Dead Warmth & Living Warmth (Part 2)

“I change my mind a lot… I don’t usually agree with what I say very much.” - David Bowie

“Even the seemingly most unappealing thing has hidden qualities that are revealed when we do not simply yield to our own selfish feeling.” - Rudolf Steiner

Living warmth always shows up precisely where you wouldn’t expect it. Aldous Huxley says, “Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.” Any living thing — including a movement — that becomes entirely uniform is like a plant entombed in amber — something that cannot change is a corpse. Mineral warmth consistently wishes to rise, though this gives even “mineral” warmth — warmth in a physical sense not being directed within a living organism — a certain kind of liveliness, for nothing, is completely dead. But there is another kind of warmth, a warmth within liveliness — distinguished from the mild liveliness of external warmth accumulated in rocks. Warmth within a living organism moves in astonishingly inconsistent ways.

The warmth of an electric heater radiates a mineral warmth, but the warmth of a good wood fire (or sunlight) gives a “health-giving warmth”3 because the breaking down of materials built by life radiates vitality, not just heat. You could say that food cooked over a wood fire increases the vitality in the food, whereas an electric heat certainly cooks the food but primarily in a breaking-down manner without adding more. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t cook with electric heat — that’s all I use at our house — but we should be cognizant that the nutritional value of food is affected by the source of cooking warmth. In my case, we primarily eat what is grown on our biodynamic farm, so there’s no reason for me to worry, since my baseline food quality is far better than average. I consider anxiety about poor food quality to be rather more deleterious than poor food quality, which is why you will see many people on a bad diet, nonetheless quite content — and even healthy! — and even benevolent participants in society, while those most frantic about their food quality can often spread anxiety about bodily existence rather than working practically towards harmony. As freedom is meant to be sacrificed for what we love, health exists in order to be used to serve. Freedom and health are both means to an end, neither of which is meant to be amassed as if leaving a big bank account or a beautiful corpse was of any positive karmic value. If we are merely vaguely warm to others because we were around their own warmth, we cool off as soon as we are out of their spiritual sunlight. Our task is to take whatever we are given and transmute it into living warmth — surprising warmth.

My experience of a woodfire versus electric heat is that the electric heat warms the surface of the skin and gradually permeates deeper, but the woodfire simultaneously warms the skin and reaches deep into the bones, warming both from the outside and from the inside in a rejuvenating way. Whenever we’ve had chilled lambs on the farm, an electric blanket is not enough to revive them. We always have to build a fire in our woodstove. We also let our dog, Pippi, lick them maternally. When the lamb is finally up and walking, Pippi comes and finds us in the other room and alerts us with a single bark. She has done this for us with many little lambs over the years. She is old now, and it will be sad to see her go. You feel that? The contrast between the warmth of a dog reviving fragile lambs by the fire and then the cool feeling in the veins when you hear of an affectionate dog getting old. You can feel the surprising dynamics of living warmth right there. A rock always falls — you’ll almost never see it float, unless it’s carried by living water as Viktor Schauberger witnessed.

Someone may be generous with their vital energy. Or they can be cold and stingy. Look at the image above and think about what it means when someone gets “cold feet” in the light of these emotional states. A compost pile assembled out of various etheric plants and manure can nonetheless produce spontaneous inner warmth. “The important thing is the generation of heat in the manure, for the activity thus called into play is highly beneficial to the manure.” It’s not enough to amass various experiences — those experiences must then be induced to heat up in a way that they generate inner warmth — so that inner kindling thenceforth absorbs vitality and always converts it into radiant warmth for others.

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