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

it should not meet until after death or until one is suitably prepared for a
conscious encounter with the spiritual world. Any drug or poison will also
to some degree deflect the life-processes from their bodily manifestation,
leading to the premature release of etheric forces into the soul realm. This
phenomenon forms the basis for the anthroposophical understanding of
certain aspects of drug abuse. Different drugs may display certain organ
affinities—for instance, the qualitative effects of cocaine may be seen in terms
of the lung, of LSD more in terms of the kidney. What one is then meeting
as a disturbance of the etheric forces of the organs is also a disturbance on
the life-processes of the organs. It is a kind of foretaste of the experience
that we meet after death, when we see the panorama of the life that we
have just lived. After death this experience—known as the etheric tableau
experience—normally happens only when our entire ether body becomes
freed from our physical body. At the time of our death this experience is
strongly held within the sphere of the Being of Christ and the Spirit of the
Guardian of the Threshold. If this happens prematurely, albeit only in a
modified form through a drug, the soul may experience later difficulties or
impediments in returning properly into the body and this may also sow the
seed for different forms of disorientation and dislocation of the conscious
life of will. I cannot expand in this talk on the theme of drug abuse or
addiction. I would, however, like to point to the close connection that has
often been noted between certain drug experiences and certain spiritual
experiences. This becomes much more readily comprehensible when we are
able to understand it in terms of the organs. The forces that are released
from the etheric activities of the organs, the forces more bound up with
the inner side of the life processes, are expressions of the living activity of
spiritual beings that are still active within the substance of our own body.
The threshold to the substance-building processes is indeed the same as
the threshold to the spiritual world altogether. We meet the spiritual world
where the substance-building processes of our bodily organs are taking
place. But it is quite a different thing to meet this through a process of
inner training and inner development, or to meet it after death when these
forces have been naturally released, so to speak, than it is to do so through
substance abuse or through weaknesses within the activity of the planetary
sphere belonging to a particular organ. For the anthroposophical doctor
and psychiatrist, the field of possible medicinal therapy opens up at this
point through, for example, an understanding of the connections between
the different metals, the planets and the organs. It is not possible to develop
this further, however, at this point.
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