Translations:Manfred Klett: Von der Agrartechnologie zur Landbaukunst/1196/en

of independence. In the measure that he strives toward that which he is predestined for, he steps out step by step from his body-boundness and simultaneously from his sense-boundness to the natural being of things. He raises himself above nature and yet remains rooted within it. Must he not then feel himself called upon to bestow upon the natural being of the earth something that the earth cannot produce out of itself, something it would have to do without for ever? Certainly, every kind of love-borne devotion is called for here. But can this confine itself to mere protection, to the preservation of what exists — or must a new evolutionary principle be implanted into the earth that has become a Work, and with it into the cosmos: in the sense of a "creation out of nothing" caused by no outer necessity, but springing as a free deed from the spiritual-soul nature of the human being? In answer to this question — so one may venture to say — Rudolf Steiner, out of a cognition of the stream of time flowing from the future, conceived the biodynamic preparations: as a kind of «Dünger» (manure, fertilizer) for the stream of time flowing from the past, which has become the artwork of creation. This may seem too grand a thought. Yet whoever cultivates, in heart-knowledge, a practical working relationship with the preparations can win, in a deeper feeling, a certainty of judgment that their handling marks an altogether first beginning in the direction indicated. Their mode of preparation follows strictly the principle of threefoldness — yet in a new way: it does not articulate itself according to the given primal unity, but builds itself up from the products of past evolutionary lines. These products — the physical-mineral (silica) of the earth, the enlivened from the plant kingdom (blossoms), and the ensouled from the animal kingdom (organs) — form the poles of a polarity that is not given by nature. What relates these end-products of evolution to one another, thereby letting a new polarity arise, and what enhances this into the synthesis of a new threefoldness, is the idea-guided will of the human being. Idea and will are the formers of a new middle (see Figures 23, 24, 25) — of new substance-compositions that are bearers of forces of a physical, etheric-living, astral-ensouled, and spiritual nature. Through the path of spiritual research, a treasure of wisdom, ideas, have been laid into the hearts and hands of human beings who, through transformation, can carry forward in free deed the «Werk» (Work) of the ordering of substance by the «Christus» (Christ). The new substance-orderings of the preparations are inventions of spiritual research out of supra-nature — as the synthesis of ammonia is a result of the investigation of

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