The Senses, Life-Processes & the Cosmos

Aristotle taught that the nerves begin in the heart. Steiner read this as a description of etheric currents, not of physical anatomy.

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.

Steiner's teaching that bodily hair is hardened sunlight, the dried remnant of astral-etheric streams that once flowed into the human being from outside.

Steiner's principle that the human being is a concentrated image of the whole cosmos, recapitulating the zodiac and the planets within one bodily form.

Steiner's answer to William Crookes: a sense organ for electricity and magnetism would also hand its owner the power to kill at will.

Steiner's claim that red slightly destroys blood and nerve in the eye, which the body then revives with oxygen, while blue leaves both untouched.

The first and crudest supersensible perceptive organs, grown when a soul stays inside an unanswerable boundary question long enough for its groping to differentiate.

In sleep the brain stops serving willed thinking and behaves like a sense organ, receiving impressions passively as the eye receives light.

The first of Steiner's seven life-processes: the rhythmic exchange by which every living organism takes the outer world in and gives itself back to it.

The portion of the etheric body surrounding the skull, which in earlier ages extended far beyond the brow before consciousness settled inside the physical brain.

Steiner taught that the heart does not pump the blood. It is a sense organ, perceiving a circulation the blood drives itself.

Two sense capacities Steiner called occult in 1907, a sense of space seated in the inner ear and a sense of time seated in the pupil of the eye.

The spirit-germ of the heart, received in the Sun sphere on the return journey toward birth, carrying every moral gain of past earth lives.

The third of Steiner's seven life-processes: the taking-in of outer substance and the start of its transformation into the body's own.

Steiner's name for the brain's pine-cone-shaped organ: the shrunken remnant of an ancient sense organ that once perceived while the earth was still vaporous.

Seven concentric spiritual realms, from the Moon out to Saturn, that form the human being and that the soul travels through between death and rebirth.

The inner sense, one of Steiner's twelve, through which a person experiences uprightness and orientation in space.

The highest of the twelve senses: the organ by which one human being perceives the I of another person directly, not by inference.

In Steiner's twelve senses, the sense of hearing is the upper sense by which tone reveals the inner being of a sounding thing, not merely its surface.

The inner sense by which we perceive the overall state of our own body, the background feeling of being alive, comfortable, hungry, or unwell.

The inner sense by which a person registers their own bodily motion from within, rather than watching movement out in the world.

In Steiner's anthroposophy, the perception of colour and light: one of the twelve senses, and the most soul-pervaded of the middle band.

The first of Steiner's twelve senses to reach past the skin, where the soul meets the chemical substance of the world directly, yet at arm's length.

In Steiner's twelve senses, the soul's organ for discerning the inner quality of a substance taken into the body, reading what food becomes within rather than what it is outside.

The cognitive sense by which we perceive the thought or concept living in another person directly, above and beyond the spoken word.

The first of Steiner's twelve senses: the perception of the felt boundary where the body meets the world, registering hardness, softness, and resistance at the skin.

One of Steiner's twelve senses: the bodily sense that perceives the temperature-quality of things, drawing us intimately into the warmth or coldness of the world.

The cognitive sense by which we perceive the meaning carried in spoken sounds, a faculty above hearing that grasps the word itself rather than its tone.

Two regions where the human being stops belonging wholly to himself: in sensing, the world reaches in; in moving, we are taken up by it.

The seven inner activities of the etheric body that keep an organism alive: breathing, warming, nourishing, secreting, maintaining, growing, and reproducing.

Steiner's twelve senses fall into three groups: four upper senses that meet other beings, four middle senses, and four lower senses that report our own body.

The second of Steiner's seven life-processes: the inner working by which a living being draws in the warmth of its surroundings and makes it its own.

The creative cosmic speech, the Weltenwort, that elemental beings and all of nature sound forth, the Logos by which the world is spoken into being.

In anthroposophy, the twelve constellations are twelve real spiritual regions whose formative forces shape the upright human form and the twelve human senses.