The nature of man : approached through the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner

and the pulse beat, but the intestinal movements, the kidney functions, sleeping and waking, and other rhythms of all our functions and organs. One can envisage the organism as a supreme symphony with many diverse organs whose varied times are woven together into a great harmony-filled interplay of rhythms. On all this our emotional life plays in a dream consciousness. We are not in full awake consciousness in our feelings; they weave to and fro in that state of consciousness which we experience in dreams and which does not rise to the clear awakeness and conceptual sharpness of waking life. When we breathe in we awake a little, and when we breathe out we go a little more to sleep. The great rhythm of our earth life commences with our first in-breath and ends with our final expiration. To follow these processes we must rise to Inspirational cognition.

The will activities are even more difficult to follow because in them the soul plunges down into the bodily processes, brings about real changes and effects, and in moving the limbs brings about objective changes in the world. Of how we do these things we are unconscious: to them the word magical can justly be applied. The consciousness of the will activities is a sleep consciousness and in them the soul and spirit continue a mode of existence characteristic of embryonic and childhood life. Only with Intuitive consciousness can we penetrate consciously into these realms.

We can now characterise these three functional realms in another way and recognise that our nerve processes centred in the head are old. Death processes predominate but consciousness is most awake. Our head does very little, all our life it gets carried around and spends its time observing rather critically the goings on around. Basically it is based on memory, looking back even, as Plato saw, to pre-natal existence. By contrast the life of the metabolic-limb system is for ever young. We walk into the future but look backwards in memory in our head system. In our emotional rhythmic processes we live in the present, in the immediate experiences of our pleasure and pain, our loveand hate.

So do we see yet again how Man unites the spiritual, or continuum of wholeness, with the material bodily world of diversity and discreteness, and the past and future with the present. It is the nature of Man to unite two worlds, and he is that spiritual

T$