Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/607/en

in its grazing and wandering already felt, tasted, and smelled. Now, however, in the repeated tasting of the already pre-digested fodder stream, what was perceived unites with the cow's whole soul-nature. What was previously merely living, structured plant matter is now, in the perceiving act of rumination, lifted up to become soul sensation. The cow awakens in this activity to its consciousness — a consciousness that, dreaming, is wholly immersed in the processes of the body. It is the sentient force of the soul body that henceforth ensoul the entire further digestive process right through to the end products of manure and liquid manure. What Rudolf Steiner calls the "cosmic-qualitative analysis" that the animal carries out in digestion applies in the highest degree to the bovine. In rumination this analysis takes its beginning. This becomes visible at the eyes; the gaze changes during rumination. Whereas ordinarily one looks into the large eyes as into the blueness of a deep well, now — with the head slightly raised — eyes and face take on an intently concentrated expression. It has the appearance as though the cow were "meditating" all that it has inwardly received, in the way of perceptions, in this first phase of digestion. Such an intensely inward-directed gaze is found, one might well say, nowhere else in the animal kingdom. It is as though in the expression of the eyes there is mirrored the becoming-conscious of the formative forces that are released in the grinding down of the carbon scaffoldings and protein structures of the plant masses. In the act of rumination the cow is wholly with itself, close to a self-perception it cannot have — because it has no incarnated I. Through the proximity of its highly concentrated soul body to its I-hood, which lives itself forth as its "group soul" and comes to expression as a reflection in the herd organism, it is in a special measure fitted to work through inwardly the powerfully surging mass of formative forces. In a first step it carries out the aforementioned "cosmic-qualitative analysis" in the breaking down of the plant nourishment, culminating in the act of rumination. It analyses, in a dullness of soul, the formative forces that have built up the plant form from out of the cosmos in the light of the sun, that have congealed in the individual forms of those plants, and that have at the same time become bearers of the living substance-process within the plants.