And it's the heart that is the organ of the balancing both of the physiological polarities and the polar states of awareness. So that's why the esoteric work on ourselves is so paradoxical. It is a great paradox that if we want to be creative, we have to commit to an intense discipline. It's because of all these reversals in the great sense organ of the heart. And it's only the human heart that can really understand paradox. The brain can't understand paradox. It's hard wired. This is this and that is that. And what goes in goes through a database and comes out again should be logical, and that's just as things should be. But logic does not always rule life.

But the heart understands the upper right to the lower left, and the lower right to the upper left, and the above to the below, and I once thought this way but now I'm thinking that way. The heart understands those kinds of reversals. The brain is just making layers of data. Now I put another layer on, I get more functions. All you're doing is buying memory chips fundamentally in the brain. You're just getting more RAM (random access memory). But more RAM is not going to solve the problems of your life -- more random access memory. More memory in the brain is not going to solve your problems. In fact, Rudolf Steiner says the neocortex (it's the biggest layer with all the gray matter which most people associate with being really human and cool). Rudolf Steiner says that this part of the brain is really just the digestive organ of the brain. But the real thinking we really need to transform is the thinking that goes between the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere, between the word-like analytical thinking and the music-like geometric thinking of the two hemispheres. This fluctuation gets integrated into the emotional life in the middle or limbic brain. Esoteric development can also transform patterns imbedded even more deeply in the sensory integration areas of the midbrain in the area of the primitive cortices. These are laid down in prenatal times and are imprinted with karmic patterns. That's the brain that really needs to get transformed by esoteric work, the more primitive stimulus / response type of brain. But more about that later. That's where I'm trying to eventually steer this Consciousness Studies course.

The primitive cortices of the mid brain are stimulated by the way you move your eyes with your ocular motor muscles among other inputs. So that's why I keep talking to you about ratio and proportion, and being aware of the way in which you respond to visual perceptions. It is the midbrain we are working on when we're doing exercises in transforming the gaze while looking at artwork. In the exercise of observing the Rembrandt 100 Guilder print, we pay attention to the movements we make with our eyes when we look at the images, because those movements in the ocular motor muscles are training the midbrain and the limbic pathways in the brain towards feelings of emotional integrity. To make these motions conscious is actually feeding your limbic structure lawful impulses where normally the limbic structure simply wants to emote and dream desirous dreams. When you work with consciously altering the ways in which you gaze at something, you're feeding your emotional centers in the brain disciplined, rigorous, harmonious intervals in a conscious way. And when your eyes look and track the movements depicted in the forms of the artwork, it's the equivalent of being in a REM state in a dream, in a rapid eye movement state, because it's in the rapid eye movement that your limbic structure working through the midbrain is trying to integrate the dream nature between the higher centers in the brain and the more emotional, movement perceptions in the body. Fundamentally that is why we are given dreams in the first place, to heal ourselves emotionally. And your rapid eye movement in dreams is a foundation upon which the conscious esoteric work of entering the dream pole is consciously set. Through aesthetic experience we become aware of the moral forces available to the soul by moving our eyes in the right way. I'm sorry if this seems too abstract, but I'm going to cover this in detail through the year. I' m bringing a lot of threads together in this lecture and I'm saying that this is where we're going with the Consciousness Studies work, into the dream pole consciously.

The heart is the place where the pictures are actually thought out in terms of whether or not they are in balance. So if we wish to be creative, we have to discipline the way in which the mental images arise and the way in which the soul postures with them. We have to discipline the way in which we recognize inner pictures or else there will be no way to become creative safely. This is because unrecognized inner pictures automatically start to stimulate the limbic structure in the emotional brain to self feeling, which is the great danger of the inner work. The danger is that we mistake self feeling for the feelings of the world soul. There's a great temptation to do that. If we mistake our own self feelings for the feelings of the world soul, the heart loses it's vision of our destiny and can only see our passions or our inclinations; and what it's looking for is insights into our destiny through the development of the Ego, which lives in our blood. That was a lot but it is a useful sequence.

These are all coherent pictures somewhere in the universe, and the heart is the organ that perceives all this through movement. The heart perceives whether or not the movement in a perception is leading to illness or to health. But to train the heart to do that, we need to pay attention to the movement motifs of balancing and reversal and reciprocation, you could say. We need to pay attention to exactly how one thing turns into another thing. How the form of one thing can reveal both of the poles of its existence simultaneously; each changing into the other at the same time. And the more we can put ourselves in the conditions where our thinking can follow the whole metamorphosis of things simultaneously from one transformation to the next, when our thinking can do that and you can see the whole in each little part, then the heart begins to participate in the imaginative work in the blood in a conscious way. The heart begins to think, and it thinks in pictures that move lawfully, which means pictures in which each part is a mirror of the whole. Both of the two polar opposite states mirror each other, they must contain each other or else they are not true polarities. If we can see that reality clearly with our hearts, then the mysteries of nature and the whole elemental world begin to speak to us inwardly, not as visions or voices, but as inner perception. The elemental world becomes a rigorous cognitive experience filled with feelings. It's the same experience as if you were figuring out an algebraic formula or doing a geometry problem. Exactly the same kind of rigorousness, but it arises in the soul as a feeling of knowing.

[Question]: Can you say more again about how you know when a picture is lawful?

That's a great question because that's the big problem: How do you know when a picture is lawful? The only way I can actually describe it is that you have to practice looking with your heart at pictures again and again until one day, through grace, your discipline allows you to say to yourself, "I can see that this inner picture is not moving lawfully. I'm sure of it. There's something wrong with the way I have understood that picture as a becoming." The best way I can say it in a short way is, develop a practice where you can prove yourself wrong, where you, yourself, through dint of your own grinding (the grain), can prove to yourself, "I thought that things were this way, but now I see that things are the other way." When you do that, your heart goes, "Great, finally there is somebody at the controls here who is awake and is willing to go through the tough process of discrimination, Whew! I guess that now I can relax a little bit, and I don't have to be just waiting for it all to hit the fan all of the time." Because until you discipline your thinking, your heart is going, "Holy cow, is this going to be how it will be for this whole incarnation, either down in the bottom of the barrel or off with the fairies in la-la world?" But as soon as you start disciplining the thinking, the heart goes, "Okay, now maybe I can participate in this process in a little more graceful way. Maybe I can actually enter consciously into these pictures which are forming inside of me, instead of having the whole organism just flow along with whatever seems to demand my attention at odd moments." The heart wants to say, "Do I really know this? Really?" Because if the heart can't know something in a real way then it experiences alienation. If the heart can't say I really, really know this then there is no chance for love to enter into it.

So the brain can help the heart start the process of knowing by providing the soul the tools for analysis. This is the function of the intellect. But through analysis the heart never actually can reach an answer. So the women that are sitting at the breakfast table when their husband is analyzing the logic in the heated conversation last night, those women are correct. This guy is heart dead. He has a heart of stone. All he sees is logic. But the guy is also correct that the woman who is following her personal feelings is not thinking clearly -- just to use male and female as principles, not specifically a woman and a man, but whatever your role is at the time in a conflict. We could also say logical (male principle) and intuitive (female principle). And that drama goes on in each one of us all the time between our head and our heart. The head says, logically the answer should be this -- and the heart says, yes, I know what is logical but I don't care what the answer should logically be, my intuition tells me that there are other things in this conflict that need attention. I don't care about all of your proof, and I can't understand how you don't intuit these other aspects? And then the head says, Aspects? I've got proof! [raising his voice] Well, don't raise your voice at me. Boo Hoo. You never listen! And that's the drama between these two, between the nerve and the blood, the head and the heart.

The way in which the nerve knows is [speaking the following in bold voice] "It has to be this way because here is the proof that it is this way!" And that approach to the conflict is accurate, because that's the way the nerve knows. The nerve either has proof or it doesn't have any basis for knowing. The problem is that when some more data comes in, the absolute certainty with which the last point of view was held often has to change. When things change like this the nerve thinker will restructure the proofs and say again. "It has to be this way because here is the proof that it is this way!"

But the heart never says "It has to be only this way." The heart says "In one way it is like this and in another way it is like that, and both of these positions are very clear to me, but I can't really decide which one right now, because I haven't worked it through enough. But when I do work it through I will really know! And I will know it for a long time" That's what the heart says. But it often takes a long time to know with the heart.