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

time-body. One came backwards into the flow of time and passed through
the gateway of birth. First one saw oneself and then in the course of time
one saw many generations, of which one had the impression that these
were one’s ancestors, until the moment when this experience ceased. The
mystagogue made clear that from a particular moment on one is occupied
via one’s ancestors with working on one’s own etheric body with its heredity,
until it possesses the quality that one requires in one’s earthly life. This was
called the heavenly part, the upper part of the etheric body. That which
accompanies one from the spiritual world to the earth.
After that the neophyte became acquainted with something else besides.
He encountered something that was at first strange to him but which the
Hermetic priest explained to him that it nevertheless belonged to him. He
became acquainted during regression with the etheric body as it was when
he passed through the gateway of death the last time. That was the moment
when reincarnation became a reality for the aspirant. And karma too. For
the essence of that previous etheric body lives on in his present etheric
body. And in it he met the lower part of his etheric body. The terrestrial,
chthonic part. That part harbors the disturbances which stem from the
pre vious and earlier earth-lives. These are a source of illness. The Mercury
in itiate is concerned with the etheric body. He must as it were transpose
everything into etheric terms. The ultimate cause of illness lies in the astral
body. But the unresolved situation from earlier lives lies hidden in the
etheric body. And so it is a typical Mercury-sentence when the second chapter
of Fundamentals of Therapy,* “Why is Man subject to illness?” (Warum
erkrankt der Mensch), ends with the sentence: “Thus healing must consist in
the treatment of the etheric organism” (Heilen muss daher in der Behandlung
des aetherischen Organismus bestehen).
Elementals and the cure of illness
How is a cure set in motion? The Course for Young Doctors gives an
elevated point of view on this. And speaks of healing spirits (heilende Geister).
In the meditation suggested there it is very clearly the elementals that
are associated with the plant-world. Elementals are descendants of the
hierarchies. They are the messengers of the third, second and first hierarchy,
who allowed themselves to be banished into condensation when the world
came into being.
The world arose from warmth. At the moment when the warmth begins
to work in such a way that on the one hand light arises and on the other
*Fundamentals of Therapy, R. Steiner, I. Wegman, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1967.
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