Two Streams of Nutrition – Reading 2

 

“Everything people today think about the nature of their own being—they think ‘scientifically’, so they say—is in fact entirely wrong, or indeed nonsense, for actually we have to have quite different inner pictures of the human being. These inner pictures are what arose for the ancient ‘Fathers’ from the holy sacrifice for the consecration of man through a direct vision brought about by the Transubstantiation. They knew that we not only breathe air through our respiratory organs, but also ceaselessly take in all kinds of substances from the cosmos through our sense organs; through our hair, through our skin, all kinds of substances are ceaselessly absorbed from the cosmos. Just as someone breathing consciously feels the air being sucked into his respiratory organs, so did the priest in ancient times feel the substances from the silica-environment, in which he found himself in the subterranean temple of consecration, entering and filling his organization of nerves and senses. Just as the aeriform human being feels the air moving on when he breathes consciously, so do these substances fill the whole organism. The priests in ancient times knew that our system of metabolism and limbs receives nothing into its make-up from what we eat. Nothing of what we eat goes into our system of limbs and metabolism. Substances are absorbed out of the cosmos. Today’s whole theory of nutrition is untrue. The ‘Father’, as he celebrated, felt what is eaten and transformed by the digestive system moving up from the metabolic human being into the human being of nerves and senses, especially the head. He knew: What I eat is transformed in me into the substance of my head and all that is connected with it; what builds the organs in me that take care of metabolism is absorbed from the cosmos through a more subtle form of breathing. He felt the substances of the cosmos being taken in from all sides through senses and nerves and then going on to constitute his system of metabolism and limbs. He felt the downward-streaming flow that originates from all the directions of the cosmos and streams into his organism from above downwards. And he felt how what we take in directly in the form of food is first transformed within our body before turning in the opposite direction and going to constitute our upper human being. As he celebrated the Transubstantiation, the ‘Father’ had two streams within him, one flowing upwards, the other downwards. When he then proceeded to the Communion he knew, through having become conscious of his physical body in these streams, that he was linked to the cosmos. What he had just received through celebrating at the altar he incorporated into the downward- and upward-flowing streams within him; having become one with the Earth, he incorporated what he had prepared on the altar into the streams which belonged both to the Earth and to his body, he incorporated it into the divine on Earth, which is a mirror of the universe. He knew himself to be at one with the universe, with that which was outside of him. He knew that this Meal, of which he had partaken in this way, was a Meal being solemnized by his cosmic human being. Through what was flowing into the upward and the downward streams he felt burgeoning within himself the divine human being who was permitted to be a companion for the gods who had descended. He felt that he was being transformed into a divine human being, that he himself was being transubstantiated by the gods in his physical body. This was the moment at which he spoke from the deepest depths of his heart: I am not now the one who walks about in the physical world; I am the one in whom the god who has descended is living; I am the One whose name comprises all the sounds of speech, the One who was in the beginning, who is in the middle, and who shall be at the end. I am the Alpha and the Omega.”

R. Steiner, The Book of Revelation and the Priest, 6 September 1924, CW346