Lecture IX

We don't have to go back to those old methods. We have to move forward to methods by which we are able to follow the course of an illness through imaginative experience, and by which we are able to experience the healing process through an intuitive activity that leads not into the human being, but outward. What has formerly been a kind of experimentation in this field will now have to become careful observation. You see the direction in which we are turning. In olden times external physical science was a purely observing science; then it began to experiment and more and more substituted experiment for pure observation. That was right. But medical science did the same thing in imitation, and that was not right. It experimented on human beings with the temple research. We must find the way to change over from experimenting to observing, to an observation of life that is sustained by spiritual knowledge and enriched by scientific research. For whoever really looks at life can catch a view of illness everywhere. In the simplest form of everyday life that has deviated only to the slightest degree from so-called normal, something can be seen that will lead—if considered properly—to a recognition of complicated disease processes. One has only to understand how things relate to one another.