[Student:] Thought?

[Dennis:] Thought. Yes, very good. Thought was the dew of the brain. You must be an alchemist to think like that! So when we think, there is a process of dew formation, our thinking is sol, but then out of sol comes thought, which is more gravity laden, so therefore it is the dew of the brain. Modern chemistry or modern physiology would also have brain dew. What would brain dew be in modern physiology?

[Student:] Electrical impulses?

[Dennis:] Electrical impulses would be one form of brain dew. Brain dew could also be things like melatonin. Things like that. Neurotransmitters. Secretions. Brain secretions. Dopamine, etc. Neurotransmitters -- things that enable transmission of chemical-electrical impulses. Brain dew. And it's in those endocrine secretions and neurotransmitters that much research is being done today to try to find the seed of consciousness. But they're looking at the dew and not the process of the forming of the dew, just like we do today: we take the thing and not the process. So every levity condition to an alchemist, especially to a healer, had its particular dew that it produced, it's secretion, so to speak. It had it's own rhythm of secretion, its own process of secretion, and it had also, because it was involved in a dew forming process -- it had a gravity state and a levity state in the forming of the dew. So this morning if you took a walk out in your garden, there was plenty of dew. But if in the next few days the weather changes a little bit and the clouds come in the morning and you take a walk in the garden, there won't be dew on the plants, because the dew will be up in the sky, because it won't come down to the earth because the pressure will change.

So there's a constant breathing of the dew in the morning and in the evening having to do with warmth and cold of the earth and the pressure of the atmosphere and things like that. The exact same process is happening in us daily with the secretions around our organs, what an alchemist would call the dew of the organ, or what Paracelsus called sweat. His descriptions were a little more earthy than most. He would say the organs sweat. When an organ sweats, it sweats a condensate of its process of what he called the evestrum or the archeus, its sol field, or its star field. It was considered by an alchemist that the source of the forms of the physical organs of the body was the starry realm. And so the dew that was created on the organ, especially on the surface of an organ, like the drops on your cold glass of ice tea or on the plants in the morning, the dew will form on the organ. So in our organs there are certain patterns that the organs have of moving in and out of gravity and levity that have to do with the dew of the organ, the secretion of the organ. And the reason I'm speaking in this language is because we can get a lot further in looking at physiology if we understand this process in this way. Because if we just look at physiology as physiology, we'll have endocrine secretions and we'll get a headache trying to remember dopamine and ATP and whatever. We'll get crazy trying to give names to all of the corpses that result when an organ sweats. There are just hundreds of these secretions. We must remember the picture of the process, that this organ is becoming out of nothing into something. If we remember that the dew is kind of a signature of the motif of the becoming of the process (to use that as a language now), then we can see that everything is breathing. And the organ has times when it's more in a levity state and times when it's more in a gravity state according to its dew forming process. The dew forming process is what Rudolf Steiner would call an Imagination. It is the cosmic activity of the hierarchies. It is a motion motif of the creative activity of the cosmic artists whose imaginations created the life organ in the body. When an organ is in a levity state, it is participating in the becoming of its process. It's participating in the creative imaginations of the hierarchies which surround the organ.

What is present as the imagination surrounding that organ becomes the content of the consciousness of the person that has that organ. In the life of humans the imaginations which form the organ become free of the organ forming process. Once the imaginations are free of the organ physiology calls them endocrine secretions. The endocrine secretions circulate around the organ and breathe rhythmically in time with the organ so that the secretions can interact with other secretions, and then you don't have any stuck places in your body. The endocrine secretions keep the soul circulating through the body. But the organ also has its gravity side, a particular emotion where the secretion gets stuck, and can't circulate. The secretion gets stuck at the surface of the organ like a crust when we are feeling the particular emotion. They can't just be released. They are held and locked in the organ. That emotion in the soul would be called fear. It's opposite, the quality of the freely moving secretions, would be called creativity.

So we're making a shift now between regular physiology and soul states, because the alchemical language can do that. It can help you see the relationship between physiological dysfunction and soul dilemmas. They very much are connected to one another. It's what today they would call the body-mind connection. But in the body-mind literature today there's not a really good poetic language of pictures, because everybody's trying to compete with the guys who are doing research on neurotransmitters and seratonin and whatever, and dopamine -- to try to say oh yeh, it's the seratonin we're after when we do mind / body stuff. But to an esotericist the seratonin is a being that has an activity that eventually becomes dew that eventually becomes a crust through fear, which is actually another type of being. From this perspective the human soul is a battleground between the creative beings of the hierarchies and the entrapped beings of the adversaries. Both live in the human soul. Which one dominates is determined by the consciousness of the human who has the soul forces moving through their body. The adversaries create our wounds the hierarchies give us our gifts and the alchemist learns that from one perspective these things are the same thing. Our gifts are our wounds and vice versa.

So the same thing that could be creative, if it's not allowed to be creative, becomes the problem. So the way they would say it in alchemy is your wound is your medicine. Your wound is your medicine. Your dysfunction is your teacher. It's where you're learning. So if you're struggling with something being stuck in your soul, then the dew has deposited as a crust of fear or doubt in a life organ, and we have to be able to breathe it back into a levity state to get rid of the fear, so that what is trapped in the fear can once again circulate in the soul. This all comes under the idea of dew, organ dew.

To an alchemist the most sacred thing was a picture that the great sacrifice of the Avatar was dew. Ros. Another word for ros is blood. Dew, or blood. So your blood is the dew of heaven. And your organs are made out of that blood, that heavenly dew. And so there is in each organ, because it's fallen so far into manifestation, there's the tendency for a part of the organ and its function to always be carrying a little fear in it. It is the anxiety produced by the fear of alienation from the creative cosmos because the organ has lost it's potential and become manifest. And that becomes, then, a kind of stone that gets stuck, and it has to be transformed again and brought back again into levity state so that the imagination can once again flow. But the danger is that if it's really stuck, when the imagination starts to flow, the imagination just leaves the organ and evaporates, and then we get fantasy. Fantasy occurs when a life organ just exudes its imaginations and they escape the organ, rise up into the consciousness and evaporate. As an alchemist we want to learn how to collect the dew of the released imaginations. We want to learn how to collect imagination and keep it in little bottles so that we can use it again to heal.