On Attaining Spiritual Sight (Part I)

[AshvinP]

So I think that "If the motor nerves in my arm are severed, I can’t move the hand because I can’t perceive it" is not quite correct.

Thus, I think we should be careful not to mix the two kinds of nerves, just like we don't have to take 'the heart is not a pump' in the fully literal sense. We can still express in such a way as if the motor neurons perceive the will impulses, but now 'perception' doesn't mean that we have conscious sensations. Probably, we can say that our nervous system perceives the will impulses and propagates them to the muscles, but we still need the feedback of the sensory neurons if we are to have sensations, which turns out to be critical for refining the consequent steering of the will. In that sense, I don't think we are turning things upside down by recognizing that the will impulses use the nervous system as the leverage points through which bodily movements manifest.

Well Steiner says, we are indeed turning things upside down if we say the bold. The bodily movements manifest directly through metabolism, they are metabolism, as direct expression of the will. There is no leverage of the nervous system. Motor nerves have nothing to do with will, Steiner says. They are only mediators. The mediation of the nervous system is not to convey will impulses, but to allow the picture forming /thinking activity in the body. Without this perception, the movement cannot manifest.

I will include a brief 2 cents here, which may be ignored, but in any case, it's simply a reiteration of previous comments. We can put it this way:

"will impulses use the [motor] nervous system as the leverage points through which bodily movements manifest"

=

"The mediation of the nervous system is ... to allow the picture forming /thinking activity in the body".

This equivalence is valid when viewed from a deeper imaginative scale. The motor nervous system as leverage points is what the picture forming (perceptive) activity in the body looks like within the decohered physical scale. All the confusion comes when we declare the latter to be some sort of absolute Maya, rather than recognizing it is a valid intuitive perspective on the Whole and thus its transformations can be described with unique lawful dynamics. These dynamics can be validly described as the motor nervous leverage points being a precondition for muscle movement in response to will impulses (or the heart's pumping action being a precondition for blood movement).

Many aspects of spiritual science are rejected by skeptics because it isn't understood how two seemingly opposed things can be true, depending on what scale of intuitive perspective we are speaking from. We shouldn't fall into the same trap when defending Steiner's assertions, either. The moment we assume that the deeper scale spiritual relationship must be translatable to the physical scale in some isomorphic way, and therefore the physical facts themselves will reveal the motor nervous system as solely a mediator of picturing forming, we are trapped in an irresolvable conundrum from a scientific perspective. Instead, we need to realize that the picture forming of this system at a deeper imaginative scale is what can be described as the leverage point for will impulses at the physical scale.

[Cleric]

Well Steiner says, we are indeed turning things upside down if we say the bold. The bodily movements manifest directly through metabolism, they are metabolism, as direct expression of the will. There is no leverage of the nervous system. Motor nerves have nothing to do with will, Steiner says. They are only mediators. The mediation of the nervous system is not to convey will impulses, but to allow the picture forming /thinking activity in the body. Without this perception, the movement cannot manifest. Movement can only take place when perceptual feedback is in place and ready to monitor movement, which is why a severed motor nerve in the arm makes the movement impossible: the required perceptual feedback is not in place, and arm movement without reflection in the light-pole is an unreality. I guess the well-known PoF metaphor could be repurposed here, and applied to will and nerves:

I do understand what you say, but I think there's some confusion going on here. What you say is basically what Steiner says here:

There is no essential difference whether we experience a color consciously from outside, through the nerve-cord <a c>, or whether we experience an organ, or the position of an organ, etc., from inside, through the cord <d b>; in essence, this is the same. In the one case we experience something physical is in us, i.e., enclosed within our skin. Not only that which is outside, but also what is within us, places us in the process that can be experienced as a will-process.

But something isn't quite right here. The statement is that the motor neuron <d b> (blue) gives us the awareness of an organ position, etc., but this is incorrect. This awareness results from sensory neurons (like <a c> red) too. For example muscle spindles, Golgi tendon organs, etc. This whole area of neurology is called Proprioception. In all cases, the sensations come from <a c> nerves, called afferent. The nerves that propagate impulses from the CNS toward the muscle fibers are called efferent.

So the motor nerves are not nerves that cause proprioceptic sensations in our human consciousness. Also, if the motor nerves were indeed there only to provide the sensory feedback to our consciousness, then we might expect that if they are electrically stimulated, corresponding sensations should be evoked (as is the case for all sensory neurons). But what happens instead is that the stimulus reaches the muscle fibers and they respond by contracting. And this is nothing new. The famous story about Luigi Galvani and the twitching frog legs was practically the beginning of the study of bioelectricity. If muscle contraction has nothing to do with the motor nerves (the latter are there only to sense the movement which happens through 'metabolism'), why do the fibers contract precisely when these nerves are energized?

When I say that I'm unclear about Steiner, it is because even in your quote at the end, he says:

Now suppose that a so-called impression goes out from here and that the interruption of the nerve is in this place (in the head on the diagram) “Walking” will be the result, and the real process consists in this—that everything that we experience through the nerve here (the sensory nerve raching only the head), is experienced by day in a waking way. But what we experience here (from the head toward the leg, that is, that motor nerve) as unconscious will is experienced in a sleeping way, even when we are awake. The spiritual world forms and creates directly everything that lies below the point of interruption in the nerves.

This in itself is much more in line with what we're speaking of (about motor nerves as the leverage points through which the will condenses into physical manifestation). Also note that here there's nothing about these nerves serving proprioceptic function - in fact, they are completely unconscious (sleeping) from our human perspective, while just above it is said "we experience an organ, or the position of an organ, etc., from inside, through the cord <d b>"

But this contradicts that the <d b> cord is unconscious. It is as if, first, Steiner considers the motor nerve to be the one that brings about proprioception (while in reality, all proprioception depends on afferent nerves - from the periphery to the center). Then he speaks of the motor nerves in a much more sensible way, as the way the spiritual effects the muscles/movement.

But in any case, I think that the claim that movement is 'metabolism', while neurons are only for imagery, simply doesn't stand up to the facts (for ex. Galvani).

Now there's a kind of movement that will become dominant in the future, which indeed won't need nerves. It would rather be something like the Warpdrive metaphor. However, this would require a kind of coherence of our flow of becoming that is still far away.

[Federica]

This is one of the worst sides of Anthroposophy, Federica, and it's saddening to see you exhibit it here without a second thought. Spiritual science should never become dogmatism and fanaticism in this way. A free thinker can never sacrifice dispassionate contemplation for "Steiner says such and such" and worries about being "disrespectful" when exploring his statements. If you were to exercise such dispassionate contemplation, you wouldn't be focused so much on the word "careless" and would see that, on the contrary, the substance of what I am writing points toward the endless profundity of Steiner's work in these domains. One of the best ways to realize this inner depth is precisely by spotting the errors, overstatements, etc. and how they took shape through supersensible perception. This is something you will learn over time IF you renounce the fanaticism and reliance on authorities which is characteristic of worldly movements, but has no place on the inner path.

Allright, Ashvin, okay.
Now see if the following makes some sense to you.

It is NOT disrespectful to say: “I think Steiner is wrong in this contention about nerves”. But it IS first unreasonable, and moreover disrespectful to say: “Steiner has been careless with this”. First, it is unreasonable, since he came back to elaborating on the idea time and again through the years, in speech and in writing, based on long-term spiritual research, presenting detailed illustrations accompanied by various metaphors, references to experiments, sketches, etcetera, knowing only too well the opposition - and anger - with which he would be received. He just can't have been careless with that, under no possible meaning or interpretation.

And, it is also disrespectful to make up something about Steiner’s soul attitude (“careless”) while he was delivering the idea. I am afraid, this is another instance of a well-known habit that you exhibited many times already on this forum, for example with your notorious: “you are feeling insulted”. For some reason, you love to tell people what you think their soul attitude is, and now you do this even with the dead, on basis of transcripted material!

As the saying goes, the leopard doesn’t change its spots. Or, as we say in Italian, the wolf loses its fur, but not its vice. Notice, you are the one who have showed attachement to the expression “careless”, which you have been spelling out insistently in consecutive posts. For my part, I waited until the third occurrence before pointing out that it’s unreasonable, and moreover, disrespectful.

Hopefully this makes some sense to you, so that we can all learn from such discussions not so much to form opinions on esoteric physiology issues, but especially to actually 'change our spots' - that is, to meet the Guardian. As Dennis says, when we meet him, the Guardian tells us that everything that we think is coming at us is actually coming from us.

[emphasis by the author] I have talked to a number of people who have studied Anthroposophy for a long while, and many of them have had this experience. It's kind of splitting. This has to happen because you are crossing a kind of boundary where you have to realize that your thoughts have reality in the life of another human being, even if you never express any of it to that person. To do the work, you eventually have to experience how the toxicity of what you put out affects the people around you. This is rough, because it is ugly, and it leaves a bad taste. However, this is a certain stage in the path we could call dealing with the proclivity to make curses.

In the ancient world, cursing was just popping somebody's bubble again and again and again - similar to when a kid blows up frogs down by the creek. If you are a doctor, you probably blew up some frogs, or at least killed them in a biology lab to see what their guts look like. Why? Because you have to learn to deal with it. Thus, in this realm that you reach when you do this kind of work, when you actually go into your physiology and follow the blood circuits consciously, you can eventually feel and know how a particular organ reacts to what somebody says, especially in the morning. You wake up and there is a dream picture of that. If you can access that, you wonder how to deal with it and want it to go away. Next, you see in the other people how what you are saying will affect them; that is previews of kamaloka, little movie trailers of what you will see after your death. This is what you will do when you can no longer push people around or think ill of them. You will see and feel how they felt about you pushing them around.

Rudolf Steiner calls such training Meeting the Guardian. The Guardian tells you that everything that you think is coming at you is actually coming from you. What I am describing is called entry to the astral body. I enter my astral body consciously through the practice. The Rückschau, especially, does this, because when you go through your day backward, you winnow it, and when you wake up the next morning your dream is right there where your ether body is affected. Your astral body is returning, and the ether body is assessing what happened when the astral body was away, but really you don't want to see that. Generally this is the cue for waking up. Those dream moods are symbolic of crossing of the threshold. That is crossing the threshold, but as I do this work, I begin to cross the threshold before I cross the threshold. I start to wake up in parts of my astral body in which I am sleeping. And that is pretty much the sentient soul, in which I begin to awake. As I do it, I become aware of curses coming at me and curses coming from me. The teaching, at least in my life, is that the curses you are putting out are the source of the irritations coming to you. It is simply the great law, and not personal, except that it is your own stuff.

Dennis Klocek, "Esoteric Physiology - Consciousness and disease". Lindisfarne Books, 2016, p. 108-109

[AshvinP]

Allright, Ashvin, okay.
Now see if the following makes some sense to you.

It is NOT disrespectful to say: “I think Steiner is wrong in this contention about nerves”. But it IS first unreasonable, and moreover disrespectful to say: “Steiner has been careless with this”. First, it is unreasonable, since he came back to elaborating on the idea time and again through the years, in speech and in writing, based on long-term spiritual research, presenting detailed illustrations accompanied by various metaphors, references to experiments, sketches, etcetera, knowing only too well the opposition - and anger - with which he would be received. He just can't have been careless with that, under no possible meaning or interpretation.

...

Hopefully this makes some sense to you, so that we can all learn from such discussions not so much to form opinions on esoteric physiology issues, but especially to actually 'change our spots' - that is, to meet the Guardian. As Dennis says, when we meet him, the Guardian tells us that everything that we think is coming at us is actually coming from us.

It makes sense to me why you are perceiving it this way. We all know that it wouldn't make a bit of difference if I used "wrong" instead of "careless" (I also characterized it as "overstated", "understated", and similar things). I even put 'careless' in these quotes to emphasize that it's not about the specific meaning of that word in isolation, but about the general feeling that, as Cleric put it, something isn't quite right here. You were looking for reasons to pick a fight with me and ignore the substance, as usual, and this time you latched onto the word "careless". Next time, it will be another word, phrase, reference, etc. I imagine this is obvious to everyone here, except you, apparently.

Apart from that, the non-dogmatic spiritual scientist should feel pained to experience the thought, "I am refusing to consider and engage with the substance of ideas presented to me because I feel that Steiner and his 'famous statements' have been disrespected." Thinking, let alone expressing, such a thought should strike us to the very core as anti-spiritual and anti-scientific.

[Federica]

I do understand what you say, but I think there's some confusion going on here. What you say is basically what Steiner says here:

There is no essential difference whether we experience a color consciously from outside, through the nerve-cord <a c>, or whether we experience an organ, or the position of an organ, etc., from inside, through the cord <d b>; in essence, this is the same. In the one case we experience something physical is in us, i.e., enclosed within our skin. Not only that which is outside, but also what is within us, places us in the process that can be experienced as a will-process.

But something isn't quite right here. The statement is that the motor neuron <d b> (blue) gives us the awareness of an organ position, etc., but this is incorrect. This awareness results from sensory neurons (like <a c> red) too. For example muscle spindles, Golgi tendon organs, etc. This whole area of neurology is called Proprioception. In all cases, the sensations come from <a c> nerves, called afferent. The nerves that propagate impulses from the CNS toward the muscle fibers are called efferent.


So the motor nerves are not nerves that cause proprioceptic sensations in our human consciousness. Also, if the motor nerves were indeed there only to provide the sensory feedback to our consciousness, then we might expect that if they are electrically stimulated, corresponding sensations should be evoked (as is the case for all sensory neurons). But what happens instead is that the stimulus reaches the muscle fibers and they respond by contracting. And this is nothing new. The famous story about Luigi Galvani and the twitching frog legs was practically the beginning of the study of bioelectricity. If muscle contraction has nothing to do with the motor nerves (the latter are there only to sense the movement which happens through 'metabolism'), why do the fibers contract precisely when these nerves are energized?


When I say that I'm unclear about Steiner, it is because even in your quote at the end, he says:

Now suppose that a so-called impression goes out from here and that the interruption of the nerve is in this place (in the head on the diagram) “Walking” will be the result, and the real process consists in this—that everything that we experience through the nerve here (the sensory nerve raching only the head), is experienced by day in a waking way. But what we experience here (from the head toward the leg, that is, that motor nerve) as unconscious will is experienced in a sleeping way, even when we are awake. The spiritual world forms and creates directly everything that lies below the point of interruption in the nerves.

This in itself is much more in line with what we're speaking of (about motor nerves as the leverage points through which the will condenses into physical manifestation). Also note that here there's nothing about these nerves serving proprioceptic function - in fact, they are completely unconscious (sleeping) from our human perspective, while just above it is said "we experience an organ, or the position of an organ, etc., from inside, through the cord <d b>"


But this contradicts that the <d b> cord is unconscious. It is as if, first, Steiner considers the motor nerve to be the one that brings about proprioception (while in reality, all proprioception depends on afferent nerves - from the periphery to the center). Then he speaks of the motor nerves in a much more sensible way, as the way the spiritual effects the muscles/movement.


But in any case, I think that the claim that movement is 'metabolism', while neurons are only for imagery, simply doesn't stand up to the facts (for ex. Galvani).


Now there's a kind of movement that will become dominant in the future, which indeed won't need nerves. It would rather be something like the Warpdrive metaphor. However, this would require a kind of coherence of our flow of becoming that is still far away.

Thank you, Cleric. Here I would like to add some mere considerations to your points.


1/ It seems to me that the two Steiner passages are not necessarily in contradiction with each other. In the second, the attenuation of waking consciousness previously elaborated is presented in a concrete example. When he says: "what we experience here (from the head toward the leg, that is, that motor nerve) as unconscious will is experienced in a sleeping way" it could still refer to the monitoring/proprioceptive experience, but unconscious - or semi-unconscious (just like our eyes or ears can give us proprioceptive experience that we are not consciously aware of). The conclusion of the sentence is still: "The spiritual world forms and creates directly everything that lies below the point of interruption".
Similarly the possible confusion conscious/unconscious sensory monitoring in Steiner's vision, doesn't seem a real one to me: he explicitly speaks of a gradient of consciousness in any case: from sharp waking consciousness in the monitoring of, say, eye activity, to much attenuated, or sleeping consciousness in the inner monitoring, probably also depending on different people having different ability to be more or less aware in the inner organs. And it seems to me that proprioception also includes various levels of conscious awareness? (if I am getting it right, I will admit I am not familiar with these definitions). In short, I don't see an obvious inner contradiction in Steiner's elaborations.


2/ Browsing through your wikipedia links, I notice that science distinguishes not only afferent and efferent nerves, but also so-called mixed nerves. These are at the same time afferent and efferent. And, interestingly, all spinal nerves are mixed nerves in neurology. These mixed nerves are also present all throughout the body. In this sense, it doesn't seem exactly accurate that all proprioception depends on afferent nerves, even according to science. Not to draw any firm conclusion from this, but it goes to show that all those motor impulses that seem to pass through the spinal nervous system (the part of the nervous system that is more directly astral) have to pass through nerves which are simultaneously carrying out proprioceptive activity. Also, I see that for example the inner organs are said to be innerved by an "autonomic nervous system" and something catching my attention from a brief browsing in the Wiki article is: "Although conflicting reports about its subdivisions exist in the literature, the autonomic nervous system has historically been considered a purely motor system". So, things are perhaps not so clearcut as they seem at first approximation?


3/ Regarding Galvani's findings, Steiner was well aware of them, and so, inevitably, it was his take that there was no contradiction between them and his unified vision of the nervous system. He characterized Galvani's implications as follows:

Galvani observed the leg of a frog which was in touch with metal plates and began twitching. He had discovered something of very great significance. He had found two things at once, truth to tell,—two things that should really be distinguished from one-another and are not yet quite properly distinguished, unhappily for Science, to this day. Galvani had discovered what Volta, a little later, was able to describe simply as “contact electricity”, namely the fact that when diverse metals are in contact, and their contact is also mediated by the proper liquids, an interaction arises—an interaction which can find expression in the form of an electric current from the one metal to the other. We have then the electric current, taking place to all appearances purely within the inorganic realm. But we have something else as well, if once again we turn attention to the discovery made by Galvani. We have what may in some sense be described as “physiological electricity”. It is a force of tension which is really always there between muscle and nerve and which can be awakened when electric currents are passed through them. So that in fact, that which Galvani had observed contained two things. One of them can be reproduced by purely inorganic methods, making electric currents by means of different metals with the help of liquids. The other thing which he observed is there in every organism and appears prominently in the electric fishes and certain other creatures. It is a state of tension between muscle and nerve, which, when it finds release, becomes to all appearances very like flowing electricity and its effects. It was then these discoveries which led upon the one hand to the great triumphs in materialistic science, and on the other hand provided the foundations for the immense and epoch-making technical developments which followed.

From GA 320 The Light Course - Lecture IX as retreived from The Rudolf Steiner Archive.

So, this bioelectricity, or physiological electricity, is very similar to electricity (correct?). My first thought about how this may not contradict Steiner's vision is that it's an adversarial permeating force, that only can be "leveraged" when purposefully highjacked, or diverted, in other words when the will is permeated by the head forces too much, so that technological (black) magic - or bio-technological magic - is developed, or extracted (Levin's style).


4/ I would reply similarly to the objection: "If muscle contraction has nothing to do with the motor nerves (the latter are there only to sense the movement which happens through 'metabolism'), why do the fibers contract precisely when these nerves are energized?" Well, the fibers only contract when a head-intent, materialistic intent we can say, external to the body, is applied to the nerve from without. Another way to say it is contained in this passage:

According to that concept [Kant-Laplace nebula] the earth and the whole solar system were fashioned out of a sort of primeval nebula, which contained nothing but forces belonging to a misty form. The rotation of this nebula is supposed gradually to have fashioned the planetary system and within this system the earth, so that through the continuous evolution of the forces originally contained in this nebula, all the things upon the earth which we admire, came into being, man included. This view is considered highly illuminating, and it is taught to our school children. People delude themselves into finding it illuminating, for one has only to perform a simple experiment for the children in order to believe that the process has been entirely elucidated. And visual elucidation is much admired by many who desire to find an adequate concept of the world in natural science. It is only necessary to take a drop of some substance that floats on water, pass a tiny strip of cardboard through the equatorial plane of this substance and stick a pin in the cardboard perpendicular to the equatorial plane. This floating drop on the surface of some water is then revolved by means of a pin. And behold! tiny particles do actually sever themselves from the main body! A cosmic system in miniature comes into being. How is it possible not to be able to say that here you have the entire process of the world's creation in miniature? The children think they understand; the experiment seems so illuminating. Yet there is one factor which always escapes notice in the experiment. And while it is sometimes a good thing to forget oneself in the world, it is not a good thing to do so in conducting a scientific experiment.

For, observe, the drop would not throw off particles from itself, were the class teacher not standing there, revolving the pin. But since everything necessary to accomplish the result must be taken into account, the one presenting this experiment to an audience should give them to understand that a great professor or teacher, a giant professor, ought to be located in the universe outside, who has passed a gigantic pin through the nebula and is now causing the whole mass to rotate. And furthermore: what has come into being out of the drop? Nothing whatever, save that which was already there in the undivided state. Empiricism often leads us astray in our search for knowledge.

From: GA 35 - Human Life in the Light of Spiritual Science, as retrieved from the Rudolf Steiner Archive.

5/I am impressed by your last sentence, I prefer not to attempt any comment for the time being.

[Cleric]

2/ Browsing through your wikipedia links, I notice that science distinguishes not only afferent and efferent nerves, but also so-called mixed nerves. These are at the same time afferent and efferent. And, interestingly, all spinal nerves are mixed nerves in neurology. These mixed nerves are also present all throughout the body. In this sense, it doesn't seem exactly accurate that all proprioception depends on afferent nerves, even according to science. Not to draw any firm conclusion from this, but it goes to show that all those motor impulses that seem to pass through the spinal nervous system (the part of the nervous system that is more directly astral) have to pass through nerves which are simultaneously carrying out proprioceptive activity. Also, I see that for example the inner organs are said to be innerved by an "autonomic nervous system" and something catching my attention from a brief browsing in the Wiki article is: "Although conflicting reports about its subdivisions exist in the literature, the autonomic nervous system has historically been considered a purely motor system". So, things are perhaps not so clearcut as they seem at first approximation?

I'll need to respond to the other points in a separate post, but only a quick note about the mixed nerves.

Nerves are bundles of nerve fibers (which are actually the long axons of single neuron cells).



Mixed nerves refer to the fact that within the bundle there are both afferent and efferent fibers. But a single fiber is always either afferent or efferent, it can't be both (an impulse always travels from the neuron body, away through the axon).

[Federica]

Reconnecting to the question of the heart - which we have seen is practically the same question as the unity of the nervous system - I would like to add Dennis Klocek's view. Klocek has dedicated his life to building a bridge between natural science and Anthroposophy. He has studied in details embryology, neurology, physiology, chemistry.

I was at the dentist yesterday, and the doctor was talking about the novocaine that they gave me and then the technician started talking about the blood moving through the brain and then how the novocaine would affect the heart. The dentist said something like, Oh yeah, your heart would really have to pump it out. Then we started talking about the relationship between the heart and longevity and the size of a person. He said Wilt Chamberlain—who was a basketball player— died when he was 62 because his heart couldn’t pump the blood up to his head anymore.

Well, after years of Steiner, I just couldn’t go along with the dentist. He was expressing the prevailing picture in modern physiology that the heart is a pump. But many of the details of heart physiology go against that idea. Many details in the construction of the heart are actually the reverse of what they should be if it were a pump. It’s thick where it should be thin and thin where it should be thick if it were a pump. It’s like it’s upside-down, which we know to be the case from embryology. If it were a pump, if it were right-side-up, it would be fine, but it’s upside-down, and instead of being a pump, it acts as if it is receiving a charge from a pump.
In physics there’s a kind of pump called a ram. The ram pump is the way the Egyptians moved water. They had to use this type of reciprocating ram because they didn’t have hydraulics the way we do. There’s an impulse of gravity and suddenly there’s a reciprocation, a stronger impulse comes out of the reciprocation, and according to Steiner’s research, the heart works more like a ram than a regular pump that moves fluids through creating a pressure head.

So, according to its apparent engineering design, the function of the physical heart is to receive the blood, to receive the action of the blood. The etheric heart, which results from the process in which the thymus atrophies, is then found in the negative space around the gland that is losing its physical function. In actuality, the negative space around that gland is becoming stronger as we get older. So you’ll hear in anthroposophical circles that the older you get, the younger your ether body gets. The older your physical body gets, the younger your ether body gets, because the ether body is being freed up from the physical body, and moving out of space and into counterspace. It’s being released from its physical burdens and it can come more into its own etherically. And so at seven years old, the function of the ether body is released from the task of growing and becomes available to us as the force of thinking. The living patterns of growth are released from forming the physical body and are then used by the human being to think. Thinking is the ability to form inner pictures at will. So if we follow along, the function of this heart, this counter-space heart that is growing, is to be able to form inner pictures at will.

So when we get older, the capacity to consciously use the forces of growth to form inner pictures is strengthened. I should actually say, COULD be strengthened, that in the maturing human there’s a POTENTIAL for this capacity to be strengthened. Nothing is automatic about this, the development of this organ has to be cultivated. There is the seed of a counter-space organ there available for us to do that. Something is there that will respond to our work. It’s not like there’s just nothing there; there’s a potential for a very active inner picturing capacity within the realm of the heart. And that inner picturing in the realm of the heart is the basis for what Rudolf Steiner calls moral imagination in the Philosophy of Freedom.

Now, when a human being forms an inner picture in which they have penetrated that inner picture to the point where they feel morally sympathetic to it or morally in line with it, they form an emotional link to the picture they are forming, they have penetrated it with we could say a moral impulse, there are tremendous forces of warmth that come out of the picture towards the person that is contemplating it. If the person works to try to make the picture morally progressive, to try to lift it into a little more of an objective realm, away from their own personal feelings, into the realm of the transcendent feelings of the world soul, then the heart expands greatly into that space. When this happens as the result of an ongoing practice, the organ of the etheric heart becomes a kind of sense organ of moral force. This happens a great deal in our lives without our knowing it. Generally, when we perceive a moral perception with that organ, the spiritual adversaries living around that organ cast down our moral feelings into judgment. They rob us of feelings of warmth, and instead of feeling the lift of moral experience we’re left with feelings of judgment, that is, casting down others because we judge them to be in error or something. The spiritual adversaries of humans know that the only real source of freedom and love in the immediate cosmos is around the human heart, the only source of these types of higher feelings. Unfortunately, the adversaries are well aware of this but the human being isn’t. Generally, as humans we don’t know that we are a potential source of moral capacity. We think that morality exists somehow external to us. You know, God tells us what to do, and then we do it. If we’re bad, we get hit or something. In reality morality has to do with how much consciousness of understanding, warmth and compassion we can bring to a given situation.

From: Spiritual Physiology: The Heart - Lecture by Dennis Klocek - October 2000, Consciousness Studies Class - Fair Oaks, CA

From the initial passages, it appears that Klocek specifically describes the material heart. Hence we can't say that, according to him, a pumping heart is what a heart as inner sense organ looks like on the decohered material plane. As it appears from the passage, Klocek does not agree that the heart's spiritual dynamics can be validly described by saying that the heart's pumping action is a precondition for blood movement.

Similarly, when speaking of the unity of the nervous system and its unitary quality of perceptual monitoring, Steiner was referring to the material nervous system. Therefore we can't say that, according to him, the motor nerves as leverage points for movements is what the picture forming (perceptive) activity in the body looks like within the decohered material scale. Needless to say, realizing this has nothing to do with declaring the physical scale some sort of Maya per-se - a reckless idea for anyone who has only just begun to consider any esoteric matter.

------

I have watched Franck Chester's Heart lecture - where he only uses geometry to draw parallels between heart form in movement and geometrical forms in movement, and it seems to me that his findings resonate well with what Klocek says at the beginning of the passage here. I find the lecture very interesting. He doesn't speak of pumping or not pumping, he only observes and conceptualizes the heart geometrically. The interesting thing is the geometrical inversion which he prototypes in a visually clear mechanism. And it makes a lot of sense, that it's this abrupt inversion of movement that gives that souding, resonating pulse, which no other muscle or muscle group produces in flexing and extending.

[AshvinP]

Well, after years of Steiner, I just couldn’t go along with the dentist. He was expressing the prevailing picture in modern physiology that the heart is a pump. But many of the details of heart physiology go against that idea. Many details in the construction of the heart are actually the reverse of what they should be if it were a pump. It’s thick where it should be thin and thin where it should be thick if it were a pump. It’s like it’s upside-down, which we know to be the case from embryology. If it were a pump, if it were right-side-up, it would be fine, but it’s upside-down, and instead of being a pump, it acts as if it is receiving a charge from a pump.
In physics there’s a kind of pump called a ram. The ram pump is the way the Egyptians moved water. They had to use this type of reciprocating ram because they didn’t have hydraulics the way we do. There’s an impulse of gravity and suddenly there’s a reciprocation, a stronger impulse comes out of the reciprocation, and according to Steiner’s research, the heart works more like a ram than a regular pump that moves fluids through creating a pressure head.

These are the same details Cowan provided in his book, which I quoted before. I don't think we addressed the thickness-thinness fact yet, which seems interesting, but perhaps it can be accounted for by standard fluid mechanics (similar to the capillaries, which Cleric addressed).

But these aren’t the only insights we can gain from studying the chestahedron in relation to the heart. Back in anatomy class, I learned that the heart is a muscle and that the thickness of the muscle varies in different parts of the heart. But I never learned how many layers of muscle the heart has. Nor did we investigate why the apex—the bottom of the heart where the point of the upside-down chestahedron meets the bottom of the cube—is so thin. The apex is one muscle layer thick. This is the point in the heart that sits directly opposite the outlet of the left ventricle, the aortic valve. In the pump model of the heart, this should be the area of most stress or tension. How is it possible that, just at this area of maximum stress, it is so thin?

Still on his investigative path, Frank Chester encountered the anatomical work of Dr. James Bell Pettigrew, a nineteenth-century Scottish naturalist, who conducted detailed dissections of the layers of muscles of the heart. Dr. Pettigrew found that at various points in the heart, the number of layers of muscle varies from a minimum of one (at the apex) to seven.6 Working with the geometric knowledge he’d gained, Chester began wrapping his spinning chestahedron in layers of paper at the angles outlined by the cones of water created by the spinning chestahedron in water. (These are different from the vortex created by the spinning wire form.) The only way Chester could properly wrap the form—while still maintaining the outline of the spinning form—also reproduced the thickness of the muscle layers at the various points of the heart: seven layers at the thickest and one layer at the apex.

Cowan, Thomas. Human Heart, Cosmic Heart (pp. 44-45). Rizzoli. Kindle Edition.

[AshvinP]

From the initial passages, it appears that Klocek specifically describes the material heart. Hence we can't say that, according to him, a pumping heart is what a heart as inner sense organ looks like on the decohered material plane. As it appears from the passage, Klocek does not agree that the heart's spiritual dynamics can be validly described by saying that the heart's pumping action is a precondition for blood movement.

Not the spiritual dynamics, but the physical dynamics can be validly described that way. It is how the spiritual dynamics project into the physical scale.

Similarly, when speaking of the unity of the nervous system and its unitary quality of perceptual monitoring, Steiner was referring to the material nervous system. Therefore we can't say that, according to him, the motor nerves as leverage points for movements is what the picture forming (perceptive) activity in the body looks like within the decohered material scale.

This is where it becomes unclear, and yes, possibly a bit careless, i.e. possibly not explicated by Steiner in all these various lectures with the standard of care he usually brings on such topics. The very existence of this discussion, amongst people who all deeply respect Steiner's scientific knowledge and understand him to be investigating the objective inner constraints of reality at unprecedented depths, is practically a verification of that fact by itself.

For example, he said:

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA319/En ... 02m01.html

First of all, we have the human organism. We follow the centripetal and the centrifugal, the so-called sensitive and motor nerves. Yes, this fact arises. I can fully appreciate these reasons, and I can also appreciate how the duality of the nervous system is supported by tabes dorsalis and so on.

But when one knows the higher aspects of the being, then the nerves become something unified; one sees the unity of the nervous system. The sensitive nerves are predisposed to convey sensory impressions; the motor nerves have nothing to do with the will, but rather they have the task of conveying the sensations that are in the periphery, the chemical-physiological processes in the legs and so on. The motor nerves are sensitive to the organism's inner processes, while, as paradoxical as it may sound to modern science, one can actually see the will directly in the soul and assume that the soul and spirit have a direct influence on the physical for the emergence of movement and the effects of the will.

I would like to point out to you the path that can lead to finding this view. For as a modern anatomist, the soul-spiritual is something that can lead to all kinds of hypotheses, but it is something that today is more imagined with an abstract content. Ziehen speaks only of an “emotive emphasis” of the ideas. What one imagines as soul is something so abstract and thin that one does not come to understand the intervention of this soulfulness in the physical.

In the moment when one realizes that the physical body goes from being solid to liquid, to air, and to warmth, then one comes closer to the spiritual. It is, of course, impossible to imagine the spiritual as the organism that modern science imagines. But as soon as one assumes a warmth organism, it is not so difficult to imagine that the inner forces of the body of formative forces intervene in the heat differentiations of the human organism. In one respect, we will have to go through a great deal before we can bring to life what has become frozen in knowledge today. We will find the transition from the physical, which has become more subtle, to the soul, which has become more powerful. And we will be able to say: what is a being of will intervenes directly in the warming processes, from there in the air organism, from there in the aqueous organism. And something is present that is quite different from what modern science believes in relation to the motor nerves; there is a spiritual-soul-physical activity that is brought to consciousness through the motor nerves.

Here, it seems clearer that he only sees the unity of the nervous system emerging at the deeper imaginative scale, when one comes to know the higher aspects of the human organism. Of course, at these deeper scales, one is practically exploring the future potential of the human organism, i.e. how will impulses can potentially work directly as physical movement without mediation of the motor nerves. As paradoxical as it seems for the intellect, this potential capacity already exists and can be perceived. It's not very difficult to imagine how such valid higher knowledge could be too loosely or casually applied to the physical facts available at his time, especially since we know it has occurred on other occasions.

[Cleric]

So, this bioelectricity, or physiological electricity, is very similar to electricity (correct?). My first thought about how this may not contradict Steiner's vision is that it's an adversarial permeating force, that only can be "leveraged" when purposefully highjacked, or diverted, in other words when the will is permeated by the head forces too much, so that technological (black) magic - or bio-technological magic - is developed, or extracted (Levin's style).

Great. Now all we need to do is to have the lucid recognition of how much of our contemporary bodily movements are actually of such bio-technological magic, and how much are due to direct warping of the curvature of becoming, so to speak. Over- or underestimation was considered precisely in this aspect.

As a preface, I would like to start more broadly. We can only understand things right if we realize that the intellectual lattice, within which higher intuitions can be captured, itself develops. It has often been emphasized how notoriously difficult Steiner's task has been. The lattice that he had to operate within was practically the Newtonian picture of space, substances, and forces. With these tools, anything that we can state about the deeper flow of reality can never be anything more than a parable. As such, Steiner had to constantly seek a balance. Let's look at a more concrete example.


(the Flammarion engraving)

It is difficult to comprehend how much consciousness has changed in the twentieth century, even for the layperson. In the space age, even the average man feels his imagination readily stretching into the physical Cosmos (as if one can stretch hands and touch planets and galaxies and follow them into their orbits). Think how different this would have been a century ago. The sky was really a dome. It is 'there', but at the same time it's a mystery. Just think of what an uncertainty it is to live in the intellectual sphere and truly not knowing whether if one could fly up in the sky, they would actually hit the boundary of the dome. Of course, scientists of the last two millennia were extending their intellectual and sensory feelers (especially with the invention of the telescope) into the physical Cosmos, but for the occultist, it was still clear that these are mental projections. The ego still lives at its meso scale of mental images and simply extrapolates them into the greater space. Steiner was also aware of this and strongly felt that we live in intellectual fantasy when we picture orbiting planets, stars, nebulae, etc. Note that this is a fact. We truly live in intellectual imagination when we picture the planets as circling marbles. The same also holds in the opposite direction. Steiner has said:

Now when we pass into sleep, we are not in the world this side of the senses, we are then in reality inside things, we are on the other side of the tapestry of sense-perceptions. But in his earthly consciousness, man knows nothing of this and he dreams of all sorts of things lying beyond the realm of sense-perception. He dreams of molecules, of atoms; but they are only dreams—dreams of his waking consciousness. He invents molecules, atoms and the like, and believes them to be realities. But study any description of atoms, even the most recent... you will find nothing but minute objects which are described according to the pattern of what is experienced from the surface of things. It is all a tissue woven from the experiences of waking consciousness on this side of the tapestry of sense.

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/Dates/19211127p01.html

And this too is a fact of inner experience. When we think about atoms and molecules, we imagine fuzzy balls. We summon inner pictures, which are repurposed images of everyday sensory experiences. This doesn't mean that there's no deeper justification to picture both the micro and the macro physical world, but we're only stating the fact that we live in meso-scale imagination.

Equipped with this occult knowledge, one is bound to feel a little conservative. This, however, can swing the pendulum a little more in the other direction (Lu). At its extreme, this leads to our familiar stance that all Earthly existence is just a thin dream picture supported by the Demiurge. Of course, in Steiner there's not a trace of such extremism. Nevertheless, we can still find that sometimes the conservatism slightly takes the upper hand. This can be subtly noticed in many places. For example, the dome conception can be felt in certain places, say, when he speaks about how comets dissolve when they leave the spheres of the Solar system and coalesce when they enter again. Similarly, he speaks of how if we were to enter the Sun, we would encounter something like negative space.

All of this should be understood rightly. All of this emerges from the experiences in the spiritual spectrum of existence and is brought down into Imaginations. The links here are very deep. Even in ordinary physics we know that as we send our gaze further in space, we are also moving back in time. In a similar way, when our consciousness grows into the depths of inner space, we reach the more archetypal nature of everything. We can no longer speak of a comet as a point-like rock formation. Instead, we live in the 'comet-cloud' (analogy with the fuzzy electron cloud) - the non-local spiritual flow that pertains to everything having to do with the comet's concrete existence. As we contract in consciousness toward our bodily spectrum, the comet-cloud gradually collapses into concreteness, together with our bodily sensations (or think of a blurry image gradually coming into focus).

These are all real inner experiences. The question is how they are reconciled with the plane of concrete focus, where comets seem to occupy a concrete spatial place, and the same for our bodily parts. This is where we can still feel with Steiner a certain intermixing between the physical spectrum and the Imaginative. Now, before saying that this is disrespectful to Steiner, I remind that in a certain way this was the only way things could proceed. Remember that the intuitions and Imaginations had to be captured by the intellectual lattice of the time. In a way, he had to counteract the tendency of the intellect to spread with the intellectual fantasy into the spheres. It was simply not possible to counteract this in any other way except to mix the Imaginative into the physical. The Newtonian lattice simply didn't allow for anything else! This leads to a very important effect. The intellect had to speak of the spiritual in a certain sense through spatial categories. I beg you to understand this in the proper spirit. I'm not in the least suggesting that Steiner was seeking the spirit in the way the spiritualists do (inside matter)! But nevertheless, the intellectually-bound imagination constrained by the Newtonian picture could simply not do otherwise but experience things as if on an axis that had to coincide with geometric scale. In other words, if the intellect was to be truthful to the facts of higher experience, it had to picture that, were it to travel physically beyond the spheres, our being would need to pass into an etheric, then astral state, etc.

So, to repeat, within the Newtonian intellectual lattice, it is inevitable that the spatial axis (close and far) and the spiritual axis (focused physical, non-local, spread out archetypal) had to be, in a sense, intermingled. There's simply no other way to unite the spiritual with the Newtonian picture! If one were to seek reality, one couldn't move outside in a purely spatially-intellectual sense, without also dissolving things into the spiritual.



So, the Newtonian picture could only be spiritualized through the left image above. This was the only way to counteract the tendency of the intellect to see everything in a purely mechanistic way. And notice that this is not wrong in an absolute sense. In inner space, the spatial (symbolized by the horizontal circle) and the spiritual axis (symbolized by the dome-volume) are indeed archetypally of the same origin! In other words, one had to speak to the soul at that time: "If you are to move with your imagination away into space, and if you are not to remain in the materialistic dream (the extrapolated Earthly mental images), you must gradually morph into spiritual consciousness! Your Earthly mental images must dissolve and pass into the increasingly non-local astral, and then archetypal!"

Through the physics of the twentieth century, our intellect has attained the possibility to decouple these axes far more precisely, even though the physicalist scientists of today do not even realize it. Both quantum mechanics and general relativity force the intellect to include thinking that transcends the focal plane (even if still in a flattened way). In the former, one needs to conceive of the hidden order of the wavefunction that pilots the manifestation of focal points. In the latter, one needs to conceive of the hidden curvature of spacetime, which once again funnels the manifestations of matter-energy through time. We must realize that this leads the intellect into an orthogonal direction to the Newtonian picture which lies flatly on the horizontal circle.

Now we must realize that we have a new task that Steiner didn't yet have to deal with, which, if we fail to realize, we'll be paying the greatest disservice to Spiritual Science. In fact, the latter will only become a subject for even more mockery. And the sad truth is that most of this mockery will be, in fact, justified! It is up to us to understand when the intuitions must be re-accommodated into the evolving intellectual lattice. Otherwise, by trying to put the new wine into old wineskins, we quickly fall into superstition!

So, the right image symbolizes how today we attain new degrees of intellectual freedom through which we can traverse the horizontal focal plane and the volumetric (spiritual) dome in a much more decoupled manner.

Why is this important? Because it frees us from the inner obligation to seek in space (in the focal plane) something like the interruption of the nerves, or the dissolving comet. The best way to conceive of these things is that the focal plane is better understood as a frequency band of the total Cosmos. Simply put, if we are using photons (focal points) to probe the Cosmos, we'll only detect photons everywhere. This doesn't negate the integral picture. It's rather that when we ring a tuning fork from within our center, from the limitless potential similarly attuned potential tuning forks will ring back in resonance. In other words, by reaching into the depths of inner space with our sensory organs (both bodily and mechanical), we can detect only that which is of like-frequency, so to speak. But we'll never find an area within physical space (the focal plane) that is no longer woven of matter but of something more 'spiritual'. And let's emphasize again that Steiner never intended the intermingled picture in the naive physical sense. His reaching out into the spheres was synonymous with reaching out in consciousness.

It is critically important to realize this in our age, because otherwise we risk making Spiritual Science into a laughing stock. If we maintain that a comet physically dissolves as it leaves the spheres, we'll have to explain how Voyager I and II have gone quite a long way beyond the Solar bubble and are still intact. Then a series of comical exchanges can follow. For example, when one day Voyager inevitably loses power (because the energy cell has a limited lifespan) or simply malfunctions, the anthro-fanatics will scream: "See! Voyager has dissolved; it has passed into an astral condition." It's clear how nothing productive can ever issue from such exchanges. And we do something very similar if we fanatically try to show that the heart is not pumping blood.

We must realize that all said holds true also when going toward the micro world. Just as in the intermingled view we are justified to speak of the comet as dissolving into its higher spiritual nature, so it is justified to dissolve into the spiritual when we reach down into the biological world. Steiner had to put an airbrake on the materialistic tendency and point out that one lives only in scaled mental images when they fantasize about the micro world. If we are to penetrate into the spiritual reality of the microworld, we must dissolve the physical pictures. Thus, it was necessary to speak of the spatial-like interruption of the nerves. If we complete the arc entirely within the focal plane, we can never grasp that the spiritual plays a part. Today, however, we have probed the focal plane deep enough, and there's no physical interruption to be found. The nerves indeed seem to form closed circuits. This, of course, only reinforces the physicalist outlook. Obviously, if we stubbornly maintain that there is an interruption because our guru has said so, no one will take us seriously anymore.

So we see that the spiritual scientific endeavor of humanity is not a simple matter. Even things said not so long ago (a century is not that much in the scale of evolution) need to be continuously revisited from within an ever-widening context and further-differentiating cognition. And Steiner has been very clear about this. All truths need to be seen as relative to the corresponding evolutionary context. Of course, this doesn't mean that something like the truth of evolution is relative in the sense that tomorrow its opposite will be true. It's rather that the consciousness and resolution through which we grasp this truth today will move further. Then the concepts of today will seem like the helping wheels through which a higher being has developed. They are relative because one day, there will no longer be rocky comets to speak of, nor an intellect that can do the speaking.

Let's return to the over- and under-estimation. In a sense, such pendulum swings were inevitable because the intellect lacked the cognitive lattice that would allow it to find a firmer balance point. Thus, a certain overshoot is inevitable and in fact necessary.

To understand why the nervous system even had to come into being, we need to Imaginatively position ourselves within the flow of the past evolution. Imagine a rarefied astral condition in which we live as a soul being, within a Cosmic aura of inner imagery. We contract, expand, grow into a certain direction of experience, retract from another, and so on. These are all 'tunnels' of soul becoming that we explore and navigate. There's no need for 'forces' that act on astral matter. It's all steering, as if the soul continuously intuitively/instinctively 'votes' for a certain continuation of the first-person Cosmic movie. In a sense, there's a kind of superfluidity here. Imagine going into a theater and moving toward seats that are already occupied. The person there says, "That's OK, I was just leaving anyway." So within this soul labyrinth of becoming, there's still a certain fluidic balance. It's not a true superfluid; there can still be increases in pressure when two souls want to continue the movie as sitting in the same seat, but the resolutions are still more 'lubricated', so to speak.

As the interferences of intents become ever more complicated, so the steering continuations of the movie feel more frictious. This applies not only to inter-being relations but also to the volume of inner space that is gradually to densify into our inner bodily space. As such, even the metamorphoses of this space, the contractions and expansions, begin to evade the soul's intents. It is as if all possible continuations of the soul movie only offer variants of a twitching inner form that never follow the intuitive intents. It's like the soul is saying, "The inner space that I occupy no longer plays along. It has its own opinion on which seats to take, so to speak. If I do not lead the movie into a direction that gives me some leverage over the situation, it will become impossible to find my self-consciousness within this volume of inner space. All my inner intents will dissipate into oblivion without anything ever reflecting back to match them." (and in fact, all kingdoms of Nature are the soul degrees that could not find continuations with the needed leverage and remained stuck in place for the time being)

Of course, things are far more complicated. The soul doesn't singlehandedly shape the movie continuatious - the whole Cosmic hierarchy of Intelligences is at play, but for simplicity we can still speak in this way. The nervous system (at least as far as the motor half is concerned) can be seen as the attempt to provide this leverage to the soul. It is, in a way, an amplifier of the souls' intents. The soul simply loses authority over the volume of bodily space otherwise. All muscle cells will follow their elemental intents and will twitch out of sync. The holistic curvature of the flow is simply shattered. The only solution that the Intelligences have found to rescue the situation is to build a kind of an organic gradient that, on one side, is non-locally and holistically sensitive to the gentle tipping pushes of the soul, while on the other, it amplifies these pushes into organically constrained pathways that command the muscles to act in synchrony.

This is the black magic bio-technology that you speak of. My point is that at our present physical state, this is the primary way of actuating all bodily movements - even the heartbeat! Even the gods cannot, at present, instill the needed coherence to force the muscle fibers to work in synchrony. Our world exists as it is precisely because it has been allowed to go out of synchrony to such a degree. The nervous system is the compromise that has been developed in order to have coherent authority over the bodily volume.

We need to constantly remember that, regarding our present bodily nature, we're a walking corpse. Everything in our physical nature is practically dying. Steiner has clearly stated that in our bodily nature of nerves, bones, muscles, blood (physical), etc., we are a walking Lucifer-Ahriman. We carry Lucifer-Ahriman round with us all the time (https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA134/En ... 31p01.html). It is a grotesque truth, but it is a fact. Our mineral bodily nature is far more a bio-technology, than our noble spiritually-striving ego might want to admit.

So with all this, I once again try to hint that in Steiner we still find things (necessarily) in a more intermixed state. It's like it's not fully clear when he speaks of the physical blood or the soul essence, just like it is not clear whether he speaks of purely physical space when the comet goes beyond the spheres or inner space. It is up to us today to make the differentiation. Yes, at depth, the soul steers the willful flow holistically - it seeks certain continuations of the inner movie. It doesn't calculate which muscle neurons to fire in order to take the cup of tea from the table, but steers into the movie continuation where we see ourselves reaching and taking the cup. The rest is accomplished by the organic gradient, as if through inverse kinematics.

If we insist that we must be able to find the interruption in the focal plane, we fail to properly differentiate the Cosmic spectrum 'frequency-wise'. We still intermix the plane and the volume. This would be like taking the bus metaphor from the inner stretching essays and considering the intent for a walk. When we zoom into the details, we see that we move about by alternately stepping with our feet. If we take things in an intermixed way, we may say, "This isn't right, I must find the spiritual within these steps. I sin against the spirit if I recognize them only as alternating physical steps. I must find a place for the spirit within this picture, I must somehow inject it there, or rather (because I'm not a spiritualist-materialist) I need to find the specific void, where the physical is interrupted, and which should justify me of speaking of the spiritual as the only thing that can fill that void (and thus explain my walking)."

To be sure, this interruption is really there. Even the movement of an electron cannot be observed as a smooth, uninterrupted process. Rather, we detect the electron now here, then there. What happens in between remains a mystery. But we sin in a higher sense against the spirit if we fail to differentiate properly the axes. There's nothing antispiritual if we recognize that within the focal plane, the picture looks like alternating steps. We need to find the spiritual aspects along the frequency gradient, not as something that is there or missing within the focal plane. It's the same with the nerves. There's nothing problematic in tracing the chain of events of firing neurons, activating muscle fibers. We only sin against the spirit if we fail to expand consciousness within the spiritual gradient that guides and is amplified within the physical chain of events (the footsteps). And as explained, I see it that in Steiner's day, it was still impossible to do otherwise, but to somehow intermingle the Imaginative and the sensory. The intellectual lattice that allows us to do that with more precision only came about with twentieth-century physics. Now it is our duty to disentangle 'frequency-wise' the total picture. Of course, in the future, they will be once again firmly integrated into the unitary inner space, but now we need the lucid differentiation.

PS: I started with "how much of our contemporary bodily movements are actually of such bio-technological magic, and how much are due to direct warping of the curvature of becoming", but now we can see that these are not really opposite things. There's no real warping (as if our soul applies certain forces), but there are different continuations that we steer into. As such, the bio-technological magic is actually included within these continuations. They are the bureaucratic details that need to be in place for these continuations to be able to connect the alpha and the omega of the intent. Then, evolution is not simply the turning to one aspect in expense of the other, but bringing the flow back into a more cooperative mode, where we can steer into continuations where all Nature seems to 'conspire' to be in synchrony with intents.

It is also interesting to observe all of this in the social sphere, where we have an artificial replica of the whole process within legislation and law enforcement. Just like the nerves took shape in order to ensure certain enforcement of intent, as the muscle fibers were 'rebelling' to go in their own Brownian ways, so human individuals would sink into Brownian chaos without the presently external enforcement of certain rules. These laws will become unnecessary when human beings consciously strive to resonate with the higher-order curvatures of being, which, in a sense, will inspire when one is to sit or stand from a chair. It is in the same sense that the nervous system will become obsolete when the physical world is brought into a more fluidic and harmonious flow.