The Nature of Man in the Light of Spiritual Science

GA 68d — 13 February 1908, Berlin

20. The Mania for Disease in the Light of Spiritual Science

We will talk here about those forms of illness and their manifestations that are connected with our soul life and can only be properly understood in the light of spiritual science. Many disease phenomena depend on an unhealthy soul life.

(Example of a gentleman and a lady whom Dr. Steiner once met on the train. They lacked nothing but the strong will to be healthy.

Instead of castles and monasteries, you meet sanatoriums today. Description of a visit to such a sanatorium: The patients are often not really sick at all, but there was a seriously ill person there, namely the doctor in charge, who was suffering from a severe nervous disease.

It is often very important not to believe in certain symptoms of illnesses, even if they are present as such.

The etheric body and the physical body are products of the astral body. There are still some final after-effects of how the spiritual manifests itself in the physical body. We know the fact that our mouths water when certain feelings come over us. This proves the great influence of feelings on physical processes, especially on

It is similar when we turn pale with fear or blush with shame. Feelings are mental processes, but they have a direct effect on blood circulation.

Mere intellectual, sober ideas are often the seeds of many other ideas. Formative images, accompanied by feelings, must arise in our soul life if the body is to function in a healthy way. A merely rational, sober world view can have a very corrupting effect on the physical body. That is why it is so very important to have a correct world view. Then one also experiences the bliss of finding and inventing.

A large part of today's disease dispositions is based on an incorrect world view that has developed among the last generations. In earlier times, people still knew how important it is, even for physical well-being, when a person arouses appropriate feelings within himself. The tragedies of the ancient Greeks, for example, still had this healing power. Even the catharsis in the old, healthy aesthetics had, one might say, a medicinal purpose. There is a profound effect of the spirit on all that is alive. Even comedy, with the image of Auguste Clown falling from one foolishness into another, can have a healing effect in relation to this foolishness. Certain performances have a strangely suggestive effect on people.

If, in the face of such a wide diversity of phenomena, the necessary knowledge and insight into these things is lacking, a terrible discord is often caused by the abundance of impressions and by what the human being can inwardly process from them. Many people cannot cope with such a diversity of phenomena. But this is the cause of all hysterical phenomena.

Our time cannot stand still with its questions. Those who live only in empty abstractions never stop questioning because they are unable to fill these empty specters with content. The nonsensical drive for causality is also a basis for the development of hypochondria, which can have a profound effect on the body.

Hysteria is based on an inwardness that is too small and too weak in the face of an overwhelming external world with an immense diversity.

People who are unable to bring themselves into a harmoniously ordered relationship with the world are increasingly pushed back onto their own selves, and this failure to connect with the world gives rise to the phenomenon called hypochondria. It is essential that people should be able to arrive at a great and comprehensive understanding of the world, which ultimately only spiritual science can give them in this scope. Only then do we rediscover ideas, feelings and perceptions within us that have the right effect on our organism and result in the recovery of the body.

All those states of anxiety then disappear because they only arise from erroneous ideas about our environment. Ultimately, good health can only be brought about by a worldview that understands how to integrate the human being harmoniously into the course of the world.

Think of the mystical coordination of microcosm and macrocosm. Finally, a quote from Goethe's “Secrets”:

From the force that binds all beings,
Freed the man who overcomes himself.