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Barfield's thinking
about the body begins with the complex and heretical "complex notion that
the physical organism emerged from a condition anterior to the physical"
(RM 27).
Following Rudolf
Steiner's teaching (which lies at the heart of the Waldorf School system
for early childhood education) that incarnation
continues after birth, with the embodiment of the soul only completed at
the time of second dentition (at about seven years of age), Barfield conceives
of the body in the following way:
You have
the pole of the visceral man so to speak, at the opposite extreme to the
head or nerves-and-senses man; and if you remember, the correlation is
between the head, nerves, and senses on the one hand with thinking, and
on the other hand the visceral as related to willing. In thinking it is
more than related. . . . the body, considering it now as the visceral body,
really is unconscious will and the task, the function of attaining final
participation would be the transformation of unconscious will into conscious
will; which would also involve spiritualization of the material body itself.
You would have something like a body consisting of will instead of gristle!
(UV 26)
The way that "brain,
heart, liver, spleen, have been built into [the] body by the world, by
the whole history of the world," in a process known to Anthroposophy
as the descent of the potency makes
it a palimpsest of the evolution
of consciousness when inspected by systematic
imagination, as the Anthroposophist Sanderson explains in Worlds
Apart:
if you "study" [the
body] in that intensive way, you have access to the relevant period of
world-history. Access, first of all, to the building that was going on
before your birth and, through that, back into their remoter phylogenesis.
(WA 195-96)
Interior
is Anterior, as the Meggid explains to Burgeon
in Unancestral Voice; the human inner world is a condensation
of all that once was; the macrocosm has become
the microcosm.
See in particular
Worlds
Apart, passim, and Unancestral Voice, passim. |
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