12. Spiritual Science as a Life's Work

I have often referred in other contexts to the nature of that rhythmic alternation that occurs in human life in the course of twenty-four hours: waking and sleeping. What can be said about this from the standpoint of spiritual science has already been mentioned in part in various lectures. Today, I would just like to point out that, in addition to what they experience in their immediate soul mood and can feel directly subjectively, human beings have a very special kind of remedy in sleep. If you listen to modern medical science today, you will find that, insofar as it is intelligent, it is entirely of the opinion that we have a remedy in sleep, in proper, healthy sleep. For sleep is what develops those forces in the whole human being that compensate for a certain daily expenditure of energy. While waking life in a certain way, one might say, weakens the body through states of exhaustion and fatigue, through states of weariness, while ordinary waking life draws from the sources of illness — not always, of course, but it can — in sleep we are primarily dealing with the unfolding of healing forces. One need not go so far as to recommend that people sleep as much as a well-known doctor recently did in Berlin, but the fact remains that healthy forces are at work on people during sleep, and that anyone who can see life from this perspective will say that one of the best remedies for many illnesses is to bring about healthy sleep. Of course, I cannot discuss how to bring about healthy sleep in this lecture. Whether spiritual science has anything special to say about this will be discussed on another occasion.