The head pole of Steiner threefold body, the cool quiet bodily basis for ideation, perception, and waking thought.
The Nerve-Sense Organism in Anthroposophy is the head pole of the human being in Rudolf Steiner threefold-organism anatomy, published in Von Seelenrätseln (GA 21, 1917) and elaborated in the doctors course (GA 312, 1920). It carries the brain, spinal cord, and the twelve sense organs. In it, ideation and perception become conscious because organic life is held in quietness, almost in a death-tendency, so the spirit can mirror itself.
In Steiner's Own Words
When something is "represented", a neural process takes place, on the basis of which the psyche becomes conscious of its representation; when something is "felt", a modification is effected in the breathing rhythm, through which a feeling comes to life; and in the same way, when something is "willed", a metabolic process occurs that is the somatic foundation for what the psyche experiences as willing. It should be noted however that it is only in the first case (representation mediated by the nervous system) that the experience is a fully conscious, waking experience.
What it Means Today
Anthroposophic medicine, the lineage Ita Wegman opened with Steiner in Extending Practical Medicine (GA 27, 1925), still works the threefold organism as its diagnostic floor. At Klinik Arlesheim near Basel, the clinic Wegman founded in 1921 and where Friedemann Garvelmann and colleagues continue the practice today, a physician approaches a patient by asking where the three organisms have lost their measure. A migraine, in this reading, is not only a vascular event. It is a head pole that has become too quiet, where metabolic activity has begun to seep into a region that should be cool and devitalised so consciousness can take place. Insomnia, by contrast, often shows a Nerve-Sense Organism that will not release its hold, where the astral body cannot detach into sleep because the head pole has overreached.
The practical inheritance is concrete. Curative eurythmy reorders the relation of the three systems by movement; rhythmic massage works the warmth pattern between head and metabolism; silicic acid stimulates nerve-sense activity where it has weakened. A practitioner trained at the Goetheanum Medical Section listens for which of the three organisms is louder than its measure, and where the etheric and astral are pulling against each other. The Nerve-Sense Organism is the patient quiet pole the rest of the body labours to keep cool and still, so that you can read a sentence and know that you have read it. The nerve-sense system serves the antipathy pole of antipathy and sympathy, by which thinking and memory arise.
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