10. The Supernatural Human Being III

It would be very tempting, if I had forty lectures at my disposal instead of one, to point out everything that could be strictly proven from today's science that the human organization shows an upward development, but that this upward development itself is restrained, and that there is a backward development in the head. This is roughly expressed by the fact that the head is the most ossified part of the human being, which has most strongly regressed what is otherwise blossoming, sprouting life. As a result, the head is precisely the organ of ordinary consciousness, in which development does not progress but is withdrawn. While in many respects the rest of human life can be compared to exuberant development based on saturation, what happens in the head must be compared to a continuous, slow decline in development. The nervous activity of the head, indeed the entire activity of the head and also of the sensory organs, is based on the fact that the human being mineralizes in this area of his being; he breaks down, it is a slow dying, an absorption of dying towards the head. Consider the human being as he stands before you in his exuberant, upward-striving life, and how he then absorbs that descending life into his organization, his own destruction; this decay creates space, and as it makes space, something else takes its place, namely their soul and spirit. Human beings do not think because the same forces that otherwise work in their growth, in their sprouting, budding life, are also active in the head and in the entire thinking organization; no, he thinks because these growing, sprouting forces withdraw, decay within themselves, and make room for what now takes the place of what otherwise causes unconsciousness of the rest of the organism in the surging, swelling blood. Once we realize that human beings develop their free thinking not by continuing their development in a straight line, as natural science suggests, but rather by reversing their development in order to unfold their thinking, then we will understand the connection between the human organism and thinking. One will understand how thinking intervenes in the organism, but that in order for it to intervene, the human organism must first be bent back, first broken down.