In his Notebook #210, Rudolf Steiner writes about a combinatorics of body, soul, and spirit that would be suitable for a quiz, a table with three times three fields. On the side margin, one could write ‘physical body’, ‘soul body’, and ‘spiritual body’, and at the foot of the table one could write ‘physical’, ‘soul’, and ‘spiritual’. Now please fill it in! What does the physical body bring forth into the physical? Ego! The most elementary experience to exist. And in the soul? Sensation! On the spiritual level it is perception, as the highest level of the physical—the eye, spirit of the physical! And now to the soul body: physically, it produces ‘movement’, and in the soul, ‘feeling’. If the soul spiritualizes, it conquers thinking.
And what of the spiritual body, which Rudolf Steiner refers to as ‘I body’ in his entry? In the ‘physical’ it creates ‘form’. Yes, through ‘form’, the spirit shows itself in substance. On the soul level it is the ‘inner life’, the soul that experiences itself. I find his entry in the last field, that which the I creates in the spiritual, puzzling. Rudolf Steiner writes ‘Beseelung’—‘ensoulment’ or ‘blessing’—which I understand like this: The spirit within the spirit can stir up the soul—it is able to give birth to warmth.
Translation Eliza Rozeboom
Art Cornelia Friedrich
“The spirit within the spirit can stir up the soul—it is able to give birth to warmth.” or an alternative interpretation: ‘the Soul (chills) can stir up the Spirit (shivering) that triggers Warmth (body) and thus life proceeds .. as in the passage from struggling fetus to living breathing body soul and spirit ..