fontanelle, a soft membrane between the two parietal bones, on
top of infants’ heads. If we go back a long, long time through the
archives of the memory of nature, we find that the Earth was full
of volcanoes and areas with hot gases and plasma. Human beings
had to have some sense of direction to avoid being roasted alive.
The baggy object on top of their heads fulfilled this function: it
was the very primitive organ of warmth.
In terms of evolution, what has happened? The baggy part was
reintegrated inside the head and slowly became our present pineal
gland. And now our sense of warmth is no longer localised in a
particular organ but distributed all over the body. Thus we can
observe how a sensorial function develops over a long, long period
of time. It first depends on one organ and is restricted to it, and
then it slowly spreads to the whole body. We now do not feel
warmth through any localised organ but through our whole body.
Steiner foresaw that our present senses will all follow a similar
evolution process, so there will be a time when human beings can
smell, see, hear, taste... with their whole body and not only
through a particular organ. It is as if the localized organ is there
to teach us about one particular sense, and when the lesson is
complete, we no longer need the organ.
As the sense of warmth is much more ancient, and therefore more
integrated into our being, it is easier for us to recognize what
warmth is, independently of any object. We can grasp the pure
quality of warmth. Let us develop this as an analogy to understand
more about seeingness.
In the beginning it may be difficult to get a sense of seeingness,
meaning the fact of seeing, independently of any image in
particular. We understand what it is to see a tree, to see a light or
even to see an aura... but the naked seeingness may not be so
obvious.
Roughly speaking, the feeling of warmth is to heat what
seeingness is to the perception of images. We don't have to refer
to concepts such as ‘hot as a fire’ or ‘hot as the Sun’ or ‘hot as the
stove’ and try to understand what is common to them. We can just
go to the essence and recognize warmth, independently of any
source of heat. It is a similar quality that has to be developed with
vision in order to discern the seeingness.
In other words, for perception to take place, 3 elements are
needed: 1) a person who perceives 2) an object to be perceived 3) the
barré
(Barré)
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