The Rudolf Steiner Archive

5. Illness and Healing

[ 1 ] From the lectures I had the privilege of delivering here this winter, it was likely clear to those who were more or less regular attendees that this lecture series dealt with a series of profound questions of the soul. Today’s presentation—on the nature of illness and the nature of healing—will also be approached from the perspective of a spiritual question.

[ 2 ] What can be said from the perspective of spiritual science about the corresponding facts of life—insofar as they are merely physical expressions of spiritual causes—has been discussed in earlier lectures—for example, in the lecture “How Do We Understand Illness and Death?”— on the “delusion of illness” and the “fever of health”—has been discussed here. Today we will address significantly deeper questions regarding the understanding of illness and healing.

[ 3 ] Illness, recovery, or indeed the fatal outcome of this or that illness have a profound impact on human life. And if we have repeatedly asked ourselves about the underlying conditions—the spiritual foundations of the things that form the basis of our considerations here—then we may well also inquire into the spiritual causes behind these profound facts and experiences of human existence. In other words, we may raise the question: What does spiritual science have to say about these experiences?

[ 4 ] Here, however, we will once again have to look deeply into the overall meaning of the development of human life in order to understand how illness, health, death, and healing can fit into the normal course of human development. For, fundamentally speaking, we see these phenomena as, so to speak, fitting into the normal development of the human being. Do they perhaps contribute something to our development? In other words, do they propel us forward or backward in our development? We can only arrive at a clear understanding of these phenomena if we also take into account the overall nature of the human being here.

[ 5 ] We have often described this total nature here as consisting of the four real aspects of the human being: first, the physical body, which humans share with all mineral beings in their environment, whose forms are determined by the physical and chemical forces and laws inherent in them. We have always referred to the second aspect of the human being as the etheric or life body, and we have noted that, in the sense in which we speak of it, human beings share this body with all living things—that is, with the plant and animal beings in their environment. Then we pointed to the astral body, which the human being possesses as the third member of his being; it is the bearer of pleasure and suffering, joy and pain, of all the feelings, impressions, thoughts, and so on that ebb and flow within us from morning to night. The human being shares this astral body only with the animal world of his surroundings. And then we have always considered the highest member of the human being, which makes him the crown of earthly creation—the bearer of his “I,” his self-consciousness. When we consider these four members, we can say to ourselves at first: Even upon superficial observation, a certain difference between these four members appears to us. We have the physical human body before us when we look at a human being—when we look at ourselves—from the outside. The external physical sense organs can perceive what we call the physical human body. Through thinking bound to these physical organs—that is, through the thinking bound to the instrument of the brain—we can comprehend this physical human body. It therefore reveals itself to us when we observe it from the outside.

[ 6 ] The relationship to the human astral body is quite different. We have already seen from the preceding descriptions that only for the true clairvoyant consciousness is the astral body, so to speak, an external reality; that only this consciousness, through the training of consciousness already described on several occasions, can perceive the astral body in a certain way just as it perceives the physical body. In ordinary life, the human astral body is not perceptible from the outside; of the impulses, desires, passions, thoughts, feelings, and so on that surge within it, the eye can see only their outward manifestations. In contrast, the human being himself perceives these experiences of his astral body from within. He perceives what we call drives, desires, passions, joy and pain, pleasure and suffering. Therefore, we can say that the astral body relates to the physical body in such a way that, in normal human life, we view the former from within, but the physical body from without.

[ 7 ] In a certain sense, the other two components of human nature—the etheric body and the bearer of the “I”—lie between these two extremes. The physical body can be perceived purely externally, while the astral body can be perceived purely internally. But the middle link between the physical body and the astral body is the etheric body. It cannot be perceived from the outside, but it acts outwardly. In the ordinary life of a human being, it acts outwardly in such a way that we can say: Whatever the astral body develops in terms of forces and inner experiences must first be transferred to the etheric body; only then can it take effect in the physical instruments, in the physical body. Thus, the etheric body acts as a mediating link between the astral body and the physical body. This etheric or life body therefore leads from the outside to the inside. We can no longer see it with our physical eyes. But what we can see with our physical eyes is only an instrument of the astral body because the etheric body acts outwardly into the physical body.

[ 8 ] In a certain sense, what we call the human “I” now moves from the inside out—while the etheric body moves from the outside in toward the astral body. For it is through the “I,” and what it makes of the astral body, that the human being becomes a perceiver of the external world, the physical environment from which the physical body itself is derived. Animal life proceeds without individual, without personal awareness, because the animal does not possess this personal “I”; because the animal experiences all the sensations of the astral body internally, but does not use its pleasure and pain, sympathy, or antipathy to gain knowledge of the external world. What we call pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, sympathy or antipathy—these are indeed experiences of the astral body in the animal; but the animal does not use its pleasure to rejoice in the beauty of the world, but rather remains within that element which gives it comfort. The animal lives directly within its pain; for the human being, however, pain leads him beyond himself toward an understanding of the world, because the “I” guides him outward again and brings him into contact with the external world. Thus we see how, on the one hand, the etheric body points inward toward the astral body, while the human “I” leads outward toward the external world, toward the physical world that surrounds us.

[ 9 ] We have often emphasized that human beings lead a life of constant change. We can observe this life of change every day. From the moment a person wakes up in the morning, we see in the human soul all the experiences of the astral body ebbing and flowing—joy and pain, pleasure and suffering, sensations, images, and so on. We see how, in the evening, these experiences sink into an indeterminate darkness, how the astral body and the “I” pass into a state of unconsciousness—or, perhaps better said, of subconsciousness. We have also already emphasized the reason why human beings undergo these alternating states day after day. When we observe the waking human being—how he presents himself from morning to evening—we see that the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, and the “I” are intertwined and interlinked in their effects. When a person falls asleep in the evening, it becomes apparent to occult consciousness that the physical body and etheric body remain lying in bed, while the astral body and the “I,” withdrawing from the physical and etheric bodies, return to their true home, the spiritual world. Now, in a certain sense, we can adopt yet another system of terminology that will enable us to communicate effectively about our current discussions.

[ 10 ] We can say that what we have called the physical body—and what we had to describe as that which presents itself to us only from the outside—goes out into the physical world during sleep as the outer human being, taking with it the etheric body, the mediator between the outer and the inner. Therefore, in the sleeping human being there can be no mediation between the outer and the inner, because the etheric body—the mediator—has gone into the outer world. We can therefore say, in a certain sense, that in the sleeping human being, the physical body and the etheric body are simply the outer human being; we can, so to speak, designate the physical body and the etheric body as the “outer human being” in general, even though the etheric body acts as the mediator from the outer to the inner. In contrast, we can designate the astral body and the “I” in the sleeping person as the “inner human being.” And we can do the same with regard to the waking human being, for the reason that all experiences of the astral body in the normal state are experienced inwardly, and because what the “I” can perceive of the external world in waking life is also taken up by the human inner being to be processed there as knowledge. The external becomes internal through the “I.” All of this shows that we can speak of an “external” and an “internal” human being; the external human being consisting of the physical body and the etheric body, the internal human being consisting of the “I” and the astral body.

[ 11 ] Now let us consider the so-called normal human life in terms of its meaning and development. Let us ask ourselves: Why, in fact, does a person return every night to a spiritual world with their astral body and their “I”? Does this have a specific meaning? Does entering the state of sleep have a purpose for human beings? — Such matters have already been touched upon here, but we absolutely need them for our discussions today. We must come to understand normal development in order to be able to see through the seemingly abnormal laws of nature that manifest themselves in illness and healing. Why does a person enter a state of sleep every night?

[ 12 ] We can only understand this if we take a moment to consider the entire relationship between the astral body and the “I” in relation to what we have called the “outer human being.” — We have called the astral body the vehicle of pleasure and suffering, joy and pain, of instinct, desire, and passion, of all the ebbing and flowing thoughts, perceptions, ideas, and sensations. But if the astral body is the bearer of all this, how is it that at night a person does not experience any of these things at all, even though the actual inner human being is so united with its astral body that the physical body and the etheric body are not involved? How is it that these experiences then sink into an indeterminate darkness? What is the reason? — The reason is that the astral body and the “I,” although they are the bearers of joy and pain, judgment, imagination, and so on, cannot directly experience everything of which they are the bearers. In our human life, in order to have their own experiences, the astral body and the “I” are, in their normal state, dependent on immersing themselves in the physical body and the etheric body. What we experience as our soul life is not something that the astral body experiences directly. If it were, we would also have to experience it at night, when we are united with the astral body. What we experience in our daily soul life is, as it were, an echo or a reflection. The physical body and the etheric body reflect back to us, as through a mirror or an echo, what we experience in the astral body. Everything our soul conjures up for us from the moment we wake up until we fall asleep, it can only do so by beholding its own experiences in that mirror, which is formed from the physical body and the etheric or life body. At the moment when we leave the physical body and the etheric body at night, we do indeed carry within us all the experiences of the astral body, but we are not conscious of them because becoming conscious requires the reflection or echo effect of the physical body and the etheric body.

[ 13 ] Thus, throughout our entire life—from the morning when we wake up to the evening when we fall asleep—we see an interaction between the inner and outer human beings, between the “I” and the astral body on the one hand, and the physical body and etheric body on the other. The forces at work here are the forces of the astral body and the “I.” For the physical body, as a sum of physical mechanisms, could never produce our soul life on its own, nor could the etheric body. The forces that bring forth this mirror image come from the astral body and the “I,” just as what we see in the mirror does not come from the mirror itself, but from that which is gazing into the mirror. Thus, all the forces that bring about our soul life lie in the astral body and the “I,” in the inner human being; and they are active in the interaction between the outer and inner worlds. During the day, we see these forces at work in our soul life, interacting with one another and, as it were, radiating out toward the physical body and the etheric body. But we also see them, toward evening, entering the state we call “fatigue.” We see them worn out toward evening, exhausted. And we would not be able to continue our lives if we were not able to enter, every evening, into a world other than the one in which we live from morning to evening. In this world, in which we live from morning to evening, we can, so to speak, build up our soul life, conjure it up before our soul. We are able to do this with the forces of the astral body. But we also use up these forces and cannot replenish them from our daily life. We can replenish them only from the spiritual world—from the world into which we enter every evening. That is the purpose of sleep. We could not live without entering the night world and drawing from it the forces that we use up during the day. Thus we can say that every night we draw from the spiritual world the very forces that we use up from morning to evening. This answers the question: What do we bring into the physical world when we enter our etheric and physical bodies? — That, then, is what we now know.

[ 14 ] Do we not, in turn, carry anything from the physical world into the world of the night? — That is the other question, and it is just as important as the first.

[ 15 ] To answer this question, however, we must consider a few things that are already evident in ordinary human life. In ordinary life, we have what are called experiences. These experiences take a remarkable course in our lives between birth and death. How does this course of events present itself to us? We can examine this using an example that has been mentioned here frequently: the example of learning to write. — When we put pen to paper to express our thoughts, we are practicing the art of writing. We are able to write. But what does this require? It requires that, during a certain period of our existence between birth and death, we have had a whole series of experiences. Let us think about what we had to go through to be able to express our thoughts by putting pen to paper and simply “writing.” Imagine everything you went through as a child, starting with that first clumsy attempt to hold the pen and put it to the paper, and so on. You might say: Thank goodness we don’t have to recall all of that again! For it would be terrible if, every time we wrote, we had to remember everything—all those failed attempts to make strokes, perhaps even the punishments associated with them, and so on—in order to develop what we call the art of writing. What, then, has happened here? It is what we call, in the highest sense, a development in human life between birth and death. We have gone through a whole series of experiences. These experiences took a long time; then they coalesced, as it were, forming an essence, and this essence is what we refer to as the “ability” to write. Everything else has sunk into the indeterminate darkness of oblivion. But we need not remember it, because a stage of our soul’s development has emerged from it. Thus our experiences coalesce into extracts, into essences, which manifest as our skill, our competence, and our abilities in life. This is our development in existence between birth and death. Experiences are first transformed into spiritual abilities, which, however, can be expressed through external physical tools. All personal experience between birth and death proceeds in such a way that experiences are transformed into abilities or even into what we call wisdom.

[ 16 ] We can visualize how this transformation took place by looking back at the period from 1770 to 1815. This period witnessed a major, momentous event in world history. A large number of people were contemporaries of this event. Let us ask ourselves: How did these contemporaries respond to it? — For some, the experiences passed them by without their noticing them—they remained oblivious. They did not transform these experiences into an understanding of the world or into worldly wisdom. Others, however, gained deep wisdom about life—that is, they distilled an essence from it.

[ 17 ] How are experiences transformed into abilities and wisdom within the soul? By taking these experiences—as they first come to us—with us evening after evening into our sleep state; into those spheres where the soul, or the inner person, dwells between evening and morning. There, the soul transforms what has been experienced over a certain period of time into extracts and essences. Anyone who can observe life knows that if one is to master a series of experiences and string them together into a single art, it is necessary to transform these experiences during appropriate periods of sleep. For example, the best way to memorize something is to learn it, sleep on it, learn it again, and sleep on it again. If one cannot immerse these experiences in the state of sleep in order to allow them to emerge as abilities or in the form of wisdom or art, then one is unable to undergo a process of development through these experiences.

[ 18 ] Here, what is necessary at a lower level confronts us at a higher level: this year’s plant cannot become next year’s plant unless it returns to the indeterminate depths of the earth’s womb and grows again the following year. Here, development remains a repetition. Where we have examined this in relation to human beings, it is a true “development”; there, experiences are immersed in the nocturnal bosom of the unconscious, and they are brought forth again—admittedly as a repetition, but ultimately transformed to such an extent that they can emerge as wisdom, as abilities, and as life experiences.

[ 19 ] This is how life was understood in times when people could look more deeply into the spiritual worlds than an external observation can today. That is why, whenever cultural guides of ancient times sought to convey special insights through imagery, they pointed precisely to such remarkable principles of human life. Let us ask ourselves: What would someone have to do to prevent a series of daily experiences from igniting a fire in their soul and transforming into some kind of ability? Let us ask this, for example, in relation to a very significant experience of the soul—that experience which develops when someone maintains a certain relationship with another personality over a prolonged period of time. These experiences with another person sink into the night consciousness and are reborn from it as what we call love for that other person—which, when healthy, is, as it were, an essence distilled from the succession of experiences. The feeling of love for the other person arises because the sum of these experiences has condensed into an essence, as if we were weaving the experiences together into a fabric. — What, then, would a person have to do if they wanted to prevent a series of experiences from becoming love? — They would have to employ a special art: They would have to prevent the natural process that occurs at night, whereby our experiences are transformed into the essence, into the feeling of love; they would have to dissolve the fabric of the day’s experiences again during the night. If they are capable of doing this, then they will ensure that whatever is destined to transform the experience of the other person into a feeling of love within their soul passes by their soul without leaving a trace.

[ 20 ] Homer sought to shed light on these depths of the human soul by presenting the image of Penelope and her experience with the suitors: She promises each of them marriage once she has finished a certain piece of weaving; she avoids having to keep her promise only by unraveling at night what she has woven during the day. — We glimpse immense depths of experience where seers are also artists. People today have little feeling for this and tend to dismiss such interpretations of poets who were also seers as arbitrary, or perhaps even interpret them as mere flights of fancy. This does no harm to the ancient poets, nor to the truth itself, but at most to our own time, which is thereby prevented from delving into the depths of human life.

[ 21 ] So in the evening we take something into our soul that we also bring out again. We take in what the soul develops between birth and death and what elevates it to ever higher levels of ability. But now we ask ourselves: Where is the limit of this human development? — We can come to understand this limit when we consider how, upon waking each morning, a human being finds the same physical body and the same etheric body, with the same abilities and predispositions, and the same inner configuration, with which they were endowed from the moment of birth. Human beings cannot change this configuration, these structures, and these inner forms of the physical body and the etheric body. If they could take the physical body—or at least the etheric body—with them into the state of sleep, then they could alter them. They find them in the morning just as they left them in the evening. Here we have a clear limit to what development can achieve in the life between birth and death. This development between birth and death is essentially limited to the soul’s experience; it cannot extend to the physical experience.

[ 22 ] We need only realize that no matter how many opportunities someone might have to undergo external experiences that could deepen his musical sensibility—experiences that would be suitable for developing a deep musical life within his soul— they could not develop it if they had not been born with a musical ear, if the physical-etheric structure of their ear did not enable them to establish harmony between the outer and inner human beings. But we must be clear about this: for a human being to be whole, all the individual aspects of their nature must form a unity, a harmony. Therefore, we can say to ourselves: Everything a person with an unmusical ear has the opportunity to experience—experiences that could elevate him to a higher level of musical experience—must remain within the soul; it must be resigned to this; it cannot emerge, because the boundary is drawn every morning by the inherent structure and form of the inner organs. We will understand such a thing when we realize that it depends not merely on the coarser structure of the etheric body and the physical body, but on very fine configurations within them. One must realize that every soul capacity of the human being in our present normal life must express itself through an organ; and if the organ is not formed in the appropriate way, it cannot express itself. What physiology and anatomy cannot demonstrate—the fine, plastic structure within the organs—is precisely what is essential; naturally, these escape the scope of anatomy and physiology; yet it is precisely these that are incapable of transformation between birth and death.

[ 23 ] Is the human being completely powerless to incorporate into his physical body and etheric body the experiences and lessons he absorbs in his astral body and through his I?

[ 24 ] We know, of course, when we observe human beings, that to a certain extent a person can even reshape their own physical body. One need only observe a person who has spent ten years of his life engaged in deep inner mental work; his gestures and facial features will have changed. But all of this is bound by very narrow limits. Is it always bound by such narrow limits?

[ 25 ] We can only understand that it is not always bound by the narrowest limits if we appeal to a law that has already been mentioned here on several occasions, but which must be pointed out again and again because it is so far removed from our contemporary lives—a law that can be compared to the other law that was won for humanity in the 17th century in a lesser sphere.

[ 26 ] Well into the 17th century, people believed that lower animals, insects, and so on could grow out of river mud. They believed that it was mere matter that caused earthworms and insects to grow out of it. This was not merely a belief held by laypeople, but also by scholars. If we look back to earlier times, we can see how everything was systematized to such an extent that, for example, instructions were given on what one had to do to create life purely from the surrounding environment. For example, a book from the 7th century A.D. describes how one need only beat a horse’s carcass to a pulp to obtain bees; hornets would come from oxen, and wasps from donkeys. It was believed then that living things grew out of the substance of the immediate environment. And it was not until the 17th century that the great naturalist Francesco Redi was the first to articulate the principle: Life can only arise from life! Because of this truth—which is taken for granted today, to the point that no one can comprehend that people ever believed otherwise—Redi was still regarded in the 17th century as a dangerous heretic who only narrowly escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno.

[ 27 ] That is how it always is with such truths: At first, those who proclaimed them were considered heretics and fell prey to the Inquisition. Back then, people were burned at the stake or threatened with it. Today, this form of inquisition has been abandoned. People are no longer burned at the stake. But those who today sit on the curial throne of science regard those who, from a higher level, communicate a new truth as fools and dreamers. Today, those who advocate—in a different way—the principle that Francesco Redi established in the 17th century regarding living beings are regarded as fools and dreamers. Just as Redi pointed out that it is an inaccurate way of looking at things to believe that the living can grow directly out of the non-living, but rather that one must go back to a living entity of the same kind—to the seed that draws substances and forces from its surroundings in order to unfold in its own way— — so too must those who stand today on the ground of spiritual science demonstrate that what enters into existence at birth as a soul-spiritual entity originates from a soul-spiritual entity of the same kind, and that it is not composed solely of inherited characteristics. Just as the earthworm embryo draws in substances to develop, so too must the soul-spiritual embryo draw in the substances of its environment in order to unfold. In other words, when we trace the soul-spiritual in the human being back, we arrive at an earlier soul-spiritual entity that exists before birth and has nothing to do with heredity. What ultimately follows from this statement—that the soul-spiritual can come only from the soul-spiritual—leads to the doctrine of repeated earthly lives, of which you can become convinced if you delve more deeply into spiritual science. Our life between birth and death traces back to other lives we have lived in the past. The soul-spiritual arises from the soul-spiritual, and in the soul-spiritual of the past lie the causes of what we now experience between birth and death. And when we pass through the gate of death, we take with us what we have absorbed in this life and developed into abilities from these causes. What we take with us when we pass through the gate of death into a spiritual-soul world, we bring back again when we enter into existence through a new birth in the future.

[ 28 ] Between death and rebirth, we find ourselves in a different situation than when we enter the spiritual world every evening through sleep, from which we awaken again in the morning. When we wake up in the morning, we find our etheric body and physical body just as they were in the evening. We cannot incorporate into them what has passed us by in the life between birth and death. We have encountered a limit in the completed etheric and physical bodies. But when we pass through the gate of death into the spiritual world, we shed the physical and etheric bodies and take with us only the essence of the etheric body. Now we are in the spiritual world and are no longer compelled to take into account an existing physical and etheric body. Throughout the entire period from death to the new birth, the human being can work with purely spiritual forces; for there he is dealing with purely spiritual substances. From the spiritual world, the human being draws what is needed to form an archetype of a new physical and etheric body, into which are now woven the elements that could not be woven into the previous physical and etheric bodies. In this way, the human being develops an archetype of his physical and etheric bodies up to the time of his new birth—a purely spiritual archetype into which are woven the experiences with regard to which the soul had to resign itself between birth and death. Then comes the moment when the archetype has reached its completion, and when the human being will be able to shape what he has incorporated into his archetype into the malleable physical and etheric bodies; then the spiritual archetype contributes to that state of sleep which the human being is now undergoing.

[ 29 ] If a person could bring the physical body and the etheric body with them every morning upon waking, they could shape them from the spiritual world; but then they would also have to transform them. But at birth, a human being awakens from a state of sleep; for birth means awakening from a state of sleep that in fact encompasses the physical body and the etheric body in their prenatal state. This is where the astral body and the “I” descend into the physical world, into the physical body and the etheric body, which they can now shape plastically, and where they can mold into them everything they were unable to mold into the fully formed body in their previous life. Now, in a new life, they can express in the physical and etheric bodies what they are able to attain as a higher stage of development—something they were unable to attain in their previous life because the fully formed etheric and physical bodies prevented them from doing so.

[ 29 ] If a person could bring the physical body and the etheric body with them every morning upon waking, they could shape them from the spiritual world; but then they would also have to transform them. But at birth, a human being awakens from a state of sleep; for birth means awakening from a state of sleep that in fact encompasses the physical body and the etheric body in their prenatal state. This is where the astral body and the “I” descend into the physical world, into the physical body and the etheric body, which they can now shape plastically, and where they can mold into them everything they were unable to mold into the fully formed body in their previous life. Now, in a new life, they can express in the physical and etheric bodies what they are able to attain as a higher stage of development—something they were unable to attain in their previous life because the fully formed etheric and physical bodies prevented them from doing so.

[ 29 ] If a person could bring the physical body and the etheric body with them every morning upon waking, they could shape them from the spiritual world; but then they would also have to transform them. But at birth, a human being awakens from a state of sleep; for birth means awakening from a state of sleep that in fact encompasses the physical body and the etheric body in their prenatal state. This is where the astral body and the “I” descend into the physical world, into the physical body and the etheric body, which they can now shape plastically, and where they can mold into them everything they were unable to mold into the fully formed body in their previous life. Now, in a new life, they can express in the physical and etheric bodies what they are able to attain as a higher stage of development—something they were unable to attain in their previous life because the fully formed etheric and physical bodies prevented them from doing so.

[ 32 ] Thus, in the normal course of human evolution, two currents interact: an inner one and an outer one. These two currents manifest themselves side by side in the physical body and etheric body on the one hand, and in the astral body and the “I” on the other. — What, then, can a human being do between birth and death with regard to the physical body and the etheric body? Not only is the astral body worn down by the life of the soul, but the organs of the physical body and the etheric body are also worn down. The following becomes apparent here: While the astral body is in a spiritual world at night, it simultaneously works on the physical body and the etheric body to restore them to their normal state. Only during the state of nighttime sleep can what has been destroyed during the day be restored in the physical body and the etheric body. Thus we see how, indeed, the physical body and the etheric body are also shaped from within the spiritual world. But there is a limit: the structure and configuration of the physical body and the etheric body are given at birth and remain the same within narrow limits. We see, as it were, two currents working together in the development of the world, which we cannot readily bring into harmony in an abstract sense. Anyone who were to attempt to reconcile these two currents through abstract thought, anyone who were to develop a philosophy lightly and say: “Well, human beings must be harmonious; therefore, these two currents must be in harmony within the human being”—such a person would be gravely mistaken. Life does not operate according to abstractions; life works in such a way that what we dream of in our abstractions can only be achieved after long processes of development. Life works in such a way that it brings about states of equilibrium and harmony only by passing through disharmonies. Such is the living interplay within the human being, which cannot be easily brought into harmony through thought alone. It always amounts to abstract, sober thinking when we try to imagine harmony where life develops toward states of equilibrium by passing through disharmony. But this is, in fact, the very fate of human development: harmony must remain a goal we envision, yet one we cannot attain merely by imagining it into any given stage of human development.

[ 33 ] Thus, it may not be difficult for us to understand when spiritual science states that life does indeed appear different depending on whether we view it from the perspective of the inner or the outer human being. These are two different perspectives. Anyone who sought to unite these two perspectives through some form of abstraction would fail to take into account that there is not merely one ideal, one judgment, but as many judgments as there are perspectives, and that it is precisely through the interplay of these various judgments that the truth can be found. We may therefore surmise that the perspective on life with regard to the inner human being is perhaps different from that with regard to the outer human being. One could perhaps use a comparison to illustrate that truths are entirely relative, depending on whether they are viewed from one perspective or another. —

[ 34 ] It is certainly fitting for a giant whose fist is as big as a small child to say, “I’m laughing up my sleeve!” But whether the dwarf, who is just as tall as a small child, can say of the giant, “He’s laughing up his sleeve”—that is another question. Things necessarily appear as complementary truths. There is no absolute truth with regard to external things. Things must be viewed from a wide variety of perspectives, and the truth must be found through the individual truths that shed light on one another.

[ 35 ] Therefore, even in the life as it appears to us, the outer human being—the physical body and the etheric body—and the inner human being—the astral body and the I—do not need to be in perfect harmony at any stage of life’s development. If the harmony were perfect, then when a person entered the spiritual world in the evening, they would take the experiences of the day with them and transform them in a systematic way into the essences of skill, wisdom, and so on. It would then be the case that they would apply the forces they bring from the spiritual world in the morning into the physical world in relation to their soul life; but the boundary we have described—which is drawn for the physical body—would never be crossed. Yet then there would be no human development either. Human beings must learn to observe these boundaries themselves; they must incorporate them into their judgment. There must be the widest possible scope for them to cross these boundaries.

[ 36 ] And it constantly crosses them! In real life, boundaries are constantly being crossed, so that, for example, when the astral body and the “I” act upon the physical body, they do not respect the boundaries. In doing so, however, they transgress the regularity inherent in the physical body. We then see the effects of such boundary crossings in irregularities, in disorganization of the physical body, and in the manifestation of what presents itself as illnesses that have been brought about from the spirit, the astral life, and the ego. — A boundary can also be crossed in another way, namely when the inner human being fails to achieve harmony with the outer world, when he falls short of complete harmony with the outer world. We can illustrate this with a striking example.

[ 37 ] When the famous eruption of Mount Pel& in Central America occurred a few years ago, some very strange and highly instructive documents were found among the rubble afterward. One of them read: “You need no longer be afraid, for the dangers are all over; there will be no further eruptions!” This is shown to us by the laws we have recognized as the laws of nature. — These documents, on which it was written that further volcanic eruptions would be impossible according to our understanding of nature, had been buried—and with them the scholars who had composed these documents based on conventional scholarly understanding. We see a tragic event unfolding here. But it is precisely in this that we can clearly see humanity’s disharmony with the physical world. No one can doubt that the intellect of those scholars who researched these laws of nature would have been sufficient to discover the truth, had it only been properly trained. For they did not lack intellect. It is remarkable that intellect is a factor here, yet it alone can accomplish nothing. For animals facing such catastrophes migrate! This is a well-known fact. Only domesticated animals perish alongside humans. Thus, so-called animal instinct is sufficient to develop far greater wisdom in the face of such impending events than today’s human wisdom. What constitutes “intellect” is not the issue; our present-day intellect is also sufficiently present even in those who commit the greatest follies. Our intellect was therefore sufficient enough; but the experiences gained from life are not sufficient, because they have not matured. The moment the intellect, based on narrowly limited experiences, establishes something that seems plausible to it, it can fall into disharmony with actual external experiences, and then those external experiences come crashing down upon it. For there is a relationship between the physical body and the world that human beings will gradually come to recognize and comprehend using the powers they already possess today; but they will only be able to do so once they have gathered experience upon experience from the external world and have processed these experiences. Then, in what they have developed from these experiences to establish complete harmony, no other mind will have contributed than the one they possess today; for the mind has reached a certain level precisely today. What is lacking is the maturing of experiences. If this maturing of experiences does not correspond to the external world, then human beings fall into disharmony with the external world and may be shattered by the events of the external world.

[ 38 ] We have seen, through a striking example, how disharmony has arisen between the physical bodies of the scholars in question and what they have attained internally as their stage of soul development. We have cited this example to illustrate our observations. This disharmony need not arise from violent events befalling us; rather, such disharmony is, in principle and essentially, always present whenever any external harm befalls our physical and etheric bodies; when external harm affects the outer human being in such a way that he is unable to counteract this external harm from within through his own inner powers and banish it from his life. The same is true whenever any external harm comes upon us, whether it is outwardly visible or is a so-called internal harm that is, in fact, an external one; for if we upset our stomachs, this is, in essence, exactly the same as if a brick were to fall on our heads. This is the case when a conflict arises—or can arise—between the inner person and what approaches him from the outside; when the inner person is no match for this external influence.

[ 39 ] And fundamentally, every illness is such a disharmony, such a transgression of the boundary between the inner and outer self. What must first be achieved as harmony in the distant future—what would remain an abstract idea if we were to dream it into life—is brought about by the fact that such boundary crossings are in fact taking place continuously. It is only through this process that a person learns to become increasingly mature in regard to their inner life, as they gradually come to see how, through what they have already attained, they are not yet a match for outer life. This applies not only to the things that the ego permeates, but also to what the astral body permeates. What the ego permeates, a person experiences consciously from the moment of waking until falling asleep; how the astral body functions, how it can cross its boundaries and prove powerless to establish a proper harmony between the inner and outer human being—this eludes a person’s ordinary consciousness, yet it is nevertheless present. In all these things, we have described the deeper inner nature of the illness.

[ 40 ] What, then, are the two possible outcomes of the illness? — Either a cure occurs, or the illness ends in death. When we consider the course of normal life, we can place death on one side and recovery on the other.

[ 41 ] What, then, does healing mean for the overall development of the human being? — We must first be clear about what illness means for the overall development of the human being.

[ 42 ] Illness represents a disharmony between the inner and outer self; the inner self cannot come into harmony with the outer self when illness is present. In a certain sense, the inner self must withdraw from the outer self. We can see this most clearly when we cut our finger. — We can only cut the physical body, not the astral body. But the astral body must constantly intervene in the ordinary workings of the body, and the result is that the astral body does not find in the cut finger what it would expect to find if it were to penetrate the finger down to its smallest parts. It feels repelled from the physical part of the finger. This is the essence of a whole range of illnesses: that the inner human being feels repelled by the outer one, that it cannot participate in the outer human being because it is destroyed, because it has been torn away from it through injury. Now we can take the matter so far that we either restore the outer human being through external influences—or strengthen the inner human being to such an extent that it itself restores the outer human being; that is, healing can take place. Then, to a greater or lesser extent, the connection between the outer and inner self will be restored after healing; that is, the inner self can now, in a certain sense, find a way to continue living within the restored outer self; it can intervene once more.

[ 43 ] This is a process that can be compared to waking up. It was an artificial withdrawal of the inner self. Now, once again, the inner self has been given the opportunity to experience within the outer self what a person can only experience in the outer world. Healing gives a person the opportunity to return and bring back what they could not bring back if they were unable to return. Therefore, what constitutes the healing process is absorbed into the inner self and now forms an integral part of that inner self. Recovery and healing are what we can look back on with satisfaction and contentment, because we can say to ourselves: Just as we take something with us into our inner self when we fall asleep—thereby elevating it—so too do we take something with us through healing that elevates our inner self. Even if it is not immediately visible, it is there: we are elevated in our inner self, in our soul experience, under all circumstances; we experience an elevation of our inner self through recovery. We take with us into the spiritual world—which we experience during sleep—that which we have gained through recovery. Healing is thus something that enters into the state of sleep, something that strengthens us with regard to the forces we develop during sleep. — All the mysterious connections between healing and sleep could be explained if we had time to fully elaborate on these hinted-at thoughts. From this you can already see how we can equate healing with what we take with us into the spiritual world each evening, and what promotes the processes of development—insofar as they can be promoted at all between birth and death. However, what we draw inward from our external experiences in ordinary life must emerge in our soul life between birth and death as higher development. Yet what we take in as healing does not always have to emerge; we may very well carry it with us through the gate of death, and it may only benefit us in a future life. What spiritual science shows us, however, is that we must be grateful for every healing, for every healing signifies an elevation of the inner human being, which we can achieve only through the forces absorbed within.

[ 44 ] The other question is this: What does an illness that ends in death mean for a person?

[ 45 ] In a certain sense, it means the opposite—that we are unable to restore the harmony between the inner and outer self that has been destroyed; that we cannot cross the boundary between the inner and outer self in this life; that crossing this boundary in the proper way is impossible for us in this life. Just as we must stand in silence before the healthy body in the morning when we wake up, so too, when an illness ends in death, must we stand in silence before the damaged body; we cannot bring about a change in it again. Just as the healthy body remains as it is and receives us in the morning, so the damaged body does not receive us—that is to say, we must end in death. We must leave this body because we are unable to restore harmony. In return, however, we now take these experiences with us into the spiritual world, which we enter without having an external body at our disposal. What we have taken in as fruit—the fact that a damaged body no longer accepts us—becomes an enrichment of the life that unfolds between death and a new birth. Thus, we must also be grateful for an illness that ends in death, because it offers us the opportunity to elevate our life between death and a new birth, in order to gather the strengths and experiences that can only mature during that time.

[ 46 ] Here we have the psychological consequence of an illness that ends in death, and the psychological consequence of an illness that ends in healing. The healing processes intervene in our entire inner life and move us forward; illnesses that end in death intervene in everything that development in the outer world entails. This gives us two perspectives: We can be grateful for an illness that ends in healing, because through it we have become stronger within; and we can be grateful for an illness that ends in death, because we know: When we rise to a higher level in the life between death and rebirth, death will be of infinite importance to us, and we will then have learned that our body must not be the same when we rebuild it. And we will avoid those flaws that caused us to fail.

[ 47 ] Thus, we do indeed need to adopt two perspectives. It should never occur to anyone, for example from the perspective of spiritual science, to say: If death, which brings an illness to an end, is something for which we must be grateful, if the fatal outcome of an illness is something that elevates us in the next life, then we should let the illness end in death and not cure it! — Anyone who said that would not be speaking in the spirit of true spiritual science, for such a science does not deal with abstractions, but with those truths that are gained from the most diverse perspectives. We have a duty to ensure healing by all means at our disposal. Within human consciousness lies the task of healing as much as possible. For the view that we can also be grateful for death once it has occurred is not one that falls within ordinary human consciousness, but one that can only be attained by rising above ordinary human consciousness. From a “divine perspective,” it is justified to allow this or that illness to end in death; from a human perspective, it is justified only to employ everything that can bring about healing. An illness that ends in death must be judged from a different perspective. At first, there is no reconciliation between these two perspectives; they must coexist side by side. Any abstract attempt at harmonization is of no use here. Spiritual science must advance toward the recognition of truths that depict life from one certain perspective, and other truths that depict it from another perspective.

[ 48 ] The statement “Healing is good! Healing is a duty!” is true. — But the other statement is also true: “Death is good when it comes as the end of an illness; death is beneficial for the entire course of human development!” — Even though these two statements contradict each other, they both contain living truths for living understanding. Precisely where two such currents shine into human life—currents that must first harmonize—we see that we must not resort to stereotypes or systematization, but rather that we must view life in its broadest sense. We must be clear that so-called contradictions—provided they are based solely on experience, lived reality, and a deeper understanding of the matter—do not impair our understanding, but rather gradually lead us into a vibrant understanding, because life itself develops into harmony.

[ 49 ] The normal course of life unfolds in such a way that we develop abilities from our experiences, and that from what we cannot process internally between birth and death, we weave together what we can then process between death and a new birth. Healing and fatal illness are woven into this normal course of human life in such a way that every healing is a contribution toward leading the human being up to higher levels, and that every fatal illness, in turn, leads the human being up to a higher level—sometimes with regard to the inner self, and sometimes with regard to the outer self. Thus the world moves forward, progressing not in one but in two opposing currents. It is precisely in illness and healing that the full complexity of human life is revealed to us. Were it not for illness and healing, normal life could only proceed in such a way that human beings would drag out their lives on the leash of existence, always remaining at the threshold, and would, so to speak, have to receive the forces from the spiritual world—between death and new birth—in order to rebuild their organism. In that case, human beings would never be able to bring forth the fruits of their own work in the development of the world. Within the narrower limits of life, human beings can bring forth these fruits only by being able to err; for it is only by knowing what error is that one arrives at a conviction of the truth. To take in the truth in such a way that it becomes the soul’s own concern, that it intervenes in one’s development—this is possible only when one draws the truth from the fertile soil of error. Human beings could also enjoy good health if they did not interfere with life by transgressing boundaries with their own faults and imperfections. A state of health that comes about in the same way as truth recognized within—a state of health that a person achieves for themselves from incarnation to incarnation through their own life—such a state of health arises through actual errors and illnesses; that is, on the one hand, by a person learning to overcome their actual errors and faults through the healing process, and, on the other hand, by being confronted in the life between death and rebirth with those faults that they were unable to make amends for in one lifetime, so that they may learn to make amends for them in the next life.

[ 50 ] We can now return to our striking example and say: The minds of those scholars who made such erroneous predictions back then will not only become more cautious so as not to judge too quickly, but they will allow their experiences to mature in order to gradually bring about harmony with life.

[ 51 ] Thus we see how healing and illness intervene in human life and lead to that without which a person could never achieve their goal as their own. When we view illness and healing in this way, we can see how this seemingly abnormal intervention in our development—which includes illness, healing, and the fatal outcome of illness—is as much a part of human existence as error is when we seek to recognize the truth. We could say the same thing about illness and healing that a great poet of an important era said about human error: “Man errs as long as he strives!” Under certain circumstances, this might seem as though the poet had meant to say: Man always errs! — But the sentence is reversible, and we can phrase it this way: Let man strive as long as he errs! — Error gives birth to a new striving. The statement, “Man errs as long as he strives!” therefore need not fill us with despair; for every error generates a new striving, and man will strive until he has transcended the error. That is to say, error itself leads beyond itself to human truth! And in the same way, we can say: Man may fall ill as long as he is developing! Through illness, he simultaneously develops toward health. Thus, illness strives beyond itself in healing—and even in death—and brings about health not as something foreign to the human being, but as a health that has grown out of the human being’s very nature and is in harmony with that nature.

[ 52 ] Everything that appears in such remarkable and significant realms is well suited to show us how the entire world, in its wisdom, is arranged in such a way that human beings find the opportunity at every stage of their development to transcend themselves—entirely in the spirit of that sentence by Angelus Silesius with which we were able to conclude the lecture “What Is Mysticism?” At that time, we applied it to inner development; now we can extend it to the broad realm of illness and healing and say that even there it is truly revealed to us:

When you rise above yourself and let God take the reins:
That is how the Ascension is celebrated in your spirit!