The Senses, Life-Processes & the Cosmos

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.

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

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.

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

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.