The Pineal Gland and Atman

 

Rudolf Steiner:

Turn your attention to what may be called the Earth's excretory organs: the Earth excretes not only the nearly lifeless products of human excretion, but it excretes what is living, and among its actual excretions are the toads. In them the Earth rids itself of what it is unable to use.

From all this you can see how the outer in nature always corresponds with the inner. Whoever says “No Creative Spirit penetrates the inner being of nature” simply does not know that everywhere in the external world this inner quality is present. We can study the entire human being in regard to his inner nature if we understand what weaves and lives outside in the cosmos. We can study him, this human being, from head to limb-system, if we study what is present in the outer world. World and man belong together in every respect. And one can even say that this could be represented in a diagram, showing the circumference of a large circle concentrating its force in a point. The large circle forms a smaller circle within, produced by a raying outwards from the point. The smaller circle again forms an even smaller small circle; this is again produced by a raying-outwards of what is within. This circle again forms another such circle. What is comprised in the human being streams still further outwards. Thus the outer of the human being comes into contact with the inner of the cosmos. The point where our senses come in contact with the world is where the part of man which reaches from within outwards comes into contact with what reaches in the cosmos from outside inwards. In this sense man is a little world, a microcosm over against the macrocosm. But he contains all the wonders and secrets of this macrocosm, only in the reversed direction of development.

It would be something very adverse to the further evolution of the Earth if things were only as I have so far described them; then the Earth would excrete the beings of the toads, and would one day perish just as physical man must perish, without any continuation. So far, however, we have only considered man's connection with the animals, and have built only a slight bridge over to the being of the plants. We shall now have to penetrate further into the plant-kingdom, and then into the kingdom of mineral-being, and we shall see how the mineral-being arose during the Earth-period — how, for instance, the rock-formations of our primeval mountains were laid down, bit by bit, by the plants, and how, bit by bit, the limestone mountains were laid down by the subsequent animals. The mineral kingdom is the deposit of the plant and animal-kingdom, and it is actually the deposit of the lowest animals. The toads do not contribute very much to the mineral element of the Earth; the fishes, too, comparatively little; but the lower animals and the plants contribute a very great deal. The lower creatures, those plated with flinty and chalky armor, or having merely chalky shells, deposit what they have first formed from their own animal — or their plant — natures, and the mineral then disintegrates. And when this mineral substance disintegrates, a power of the highest order takes hold of just these products of mineral disintegration and from them builds up new worlds. The mineral element in any particular place can become of all things the most important.

When we follow the course of Earth-evolution — warmth-condition, air-condition, water-condition, mineral-earthly condition — the human head has participated in all these metamorphoses, the mineral metamorphosis being the first to work outwards in the disintegrating skeleton of the head — though it still retains a certain vitality. But this human head has participated in the earthly-mineral metamorphosis in a way which is even more apparent. In the center of the human head within the structure of the brain there is an organ shaped like a pyramid: the pineal gland. This pineal gland, situated in the vicinity of the corpus quadrigemina and the optic thalamus, secretes out of itself the so-called brain sand, minute lemon-yellow stones which lie in little heaps at one end of the pineal gland, and which are in fact the mineral element in the human head. If they do not lie there, if man does not bear this brain-sand, this mineral element, within him, he becomes an idiot or a cretin. In the case of normal people the pineal gland is comparatively large. In cretins pineal glands have been found which are actually no larger than hemp seeds; these cannot secrete the brain-sand.

It is actually in this mineral deposit that the spirit-man is situated; and this already indicates that what is living cannot harbor the spirit, but that the human spirit needs the nonliving as its center-point, that this is above all things necessary to it as independent living spirit.

Source: October 28, 1923. GA 230