Steiner's rule that in each bodily system some members of the human being are imprinted into physical form while the remainder stay free to act.
Bound and free members in Anthroposophy is the rule Rudolf Steiner set out at Dornach on 24 July 1921, in the lectures collected as Man as a Being of Sense and Perception (GA 206), that each of the three bodily systems binds some of the four members of the human being into physical form and leaves the others free to act. In the head, or nerve-sense system, the physical body, etheric body and astral body are all imprinted into visible structure, and only the I remains mobile. In the rhythmic system of heart and lung, the physical and etheric bodies are imprinted while the astral body and the I work freely. In the metabolic and limb system only the physical body is imprinted, and etheric, astral and I are all unbound. Anthroposophic medicine and therapeutic speech treat the rhythmic middle as reachable, because two members there are free.
Bound and free members answers a question the fourfold picture of the human being leaves open. The question is not which member is present, but in what condition. A member can be locked into the shape of an organ, or it can move within that organ without shaping it. The head binds three members. The metabolism binds one. Everything therapeutic follows from that difference.
In Steiner's Own Words
If we pass on to the rest of the human organisation, to the breathing-system, for instance, we find the physical and etheric bodies have their imprints within it; but the astral body and the ego have no such imprints; they are to a certain extent free. And in the metabolic-limb system we have the physical body as such, and the ego, astral body and etheric body are free. We have not only to recognise the presence of one of these members, but to distinguish whether it is in the free or the bound condition. Of course it is not that an astral body and an etheric body have no basis in the head; they permeate the head too. But they are not free within it, they are imprinted in the head-organisation.
What it Means Today
The rhythmic system is where this rule carries the most practical weight, because a free member can be reached from outside and a bound one cannot. That is the physiological reason anthroposophic practitioners work on breath and heartbeat rather than on the head. Dietrich von Bonin, a therapeutic speech practitioner, and Dirk Cysarz, a physiologist at the University of Witten/Herdecke, published a study in the American Journal of Physiology in 2004 showing that heart rate and respiration synchronise during the recitation of hexameter verse. The breath slowed and lengthened, and the pulse fell in with it, near the four beats per breath that the German chronobiologist Gunther Hildebrandt had identified as the resting norm in his rhythm research. Speech formation, developed by Marie Steiner-von Sivers from 1912 onward, had worked that way for eight decades before the measurement described it.
Thalira synthesis: the study records from the outside what Steiner described from the inside, that the rhythmic system yields to spoken rhythm because its astral body is unbound there, and an unbound member can be met by anything rhythmic offered to it. The same reasoning puts recitation, singing and movement in the middle of the Waldorf morning rather than at its edges, and sends the metabolic limb system, where three members are free, to walking and manual work rather than to explanation.
Where to Read More
- Man as a Being of Sense and Perception, GA 206
- Find at SteinerBooks [THALIRA_BLOG_LINKS_PLACEHOLDER]