Our feet are not something we normally pride ourselves on (unless perhaps we are a hobbit!) - we quite rightly feel they are lowly, humble things.  But as an example of an extremity (quite literally) they may help us to learn something about the true nature of the human body.

In a previous journal http://www.philosophyoffreedom.com/node/2355 we moved from the human head to the human heart.  Moving on in that direction, we can come then to consider our extremities - our arms and legs  most obviously.

One humble phenomenon that we can focus on is that of our feet.  Our feet are not something we normally pride ourselves on (unless perhaps we are a hobbit!) - we quite rightly feel they are lowly, humble things.  But as an example of an extremity (quite literally) they may help us to learn something about the true nature of the human body.

Feet are not usually thought of as beautiful - in fact, sometimes looking at them we can feel they never quite made it!  They are condemned to be subject to earthly forces, crushed as it were between the weight of our body and the solid earth.

But now let's look at the fact that human beings usually have four extremities or limbs - arms and legs.  Experience for a moment the following train of thought: imagine that our body is composed of a much more malleable, changing substance something like flowing lava or rubber.  Now imagine one of our legs moving upwards and to the side in a sweeping motion.  In the process it becomes more like an arm with a hand at the end as it moves towards the region of rarefied feelings around the heart.  It has moved towards the region of our chest, where feelings move in a kind of cosmic harmony as mentioned last time.  In the process, the foot has been beautified and ennobled to become a hand.

Now imagine the leg/arm to move back down again - it moves to the earthy region and the hand becomes more adapted to its humble, earthly purpose.  Fingers become toes and so on. 

Now we have brought some mobility into our thinking about the foot and the leg.  So let's go further - imagine that you are viewing someone walking towards you:

This person is looking at you quite consciously and wants to come towards you.  That is an important point, that this person should want to walk forwards in the direction they are going!  Too often, out of our training in abstract thinking, we want to exclude such considerations when we try to understand the human body - but the result is that the "person" we are picturing mentally could just as well be an automaton - a robot or some such that just happens to move in a way that is physically similar to the walking motion of a human being.

So, for a real human being who is walking in this way, something can be easily seen in the head, something that is quite literally visible in the gaze and the region of the face - this is their intention to walk forwards.  We can now move our attention downwards slightly and note a purely physical fact - that walking is asymmetrical.  That means, to walk we have to move our arms and legs in opposition to each other - one arm forward then the other, one leg forward then the other. 

And in fact, we can also notice that there is another opposition in addition to the pure opposition of right and left - when we swing one of our arms forwards and slightly outwards, to maintain our balance around the critical point of our hips, we naturally introduce an opposing and balancing motion out to the other side.  That is, if our right arm is swinging forwards and outwards, our left leg is at more or less the same time stepping forwards and outwards to balance out this motion. 

We can thus imagine a figure of eight or "lemniscate" as in the above diagram representing part of the reality of human walking - from the head, the impulse moves to the right (for example) then through the heart/breathing area via the motion of the arm and the accompanying desire to continue to walk forwards.  Below the balance point of the hips a counter-motion is created - the left foot moves as mentioned above.  It then creates its own counterbalance in the subsequent movement of the right foot.  This movement of course requires a counterbalance above in the motion of the left arm.  And so on. 

So, where has this gotten us?  We now have the picture of the static human head (see http://www.philosophyoffreedom.com/node/2307), suspended  like a rocky planet above the body.  Then the chest area with its mediating role (see http://www.philosophyoffreedom.com/node/2355), weaving an activity that I may be able to experience connecting me with the true nature of what initially appears to me as separate from me, as "out there".

Finally, we add to this the limbic system, the extremities, the arms and legs.  Through trains of thought like the one above we can start to experience the truth that these apparently most "physical" parts of our body are the most active, "out there" parts of our being.  Their physical nature is actually shaped for participating in a most profoundly human and at the same time profoundly spiritual activity - that of walking.  By focussing merely on their physical form, on what they look like when not in motion, we lose the very essence of what they are, which is inextricably bound up with what they are for.

By considering the nature of the activity of walking in this way, we can start to understand that we must make our thinking very mobile to start to really understand such humble phenomena as feet, to experience their true reality as opposed to "knowing" them in mere dead concepts.  This is one manifestation of the realm Rudolf Steiner refers to as the realm of willing.