2. The Human Soul and Body in the Light of Knowledge of Nature and Spirit

The breathing process is quite different from that which takes place in the human nervous mechanism. For the nervous mechanism, one can say, in a certain respect, that it is a faithful reproduction of the human soul life itself. And if I wanted to use an expression – such expressions have not yet been coined in language, so one can only use loan images – for the way in which the human nervous system is wonderfully depicted in the soul life, I would like to say: the soul life paints itself into the nervous life, the nervous life is truly a painting of the soul life. Everything we experience in our soul in relation to external perception is reflected in the nervous system. It is precisely this that must make it understandable that the nervous life, especially of the head, is already at birth a faithful imprint of the soul life that comes from the spiritual world and connects with the bodily life. What may be objected to this connection between the soul, which emerges from the spiritual world, and the brain, with the head as its organ, from the point of view of brain physiology, will one day be put forward as proof of it. Before birth or conception, the soul prepares that wonderful formation of the head out of spiritual foundations, which is present as the formation of the human soul life. The head, for example, only becomes four times heavier in the course of a human life than it is at birth, while the whole organism becomes 22 times heavier in the course of further growth. The head, however, already presents itself at birth as something fully developed, if the expression is allowed: perfect. Even before birth, it is basically an image of the soul experience, because the soul experience works on the head from the spiritual world long before physical facts play out in the known way, which then lead to the existence of the human being in the physical world. For the spiritual researcher, the wonderful structure of the human nervous system, which is a reflection of the human soul life, is at the same time the confirmation that the soul comes from the spiritual, and that the forces lie in the spiritual that make the brain a painting of the soul life.