When Healing Becomes Educating, Vol. 1 - Waldorf Research Institute

which are activated only to the extent that the child’s life of will is aroused
to a creative rela tionship to sense perceptions. Perhaps we are seeing in these
processes what Steiner has described in referring to a co-operation between
blood and nerve processes. After the imprint has been created they become
emancipated from the body, thereby becoming free for the conscious life
of soul. In the brain the outer world is always in danger of conquering the
inner world; that is to say, through the brain we lose touch with our inner
being.
In the spleen, however, we can say the opposite, namely that the inner
forces of self are continually triumphing over the forces of the outer world.
The astral and etheric bodies remain active metabolically in the blood
pro cesses and the spleen therefore retains a strong connection to the
unconscious ego which remains active in the body directly rather than via
the kind of structural imprint which is to be found in the brain. We may
therefore say that the way the life processes take hold of these two organs
expresses a polarity.
Between the spleen and the brain we find the inner organs of the liver
and the lung. In the lung we see an organ which is, in many ways, similar
to the brain. It has a very strong and hard endoskeleton in the form of its
bronchial tree, composed of cartilaginous rings. Steiner has characterized
the lung as having the closest relationship of all the organs to earthly
thoughts—that is to say, to the brain. Steiner connects the lung, for instance,
to the ability to memorize facts and figures, quantity rather than quality, for
example, telephone directory memories. He describes all our memories as
being imprinted into the etheric sheath or etheric surface of our organs—
and the actual etheric forces through which the lung has been formed have
a particu lar affinity to earthly thoughts, to everything that lends itself to
being weighed, measured and quantified. Steiner has called this aspect of
our etheric body, the life ether. These life ether forces which work on a
bodily level in a kind of additive way, as is expressed, for example, in the
continuous growth pattern of a fungus, these life ether forces in the lung
become something like the guardians of those sense perceptions which
belong to the essentially earthly element of cognition based on factual
memory.
We are all very familiar with various clinical ways in which this comes
to expression. For the curative teacher, for example, the child will come
to mind who can sometimes quite literally remember every single detail
of everything that has happened, not only today and the day before, but
perhaps last week, last month, last year, or even ten years ago. Some children
display remark able encyclopedic memories of this kind.
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