physical body will tire; and as long as the astral body is in the physical body, it cannot get rid of the fatigue. It must go out and work on the physical body from the outside, and this work takes place at night when the person is asleep. Then the seer sees the astral body working on the physical body and removing the fatigue. This is the source of the refreshing effect of healthy sleep. There is something healing about sleep. What is worn out in the physical body – the physical body is used by the astral body like a machine – all this is removed. An astral body that works on the physical body from the outside works to repair it; an astral body in the physical body consumes it; even destroys it within certain limits.

This is related to another phenomenon about which a man who is little known today said a great deal: Paracelsus. He knew the essence of sleep, but he knew something else as well. He realized that something special happens to this astral body when it emerges. It will become clear to us through a comparison. Imagine a vessel of water; there is water inside. Take a small sponge that can hold a drop and throw this sponge into the water, and it soaks up a drop. It used to be in all the water; now it is outside.

This is how it is in fact with the relationship between the astral body and the physical body. The astral body is not something that is original and separate from something greater. There is a mighty astral body, which is the astral body of our entire planet, and this astral body is like the mass of water in the vessel. The physical body is like the little sponge. When we are awake, the physical body has the astral body within it, and then it has separated a drop for itself from the astral sea, and this drop of the earth spirit works separately from the rest of the earth's astral body; and that is why it has an eroding effect during the day, it has to erode. Imagine a finger, separate it, and in a short time it will wither. Why? Because this finger must be connected to the whole life process, to the whole astral process, if it is to exist, and because the drop of astral mass that remains in the finger cannot lead its own life as a detached drop. The human being's astral body can do this to a certain extent, but it needs to return from time to time to draw strength from the entire astral body; this happens at night.

Thus, every human astral body connects with the entire astral body of the earth at night. This is why Paracelsus says: At night, man rests in the whole womb of spiritual nature and absorbs that harmony which has been destroyed during the day. — Thus we see that when a part is rejected from the spiritual world, it must return to gather strength there. In the state of separation, the astral body consumes the physical body.

Let us look at the ether body in relation to this. It is in the same position, it is also a piece of the general ether mass. But it does not return at night, and remains united with the physical body until death; it has a wearing effect on the physical body. The latter has drawn it out and made it independent, like the sponge and the drop of water. But now independent, the etheric body wears away the physical body, and this process of wear and tear is the life process of an individual being.

Now we can say: From the moment when this etheric body is born, when it emerges as an independent entity, it is completely independent and draws on the physical body. It draws in the way you can make clear by means of a comparison. Imagine a piece of wood that is burning; there is never a flame without a piece of wood. Just as the flame is released from the wood, so the etheric body is released from the physical body at the end of the seventh year; it shines like a flame. Just as the flame consumes the wood, just as it consumes its nourishment, so the etheric body consumes the physical body.

Until the etheric body has brought its own power to the final point at sexual maturity, until that time it replaces in some way what it has consumed. But at the end, it has nothing more to add, so it draws on the physical body. And a being that could not replace from any other side [what the ether body consumes, which in turn could not supply the ether body with new strength] would have to die when it reaches sexual maturity. In the animal world, there are such beings. How is it then that in the case of human beings the etheric body [after sexual maturity] receives further strength to grow? Because with sexual maturity the astral body is born, and this is now in a period of free growth.

What is this astral body? It is the forces accumulated by the person from a previous incarnation. The more capital a person has accumulated, the more they have to invest; and the more strength they have for their astral body, the longer their ascending line of life will last. The astral body rises; the time that expresses itself externally in the life of a person, morally, begins with sexual maturity. The human being is full of ideals, his longing goes beyond the measure of his reflection. All a sign that there is excess power in him. That is the excess power of his astral body.

Just as the physical body grows until the second dentition changes, and the etheric body until sexual maturity, so the astral body grows until mid-life. If you, as a clairvoyant, could measure the power that the astral body contains and distribute it over the years, you would be able to calculate mid-life. Because at that moment, when the astral body has given back everything that was put into it, has developed, then the middle of life has arrived. At that point, the astral body begins to consume. It consumes itself. Now the time comes when ideals fade, when man is no longer full of hope, when prudence sets in, when the astral body looks more to its surroundings, to experiences, whereas before it drew from within in the ascending current. The ideals of the young man, born from within, often do not correspond to the external. Then the time comes when harmony is established, and now he has the descending line. What the astral body has produced earlier is gradually used up, and then, when the astral body has used up itself, it begins to draw on the ether body, then it takes the strength from the ether body.

You may know that the etheric body is not only the seat of growth and so on, but also of memory, habits and temperaments. You see, just as the astral body begins to consume the forces of the etheric body from a certain point in life, so it later uses up the qualities we have just described. Memory begins to weaken and so on, and when the powers of the etheric body are consumed, what then? Then it goes to the physical body. This is then no longer able to work on itself, it ceases to stir up the life process within itself.

As long as the physical body can still enjoy the powers of the ether body, it processes what comes from outside to strengthen itself. When the ether body can no longer do this, substances are still absorbed from the outside, but are no longer integrated organically. Now the opposite of what happened earlier takes place. Whereas the substances that were taken in were integrated organically, now they are merely deposited like physical ballast substances in the tendons, in the soft parts of the human being, so that these harden; the bones become harder and harder. The physical body is actually consumed in the descending life. Just as the astral body can be born through the etheric body like a flame from wood, so the astral body first consumes itself like a flame from wood, then the etheric body, and then the physical body. What life has brought forth, what life has brought out, is at the same time what consumes this life. Just as the flame would not be without the wood, so the life of the astral body would not be, nor would consciousness, nor pleasure and pain, without the etheric and physical bodies. But just as the flame consumes the wood, so the independent life consumes its basis, the physical body. Therefore, death is not a process that takes place outside of life; rather, it is produced by life itself. This is the main thing we must realize: we could not have life at all if this life did not give birth to death.

Another thing is that the astral body is the mediator of everything that can come in from outside. If this is to happen, it must be appropriated by the physical body through the process of life. What does that mean? Light approaches us; if it were not for light, we would have no eyes. It is the same with everything that arises from the interaction of the physical body with the environment. The physical body appropriates the external environment and transforms it into organs. We transform the elements into organs when the life process is ascending.

We have to consider the following fact. A certain tribe in Africa that hunts needs certain dogs for hunting. Now there lives a poisonous fly there, the tsetse fly; it stings the hunting dogs, and they perish. Now, as so often, the “savages” have come up with something extraordinarily clever – spiritual science is familiar with the processes. This “savage” tribe now takes its hunting dog to the areas where the poisonous fly is found, just at the time when the dog can give birth to her puppies before she dies from the bite. The puppies are now immune; they can be stung and yet not die. This is an example of the adoption of an external aspect of the internal life process in the ascending line of life. Where life rekindles, where it passes through to the point of inner illumination, where the life process is re-established, it takes the poison within itself, integrates it and makes the organism strong against the poison.

This is basically how our organs came into being in the body. In ancient times, when there was no eye, a ray of sunlight fell on the skin; something like a small pain could be felt. The light had to integrate and the life process digested the light, appropriated it, transformed it into an eye, so that man had an eye to face the light.

This is how man interacts with his environment. This is to suggest that through external influences, which occur by means of the astral body, the physical body of man is organized as a receptive being that integrates the outside world; and the extent to which one can integrate the outside world gives pleasure, joy, desire. Where joy and desire are healthy, they are nothing more than the expression of a need, and that is the most reliable indicator of the life process. This can be seen in children. If their original instincts for nourishment are corrupted, they have no instinct for what is good for them. For example, if you overfeed a child with eggs from an early age, you will notice that this child loses the security of the food instinct. If not, the child is always ready to reject what is harmful to it and to want exactly what is beneficial to it. Such a child is much less exposed to damage to the organism. Too much protein is harmful.

So you see how desire is the measure for the life process itself. The life process is entirely under the influence of desire. But this also enables the human being to go beyond the measure of enjoyment and need. In order for life to be maintained, need must arise. Without hunger, life could not be maintained. Enjoyment is the concomitant of satiety. This is always the case where the external world is appropriated.

Because enjoyment is the concomitant of the life process, it can go beyond in terms of the appropriation of external substances. And so what it appropriates becomes a destroyer because it goes beyond measure; and there you have what predisposes the disease process through the activity of the astral body. Of course, we must not believe that this simply happens because it is expressed in the life between birth and death. Certainly, every excess has a destructive effect on this one life, and all moderation has a beneficial effect; but this happens to a greater extent beyond death. Here we must again consider the idea of reincarnation. The destructive forces, which are not yet harmful in life, are taken along into the next life, so that debauchery in one life means a disposition to illness in the next.

These are the most important foundations of illness. From this you can see how things are connected, but you can also see that what are actually internal causes of illness are necessarily linked to the life process, that they really arise from it. And now you will understand that we make our body stronger when we bring it into such interaction with the outside world in the ascending life process that it acquires something. This makes it strong against disease. We do not need to investigate other causes of disease. These are the ones that have less significance for life.

You know that today the bacillus plague does not only consist of being infected by it, but also of looking for the bacilli everywhere. This bacillus plague actually comes into consideration only in the second place in relation to spiritual science. Being invaded by bacilli is no different than being shot through with a bullet. In this case, the organism is so badly destroyed that the ether organism can no longer compensate for the destruction. As long as it is not destroyed, this ether organism also has the ability to compensate. The more it is connected with the ether, the more it has the power of compensation. You can cut up a polyp, and a new polyp will arise from each piece, because the etheric body of the polyp is still connected to the whole - [from which it can draw power, because in every drop of the etheric body there is the same power as in the whole] - and the connection still exists. Insofar as the etheric body becomes independent, it must lose this power. If, therefore, independence is at the same time a growth in relation to the impossibility of overcoming disturbances of the organism, then you have the Pauline sentence in a modern form: selfishness is the cause of destruction and death, and death is the wages of sin (Rom. 6:23). It is to be understood only in this sense. But someone may say: Yes, but is it compatible with the wise process of the world? Yes, if there were no possibility of illness, the great incentive for the etheric organism to become strong in order to grow by overcoming the illness would be missing. The etheric body emerges strengthened from every illness it has overcome. When germs attack us, it is important that we have a strong etheric body to overcome them. And does not the etheric body, precisely because it is forced to become an overcomer in the illness, give rise to higher forms of the etheric body? Yes, it develops itself upwards through this. Therefore, it can be said that illness is like the pearl oyster and the pearl; the noble pearl emerges from an illness of the oyster. Many things in the world have emerged as higher forms by building themselves on the basis of a process of destruction.

All this makes us understand, in a certain forceful way, illness and death. We can understand that we could not have life as we have it; if this life did not itself provoke death; as one could not have the flame if the fuel were not destroyed. Certain increases, intensifications are not possible without the possibility of illness. Sometimes strong health is the result of illness. Perhaps you will say: nature is healthy in all its parts, and even if it gives disease, it gives it to have much and strong life. In any case, it is clear that nature is everywhere, and it has, that is true, invented death in order to have much life, to have strong life, to have life. Because this can only exist if it creates death as its opposite pole.