Lecture III

You see, we have come in this way to an exact description, drawn from within, of the condition of the epileptic. Epilepsy is just the condition I have been describing—and especially so in the years of childhood. The epileptic is able to dive down with his ego organisation and astral body into the physical body and ether body—that, he can do; but he does not come forth into the physical world, he is held fast within. Let us consider then how it will be if the astral body enters into the lung, and is held fast there, cannot get out again. The astral body will remain pressed against the surface of the lung; astral body and ego organisation will be, so to speak, damned up, congested beneath the surface of the organ. This condition then manifests outwardly as a fit. That is what fits really are. Every time a fit occurs, an inner congestion is taking place at the surface of one or other organ. These congestions are to be found, above all, in the brain. But we know how the parts of the brain are related to the other parts of the body; a congestion in the brain may be due entirely to the fact that congestion is present in the liver, or in the lung, in which case the cerebral congestion is only a projection, a feebler copy of the congestion in the bodily organ. Whenever a fit occurs, this congestion of ego organisation and astral body within an organ can be observed. And so we have at last found our way to the true cause of epileptic fits. Everything else that can be said about them amounts to no more than a description of the external phenomena. You see now how impossible it is to come to a true knowledge of epilepsy unless we are able to go beyond physical body and etheric body and take into account also ego and astral body. Nothing of any real value can be said about fits if we do not know that at the surface of some organ, astral body and ego organisation are being terribly squeezed and crushed. They cannot get out, they try to make their way out, they push and are held back.