VII. Spiritual-Scientific Foundations for a True Physiology

When we examine the human being from a purely materialistic standpoint, we discover these nerve bulbs that I have described to you. Now, people say to themselves, “If I touch this box, I feel it and its solidness because of the nerve bulbs. If the box were cold, I would also feel the cold through such a nerve bulb.” They constantly look for these nerve bulbs of warmth and these nerve bulbs of feeling, but they never find them. Someone will examine a piece of skin, and because some of these nerve bulbs for feeling look a little different he thinks that they belong to something else. But it is all nonsense. There are no nerve bulbs sensitive to warmth because the whole human being is perceptive to warmth. These nerve bulbs are used only for sensing solid, water and vaporous substances. Where the sense of warmth begins, we become extremely “light-sensed” beings, that is, no more than a bit of warmth that perceives exterior heat. When we are surrounded by an amount of heat that enables us properly to say “I” to ourselves, we feel well, but when we are surrounded by freezing cold that takes away from us the amount of warmth that we are, we are in danger of losing our ego. The fear in our ego makes the cold outside perceptible to us. When somebody is freezing he is actually always afraid for his ego, and with good reason, because he pushes the ego out of himself faster than he actually should.