The Rudolf Steiner Archive

11. Nutritional Issues and Healing Methods

[ 1 ] Today, from a spiritual scientific point of view, we will discuss something that can be of great value if understood correctly. We will outline some perspectives on nutrition and healing methods. However, even more than in any other discussion, you must bear in mind that this is only a selection of very aphoristic details from an infinitely broad field and that it is very difficult to speak about it today in a language that is generally understandable. It is therefore only possible to speak about it in general terms, because in such a broad circle one is not dealing with a group of initiates who would be able to truly perceive the truth value of every word.

[ 2 ] In occult schools, whose members are already at a higher level, it is possible to agree on a very specific form of expression, so that a certain word expresses a corresponding emotional impulse. All such things, as they can be indicated today, often have a different meaning in ordinary life. But an attempt should be made to talk about such questions even today, as they also have practical value. Of course, those who do not believe that the effects produced by causes in the spiritual world are much stronger than the effects of the outer physical world will not gain much from this. Many will admit in theory that what must be called spirit, which exerts a powerful influence on the world, contains forces similar to those found in electricity, magnetism, and so on. But this will only become of real significance when everyone develops a deeper feeling and understanding for it. Spiritual science is in many ways at odds with today's cultural life. Above all, it is misunderstood both by those who want to continue living conservatively in the old ways and by the numerous people who want to be active in various areas of life through reforms. All these different groups of people approach spiritual science and find it self-evident that it is not they who come to spiritual science, but spiritual science that comes to them. It may well be easy to understand that, for example, a radical animal rights activist does not make his energies and experience available to the spiritual science movement, but becomes angry when not all theosophists immediately join the animal rights movement. You can see this in all kinds of specialized fields. This is also quite natural. But since the theosophical movement is universal, it relates to the various individual movements like an architect's plan to what the carpenters, masons, craftsmen, and so on have to do to build the house. The latter are individual workers. But the person who manages the entire construction must require the workers to come to him so that they can receive their specific instructions from him. Therefore, spiritual science cannot agree when other movements, homeopaths, anti-alcoholics, and others demand that spiritual science come to them, but all the special fields must integrate themselves into the spiritual science movement, which must strive for a fundamental reform in all areas of life, but from within.

[ 3 ] In particular, the position of theosophy in relation to science is very easily misunderstood. It is not only scientists who believe that theosophy is their enemy and wants nothing to do with science. Some friends of theosophy also hold this view. In particular, the scientifically trained physician who works according to official requirements will easily come to the prejudice that theosophy does not work with scientific methods and therefore does not go hand in hand with science. And yet this is not the case.

[ 4 ] Today, you hear many people using buzzwords upon buzzwords. In a certain sense, it is entirely justified that there are specialists. It is not the representatives of the specialist fields, but above all their followers who use such buzzwords. I would like to start with one of these buzzwords. One often hears that the public is downright hypnotized when the term “poison” is used. It seems very plausible when people say: Poison must not enter the body! — People then like to talk about “natural medicine.” But what do we actually mean by nature? And what do we mean by poison? Nature also includes the effect that belladonna poison has on the human organism, because it is a purely natural effect. Nature naturally includes all effects that are subject to the laws of nature. And what is a poison? Water is a powerful poison if a person consumes it by the bucketful, because it then has a highly destructive effect. And arsenic is a very good thing if you use it in certain combinations. That is why a truly intimate study of the human organism and the things in nature outside is necessary.

[ 5 ] Paracelsus himself pointed out in his striking language how certain processes in the human body are related to those in the external world, such as cholera and arsenic. That is why he also called a cholera patient an arsenicus, because he knew that the same factors are at work in arsenic and cholera, and because he also recognized how things harmonize with each other. We are dealing here with a natural process that must first be understood.

[ 6 ] Another obstacle to understanding science is the materialistic way of thinking, which has cast all the issues at stake here in a distorted light. Remember what has been said about the effects of certain metals on the human organism. Now, someone might claim that spiritual science is pure materialism when it explains that the forces in minerals and metals have material effects on the human organism. But spiritual science also knows that the material world has a certain relationship to the spirit. Anyone who truly holds a spiritual worldview has recognized that such substances are not mere matter, but that spirit and soul live in them just as they do in a being surrounded by skin. In this sense, the theosophist speaks of the spirit embodied in gold, quartz, arsenic, or the poison of belladonna. For the occultist, the world is full of spiritual beings. The spirituality embodied in lead has the relationship to the human organism that you heard about yesterday. For theosophists, it is not a matter of seeking out strange spiritual beings that have nothing to do with our world, but rather those that are contained in every piece of metal, as indeed in everything that surrounds us. In this way, the spiritual scientific worldview imbues matter with spirit. Spiritual analogies are something that are based on real spiritual research.

[ 7 ] This is not about opposition to specialist science. Specialization is necessary, and one must not ignore external facts. But it is impossible to obtain a comprehensive view of the world from specialist knowledge alone. Even doctors, as individuals, must know something about the higher worlds. They will then organize their work quite differently from those who know nothing about the greater context. Symptoms will then also be evaluated differently. A single observation or experience may be considered insignificant if it results from an overview of the whole. Just as everyone who works in culture must meet certain requirements, the future will also demand doctors who are educated in the humanities. It is not only a question of empirical ability, but of something else entirely. Hahnemann, the founder of homeopathy, is a good example of this. There is a big difference between Paracelsus and Hahnemann. The 16th-century physician was still clairvoyant to a certain extent. At that time, this was still a widespread characteristic. Hahnemann was no longer clairvoyant. He could only test the effects of remedies through sensory experience.

[ 8 ] There is an analogy for the relationship between humans and beings and objects in nature referred to here, namely the relationship between the sexes, which is primarily determined by sympathy. It is a mysterious force that draws the sexes to each other, a power that works within living beings. The fact that one man is attracted to one woman should not be understood as something mystical in the negative sense of the word. Those who train themselves to be occult observers of the world have a similar relationship to all living things around them, which can be called universal. Just as there is a specific relationship between one man and one woman, there is a specific relationship between such a person and the phenomena of their environment. Those who have developed these powers within themselves gain the knowledge that allows them to recognize the relationship between a particular thing and human beings. This also leads to an understanding of the effect of healing powers.

[ 9 ] Paracelsus did not need to try it out, any more than a magnet needs to try out its ability to attract iron. He could say that this or that healing power resides in red foxglove. Such knowledge will only return when doctors recognize that it is not only intellectual understanding that matters, but also their inner attitude to life; when they know that they themselves must become completely different people. Only when they have transformed their temperament, character, and the whole disposition of their soul will they be able to develop that power of insight and recognition of the forces of the world that harmonize human beings. This will be possible in the not-too-distant future. The spiritual-scientific worldview has certain principles to offer, and some of these should be added to this general consideration. Those who wish to do so can gain much from them.

[ 10 ] Four points should be considered here. The first is that there is a certain connection between what we call digestion and what we call thinking. In other words, what digestion is on a lower level, thinking is on a higher level. Both are in close contact in the human organism as it lives on the physical plane. Something concrete about this contact will now be mentioned. Part of thinking is the ability to draw logical conclusions, to correctly deduce one concept from another. This deduction within the activity of thought is something very specific. Certain exercises can be done to steer this thinking activity in a certain direction. The same effect that you achieve in your thinking when you perform such logical exercises is achieved in your digestion by a certain substance, namely coffee. This is not a fantastical assumption, but a fact that can be proven. What you do to your stomach with coffee is what you achieve in your thinking when you perform practical logical exercises. When you drink coffee, you promote logical consistency in your thinking in a certain way. And when people say that drinking coffee increases the activity necessary to strengthen thinking, that is probably true. But coffee only promotes consistent thinking in a dependent way: it acts as a compulsion. You feel a certain dependence within yourself, something like an external influence. If a person wants to think logically but remain dependent, they may drink a lot of coffee. But if they want to think independently, they must free themselves from the things that affect the lower self; they must develop the forces within themselves that emanate from the soul. Then they will also experience that, after appropriate exercises, their stomach will also return to normal or remain normal.

[ 11 ] Another thing: Opposite to orderly thinking is thinking that cannot remain with one thought, unfocused thinking. It has a distracting effect and is characterized by an inability to hold one thought together with another. This type of thinking also has its counterpart in the effect of a certain substance on digestion, and this substance is contained in tea. Tea actually has the same effect on the lower part of the body as that which causes all thoughts to flee from the upper part. From this you can see that certain harmful effects of tea can be quite devastating under certain circumstances. But do not believe that someone who drinks tea throughout their entire life must ultimately be completely torn apart inside. If they are not adversely affected by tea in this way, it is only proof that their organism has sufficient resistance.

[ 12 ] Just as digestion corresponds to mental activity, so heart and blood activity correspond to the life of the will and desires; so that everything that is exerted on the blood by certain substances, by certain types of food, has a corresponding effect on the activity of the will. This can be observed particularly when one looks at the reverse. Today, you often hear that it is a long-outdated view that someone can be healed through thoughts; that, for example, a person afflicted with religious mania or even paranoia cannot be healed by corresponding opposite thoughts. What is expressed externally is only a symptom, and if this external symptom could be eliminated, the disease would move to another organ and reappear in a new form. What materialistic medicine has researched, occultism has long known. And it would never occur to an occultist to try to heal a delusion with a counter-delusion. However, it is quite another matter when occultism intervenes much more deeply, namely at the root cause. Suppose a person has fallen ill in the sphere of will and desire; this is due to certain disturbances in specific organs. Not only the heart is involved here, but many other things that are connected with it. Then the materialistic doctor will say: I cannot heal what is manifesting itself by teaching the patient the right ideas. But you must bear one thing in mind: in the organism, there are not only two things to distinguish between, not only the material basis and what is expressed through it; there is a third element that the occultist knows about. Behind the immediate activity of the soul on the physical plane, that is, behind what is expressed through impulses of the will, there is indeed an organic activity. But behind this organic activity there is a third element: the organ is built up by the spirit; it has arisen from something spiritual. And we must look at this spiritual element that is present behind the organ as its creator. If, for example, you want to teach a religious fanatic a correct idea, you have achieved nothing. But if you influence him in such a way that you affect the creator of the organ's activity — and that is the etheric body — then you can have an effect on him, not through ideas, but by doing something that appears to have no connection with the life of ideas.

[ 13 ] To understand this, let us start from the concept of religious truth. You can approach the idea of religious truth in such a way that you understand it. Then the necessary work has been done for the intellect. But no matter how many ideas you understand, they are absolutely ineffective for your organic life — the life of the etheric body as well as the physical body. That is why it is also ineffective if you want to teach a sick person the right ideas through persuasion, because this has no influence on their will. But don't just think of this truth as effective in an intellectual sense; tell the person: You must not only understand this once, but you must allow these ideas to work on you anew every day; this must be repeated rhythmically day after day, accompanied by very specific feelings and images. Doing it once has no effect. But if it is done regularly over a longer period of time, it will have an effect on the organic constitution. This is what is called concentration and meditation. So you cannot influence people in an hour. But if you give them instructions and they carry them out every day for many weeks, then you will have a small effect on them, because you will reach what lies behind the organ as its builder. Occultism is based on nothing other than scientific healing methods, but it knows much more. Today, of course, these ideas cannot yet be proclaimed publicly.

[ 14 ] To a large extent, breathing is connected with the life of the feelings and senses. From this source, you can gain insight into many things if you become clear about everything that is connected with breathing and how it can influence the life of the feelings and senses. Respiratory activity requires that sufficient oxygen be supplied to the blood and that the organic substances be maintained as a result. A person who enjoys spiritual things, who has spiritual content that gives them a joyful mood and has a lasting effect on them, such a person influences their organs in a healing way from the spirit.

[ 15 ] If we now return to digestion and thinking, we will find that there is much to be done in this area in particular. It should be clear that humanity must increasingly move toward a conscious approach to nutrition. Those who gather knowledge in this field today often still make a certain mistake. This mistake is that people want to learn too much from what they call “nature”; they want to follow nature completely. Paracelsus, on the other hand, says that we should not be servants of nature. Although doctors should study nature, they must also be artists; they must continue nature's work. Paracelsus does not see the real remedies in what is taken directly from nature, but in new products created from the spirit of nature. Paracelsus thus anticipates an era of medicine that uses such new products as truly effective remedies. It is solely a matter of continuing nature in this field.

[ 16 ] Nowadays, when people want to justify why a mixed diet is right for humans, they tend to argue that herbivores are ruminants, which have a specially adapted stomach and corresponding digestive organs. Carnivores are predators, whose digestive organs and teeth are designed for eating meat. Human teeth and digestive organs are somewhere between those of ruminants and those of predators. Therefore, nature itself points humans toward a mixed diet. — But everything in the world is in flux, in a state of becoming and growing. It is not a question of what humans look like today, but of how they can change. If humans switch to a plant-based diet, the organs that are more suited to a meat-based diet will regress, and the organs necessary for a plant-based diet will develop. We must consider how things once were and how they may be in the future. Therefore, we do not give humans the right food if we base it on their current status, but only when we consider their inner development. Statistics and external facts only capture the external status, but they do not capture the direction in which humans must move. We must also look at the world from a broader perspective.

[ 17 ] Consider the national character of the Russian peasant as it is today and that of the Englishman. The Russian peasant will emphasize the ego as little as possible. With the Englishman, the opposite is true. This finds expression in a purely external way in the spelling. The Englishman capitalizes the letter “I.” If one pursues this line of thought further, one finds that five times as much sugar is consumed in England as in Russia. Here, once again, we see the mutual correspondence between digestive activity and thinking activity. The process that is brought about in digestion by the intake of a larger amount of sugar has its correlate in the higher human being in a stronger independence of the thinking function.

[ 18 ] Now you can imagine that it is possible to intervene in these circumstances in order to correct them. One person can arrange their diet so that they only need a short time to digest, while another may spend a long time doing so. This allows us to look deep into the human organism again. When one person eats rice and digests it quickly, certain energies remain that are then available for their thinking activity. Another person who eats wild duck, for example, and needs a correspondingly longer time to digest it, may well be intelligent, but when they produce thoughts, it is actually their stomach that is thinking. One person may be a weak thinker but think independently, while another may be a strong thinker but think independently. You can learn a lesson from this.

[ 19 ] To touch on something else: the greatest possible care must be taken to ensure that the body is not supplied with too much or too little protein. It is essential to find the right balance. For within digestion, proteins correspond to what happens in the thinking activity when ideas are produced. The same activity that causes the fertility of thought is brought about in the lower organism by proteins. If these are not supplied to humans in balanced quantities, they produce an excess of forces that correspond in the lower bodily activity to what forms the idea in the upper body. However, humans should become more and more in control of their ideas. Therefore, the supply of proteins should remain within certain limits, otherwise they will be overwhelmed by an activity of imagination from which they should be free. This is what Pythagoras meant when he taught his students: Abstain from beans!

[ 20 ] Of course, people then come and say: Look at the rice eater! He is a weak thinker. — Yes, such a person is not yet developed in his rice, but it is not a matter of just knowing the rules and thinking that everyone just needs to follow them. If the lower does not correspond to the higher, one can also cause harm. Take a person who has recently turned to vegetarianism. Then, in this new vegetarian, the activity in the lower proceeds in a very specific way. Certain forces are transformed from material to spiritual. But if they are not used, they have a detrimental effect and can even impair brain activity. Those who do nothing else but work as bankers or ordinary scholars can cause themselves great harm if they do not absorb spiritual ideas through the forces saved up by their vegetarian lifestyle. Thus, vegetarians must also transition to a spiritual life, otherwise they would be better off remaining meat eaters, as their memory could suffer disturbances, certain parts of the brain could be damaged, and so on. It is not enough to eat fruit in order to access the highest realms of spiritual life.

[ 21 ] Another correspondence in the organism is as follows. The reproductive capacity corresponds in the higher organism to what is known as the visionary, i.e., in a certain sense also the imaginative activity of the soul. That is why some orders demanded a certain asceticism, but this is also a source of enormous dangers. These can only be averted by a pure inner life, by firm confidence in one's own individuality, and by the ability to remain composed in all situations. If one does not give in to emotions and external influences, one stands firm in this area and will be able to avert harmful influences.

[ 22 ] White magic requires not only a pure life, but also a strong and secure life, a firm control of one's inner life, and the ability to remain composed in all situations. If, on the one hand, you really have so much self-control that nothing can surprise you, if you are inwardly secure, then you will also be able to overcome setbacks more easily.

[ 23 ] A new era can begin if we decide to take theosophical wisdom as our guide in all these matters. In the future, for example, we will have to study how certain forces produced by the organism can be systematically transformed into forces that can be used for spiritual knowledge. One day, a substance will be produced in the laboratory that will be of higher value than milk. Today, it would already be quite possible to establish a food laboratory and thereby gain influence over the nutrition of the peoples. But the time will come when students of spiritual science will work chemically in harmony with nature as it is becoming, not with nature as it has become. Goethe says in this sense:

“Now observe how the plant gradually,
guided step by step, forms flowers and fruit.”

[ 24 ] Take these few points of view, which are taken from a broad field, and consider them in such a way that they must be developed. Then you will see how you can draw spiritual nourishment from these things and what practical significance they can gain for you.