Lecture III

If we do not study the matter purely outwardly, we see that in the so-called blood circulation of the heart, in the aeration of the human body, we have everywhere special processes, as it were, that are somehow interrupted. I cannot go further now into this interruption, which has its purpose, but everywhere we have a specialization of this rhythmic curve that I have sketched here (see drawing). The course of breathing is a special aspect of this curve, the process that you draw if you follow the course of the blood from the heart upward toward the head or respectively toward the lungs and down to the rest of the body. Thus you have a specialization of these processes. In short, if you enliven what is suggested here, you penetrate into the functional tissue of the human organism, not in the dead way that is customary but in a living way. To do so you must enliven your own mental images. A mobile image of the human organism can thus be pictured. The human organism cannot be encompassed with static, abstract mental images, as modern physiology and pathology would like to encompass it today; it must instead be grasped with mental images in movement, with mental images that can really penetrate into the working of something that has inner movement, that is in no way merely a mechanical interaction of organs situated at rest in relation to one another.