About Tea?

Question
Evelyn:
Please tell me a little about the spirituality of tea in the
diet.  I'm writing a book about it and I'd like to know what
you think.  Thank you for past answers about oats and beans.

Answer
Dear Jason,

Hi again!As you already know about my Anthroposophical leanings, I will limit myself to answering your question from that perspective and let you research other (Taoist or Aryuvedic) angles, fairly readily available from information on the market nowadays, anyway.

The best thing I think I can do for you is to quote from Steiner.
He reminds us that, we must rise above our organism, recognising ourselves to be more than physical matter, i.e. a spirit incarnated, through the means of the right kind of food. He forsees, that it is for this reason that there will come a time when a vegetarian diet will be valued much more highly, and already it is the case today, that complex or pervasive illnesses and enviornmental concerns are raising our awarness about the extreme importance of both the quality and type of food we eat.

I need to context tea with the other three luxury items we eat and drink, to introduce why tea is also a self-indulgent substance, and its properties affect our spiritual awareness. Steiner provides us with an insight into the higher esoteric realities underlying the reasons we should moderate the consumption of tea, coffee, and cocoa, almost doctoring them to ourselves, and preferably avoid all alcohol. I have studied these guidelines in detail, and on an experimental/empirical level myself  and I can relate sufficiently to what he says to promote these views as still valid, to this day.

It is not so much that he offers a prescription for enlightenment in  the warning against the use of alcohol, for example, but an intricate revelation of how our four-fold members and the cosmic powers work together explains what it does to (against) us. At best, we can conclude it does us no favours, but more and more we need to acknolwedge, like tabacco, alcohol is also a harmful substance - precisely for its subtle anti-spiritual properties (to a greater or lesser degree manifest in outright disease or subtle and distinctive mental disturbances); the post-war intensification of the individualisation process helps us to monitor this on personal levels and understand the cosmic-chemical workings of what we expose our bodies to better (and not only in socio-psychological terms, where nutritional problems become identified as isolated problems pertaining to groups of larger-louts or abusive spouses).

The neurological impact of coffee is well recognised by all in the way it is addictive and drives the journalist or copy writer on into the wee hours, or keeps the neurotic cop out on the icy streets, simply wakes up the night-watchman or hammers the student out of bed to stumble towards a mug of java and a smoke; or in Steiner's words: "The effect of coffee becomes manifest through its influence on the astral body. Through caffeine and the after-effects of coffee, our nervous systems automatically perform functions that we otherwise would have to produce through inner strength."

There is a tendency to go on an automatic pilot and old programme when man is thus ruled by the impulse of his own astral body that falls outside the rule of his Higher Self (Ego body). Under the influence (dictates almost) of the coffee, this astrality will rumble on wherever its (innate) tendencies will take it, leading the Self by the nose, in a sense. The properties of the coffee plant's own astrality cancels out a certain degree of higher self-determination. The most obivous consequence of this ultra independence is a loss of interactive communication: one tends to go off on one's own tangent, which makes for a selfish person, when brilliant insights dry up.

While a cup of coffee most certainly does not make him a monster instantly, the effects are addictive (not having to find your own inner strength is a tempting luxury) and in turn this is what weakens him. The fact that he has made himself dependent on caffeine shows up a spiritual crack. Furthemore, Steiner calls it the drink of journalists, since it stimulates logical thinking and aids concentration, but also to the point of going on too intensely, exhausting the subject with inane theory or gossip. "All this, is in exchange for a weakening of our specific inner forces."

By contrast, tea seems less addictive, but this is because its effects are less self-conscious making. It loosens instead of tightens the astrality. Relaxes instead of sharpens. In general, tea seems a harmless drink to us, connoting comfort, hospitality and culture or sophistication, even; it is definitely a wide-spread social drink, associated with rituals and welcoming cermonies. It does, of course, depend on what you mean by tea, but all teas have basically in common that they are brews made from leaves, be they from the Theacea family or some other herbacious plant. Once flowers or berries and roots are involved we are more likely to speak of herbal infusions.

This is what Steiner has to say on classical (black) tea, a typical drink of diplomats, whose talk is meant to be more amicable and distracted:
"When large quantities of tea are drunk, thoughts become scattered and light. It might be said that the chief effect of tea is to let witty and brilliant thoughts, thoughts that have a certain individual lightness, flash forth. So we can say, coffee helps those, such as literary people, who need to connect thoughts in skilled and refined ways. On a negative: tea tears thoughts asunder"- this then causes rambling, chin-wagging, going round in endleless circles, nattering about non-issues.

On an physical-organic level, this dissolving quality of tea becomes in the lower, metabolic pole, a digestive aid. It is best taken during meals, therefore, directing the digestive forces downward,encouraging assimilation of the foreign matter (by distracting from the self). It relaxes the head pole's grip, thereby encouraging the astral body to work catabolically in the digestive system. Taken in isolation, after dinner, tea would disturb the astral body in too turbulent a fashion, interfering with the more serene anabolic work then necessary. (GA 96 & 352.) Hence herbal teas are recommended as late evening drinks only.

Coffee, in contrast should be taken only after a meal, as a digestive to help reorganise the stomach - left in "chaos"after the initial digestive process. This practice has been intuitively adopted in many cultures: with the classical after-dinner coffee. Clearly people with weak stomachs can therefore not tolerate such a powerfully organising force.  Following Steiner's findings, we would recommend a cup of coffee during a maths exam or some other exercise requiring logic. One further note: main hot meals were generally consumed at midday in Europe in Steiner's day - and still in many Germanic/Slavic parts with bread and soup, or salad for dinner - so the advice not to drink coffee after 3 pm for the sake of sparing the liver,would not be violated with this reccommendation.)

The nimbling and light-hearted effect tea tends to have (think of how one can have a jolly tea party but would not think of a jolly coffee party; coffee mornings have a more purposeful ring to them) may also lead to a scatter-brainedness and the endless cups of tea in a hospital, on a building-site or (stereo)typically in GB or India, at meetings etc may suggest ineffective management and dilly-dallying. However, different peoples/cultures are at different levels of spiritual development (maybe not higher or lower, but different) and Steiner marks specifically how the Russians react differently to tea (1907, Leipzig - n.a. in English). I have not been able to discover futher details on how this would be, why this would be, and whether this is changing with the effects of Westernisation/capitilisation.

I will leave you with this final thought:

"Man can nourish himself in such fashion that he undermines his invisible independence. In so doing he makes himself an expression of what he eats. Yet he ought to nourish himself in such a manner that he becomes less the slave of his nutritional habits. Here spiritual science can direct him.

"The wrong food can easily transform us into what we eat, but by permeating ourselves with knowledge of the spiritual life, we can strive to become free and independent. Then the food we eat will not hinder us from achieving the full potential of what we, as men, ought to be."
[from:  Problems of Nutrition, Munich, January 8, 1909; GA 68]

Good Luck with the book!
Evelyn  

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