The energy concept of biodynamics

Almar von Wistinghansen, Bio-Dynamics, Summer 1980. Reprinted with kind permission.

At home we used to have a very big bible with many pictures. There God the Father was pictured as an old man with a great beard. Michaelangelo has painted the creation of the earth, showing the Creator as an old man with a large beard. Other artists have used the same motif. When a child or an adult looks at these pictures, one thing sticks in their minds: – the Lord is an old man with a large beard. Has an artist, or anyone else, ever seen the Lord with his physical eyes? The Lord is a spiritual being. The existence of a spiritual beings is something that one can divine, acknowledge or reject, but we certainly should not think that we can see them. We don’t find the Lord if we picture him to ourselves as an old man with a beard and search for him in the likeness of this image. Would it not be better to search for spiritual beings and the spiritual world by employing our spiritual faculties?

There are many picture books for children which show dwarfs, sylphs and undines. Artists portray beings which no one has ever beheld with physical eyes, simply because they are spiritual beings, not material bodies. Only with the eyes of the spirit can we behold spiritual beings. If we train ourselves, we might be able to acquire this faculty. In this search, however, the ornamental front garden dwarf will stand in the way. I think that for the time being we can perhaps only divine the positive and negative influences of the elemental beings and hence acknowledge their existence in the spiritual world.

Nitrogen is the carrier of the astral, oxygen is the mediator of the etheric formative forces, and carbon carries the highest spiritual form. These three components, in greater or lesser quantities, are in the atmosphere. Air that is not polluted is an invisible, odourless gas. The existence of this invisible gas can demonstrate what is meant when we say that the spirit uses the physical as a carrier. We see neither t5he carrier nor what is carried. In order to describe something, we must use words with which we and others are familiar. These words, however, are derived from the physical world and only comprehensible in a metaphorical sense. This is especially true if one faces the task of describing something super-sensible by explaining its effects, as Rudolph Steiner has done.

Time and time again we try to understand the compost preparations as fertilising materials. But, as has been said before, the preparations are carriers of forces which work from the spiritual realm into the physical and which can act if the physical conditions are right. The statement in the agriculture course that small quantities can be particularly effective, and that they are conveyed by composts or water, signifies that we have to look at the contend of this source in a way that is quite different from our usual understanding of the material world.

When we use the preparations, we make it possible for effects and forces from the spiritual realm to have access to the earth. They can exert their influence on the material world, however, only if the right conditions are there. These conditions are created by the farmer or gardener who, through manuring, cultivation, crop rotations, etc., tried to enliven the soil. The forces of life are invisible. Life is a force and can only be strengthened by forces.

To really understand and to help her, we must extend our consciousness to grasp the working or forces. Then we can also come to understand, I think, what Rudolph Steiner meant when he spoke about a “hidden alchemy”. There is nothing mystical about his descriptions and explanations, without which the bio-dynamic method cannot be understood and cannot be brought home to peoples’ minds. It is indeed easier to recognise the beneficial effects of this method on soils, yields and the quality of products, since these efforts can be demonstrated in practical farming and have been established by many experiments.