There are as many states of health as there are human beings

52 Weeks of Steiner – Week 44 

Among ancient people an age-old saying remains even today. One says so frequently that what the simple person gets from such sayings often may contain something good, but just as often it is something false. So it is with the saying, “There are many illnesses, but only one state of health.” This is foolish. There are as many states of health as there are human beings. For each human being his individual health. What this says is that all general standard prescriptions holding that this or that is healthy for the human being are nonsense. The very part of humanity that is overcome by the feverish pursuit of health suffers most from the general prescriptions for health. Among them are those who believe that there could be something generally tagged as health, that if one does thus and so, that it would be healthy. It is most incredible that there is no realization that a sun bath can be healthy for a person, but that this may not be applied in general. It could be quite harmful for another. Generally, this is admitted but there is no following through in particular instances. We must make it clear to ourselves that health is a quite relative concept, something that is liable to a continuing process of change, especially for the human being, who is the most complicated being on the earth. We need but look into spiritual science. Then shall we penetrate deeply into human nature and recognize how changeable what we call health is. In reality, one forgets almost entirely today that upon which so much value is laid in material aspects. One forgets that the human being is in the throes of development.

Rudolf Steiner, Illusory Illness and the Feverish Pursuit of Health
Lecture Two, December 5, 1907

“There are as many states of health as there are human beings.” I fell across this quote on my search for something totally unrelated, and then proceeded to spend the next hour and a half reading deeper into this lecture collection.

Last year, my mother had some health trouble. Across the first 5 months we faced the inflexible nature of modern medicine, to the point that their prescribing to fix one issue created so many more issues, and left the connectedness of the human body to all of its parts totally out of the equation. For so many months they were trying to fit my mother’s symptoms into a box that they just didn’t fit into, and could not, would not, hear of any other possible causes. My mother’s doctors were SO STUMPED, they took her case to a world medical convention to present, and when met with an answer from world specialists that was not from the text book they read, they ignored the advice and plugged on with their blind solutions. Because what they were seeing didn’t fit into their knowledge, they couldn’t see outside that box. They saw not only one state of health, but only a few ways to get to a state of dis-ease. Totally mind boggling if you ask me.

Since sharing my mother’s stories with others, I’ve been met with countless accounts of the same encounters others have had in the medical field. A total inability to see the connection, and often the total and pure dismissal of such a phenomenon, between the health of one part of our body in relation to the zillion other parts we cart around within our being. The “feverish pursuit of health” of one system just doesn’t work if you don’t pay attention to all the parts of the human being.

Steiner begins this lecture by discussing a friend of his who each summer spent his vacation attempting to heal a particular ailment at various sanitoriums that advertise to be the key to bringing your health back into rights. He also shares that none of the treatments ever seemed to help his friend. Steiner goes on to share the initial quote of this post. And what strikes me the most is that last statement: One forgets that the human being is in the throes of development.

We are always changing, always in a state of renewal, of development. We are never static; even when we feel full health, our physical body is always in an active states of processing, one of which includes maintenance. Each of the four facets of our being are always alive and working together. These processes and bodies do not live in isolation. This seems to have been forgotten.

As much could be said about the education system. In the feverish pursuit of intelligence we focus on the mind and forget everything else. The growth of intelligence doesn’t happen in just the brain, but here we are anyway.

Let’s get back to the sentence that originally jumped off the page, as I realize we’ve gone on a bit of a tangent!

“There are as many states of health as there are human beings.”

Each of us is individual. Our own, personal, individual state of health will be different from the person next to us. There may be similarities, but each is unique. Similarly, each of us is individual. Our own, personal, individual journey in learning is different from the person next to us. There may be similarities, but each is unique.

I wonder how we can help the world to see the vast wisdom of the human? Something to ponder.

(This post is part of a weekly serial started on Michaelmas 2023. To see the other entries, please see the post linked HERE and scroll down to the bottom for individual links)

Until next time,
Marina