A Guide to Understanding Healing Plants

“We should be clear that development begins with the feelings and thoughts we live with all the time, but that these feelings and thoughts must be given a new, unaccustomed direction.... In the final analysis, everything is based on the simple fact that, though we carry body, soul and spirit about with us, we are conscious only of the body.” — Rudolf Steiner, CW 10, How to Know Higher Worlds, p. 55

The path of this work begins with Rudolf Steiner’s preliminary work in anthroposophically extended medicine. One aim of this guide is methodically to bring about percepts of the connection between people and natural substances and thus awaken a clearer awareness of how feeling judgments arise and what they are directed at. To begin with this requires us to extend our ability to perceive our own thinking activity and to reflect on the movements it makes as well as on the assumptions that are made in every act of comprehension. This method brings life processes into our consciousness.

The author examines the experiential aspect of metamorphosis in the context of botanical perception. He discusses the healing substances in plants and the inner capacities we need to develop as a way to perceive them. After a suitable preparation, the path taken here leads from outer observation to inner perception and thus to the human being. Thus, we arrive at a perception of a substance’s particular direction of activity that is permeated by our own experiences.

In speaking about the senses, our attitude toward the spirit should be one of waiting to see to what extent an indication of the spiritual results naturally from sensory observation. This spiritual aspect should be neither denied nor presupposed; we must wait and see if it shines in. — Rudolf Steiner, CW 45, Anthroposophy (A Fragment), p. 86

Originally published in German as Ein Leitfaden zur Heilpflanzenerkenntnis, Band I (Science Section of the School of Spiritual Science, Goetheanum, Dornach, Switzerland, 1996).