So what I'd like us to look at now is the question of satisfaction as it relates to healing. Or put another way what's the difference between being satisfied and being happy? If it's true that we have a biological basis for hunger, and if it's also true that we have a psychological pattern which permits craving, human beings have a deep polarity between the biological necessity of hunger and the psychological manifestation of cravings. The psyche craves through the astral body, and the principle of the will in the astral body is desire. In the astral body the human is free from the biological imperative of the physical. The astral is the source of the free forces in the human. It's the forces in the astral body which separate the soul out from the rest of creation. The astral forces are the source of desire. In its root desire is the will to win or get something or have it all to ourselves or hold it forever. The astral is what we could call the personal will to do or to have some thing rather than just to be, which is more what hunger is about.

Hunger, as a biological necessity is about just being. We exist so we are hungry. Craving comes out of hunger but is something that goes beyond simply being into the realm of desire. Desire is the feeling that I'm not getting what I need. So if we're not getting what we need, then what's built into the soul is this craving to be satisfied. However, at its root desire has a connection to hunger, and we can work on it that way. We can move desire back into the lawfulness of hunger and away from a craving by paying attention to what the hunger is about. If we pay attention to what hunger is about, the craving has a chance to be satisfied. If we satisfy craving we will still have the hunger, but the craving does not drive us into deeper dilemmas of dissatisfaction. So from one point of view the difficulty in the soul, is the desire in the will in the astral body. In the astral body, will manifests as I'm not getting what I need, we could say. Or I got what I need but now I want more of it, whatever the variation. And the manifestation of that in the soul is I will get it. And if I can't get it, I will substitute something so that I get the feeling like I'm getting it, because I must have the satisfaction. So if we're not satisfied, everyone else around us probably will also not be satisfied, and we will live in a world of dissatisfaction. We'll live in a universe of dissatisfaction, because the only thing we will have in common with other beings is dissatisfaction. When this happens what we're doing is we're seeing the astral bodies of everyone else with a low level of clairvoyance. This is singles bars, you know? The topic there is what is your dissatisfaction? Name your brand of dissatisfaction. I'll try and match my dissatisfaction to your dissatisfaction, and you'll be my baby tonight! And there we go. But then in the morning dissatisfaction again. And then judgment, and then "I could never commit to you because I've been hurt so much-- thank you, and bye.

It's a peculiar thing in the will, that desire, because it has a biological root that's objectively lawful and given to humans by wise hierarchies. But because of Lucifer and Ahriman, there's been this problem of the illusion of physical matter that's come in, and then as a result of interaction with big chunks of physically enduring things which resist us at every turn, the will force in the soul has been conditioned to just go out and overcome physical things. Within the soul the impulse to do this overcoming goes beyond biological imperatives and becomes tinged with personal desire. The will in the realm of life is just urge which has to do with being hungry. My urge is to eat when I'm hungry. I'm sleepy. My urge is to go to sleep. I'm thirsty. My urge is to go get a drink. And that's fine. But then that urge gets connected to desire, then the will shifts away from simple hunger pangs to craving. And then in the craving, the hunger is not the issue anymore; because the hunger can be satisfied, but the desire is much more difficult to satisfy. This is, then, over eating or over drinking or running around with a million people or whatever. The basic biological fact becomes a monkey on the back of the soul, because the will that's connected to the basic biology has been twisted in the astral body to craving. Essentially we are engaged in the same acts of, for instance, eating. But instead of having the soul experience, I eat and then I'm satisfied; it's I eat and I'm still not satisfied. And there's a great esoteric mystery in that. How has this turn of events come to be? So in order to see a picture of it, we need to look at how we can cultivate in ourselves a sense of satisfaction even though I don't have all the things that I am craving? That's one side. And the other side is, how can I substitute things for my craving that will eventually not produce the craving, but move my organism more towards the hunger with its potential for satisfaction? How can I find something which will give me satisfaction in the soul but will not create the echo of the craving that goes beyond the hunger -- won't push the desire button, but just go to urge and deal with that. There are great will mysteries hidden in this work.

In Ayurvedic medicine they have three constitutions: the vata, the pitta, and the kapha. And in Western alchemy we have a similar arrangement. The salt constitution, which is kapha, and the sulfur constitution, which is pitta, and the mercury constitution, which is vata. The salt, the sulfur and the mercury provide for the soul a kind of informational reservoir or database of information that is programmed in a certain language. And when what we could call the mercury soul has an experience it goes to that mercury database and says how does this fit in with the world view coming from your body? How does this fit in with your temperament or your bodily constitution? How does this fit in with the language that your constitution is looking for when your soul tries to recreate situations from your memory ?

Uh, I'm sorry -- a little dialogue box will come up -- you can't get there from here because you didn't give the right commands to get that information, because your soul can't handle that level of insight that your body is trying to give to you. Everyone has the physical, life, feeling and self awareness bodies in common. But with those basic bodies a particular person will focus particular and individualized energies of temperament and constitution. The constitutional patterns take the melancholia, or the cholera of the temperament and form them into compounds of patterns. These compound temperaments provide the processes which alternate between the elemental qualities. These three, process oriented, temperamental compounds are called mercury, sulfur, and salt. These processes make use of the elemental information of temperament which are the basis for the personality, but they are not the information itself. They just make use of the elemental forces to support the interaction between the physical body and the life forces and the conscious awareness. So in your constitution you take what somebody else would have for carbon-hydrogen-oxygen-nitrogen, liver-lung-kidney- heart and you combine them in personality processes which are much more individual than the elemental forces and patterns in the life organs. So the same carbon-hydrogen-oxygen-nitrogen in you is giving rise to a whole other universe than it is in someone else.

The hydrogen in you -- because you're a fire constitution, you're a sulfur say, is wreaking havoc. The hydrogen in your diet is tearing you apart, especially in the summer. If someone else had the same diet but was a salt constitution there would be no problem with what was in the diet. But for you the diet is killing you. But you don't know that, because you grew up, say, with somebody who had a different constitution, your Mom for instance, and she made food that satisfied her, and she was a salt, and you ate the food which agreed with her. It formed patterns of desire in you and now that you are out in the world you continue to eat to satisfy her constitution. Later in you life, maybe you marry someone who's a salt and they make things that really fit them. You come down to a meal and you eat, and they are getting satisfied and you're getting slowly toxic. No ill will. Just karma and possibility. And so when we looked at the four elements and the organs linked to them in the temperament that was a fundamental arrangement. We can now use that arrangement as the basis for looking at the next level of the possibilities of dynamic between the elemental qualities of temperament.

So the sulfur, the salt, and the mercury are dynamic processes moving between carbon(earth, melancholia), hydrogen (fire, cholera), oxygen(water, phlegma) and nitrogen (air, sanguine). The sulfur constitution has a tendency to love very inflammatory things. These people love the sulfur. They love burning, sticky situations that have the possibility of turning into volcano-like lava flows. This constitution just loves that. This person loves things to be cooking and bubbling and they will seek conflict out of a sense of moral imperative. The sulfur feels that is a manifest destiny for them to tell everyone what are the facts and then go and do something about it. This person loves being the one that goes in and stirs the pot. They will go out of their way to involve you in sticky things so they can watch you squirm around in the lava. Because they have the feeling in them like, I'm on the planet to get everybody up to speed. The Lord made me to tell you how you can get up to speed. That's the sulfur.

Rudolf Steiner describes sulfur as the quickening agent which leads everything to the periphery. And so the sulfur in us wants to control and push and dominate and get things to critical mass and get things to fester. Once things are oozing and fermenting they step back and go RI wonder when they are going to realize that I have the correct answers to all of this? That's the sulfur in us, yeah? And that's okay if it's in balance. But if the sulfur in us gets fed a lot of steak and eggs in the morning or worse in the evening steak and eggs, on a sultry summer evening , what could be better? Oh Yeah! steak and eggs with lots of mayonnaise. We could say mayonnaise with steak and eggs in it and that would be closer to the truth for a sulfur. Mayonnaise is eggs and oil, sulfur. Steak and fat is more sulfur. Gotta have it. What's steak without gobs of mayonnaise, right?

So it's something like that. So the sulfur craves things which are really dense and rich with fire, like meat and oil. (think pepperoni pizza with extra cheese). Then just to get a balanced diet (heart doctor says to get a balanced diet) they will go for anything with heavy sugar (think glazed Krispy Kreme donuts) on it and stuff that and a big Dr. Pepper on top of it all for dessert. If another person put that food in themselves, it would just sit there and go churn, churn, churn like that, for days and they would turn slightly green. But for the sulfur it goes in and it goes hiss, burp, boom and they start talking non stop for days about how you could do something better if you did it their way. [laughter] So that's sulfur. Food that has a yearning to go to the periphery (warmth) is taken in abundance and then it drives the soul life to the periphery (think-You do this). And when the soul is moving this way it's like you do this, you do that, you do this, you do that. And if life is all boiling and festering around them, if everyone is running around to please them then life is great. The sulfur has the feeling like Ahhh, I did my job. Now on to the next thing. That's sulfur.

And so what the sulfur is attracted to is a big chunk of greasy meat. There is a lot of fire energy in carnitas. If the sulfur type is a little more evolved, it'll be egg salad, but it will have to have lots of mayonnaise -- and really pungent herbs and hot stuff. Cayenne, yeah! Cayenne mayonnaise sandwiches. Yes! Salsa with a little mayonnaise. Favorite. This is so that they can keep the level of satisfaction up in the hot and festering sulfur range. And that's fine for the short run when the world needs saving. But if that's the habitual food and that's the habitual mood of soul, then acidosis sets in eventually. Then the festering starts to be self corrosive, because the system gets overloaded with too much sulfur, and the blood is literally boiling. The feet swell and begin to fester, the skin gets mangy and eruptions begin to occur. So what we need there is a long cool down. So what would really help is maybe a mango lassi made with yogurt and mango instead of the Dr. Pepper and Krispy Kreme. The lassi would cool out the sulfurous blood. So when you go to the Indian restaurants and you get the chicken with the pepper that goes hiss, burp, boom, then you have the mango lassi there to give some balance. That's why it's there on the menu, to just cool down the sulfur. So the sulfur constitution gets great benefit by eating salad late. Just give your system a rest there at night. Let the liver process the fats in the company of the enzymes from the fresh salad. Let things cool down. Go into evening softly. Soft music and evening ragas. Forego the evening rages. To balance sulfur go on moonlit walks by the water. Things like that can soften the heat with a cool atmosphere. Pictures of waterfalls above your bed. Just whatever you can do. Angel wings that are glowing blue instead of MICHAEL WITH HIS FIERY SWORD KILLING THE DRAGON OVER YOUR BED! Go for the moon goddess. I think that you get the picture.

So what would be very good in a salt constitution is to have some of that energy, to have some of the fire of the sulfur. So it would be really good to get the person who wants to just eat sweet, glutinous custards and pastries all the time to bite into a hunk of steak. The ideal pastries for the salt constitution are the ones that have to have sweet gushy stuff on the inside. Not a biscotti. No. A salt satisfying pastry is one of those things when we bite it on one end stuff oozes out on the other end. That custardy squishy stuff satisfies the dry and chalky mood of the salt constitution.

A salt nature finds satisfaction when you can take your finger on the plate and swirl some sweet gooey thing around it, kind of like poi. Egg custard is British poi. So the salt constitution loves things where the water and the earth kind of work it out and form a gelatinous colloid, and the food basically is like a warm sweet mud. Salt people go for the warm sweet mud-like food group. Mud, mud, glorious mud. Perfectly lovely for cooling the blood. Glorious mud. Remember that old song? So the salt constitution is looking for the world to be warm sweet mud. Lovely -- what you pay for to be in the spa. Just be there. Oh yeah. Zzzz. The mood of the salt is that the water and the earth come together, and they make this gooey thing, but not sticky like the sulfur fire . Not that sticky burning feeling. Not hot and burning and sticky like tar. No, smoooooth. Gooey. Slippery. Yeah. Salt loves that because as substances salts goes from being crystalline to being a colloid to being a solution. Then they go back into being a colloid and then into a crystal again. A colloid is an organic crystal that can become gooey. So the colloid is really the characteristic of the salt in the middle of its transformation from a crystal to a solution.

A jelly is a colloid. Jello is a colloid. Your connective tissue is a colloid. Your fingernails start out as a colloid and then precipitate out into a kind of dry skin. The same with your hair. So anywhere where is a kind of gelatinous something or other, or a kind of a jello like mud condition, that's the salt living in there. The salt can go up into the water and then down into the crystal. But it doesn't have any fire. If it gets fire, the colloid dries out and turns to dust as the gelatin burns up and the life potential goes away, and then you just have dust, and then the dust gets more and more dusty until it becomes so fine that it just self combusts like wheat dust in a grain silo and then you're in the fire pole. But when the salt goes through the fire and turns to dust and ignites it can no longer form a colloid, it can no longer be a support for life.