III. Understanding the Human Being: A Foundation for Education

What circulates in the blood is the external physical expression of our feeling. Furthermore, our feeling is connected with our thinking. What we imprint upon the circulation also vibrates within the heart. Goethe used the word “eye” to mean an inner, living organ, and the heart is just as much a living organ. It does not just move the blood. It has an enormous significance within the entire organism. Whereas the eye is affected for only a short time by light outside it, the heart continuously responds to feeling and thinking as it relates to feeling with small vibrations that are then carried into the blood. After a time, the heart’s vibrations include what lives specifically in feeling and in feeling-related thinking. The heart is a part of the body that influences us when we remember experiences. All human organs that partake of the currents of organic human fluids, that are included in the liquid currents—whether it is the kidneys imbedded in this flow or the liver connected to it in the digestive stream—all these organs vibrate in unison, vibrate with our feeling and willing in circulation and metabolism. Just as an after-image arises in the eye, in the same way a memory arises within the entire human being, though in differentiated and specific ways; it is a memory of experiences in the outer world. The whole human being is an organ that vibrates, and the organs people normally say are placed next to each other are there in reality so that human beings can process and retain spiritual-soul experience in a certain way. We will see that this only appears to be a materialistic perspective. We will see that it is precisely this that allows us to properly recognize the human being as a spiritual being. Today, however, now that I have mentioned this, you can see how we can grasp the entire human being through such a perspective. We can comprehend the human being not only in the way materialistic science does, by placing the individual organs alongside each other, even assuming that they interact mechanically. The spiritual-scientific perspective shows that the entire human being is unified as body, soul, and spirit, but our thinking separates these three perspectives. In reality, body, soul, and spirit are always interconnected within the human being.