"The way a plant is formed is what we see when we vividly grasp its form, colors, smell or composition and enter into its spatial and transformational totality without using abstractions."
Jochen Bockemühl's Guide to Understanding Healing Plants II presents an elementary botanical experience of fundamental chemical activities to help the reader gain a deeper understanding of pharmaceutical processes within plants and their connection to the human organism from a spiritual perspective.
In this volume, we meet a scientist who practices what he preaches--an approach to an imaginative way of viewing phenomena, in which outer sensory perception and soul participation unite in a loving understanding of nature. This links Bockemühl's approach to those of scientists such as Paracelsus and Goethe, for both of whom love became the highest power of knowledge and without which life and healing processes would remain forever incomprehensible.
The foundation for this approach is the Goethean method of observing nature, and the study of Rudolf Steiner's spiritual science offers the working hypotheses for our own path of research.
Originally published in German as Ein Leitfaden zur Heilpflanzenerkenntnis, Band II (Science Section of the School of Spiritual Science, Goetheanum, Dornach, Switzerland, 2000).
