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When Healing Becomes Educating, Vol. 2 - Waldorf Research Institute

When Healing Becomes Educating, Vol. 2 - Waldorf Research Institute

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situation, treating these on the lines of generally accepted principles is more<br />

or less a matter of priority and can be life-saving. So where is the difference?<br />

This brings us to the second level. In our little story the second physician<br />

said: “He died because of his weak constitution which lacked sufficient<br />

resistance. If he had possessed greater powers of health he would still be<br />

alive.”<br />

Now the questions begin.<br />

Are there such things as healing or powers of life, or, as they are called<br />

in anthroposophic medicine, etheric powers? What are they and how is it<br />

possible to talk about them?<br />

According to Rudolf Steiner they can be perceived and understood. You<br />

have to school yourself inwardly with exercises and thus learn to approach<br />

them.<br />

Let us stop for a moment to consider what science has to say about this,<br />

using an occurrence in a university lecture hall as an example. Beginning his<br />

first lecture of the semester, a biochemistry professor said: “In former times<br />

it was thought that life was a power in its own right. Then it was found that<br />

all life is linked to chemical processes. Gradually the realization dawned that<br />

the chemical processes are what counts. For a while people considered that<br />

life went with chemical processes in an organism the way noise goes with a<br />

machine when it is running, but now we know that life is no more and no<br />

less than the sum of all the simultaneous biochemical processes.” 3<br />

So much for the professor of biochemistry.<br />

The statement was: Life is the sum of all the simultaneous biochemical<br />

processes. The author, who heard this in his third semester as a medical<br />

student, was impressed by the courageous nature of this definition until<br />

it occurred to him that the lecturer, too, must be a sum of simultaneous<br />

biochemical processes. What was the value of a statement that was nothing<br />

but a consequence of biochemical processes? Indeed, when the professor’s<br />

wife came to meet him at the door and gave him a kiss, was one sum of<br />

simultaneous biochemical processes kissing another sum of simultaneous<br />

biochemical processes? If the scientific view of human beings was that<br />

they were nothing but the sum of chemical processes, why bother with a<br />

highly-sophisticated medical science? Was it worth it just for the sake of the<br />

biochemical processes? Questions like this provided the starting point for<br />

Rudolf Steiner.<br />

At the age of 25 he published his first book on the theory of knowledge<br />

in which he asked what kind of cognition was needed for comprehension<br />

of the phenomena of life. Giving full credence to the principle of causality<br />

on which the science of physics is founded, he sought to show that this was<br />

nevertheless a special case that should not be accorded general validity.<br />

12

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