Glen,
I look forward eagerly to discussion with you as e-mail is entirely too inadequate.
Hugh
Hugh
The main reference we need to refer to is the diagram in lec 8- pg 155 I think.
>From what you have said below you have what RS is saying re Cosmic and Earthly nutrition streams in humans which is a 4 fold story. With plants though you keep telling a 3 fold story.
So�apply your 4 fold understanding of humans� to plants
Double Head forces = below ground
Double Metabolic system = above ground.
Dear Glen,
I'm sure I still don't have it straight. I'm very visual in my thinking, meaning I want to picture things unfolding in my mind so I can see the processes unfolding and be able to cite examples everyone can relate to in everyday experience. It leaves me in limbo to say 'double head forces' and only works when I can say WHAT double head forces, as in carrot or turnip and ant or earthworm and what these DO.
For example, watch ants living on Florida sugar sand and you'll see they delve down and mine clay, bringing it up to the surface where it is so badly needed to serve as the intermediary between the silica forces rising out of the earth and the nutrient uptake by the plant that the silica forces provide the pressure but not the connection for. Clay provides the connection (though not the pressure) and on those soils where there's 60 feet of sand before you hit the limestone below, perennial peanut needs this clay to connect with the lime below and bring it up. With all that sand there's plenty of pressure, but the lime's deep down. The peanut gets there with its tap root (which takes it 3 or 4 years to delve that deep, but once it does--step back!) but it needs a bit of clay to do so. Ants go down and search out the clay (there usually is little enough down there) and bring it up so the peanut can catch on a lot better.
Once the peanut gets to the lime, the soil it's in (pH 5.2, CEC 2) will improve of itself with rotational graizing and you'll see that sugar sand colour up with grey/browns and the pH and CEC will climb as the plant pulls carbon in from the atmosphere and feeds it to the soil, while the soil pulls nitrogen in and feeds it to the plant. The cow eats the peanut forage and digests the carbon and nitrogen, feeding the carbon back to the air and the nitrogen back to the soil.
Now let's take this example and go through it tagging all the little components of the process with "earthly forces, cosmic forces, earthly substances, cosmic substances." For example, nitrogen feeds/builds the human head and its activities, so it must come from the soil. Oxygen feeds/builds the limbs and their activities so it must come from the air. That is because--as Steiner so cogently pointed out--we must develop our head organization out of what we take in from eating (earthly, below ground stuff like lime, phosphorus, nitrogen), while we develop our limbs and metabolic system out of what we take in by breathing (cosmic, above ground stuff like oxygen, carbon, sliica). If we break everything down like this I believe it will be a lot clearer from tieing it in to real/life examples like the ant, earthworm; perennial peanut, cow; silica, clay and lime, etc.
Sorry, but I never seem to get there by way of these soaring abstractions that are free and clear of any examples and any real-life, gutsy, look-at-this stuff. I have to tie it into the things in nature I can point to as examples. I'm always amazed by anyone who can grasp these things as purely abstract principles and yet never seems to come up with the example-after-example thing. Hell, everything in nature is an example. I really must get to the endless examples immediately or there's nothing to ground my thinking and it sails off into la-la land like nitrogen in the atmosphere. I need some lime in my thinking to drag nitrogen into my head organization and light up my conscious thinking.
Best,
Hugh
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