Eleventh Lecture

If we look around the entire mineral kingdom, we will find that what is present in the mineral kingdom contains the spiritual in such a bound form that there is a certain affinity between the mineral and the human ego organization, namely as follows: One might believe that if minerals are administered to humans in some way, whether by mouth or by injection, then the minerals will mainly affect the human organism and make it healthy or sick. But in reality, the physical mineral as such, the one that chemists study and physicists deal with in their thoughts, does not actually affect the human organism as a physical entity, but remains as it is. From a spiritual point of view, the physical, when transferred from the outside world into the human organism, hardly undergoes any significant metamorphosis. On the other hand, the spiritual present in the physical has a particularly strong effect on the human ego organization in minerals. So we can say that the spirit of a rock crystal, for example, has a particularly strong effect on the human ego organization. So that the ego organization of the human being, by carrying within itself, for example, the siliceous element, dominates the spiritual element of silicic acid, that is, of quartz. That is what is significant.