Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/1423/en

In the foregoing citations, spiritual research has touched upon the mystery of transubstantiation. How can one approach the solution of this problem? Certainly not with the same mode of thinking with which one seeks to decode the mysteries of inorganic nature. The two quality-relationships cited above stand to one another in polar opposition. That of oxygen to nitrogen in the air is determinative for the breathing of animal and human being. Both substances constitute the element of air to a large degree; both are present in the air in a gaseous, inorganically inactive state. They stream around the plant shoot from without. The situation is different with the earthly substances potassium and calcium. Through the life organisation of the plant they are lifted out of their captivity in the physical form of substance — the "working material" — into the sphere of living efficacy. One can understand it thus: certain plants, medicinal plants, such as yarrow, chamomile, and stinging nettle, have the capacity, by virtue of their etheric body, to set in motion the organisation of the substances potassium and calcium — congealed into the physical — out of their bondage to form. In their outward appearance and their properties they are an imprint of their condition in early stages of evolution, still filled with life. As the mineral form is absorbed into the life processes of these plants, the thought readily arises that potassium and calcium become receptive, in a new way, to the working of the next higher member of the being — the etheric body of these substances. The spiritual researcher finds the essential reality of this etheric body in the supersensible world of the spirit, which borders as its lowest region upon the physical-sensory world. New developmental impulses of a soul-astral character, working from out of the future, can then enable these substances — gifted with their own proper etheric body — to open themselves to their members of being that are at home in a still higher region of the spirit. The earthly substances potassium and calcium become in this way "nitrogen-like," in that they themselves become bearers of soul-astral forces. They take on properties of nitrogen, which by its very nature is, in all life processes, the bearer of the type-revealing world of the astral. "Nitrogen is in truth the one that is the bearer of sensation." In living nature, nitrogen makes present, through protein formation, life processes that have their origin in an early earthly past, have passed through stages of development, and have now become part of the "Work" of creation.