Lemniscatory time and space

Contemporary mineral science, based on its foundational worldview, considers only the 'mineral aspects of physical matter' in a framework of linear euclidean space. Because the world around us in an emanation of the spiritual, embedded in the etheric and astral, it is a foolish extrapolation to consider that the whole universe is bound by the same laws as Man has found and framed - within a limited consciousness window - in lab experiments on Earth. (see oa Relationship between mineral and spiritual science). Since the beginning of the 20th century, mathematics has been applied ever more for the construction of theories of physics using space-time. These consist merely of human thought forms that do not (necessarily) bear any relation to reality (at all).

A spiritual reality underlies our perceived 'maya' human reality experience, see Cosmic fractal, and through the astral we live in a projection in the physical world so we get an experience of time and space in this world. This is how the concept of space arises through as an astral projection. Similarly, time only exists in the lower spirit world and below, it ceases to exist beyond the so-called 'abyss' in the higher spirit world.

Aspects

• time and space as we know it are specific to our current experience with Waking consciousness in the physical world, in the astral world and the spirit world these concepts are experientially very different for Man's consciousness. The lemniscatory movement between inner and outer worlds stem from the astral world experience between Man's soul experience and the object-subject interface. (1906-09-30-GA091)
• evolution of solar system: before Old Saturn there was only 'duration', time arose during the Old Saturn planetary stage of evolution , space during the Old Sun stage (references in subtopics below). See also illustration Schema FMC00.293 on Evolution Module 3 - Integrating traditions, and Schema FMC00.077A
  • On Old Saturn one can only imagine spaceless eternity: time itself did not even exist (first came into being there), and when we speak of space we are speaking pictorially (as there was none in our sense on Old Saturn). Time arising on Old Saturn is not what Man means by the abstract term 'time' today on Earth, but the arising of the archai or Spirits of Time from the sacrificial deed offered by the Thrones to the Cherubim. Hence 'time' could be present on Old Sun; for it came over from Old Saturn (1911-11-07-GA132)
• there is an inner relationship of space and time related to the numbers twelve (for space) and seven (for temporal conditions of time) (1909-08-31-GA113, see also Twelve as seven and five)
• Out there in the cosmos the physical is nowhere to be found. The physical exists only on the Earth. In the universe there is the etheric and the astral. Space itself is being radiated out by the Sun. The Sun not only radiates the light; the Sun creates the Space itself. (1924-06-04-GA236)

space

• origin of space in the Old Sun stage of solar system evolution (see Old Sun#1911-11-07-GA132)
• spiritual beings are to be considered without the concept of space, as space is something that has been produced, it has been created by the highest Trinity (1909-04-21-GA110)
• the mathematical concept of space does not really exist in reality, instead everywhere there are differentiated lines and directions of force (1920-04-17-GA201, see also 1918-10-04-GA184)
• the lemniscate is a form that follows from the mathematics of the etheric, and applies to the dimensions of space once we remove the limit of only considering the laws of euclidean space.
• lemniscatory paths of the heavenly bodies in astronomy (1921-01-GA323, or for an overview, see Schrapp below under 'Further reading' section)
• example of comets with paths entering and leaving the physical into the astral

time

perspectivity of time

• time as we know and experience it with waking consciousness is an illusion and not a spiritual reality
  • consequence: time separates effect from countereffect, therefore it is the root of the sense-based observation based hypothesis of causality as it is creates the illusion of causal occurences.
• as a fundamental requirement for the spiritual scientific worldview, one must absolutely imagine time in a spatial way and consider this connection of the spiritual substance with time (1918-09-02-GA183)
  • Man has become detached from space (and has the instinctive ability to transpose between 3D realities and 2D view and images), but this is not the case for time (and "that is something tremendously important and significant"). In space on has to take into account the perspective: looking down an avenue, you see distant trees of the avenue as smaller and closer together - it is clear to the human being that one sees in space is juxtaposed in a flat surface. Even though there are two trees in front and two trees far away, in a view or 2D image you place what is behind one another next to one another. Man has not detached himself from time in the same way. (1918-09-02-GA183)
• the current worldview is based on the relationship between Man (and his soul) and the natural order. ... The temptation is great to simply place one thing next to the other: cause, effect; cause, effect; cause, effect – an abstract, illusory causal order. (1918-09-13-GA184)

spiritual hierarchies

• The idea that something stems from something else is inappropriate for describing the sphere of eternity which consists of interrelationships between spiritual beings. The concept of time is inapplicable to the changing relationships in the higher hierarchies, there everything is eternal and things happen only in perspectives within which we see battles and changing relationships. See elaboration on the temporal transitory and what endures eternally, and why what appears to be temporal must be presented in picture form. (1918-09-15-GA184)
• the activities of the hierarchies are timeless. Time originates in the collaboration of a sum of lesser and higher beings: in timelessness various development grades are possible, and through their interaction, time arises (1909-04-21-GA110, see also see also 1918-10-04-GA184)
• history is not made by human beings directly, the unfolding of events through what we experience as time only exists as the deeds of the third hierarchy (1918-09-08-GA184)
• relation of the evolutionary periods such as epochs and cultural ages to the spiritual hierarchies, see
  • spiritual hierarchies and their eigenperiods and Spirits of rotation of time
  • 'Precession of the equinoxes and Spirits of Form' on Zodiac clock

lemniscatory

• Man's physical experience of time with sensory waking consciousness is to be seen in a spiritual scientific context as astral experiences within the different planes or worlds of consciousness (see Schema FMC00.289 on Human 'I').
  • "Evolution does not proceed in a simple way with time abstractly going ever forward on and on into the infinite. Time moves and turns in such a way that evolution is constantly reversed and runs back. It is not only in space that we find movements in curves as in a lemniscate, but also in time." (1916-10-02-GA171)
• example of the timing of discovery of electricity (1916-10-02-GA171), see Remembrance

evolutionary

• origin of time out of the eternal in the Old Saturn stage of solar system evolution (see Old Saturn#1910-GA013)
  • "The Time-Spirits are the true ancient time—and they are the children of the Thrones and the Cherubim. The condition by means of which the Beings of Time originated on Old Saturn was sacrifice." (1911-11-07-GA132, see also higher)
  • see also: Spirits of rotation of time
• current notion of 'time as we know it'
  • time as we currently know and use it is related to the balance in the system and orbits of Earth between Sun and Moon. As a result of the huge changes with the separation of Sun in the Hyperborean epoch and the separation of moon in the Lemurian epoch, time as we know only because stable around the middle of the atlantean epoch. See also 'Concept of time as we know it' on Zodiac clock
  • the fact that 'time as we know it' only has meaning since the configuration of Earth+Moon+Sun stabilized in their current orbits (so after the separation of Sun and separation of Moon), has been pointed out by Vreede, Cloos, Riedel and others (see reference section below). Remarkably all sources are independently but consistently in agreement that this was around 20.000 BC or around the middle of the Atlantean epoch. Hence before this, it does not make sense to use current Earth years, and the zodiac clock is used.
• evolutionary cycles start at a certain speed and slow down in the descent, than reach a slowest pace, and then evolution speeds up again increasingly. (1904-06-16-GA090A, 1905-01-30-GA090B below, see also Schema FMC00.302 on Overlapping evolutionary periods)

various

• relativity of the experience of time
  • Michel Siffre (1939-2024) explored how humans experience time by spending two months underground in 1962, and again six months underground in 1972. See a.o. the book 'Beyond Time' (1964 in EN, original in FR 1963 'Hors du temps') on the first experience.

physical reality as a projection

• Rudolf Steiner used a recurrent concept drawing to illustrate how our experience of reality with waking consciousness in time and space is a projection of higher spiritual realities. The various Schemas show no less than 8 different versions from various lectures, and are to be juxtaposed and studied together:
  • Schema FMC00.627 for explaining linear time vs. eternity (1; well explained), along with Schema FMC00.327 for IAO (1 version; the line Alpha and Omega) - leading to Schema FMC00.328 and the ouroboros (circle and ancient symbol used to depict this)
    • more ouroboros depictions, see: Schema FMC00.002 and Schema FMC00.448 and Schema FMC00.658
  • Schema FMC00.511 (3 versions; kingdoms and explanation space Astronomy course) and additional perspectives on Schema FMC00.511A (2 versions; incl the symbol Pi).
  • Schema FMC00.642 for the color spectrum of light (1 main version), with a more general explanation on Schema FMC00.641A (meta view)
• see also: Lemniscatory time and space#Note 3 - Regarding physical reality as a projection and see also Schema FMC00.679 for the relation between time and space experience and the physical world

Inspirational quotes

time

1918-09-02-GA183

A fundamental requirement for a real view into the spiritual world is this: that one learns to see in perspective in time, that one learns to place every being at its correct point in time. ... If one wants to understand the world, if one wants to speak spiritually of time, then one must absolutely imagine time in a spatial way and must consider this connection of the spiritual substance with time. This is very important.

1918-09-08-GA184

Man, as a microcosm, is connected to the whole universe, to the macrocosm. ... the third hierarchy work ... first of all everything that happens in the historical life of humanity ... No one knows anything of the reality of the historical life of humanity without having an inkling that what actually constitutes history is not made by human beings, but by the beings of the third hierarchy. ... history does not unfold as natural life unfolds; history unfolds as the deeds of spiritual entities

from: Impulses from waves of reincarnating souls#1918-09-08-GA184 1908-09-10-GA106

.. we cannot apply to more ancient epochs the familiar time-reckonings of [current] Postatlantean times ..

see quote in context on Zodiac clock#1908-09-10-GA106

space

1911-12-30-GA134

Space is nothing else than something that originates together with matter when spirit is shattered and thereby goes over into material existence.

see quote in context on The nature of atoms#1911-12-30-GA134 1924-06-04-GA236

Out there in the cosmos the physical is nowhere to be found. The physical exists only on the Earth, and it is but empty fancy and imagination to speak of anything physical in the far universe. In the universe there is the etheric and the astral.

...

Space itself is being radiated out by the Sun. The Sun not only radiates the light; the Sun creates the Space itself.

Illustrations

Schema FMC00.255 shows four types of earthly and cosmic laws. The physics of the current materialistic or mineral science is extremely successful in describing the laws for the element earth, on our planet Earth. However 'life', as we see it in the plant world, is governed by different laws, these are those of the etheric world and formative forces. Still other laws exists apply for the astral and spirit worlds.

Hence, space and time are characteristics that do not apply to the astral and spirit worlds.

.

Schema FMC00.472B positions the backward luciferic Spirits of Wisdom (SoW) which operate at the level of the Spirits of Form and create the illusion of time in physical timespace. See more on see Lemniscatory time and space#1918-10-04-GA184.

The schema is another variant of the FMC00.472 Schema used to help imagine the various spiritual hierarchies and their relation to Man's bodily principles and experience of physical timespace with mundane waking consciousness as part of the cosmic fractal.

Note: relate this to the beginning of time from duration, and appearance of the archai or time spirits (Schema FMC00.193) in the Old Saturn stage of evolution.

Schema FMC00.511: shows various versions of the concept drawing that Rudolf Steiner used to illustrate how our experience of reality with waking consciousness in time and space is a projection of higher spiritual realities, an important fundamental point to be grasped. The same concept drawing is also used (a) on Schema FMC00.627 for explaining linear time vs. eternity, and (b) Schema FMC00.642 for the color spectrum of light, with (c) a more general explanation on Schema FMC00.641A, and (d) some additional perspectives on Schema FMC00.511A. See also summary overview on Lemniscatory time and space#physical reality as a projection.

Left: the drawing is used to explain the workings of the spiritual forces as underlying the rendering of the kingdoms of nature in the physical world, see also Cosmic fractal. The 1905-08-07-GA091 lecture uses the Elementary Kingdoms as a basis, see Schemas FMC00.143 and FMC00.175, showing how the mineral physical world and gravitational forces are just a weakening of the spiritual whereby the radiation from the ever larger circles below gets ever weaker. See also Schema FMC00.172 on Force substance representation.

More to the right, illustration from the Astronomy course GA323 (for base concepts of the etheric and counterspace - see Mathematics of the etheric). In 1921-01-09-GA323 this is explained starting from a mathematical perspective with lemniscate cassini curves, showing by logical reasoning that "in the transition from circle to straight line we are thrown out of space". Then this is applied to Man also, and a reasoning by analogy on how these forces of the kingdoms of nature are also working within the human being:

"the human organisation is of such a nature that it cannot be embraced by the anatomical approach alone. Just as we are driven out of space in the Cassini curve, so in the study of Man we are driven out of the body, by the method of study itself. ... In this way we describe what is within the human being in comparison with what takes place in nature outside him. ... We say: I must place myself within Man and say that the curvature is facing this way. I then consider what is inside, without taking into account that I have reversed the curvature. I will make the interior of the human being into an outer nature. I simply imagine outer nature to continue through the skin into the interior."

Schema FMC00.384 captures the key principle in the explanation of timespace from a spiritual perspective in 1916-10-01-GA171, complementing contemporary astronomy's purely mineral-physical perspective. It provides a deeper understanding and meaning of the equinoxes and solstices. See lecture extract below and the illustration in the lecture of the next day.

Schema FMC00.544 provides a timeline for easy reference, linking the various ages to the zodiac clock and Yuga ages, since the beginning of 'time as we know it' currently, so since approx. 20.000 BC or around the middle of the Atlantean epoch. Before this one should not use current Earth years but use the zodiac clock instead.

Compare with Schema FMC00.451, Schema FMC00.373B.

Schema FMC00.107 shows the yearly cycle as an in and out breathing with the solstices and equinoxes as turning points. This lemniscatory view is also used in Rudolf Steiner's Calendar of the Soul, see 'Further reading' section on Christ Module 17 - The experience of the year

Schema FMC00.679: shows the relation of the human being in the current stage of consciousness to 'the three worlds' (of consciousness) and its relation with and experience of space and time.

Lecture coverage and references

Rudolf Steiner introduces the lemniscatory movement in the astronomy course 1921-01-GA323, eg lectures 12, 17, 18 of 12, 17, 18 january.

On the mathematics of dimensions and the nature of space and time, a package of 6+2+4+3=15 lectures is available as follows:

• The volume GA324A is called 'The fourth dimension' and combines:
  • a six lectures series of March to June 1905
  • two single lectures 1905-11-07 and 1908-10-22
  • Q&As from 1904 to 1922

• More was published in GA091:
  • four lectures on the fourth dimension of 1906-08-GA091 (21, 23, 25, 27/08) held in a small private study group, with notes by Mathilde Scholl
  • the lectures of 1906-09-21-GA091 and 1906-09-22-GA091 leading up to the important 1906-09-30-GA091

1905-01-30-GA090B

We are finding ourselves in times when things develop themselves extraordinarily quickly.

The 19th century means as much in the astral as the preceeding millenium.

Things are speeding um in ever quicker pace. At the end of an epoch one can also see this. Towards the end of a cycle life is strongly accelerated.

1906-09-30-GA091

(p301-310, untranslated)

• in the physical world space is static, hence movement within allows for time. This can be represented by an ellipse.
• in the astral world space itself is mobile and physical movement is not necessary. So time is not necessary to move from one place to another, Man lives in time there like he lives in space in the physical world. All that is in the astral space moves through himself. This can be represented by the lemniscate.
• in the spirit world Man is the center of a radiating world streaming into him from all sides. Space nor time are necessary here. Time streams through space in Man, as Man has space in him and time streams in an out. This can be represented by a circle with a dot in the center for Man

1907-GA262

Steiner to Shuré, here quoted from p 32 of Meyer's book 'Rudolf Steiner's core mission'

It was at this time .. that full clarity about the idea of time arose. ... It involved the insight that the evolution that advances in a forward direction interacts with a reverse evolution, the occult and astral. This knowledge is a precondition for spiritual vision.

1908-06-19-GA104

see longer extract on: Creation of solar system#1908-06-19-GA104

Did then the development of the world begin with Old Saturn? Have not perhaps other conditions brought about that which became Old Saturn? Was not Old Saturn preceded by other incarnations?

It would be difficult to go back before Old Saturn because only with Old Saturn begins something without which it is impossible to go beyond Old Saturn, namely, that which we call time. Previously there were other forms of being; that is to say, we cannot really speak of a “before,” because time did not yet exist. Even time had a beginning! Before Old Saturn there was no time, there was only eternity, duration. All was then simultaneous. Only with Saturn did it come about that events followed one another.

In that state of the world where there is only eternity, duration, there is also no movement. For time belongs to movement. There is no circulation, no revolution; there is duration and rest. As one says in spiritual science: there is blissful rest in duration. That is the expression for it. Blissful rest in duration preceded that Old Saturn condition.

The movement of the heavenly bodies only entered with Old Saturn. The path indicated by the twelve signs of the zodiac was conceived of as signs, and the time during which a planet passed through one of these constellations was spoken of as a cosmic hour; twelve cosmic hours, twelve hours of day and twelve of night!

1909-04-21-GA110 Q&A

(not on rsarchive)

.. space itself, spiritual scientifically speaking, also has to be regarded as something created, this creation lies before the work of the highest hierarchies .. there we may presuppose it. However we may not try to present ourselves the highest Trinity, because space is their creation. We have to regard spiritual beings without the concept of space, as space is something that has been produced. However, the workings of the hiearchies in our world are delineated or restricted in space, just like those of human beings.

.

The concept of time can be used for spiritual events and processes .. however the activities of the hierarchies are timeless. It is difficult to talk about the originating of time, as in the word originate the concept of time is already implicit. Rather one has to say, the Being of Time .. and it's not so easy to discuss this. ... Time originates in the collaboration of a sum of lesser and higher beings: in timelessness various development grades are possible, and through their interaction, time becomes possible.

1909-08-31-GA113

.. there is an inner relationship of space and time which I can only indicate here in bare outline with which the numbers twelve and seven have something to do.

...

... space, when if forsakes its sphere of eternity and takes into itself created things which run their course in time, is divided into good and evil; and in bringing out the good, seven is raised out of the twelve; seven then becomes the true number for temporal conditions. For truths, which belong to time, we must take the number seven as our clue; the remainder, the number five would lead us into error. That is the inner meaning of these things.

see: Twelve as seven and five#1909-08-31-GA113

1911-11-07-GA132

For instance, the Old Saturn stage is described (and this is quite correct within certain limits) as a heavenly body whose essential parts did not consist of what we know as earth, water and air, but of “heat (or warmth).”

So, too, in first speaking of “space,” that also is merely a pictorial description; for, as we saw in the last lecture, “time” itself did not even exist. When we speak of “space” we are speaking pictorially.

Of space there was none in our sense on Old Saturn. And time first came into being there. When we carry our thought back to Old Saturn we are absolutely in the realm of spaceless eternity.

When, therefore, something is said to call up a picture before our minds, we must be clear that it is only a picture. If we could have observed the space of ancient Saturn we should have found no substance dense enough to be called gas, nothing but heat and cold.

...

Then we have seen that from this sacrificial deed offered by the Thrones to the Cherubim is brought to birth that which we call time: though I have already called attention to the fact that “time” is a modern term and does not quite apply. For time was not then that abstraction Man now accepts as time, but a totality of beings, the Spirits of Personality (archai), whom we have therefore come to recognise as “Time-Spirits.”

The [archai] Time-Spirits are the true ancient time—and they are the children of the Thrones and the Cherubim. The condition by means of which the Beings of Time originated on Old Saturn was sacrifice.

...

Let us hold firmly in mind that on Old Saturn the Spirits of Time had been born, therefore “time” could be present on the Sun; for it came over from Old Saturn. Thus on Old Sun there was the possibility of giving, which could not have been found on Old Saturn.

For just imagine—how could there have been any giving if there had been no time. It would not have been possible, for giving must include acceptance, the one is not to be thought of without the other. This giving must consist of two actions, giving and accepting, otherwise giving has no object. On the Sun, however, giving and accepting occupied a peculiar relation to one another, for—as time was already there—the gift offered to the environment on Old Sun had been, as it were, stored up in time: as it were, guarded in time so that the Spirits of Wisdom pour forth their gift—and it endures.

...

The inner and the outer are the two opposites which we now meet. The earlier and the later are transformed into the inner and the outer; and “Space” is born! Space comes into existence through the bestowing virtue of the Spirits of Wisdom on ancient Sun. Before that, space could only have an allegorical significance. Now we have space—but consisting at first of only two dimensions. There was as yet no above and below, no right or left, nothing but an outer and an inner. In reality these opposites appear at the end of Old Saturn; but they repeat themselves as space-creative on Old Sun. And if we wish to obtain a conception of all these occurrences, as we did of the last when the picture appeared before our soul of the sacrificing Thrones, giving birth to the Spirits of Time, we must not even picture a body consisting of light, for the light within it is only an inner reflection. We must think of it as a globe of inner space, in the centre of which the picture of Saturn is recapitulated: the Thrones as Spirits as though kneeling before the Cherubim, those winged beings, sacrificing their own being, and, in addition to these, the Spirits of Wisdom, absorbed in the vision of the sacrifice. And now it is also possible to have the vision of the heat of the sacrifice being so transmuted that we may think of it objectively as the incense of sacrifice, as air ascending from the sacrifice as incense. We obtain a complete picture if we imagine: the sacrificing Thrones kneeling before the Cherubim, and as though participating, the Spirits of Wisdom, absorbed in the contemplation of what they perceive in the centre of the Sun as the sacrifice of the Thrones, and thereby ascending in their mood to the picture of the sacrificial incense pouring forth and spreading out on all sides, and finally condensing, while from its clouds proceed the figures of the Archangels—who reflect back the incense from the periphery as light, illuminating the interior of the Sun, returning the gift of the Spirits of Wisdom, and in this way creating the sphere of the Sun. This sphere consists of the outpoured gift of glowing heat and sacrificial incense. At the outer periphery are the Archangels, the creators of the light, who later depict what was first on the Sun; it then returns as light.

What then, do these Archangels preserve?

They guard the beginnings, what was formerly there, the earlier. The gifts they receive they reflect. That which was there in the beginning they radiate forth at a later time, and inasmuch as they do this, they are the Angels of the Beginning, because they bring into activity in later times what was previously there. “archangeloi” “Messengers of the Beginning”!

It is very wonderful when such a word arises from the depths of true occult knowledge and we remember that this word comes across to us from primeval traditions, along the path of the School of Dionysius the Areopagite, who was the pupil of Paul. It is wonderful to see that this word is so deeply stamped that when we evolve it again, independently of what is written, what stands there arises before us. And we then feel ourselves united with the ancient holy schools of Initiation-Wisdom, of the science of Initiation, so that we feel as though this ancient time were streaming into us, we picture it with understanding after having ourselves created the possibility of accepting it independently of what we have heard. Anyone feeling even a little of the spirit of these old expressions which have descended to us without our having paid attention to them, will feel himself within the current of the mighty power of the Spirits of Time passing through humanity. What is thus felt in contemplation of these things is in marvellous connection with the whole human evolution, it makes us feel one with it. The archangels preserve the memorial of the primordial beginnings; but whatever takes place on any one planet is always recapitulated later, only when it occurs later there is always something added to it. So that we meet with the being of the Sun again in what we find on our own Earth.

1911-12-30-GA134

There is still another difficult idea which I must place before you, which is connected with what I said at the beginning of the lecture. I said that within the soul and spirit itself we have to distinguish between an outer and an inner.

Now it is of such contrasts that all space dimensions are really composed; so that everywhere where you have a dimension of space you can think of it as proceeding somewhere or other from a point. That point is the “inner,” and all the rest is the “outer.” For the plane, the straight line is an inner and all the rest an outer.

Space is, therefore, nothing else than something that originates together with matter when spirit is shattered and thereby goes over into material existence.

1916-10-01-GA171

is a key lecture. Lazarides (see reference below) discusses it in detail in Chapter 8. This note is put in a frame of the worldview of mineral science as a required phase since the 15th century, that will be superseded in the future again by taking into the spiritual again, see quote in this worldview context on Mineral science.

One will say, “Good, now we have a physical cosmic system; when we study it we must, as we know, calculate it and treat it geometrically as is taught today in practically every elementary school.” But spiritually, things are otherwise. You see, to an observer able to behold the spiritual, the following is presented, for example. He comes upon a certain movement of the sun; it takes this course. [figure]

Seen from a certain point of view, it is the sun's course; but when I draw this line here and bring the sun back again, the point does not fall exactly on the earlier point; it lies somewhat above it. This is a real movement of the sun that can be perceived spiritually.

But the earth, too, makes certain movements in the course of a year. Observed spiritually, it describes this orbit. [figure]

You must picture it in three dimensions. If you picture the orbit of the sun lying in a plane, then the orbit of the earth lies in this plane — seen, that is, from the side. If here is the orbit of the sun drawn as a line the earth orbit is so: [figure]

But, as you see from this, there is a point in the cosmos, where the sun and the earth are both together, but at not the same time. When the sun is there on its path, or rather has left this point by a quarter of its path, the earth begins its movement at the point that the sun has left. After a certain time we are, in fact, on the spot in cosmic space where the sun was; we follow the sun's path, cross it and are, at a certain time of the year, at the very place where the sun has been. Then the sun and earth go forward and after a time the earth is again practically at the spot where the sun was. Together with the earth, we actually pass in space through the spot where the sun has been. We sail through it. We not only sail through it, however, because the sun leaves behind results of its activity in the space it has traversed, so that the earth enters into the imprints left behind by the sun and crosses them — really crosses them. Space has living content, spiritual content, and the earth enters and crosses, sails through, what the sun has called forth.

You see, this is how the matter looks spiritually. Spiritually one must draw lines like these when one thinks of the orbits of earth and sun. There is a similar relationship with the other planets, too. At certain times we are approximately at the places where Mercury was, etc. The planets carry out quite complicated movements in universal space, and they enter into the imprints of each other. We have now the external picture, the purely geometrical picture. The other picture will be added, and only from a combination of the two will a later humanity attain the concept it must have.

You see, I am now telling you these things, but imagine for a moment that you relate what I have said to an astronomer. He would say, “Someone has lost his senses, has gone mad, to present such things. They are out of the question.” But it was not so long ago that the members of a famous Academy of Science also said, when meteoric stones that fall to the earth were spoken of, “That is a senseless statement!” This happened not at all long ago; many similar things could be recorded. Today, in orthodox physics, one recognizes the so-called law of the conservation of energy as something fundamental. The first to speak of it, Julius Robert Mayer, was confined in a madhouse. One could, of course, relate hundreds of such stories. But the point is this, that you see from what I have told you — I have given it only as an example — how the nature of thinking in astronomical fields, that wonderfully effective thinking from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, has had rather the faculty of bringing men away from reality. Men do not at all stand, as they believe, with both feet, both hands and the body in the real, but they give themselves up to the most fantastic ideas and imagine these to be reality. Men had to be educated like this in these centuries. They had to give themselves up to fantastic ideas about outer nature so that they might not be merged in the external events in the old way, but that, by virtue of these fantastic ideas, they might all the more obtain a feeling of the inner ego. This feeling has been greatly intensified in men during the last few centuries precisely through these fantastic materialistic ideas. That had to happen; the feeling of the ego had at some time to be engendered in the development of mankind's history. I have chosen an astronomical example, but it could be shown in every sphere how human evolution followed a course in the centuries just past that drew man away from true reality.

Now you will ask if men have known of such things as this, that together with the earth we enter the tracks of the sun, that twice in the year we are where the sun has been operative in space. Have men ever known anything of this? Yes, they have known it before, and it can even be easily proved historically that they knew it. Imagine that a man knows, really knows, that at a certain time in the course of the year the earth on its path so crosses the sun's path that the earth enters into the tracks of the sun and follows it. The reverse comes about when the earth turns back again toward the other side. The first time it is as if the sun descended below the earth's path, and the second, as if the sun ascended and the earth's path were underneath. The first time, the human being moves up with the earth above the sun's path, finding the traces of the sun by ascending; the other time, he moves down and passes under the traces of the sun. What can the man say who knows this and who also possesses the means to confirm it? He is able to know that now, at the point where the earth's path crosses the sun's path, he is passing through the place where the sun has stood. What could such a man say? He could say that this is a specially important time for us because we are at the place where the sun has been. This is expressed in the spiritual atmosphere and one meets the picture that the sun has left behind in the ether. Here, at this point in time, one establishes a festival! The ancient mysteries celebrated two such festivals of which but faint memories still remain in those of today, though the connection is no longer known. Please do not understand this as if I wished to give the actual point in time, but in the ancient mysteries it was known when we cross the sun's path and find in the ether the sun's content that has remained behind. In the time of such knowledge it was right for special festivals to be established at definite times of the year.

With the knowledge of today men are separated from these connections. Nor will they respect these things much since they say, “Well, what good is it to me if I do know that I am on the same spot that the sun was on? Of what use is that to me?” That is how modern man would speak. But the ancient Egyptians, for instance, did not speak in that way in their mysteries. On the fifteenth day of that month when they knew that the earth is passing through the point the sun has left, they interrogated the priestess of Isis, who had been prepared in the sanctity of the Temple. They knew that through the special spiritual preparation that this priestess could undertake, she could bring to light what can be experienced when one passes through the aura of the sun, and the priests might write down what they heard from the priestess, for example, “Rainy year, sow seeds at such and such a time...” In short, they were purely practical; that is, things that were important for guiding life in the succeeding year were noted. They lived according to these directions because they knew how the heavens work down into the earth.

This is what they investigated. It was already a time of decline when this science was betrayed by the opponents of the Osiris-Isis cult. The only way they could protect themselves — this external event has again a connection with the Osiris-Isis saga — was henceforth to impart at fourteen different temples what earlier, in ancient Egypt, had been the secret of only one temple. This was the art of living with the course of the year and investigating spiritually the influences on the earth.

The humanity of our age had to break away completely from such a relationship with the heavens because it had the task of finding the path away from the ambiguity of impulses and instincts, and of forming the pure ego. The ego did not act strongly at a time in which men made themselves mere instruments of heavenly activities, nor did it work strongly in the ages when the priest taught his immediate pupils, “There stands the Pleiades. When they are there, we must begin the days of Isis; then we must see that what we learn prophetically is the best way to proceed in the coming year.” They placed themselves as completely within the course of the universe as a cell is incorporated into our organism. Humanity could only become individual, personal, if in a definite epoch it were torn out of this connection, if all these human faculties of spirit that mediated such connections passed into a state of sleep. Thus a sleep regarding the spiritual was prepared, and mankind has slept most deeply in respect of spiritual matters ever since the fourteenth century. It has been a sleeping culture but now the time has come for an awakening.

Do not say, “I wish to criticize Creation and the Creator; why has he let me sleep?” This means putting oneself with one's intellect above cosmic wisdom. During the course of the earth stage, human evolution must go through its sleep periods just as much as the individual man must sleep in the course of twenty-four hours. Spiritual faculties, which is to say, a concept of the world in the sense of these faculties, slept deeply in the centuries indicated. On the other hand, man dreamt of geometrical lines in space; he dreamed the dream of the Copernican, the Galilean and the Darwinian world conception. Man needed this dream, this training, even the illusion of experiencing a special reality through the dream. Ultimately, it is the same with our sleep. In the evening we are tired and we go to sleep. Then we wake up refreshed with an inner feeling of reality. If humanity had developed the ancient spiritual faculties further, if these had not slept, men would have been tired out and would not have reached reality. They came to reality precisely by the fact that in their thinking and reflecting, and also in their social organizations, they had left reality. Because these capacities slept, past centuries have brought renewal and refreshment to mankind. In a certain respect, humanity has even become freer than it was in earlier centuries, and it will have to regain spiritual knowledge — and later spiritual power — in order to progress even further on the path of freedom.

Such things can be known! But again today's true materialist will say, “Well, and what if they are known!” I have, in fact, found materialists who say, “Good gracious, why must I think about the life of the soul after death. I shall see all that when death has arrived. Why need I bother now in the physical body about this life after death?” This seems to be quite plausible, this idea that it would be really unnecessary, here in the physical body, to bother about the super-sensible life. But this is not the case; it was so only in an earlier age when man was not yet ready for freedom. Today, the position is such that certain thoughts can only be grasped by the super-sensible hierarchies if men grasp them here in earthly existence. The gods only think certain thoughts if they live in human bodies. These thoughts must be carried into the spiritual world through the gate of death; only then can they be active. It is truly so; one who will not think about the super-sensible is like a farmer who says to his neighbor, “You are a silly fellow. Every year you put by a certain part of the grain for seed. I only became a farmer this year, but I am not as foolish as you. I shall grind it all, eat it and calmly wait. The grain will certainly grow again by itself.” Such a farmer resembles a person who is not willing to hear that, as well as consuming what we experience in the world, we must also lay aside certain seeds in the soul to guide it along its path in the spiritual worlds. Inasmuch as we pursue the science of the spirit, we are creating the right seeds for the present time. And the science of the spirit must be pursued.

You see from this that our time can become ever more clear to us through the spiritual understanding of its fundamental character and nature. This deepening of our inner faculties that must be striven for in order to come to a more real astronomy, for example, must also be striven for in social thinking. Regarding our thinking, we — or at any rate, most of us — have become as much asleep and dreaming in outer lives as we are in regards to astronomy, for instance, which I chose for an example. In the centuries gone by, and right up to today, very much has become veiled from humanity. Nor will what was present earlier appear again — investigations, for instance, through a priestess of Isis or through the Celtic druidical mysteries in which a priestess was similarly employed. To seek in that way to know about the action here of the spiritual will not recur; much more inward ways will be found, ways much more suited to future humanity. But they must be found.

Now, connect this with something I have already indicated yesterday. Remember that the servant of Osiris prepared the priestess of Isis before the fifteenth of a certain month of the year in order to obtain certain prophetic utterances from her when she traversed the sun-space with her soul. What happened through this Isis cult? What occurred was that actual time — not the abstract time of which we dream today, but actual time, was investigated. The time of year, the point of time, was, in fact, a specially important point, and the point on the return path was again important. How time works — concrete, real time — was expressed through the content of what the Isis priestess had to say. Then, might not the inscription on the Isis image read, “I am the Past, the Present and the Future?” this is the order of time. But only when such prophetic research was penetrated with a noble mood resembling the mood of virginity, when coming near to Isis was symbolized by the fact that Isis wore a veil, only then could one bring forth what was necessary. The whole must be steeped in holiness, in the atmosphere of a sacrifice.

Do not imagine that wisdom was not connected with the practical in those ancient times. What was called wisdom was fully united with practical things. Everything had a practical direction. One investigated the voice of the gods in the Egyptian temples, but the investigations were made in order to know in the right way which days or hours were most suited for sowing. Everything was connected with practical life. One investigated the action of the gods in practical life, and was conscious of how they penetrate it. Indeed, it was necessary that this temple service should be kept holy. What evils could have been committed if it had not been treated as sacred! It must never be asserted that these things that relate to past ages will arise again in the same way. They will arise quite differently. But a knowledge will again be won for humanity that will be directly fitted for entering practical life. A spiritual knowledge — but just because it is spiritual, a practical knowledge — will again appear in which the things around us will be fully mastered. Neither an Isis nor an Osiris cult will appear. Something else will arise that will bear the traces of our having passed through the centuries since the Isis and Osiris cult existed. It will show that the new science of the spirit must be sought with full consciousness and in freedom. But the things that have taken place must be tested a little in their reality. History must be different from what it so often is today, when people merely make researches in documents and records.

One comes, however, upon all sorts of peculiar explanations, like the one I have already given regarding Isis. When there stood as inscription on her image, “I am the Past, the Present and the Future,” one who was initiated knew that this referred to concrete reality and that the veil only expressed a certain attitude of mind. Today, people say of the veiled Isis image at Sais that the veil means that one cannot penetrate behind wisdom, that one will never know who Isis is. But when the inscription, “I am the Past, the Present, and the Future, no mortal hath yet lifted my veil,” stands there, one must explain it as meaning that the veil is not lifted because one only approaches its holiness when veiled as a nun, not because something lies behind it that one cannot know and that cannot be communicated to anyone. If the explanation that people usually give were correct, then one must really compare it with the trivial statement, “I am called Hans Muller, but you will never know my name.” She says indeed who she is — “I am the Past, the Present and the Future” — and this implies that it is for her to impart the Mysteries of Time, while what flows out of Time into Space is to be mediated by the Osiris priest. He is to carry the temporal into the spatial and is to receive in thought what comes from the soul, that is, the Isis revelation that is embedded in the universe and its course.

Today, the science of the spirit is still largely held to be foolish. But when it has really been understood, it will be seen to contain a science much more real than the scientific dream of the past centuries. Quite different practical operations, practical mastery of the outer world, will come to light when the time arrives. It is not yet time today; mankind must first have knowledge and know in the spirit of spiritual science before it can act in the spirit of the science of the spirit.

I wanted to go into this in order to point out precisely at this time how it is only through a true understanding of what has happened that an understanding can also be reached of what has to happen. In the future, humanity must be guided beyond many things with whose karma mankind is heavily burdened in our present grievous and painful times. Today mankind is burdened with the karma of the dream life of the past centuries.

This mystery must first be grasped on its depths; then it will be easier to understand our sorrowful present and also to understand how humanity must gradually prepare a different karma for the future.

1916-10-02-GA171

gives a concrete illustration of what was explained the day before

Man had to go through materialism. His forces would have been too weak for the times to follow, if he had not gone through materialism. For strange and amazing is the evolution of mankind.

Let us look back for a moment to an event of the Lemurian epoch. We find there a certain moment in evolution — it lies thousands and thousands of years back — when the mankind of the earth was quite different from what it is now. You will know from the descriptions I have given in 'Outline of Esoteric Science' of human evolution on the Earth that the various impulses entered into Man only gradually. There was a moment in evolution when what we today call magnetic and electric forces established themselves within Man. For magnetic and electric forces live in us in a mysterious manner.

Before this time, Man lived on earth without the magnetic and electric forces that have developed ever since, spiritually, between the workings of the nerves and the blood. They were incorporated into Man at that time. The forces of magnetism we will leave out of consideration, and a portion of the forces of electricity. But the forces which I will distinguish as the electrical forces in galvanism, voltaism, etc. — forces that have taken deep hold in the culture and civilization of our time — these forces found entry in that far-off time into the human organism and united themselves with human life; and this very fact made it possible for them to remain for a long time unknown to human consciousness. Man carried them within him, and for that very reason they remained unknown to him externally.

The forces of magnetism and the other electrical forces we learned to know earlier.

Galvanism, the electricity of contact, which has a much deeper determining influence on the karma of our age than is generally realized, was, as you know, only discovered at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, by Galvani and Volta. People give far too little thought to such facts as these. Just consider for a moment! This Galvani was dealing with the leg of a frog. “By chance,” as we say, he fastened it to the window, and it came in contact with iron, and twitched. That was the beginning of all the discoveries that rule the earth today by means of the electric current. And it happened such a little while ago! People do not generally stop to think how it is that mankind did not come to this knowledge earlier. Suddenly this thought emerges in a human being, in a perfectly miraculous way; he stumbles on it — as it were, perforce. In this materialistic age of ours, we naturally never stop to think about such a thing. And this is the reason why we can understand absolutely nothing at all of the real becoming of the earth. The truth of the matter is as follows:

After mankind had passed the moment in the Lemurian time when it implanted into it, or received implanted into it, the forces that go through the wire today in electricity and work in an invisible manner in Man himself, after this time had passed, electricity lived inside the human being.

[key section]

Now evolution does not proceed in the simple, straightforward way in which people are inclined to picture it. They imagine that time goes ever forward on and on into the infinite. That is an altogether abstract conception. The truth is that time moves and turns in such a way that evolution is constantly reversed and runs back. It is not only in space that we find movements in curves as in a lemniscate, but also in time.

During the Lemurian epoch, Man was at the crossing point of the lemniscate movement, and that was the time when he implanted into himself the principle of electrical force. He traversed the returning path in the Atlantean time and, in respect of certain forces, in the Post-Atlantean time, and arrived about the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century exactly at the point in the evolution of the worlds at which he was in the old Lemurian time when he implanted into himself from the cosmos the principle of electricity. There you have the explanation of how it came about that Galvani discovered electricity at that particular time. Man always goes back again in later times to what he experienced earlier. Life takes its course in cycles, in rhythms. At the middle of the materialistic age which had been developing ever since the 14th–15th century, mankind was standing at that point in the world. All through which he had passed long ago in the Lemurian epoch. And mankind as a whole in that moment remembered the entry of electricity into the human being, and thereupon as a result of this memory impregnated his whole civilization with electricity. The soul and spirit in Man found again what it had once experienced long ago.

Truths like this must be clearly envisaged again, for it is only with truths like this that we shall escape decadence in the future.

1918-09-02-GA183

see also: Metamorphosis#1918-09-02-GA183

synopsis

Time and Space. The perspectivity of time. The Influence of Ahriman and Lucifer upon Man

The nature of time by analogy with space. Man experiences only the image of real time.

Earlier periods of time relate to the present in a perspective-like way. The similarity of time to space and its constant link with all that is.

quote

[introduction, leading up to the section on 'time']

hat is what I want to comment on in particular regarding this preliminary question. So the comfortable notion that one can wait until death to form such ideas does not apply if one considers in concrete terms at what point in time of the development of the Earth we actually are. And this must always be borne in mind. For views that are absolutely valid, that apply at all times, do not exist; there are only views that can guide people for a certain period of time. This is what one must acquire in such an eminent sense through spiritual science.

And now I would like to discuss a few things that can bring our considerations to a preliminary conclusion. We started from the assumption that the present human being feels a gulf between what he calls ideals, be they moral or other ideals, which he also calls ideas, and what he feels to be his views on the purely natural order of the world. The concepts and views that man forms about the natural order of the world do not enable him to assume that what he carries in his heart as ideals has real power and can actually be realized like a natural force.

The essential thing to consider in this question is now the following: We now know how it is with the structure of the human being here on the physical earth. We also know how it is with the structure of the human being in the spiritual world between death and a new birth. Some time ago I raised a question which actually already comes before the human soul as a concrete question when the human being looks at life, but which is precisely a question to which one cannot say anything when one is faced with the gap just characterized between idealism and realism between idealism and realism, that is the question:

How is it that in our world order some people die very young, as children or young people or in middle age, while others only die when they have grown old? What is the connection with the order of the world?

Neither idealism on the one hand nor realism on the other, which cannot regard ideals as real powers, can shed any light on such questions, which are, however, questions of life. These questions can only be approached if one has something very definite in mind. And that is to realize that the present human being, as he will one day stand before us as an earthly human being, can cope relatively easily with space, but he does not cope in the same way with time. In this respect, the sum of all existing philosophical views does not really offer any significant insight, and the question of the nature of time has so far only been treated in the narrowest human circles.

It is not that easy to speak about time and its essence in a way that is accessible to the general public, but perhaps I can succeed in giving you an idea of what I mean by bringing time into discussion in analogy to space. I will have to tax your patience a little, because the brief consideration I want to give to this subject seems to have a somewhat abstract character.

[about time - perspectivity]

If you simply overlook a piece of the room, you know that what you overlook reveals itself to you in a perspective character. You have to take into account the perspective of the room when you overlook a piece of it. If you now bring the piece of room that you overlook and to which you instinctively ascribe a perspective character onto a surface, then you take the perspective into account. If you look down an avenue, you see the distant trees of the avenue as smaller and closer together. You can express this in perspective, and you can, in a sense, express in perspective on a surface what you see in space.

Now it is clear that what you see in space is juxtaposed in a flat surface. In space, it is not juxtaposed; there are two trees in front (see drawing on p. 164), and two trees are far away. But by bringing the visible space into the flat surface, you place what is behind one another next to one another. You have the instinctive ability to transpose what you have painted or drawn on a surface into three dimensions. That you have this ability is due to the fact that man, as he is now as an earthly man, has become relatively detached from space as such.

Man has not detached himself from time in the same way. And that is something tremendously important and significant, but something that unfortunately is hardly noticed, hardly noticed by science.

Man believes that when he develops in time, he has time. But in reality he does not have real time. He does not have real time at all, but what you experience as time is actually, in relation to real time, something that can be called an image. Just as this image (see drawing) in the plane relates to space, so what the ordinary person calls time relates to real time. The ordinary person does not experience real time, but rather experiences an image of time. And that is very difficult to imagine.

For example, it is extremely difficult for you to imagine that something that is effective today does not need to be present at the present moment in time, but is real at a much earlier point in time and is not real at the present moment in time. You can, so to speak, project that which is present in a very early period of time into your own time.

What I have just said has a very significant consequence. It has the consequence that everything we call nature has a completely different character than everything we have to regard as a certain part of the human being itself.

• For example, Ahriman also works in nature outside, or rather the Ahrimanic powers work; but the Ahrimanic powers never work in nature outside at the present time. If you look at nature as a whole, Ahriman is at work in nature, but he is working from a distant time. Ahriman works from the past. And whether you look at the mineral, the vegetable or the animal kingdom, you must never say that there is something in what is currently unfolding before your eyes in which Ahriman is active. And yet Ahriman is active in it; but from the past. If I were to describe the matter, I would have to say: Here is the line of development from the past into the future, and here you survey nature. Yes, now you have to imagine looking into it. What you see before you in the present contains no ahrimanic powers, but Ahriman works through nature from the past, from a particular past.

And to you, Ahriman appears in nature, when you become aware of him there, in perspective. If you were to say: Ahriman is at work in the present — then you would be making the same mistake in relation to nature as if you were to say: When I survey a room, the distant trees stand beside the near trees (see drawing on page 164) because they can be placed in perspective within the space.

A fundamental requirement for a real view into the spiritual world is this: that one learns to see in perspective in time, that one learns to place every being at its correct point in time.

If I said yesterday that after death the I is, as it were, transferred from a fluid state into a kind of solid state, that is not all there is to it.

Suppose you lived here on Earth with your I from 1850 to 1920, and in 1920 you became aware of your I. I mean: you will become aware of it earlier, but now you look back, with the spirit self through the hierarchies you look back at your I; there you see your I always as it was from 1850 to 1920. The I stays there, stays put.

This means that your experiences do not go with you soon after your death, but you look back on them. You now look back from a temporally distant perspective and you see into the length of time, just as you see into the length of space here in the physical world. I can also express it this way: when you die, say, in 1920, you live with all that I described to you yesterday as the members of your being, but then you look back on the stretch of time in which you lived here on Earth with your I. And that stretch of time remains there, and you always see it as you continue to live in perspective, at the point in time where it was. And so you have to imagine that Ahriman is active outside in nature, but from an earlier point in time.

This is very important. It is something that is given very little consideration. If one wants to understand the world, if one wants to speak spiritually of time, then one must absolutely imagine time in a spatial way and must consider this connection of the spiritual substance with time. This is very important.

Now, what I said to you about the Ahrimanic powers, that they work from the past, is true for nature.

[experience of the human being]

But with human beings it is different. For the human being, while he lives here between birth and death, it is different precisely because everything that comes to an end in time becomes maya, deception, for him. While he lives here, the human being lives within the course of time itself, and by living through a certain number of years, he lives through the course of time. As time passes, he himself passes with time. That is not the case with space. When you walk down an avenue, the trees remain behind and you move forward, and you do not take the trees, which are left behind, and your impressions with you in such a way that you would have the impression that the tree image is moving with you when you take a step. You do that with the image of time. Here in the physical body you actually do this – because you yourself continue to develop in time – by allowing yourself to be deceived about time in relation to its perspective. You do not notice the perspective of time. And in particular, the subconscious mind does not notice it. The subconscious mind does not notice this living with time at all, and gives itself over to a complete deception with regard to the perspective of time.

[consequence of waking consciousness -> the experience of reality as an ahrimanic deception (from a spiritual perspective)]

But this has a very definite consequence. It has the consequence that Ahrimanic powers can now work as present powers in what happens in Man. Ahrimanic powers work in the life of the human soul as present powers. So that Man stands in relation to nature in this way: when he looks out into nature, there is nothing Ahrimanic in the present. The Ahrimanic works in him as a presence, precisely as maja, as deception. But the human being is given over to this deception about the things that I have explained to you, so that through the human being the Ahrimanic powers gain the possibility of creeping into the present, of walking into the present. We can say that the Ahrimanic forces – and the same applies to the Luciferic forces, albeit from a somewhat different point of view, which we will discuss in a moment – work in nature in such a way that they actually have nothing to do with the present, but extend their effects from prehistoric times. These Ahrimanic forces are currently at work in the human being.

What are the consequences? The consequence is that, in his deepest soul, Man cannot feel related to nature in relation to the point just discussed. He looks at his being, or rather feels himself in his being, senses the nature-based being. Because ahrimanic powers are countervailing powers in him, and ahrimanic powers are past powers in nature, everything that is natural appears to him differently from that which develops within himself. Man does not unravel the difference he perceives between himself and nature in the right way. If he unraveled it in the right way, it would be as I have just explained. He would say: Outside in nature, Ahriman works from the past; in me, Ahriman works as a present power. But because of this, even if he does not know the difference, he behaves in the sense of this difference and perceives nature as spiritless. He does perceive that in the present the Ahrimanic powers are not directly active in nature, but he perceives nature as spiritless because he does not say to himself: Ahriman works from the past – instead, he only looks at present-day nature. Ahriman does not work in it.

[cont'd]

1918-09-08-GA184

see: Impulses from waves of reincarnating souls#1918-09-08-GA184

plicable to the changing relationships in the higher hierarchies, and if we do use it, then we are only using it to make an illustration of the essential being of these hierarchies.

Hence you can follow in my Outline of Esoteric Science how carefully I suggest that what appears to be temporal must be presented in picture form. For example, where I speak about the stages of Old Saturn and Old Sun, I draw attention very clearly to the fact that the concept of time is only used pictorially to describe what preceded the Old Sun period and even into the first half of the Old Sun period itself. You can check all this in Esoteric Science where these apparently minor details in my book about spiritual science are of tremendous importance, because precisely in these details lies the basis for an understanding of the difference between what is temporal transitoriness and what endures eternally.

If you think about what I have just said, then you will see that yesterday I tried to describe the being of man purely in time. The concept of time played a really major role there, because it depends on time whether someone has gained a certain understanding by living through to old age, or not if he is still in childhood. Yesterday when we described what forms the basis of the soul-bodily being of mankind in the light of the spirit, it was based firmly on the concept of time. Today I have described what forms the basis of the soul-spiritual being which can only be portrayed by describing it in the sphere of eternity, in which – and this is rather difficult – the concept of time is completely inapplicable.

In this respect our being is indeed split in two, and insofar as we do develop through our lives, we do so on the one hand, by waiting calmly and patiently until we are mature enough in soul and body to understand something, while on the other hand we remain without development in the sphere of eternity, where to a certain extent we gaze simultaneously at our childhood in one region, and at our dotage in another. Here on earth, mankind lives in such a way that what happens in the sphere of eternity rays down into what happens in the temporal sphere, and vice versa, both being mixed up with each other.

The task of initiation wisdom is to separate what is mixed up, because only by being held apart can it be understood. Initiation wisdom has always called what is in the sphere of eternity – Above, and what is in the sphere of transitoriness – Below. But as the human being lives here on earth, he views a mixture of Above and Below, and can never come to an understanding of his own being when he sees it mixed up in this way. He can only understand himself when he understands how to separate what is mixed up.

So you can appreciate why the point of view that ordinary life provides makes it impossible to grasp in normal consciousness how things are the way I described them yesterday and today. Someone basing things on normal consciousness might say: “Yesterday, you outlined something about mankind that we can’t see, that isn’t reality at all, because people don’t develop the way you described; there are many people who are quite mature in their youth”, and so on. But this is an objection based on a deception, since reality is as I described it, and people today slip into dualism because they do not see what is Below as mobile and fluid in the way I presented it yesterday. The normal view is to look at a person as he stands before us, while the initiate considers the course of events that take place between birth and death and sees the human being in flux, taking the rigidity of what is Below and bringing it into flowing movement.

On the other hand, when an initiate considers the fluidity of thinking, feeling and willing, he brings this movement to a halt, and what is bound to the physical body apparently happening in time, he views in the sphere of eternity, the region of spiritual juxtaposition.

People strive towards initiation wisdom, and openly admit that the perceivable environment is maya, a great deception, an illusion. But when it gets serious, then they don’t accept it, and would rather describe the region Above with the same idea of maya that they use for the region Below. One should make beautiful schematic drawings based on the ideas of maya, and move about the spiritual world with them, up or down, above or below consciousness. People say to me: “Yes, but you’re not describing things so that I can understand”. But behind this lies “You challenge me with ideas and thoughts that are different from the ones in maya; you challenge me to come to grips with ideas which are in the sphere of reality.”

As another objection, someone might say: “Yes, but in the end, what concerns me in all this is what happens here below! If we just use the concept of time seriously in relation to human development, or we gaze out from life into the sphere of eternity, then one can get by quite well, thank you very much”. You could say this if you remained in maya, and if you formed concepts from what is all mixed up; and yes, you can survive, you can of course continue to live albeit asleep by remaining only in the sphere of eternity.

...

Now the doctrine of emanation became known in Western culture indirectly through the Gnosis. However, the manner in which it became known in the West – the underlying literature has been largely destroyed – means that the doctrine of emanation has become distorted, because within Catholicism only its distortion is known, which gives rise to great misunderstanding. Because what one knows as the doctrine of emanation – the outcome of one eon from another, where the less perfect always stems from the more perfect, which is usually described exoterically as the Gnosis – is in fact already a distortion. It points back to a completely different world view, particularly to ancient times when it was possible for spiritual teachers to instruct mankind directly out of the supersensible. The doctrine of emanation – although a corruption – points back to a wisdom that in its old form referred to the sphere of eternity, to what is Above. As such, one can to a certain extent defend emanation, not in the corrupt form that we know, but in the form where only a perspective within time is described and not from the point of view of true evolution. But if it cannot speak about real evolution, then neither can it speak about creation from nothing, because that too is a kind of evolution, albeit an extreme case. The idea that something stems from something else – as we have discussed today – is inappropriate for describing the sphere of eternity which consists of interrelationships between spiritual beings.

1918-09-13-GA184

... what happens in any given age is always preceded by a long period of preparation. And in fact we can only study that which emerges as particularly significant in a particular age. In our endeavor to build a bridge between the dualisms of the present, we want to take a particularly close look at the hallucinatory aspect of the intellect, which is connected with everything I have described, and at the illusory aspect of natural phenomena, which in turn is connected with what I have described. This leads man into a kind of inner conflict in life.

I would say that there are two currents at work in him, whereas he must strive for one current. And today, one of these currents is particularly seductive: the one that arises from the relationship between man and his soul and the natural order.

[example]

Today's man, who sees in it a reality that is the same for all things – the anatomist, if I choose a nearby example, or the physiologist – today takes the human body and differentiates only externally, not internally, the individual limbs of this body.

I would say he puts the heart next to the liver and examines both only in a purely external way, not taking into account the time perspective of which I spoke recently; whereas in fact one only gets a proper understanding of the nature of the heart as well as the liver if one takes this time perspective into account , for example, if one really proceeds spiritually scientifically in embryology in such a way that one learns to distinguish in time the disposition of the heart in the development of the embryo, and furthermore, that one does not simply let them exist next to each other and consist of cells, which on the one hand is right and on the other hand is nonsense. Because something can be right and nonsense at the same time, as we know.

So, in explaining the natural order, today's scientific trend, as it were, takes no account of that which is temporally apart, placing it side by side and thereby arriving at its abstraction. There the temptation is particularly great to simply place one thing next to the other: cause, effect; cause, effect; cause, effect – an abstract, illusory causal order!

We know from the presentations that I gave you here last year and also already this year that you cannot look at nature in this way, that nature can only be explained if you look at it primarily as a reflection of a spiritual being. That is when you come to the true metamorphosis, that is when you come to real Goetheanism. In this way, the human head appears as an education that depicts the distant past; the organism of the extremities appears as that which points to a distant future. But what stands in the individual is not just next to each other according to causes, but it is imagination, an image of what stands behind it. We do not understand the human head if we understand it only as if it grew out of the rest of the human organism, whereas in truth it is formed out of the whole cosmos, and out of the cosmos in a different way than, for example, the organism of the extremities.

In physics, everyone would find it ridiculous if someone were to explain that a magnetic needle always points north because it has the inner power to point north; instead, the explanation is that the cosmos, i.e., the earth's magnetism, is the guiding force for the magnetic needle in one pole and the other. Only in the case of humans or other organisms should everything grow out of itself in a straight line! Just as the magnetic needle points to the north for cosmic reasons on one side and to the south on the other, so man, for reasons of cosmic time, points with his head backwards into primeval, distant pasts, even into pasts in which the earth itself was metamorphosing, and he points with his limb organism into primeval, distant futures. He is temporally and cosmically oriented. And that will be the formation of the doctrine of metamorphoses, that is real Goetheanism: rising from the mere illusory causal order to the conception of nature through imagination. By recognizing that which one has before one as an image of another, one rises above mere illusion.

1918-09-15-GA184

If you fail to bring into consideration the connections between what I explained yesterday and today then you will never really understand the relationship between the temporal and the eternal.

I have already explained how the human being, as a soul-bodily being, is placed in temporal development in such a way that he needs to become an old man before he can first begin to understand what happened to him as a child. This has everything to do with the concept of evolution. But as a soul-spiritual being, we must recognize that the human being is not placed within evolution, that the concept of time as we know it in outer sensory life is totally inapplicable there, and that we make a mistake when we speak of the human soul-spiritual being and bring time into the sphere of the higher hierarchies. There, everything is eternal and things do not happen in time, only in perspectives within which we see battles and changing relationships.

The concept of time is inapplicable to the changing relationships in the higher hierarchies, and if we do use it, then we are only using it to make an illustration of the essential being of these hierarchies.

Hence you can follow in my Outline of Esoteric Science how carefully I suggest that what appears to be temporal must be presented in picture form. For example, where I speak about the stages of Old Saturn and Old Sun, I draw attention very clearly to the fact that the concept of time is only used pictorially to describe what preceded the Old Sun period and even into the first half of the Old Sun period itself. You can check all this in Esoteric Science where these apparently minor details in my book about spiritual science are of tremendous importance, because precisely in these details lies the basis for an understanding of the difference between what is temporal transitoriness and what endures eternally.

If you think about what I have just said, then you will see that yesterday I tried to describe the being of man purely in time. The concept of time played a really major role there, because it depends on time whether someone has gained a certain understanding by living through to old age, or not if he is still in childhood. Yesterday when we described what forms the basis of the soul-bodily being of mankind in the light of the spirit, it was based firmly on the concept of time. Today I have described what forms the basis of the soul-spiritual being which can only be portrayed by describing it in the sphere of eternity, in which – and this is rather difficult – the concept of time is completely inapplicable.

In this respect our being is indeed split in two, and insofar as we do develop through our lives, we do so on the one hand, by waiting calmly and patiently until we are mature enough in soul and body to understand something, while on the other hand we remain without development in the sphere of eternity, where to a certain extent we gaze simultaneously at our childhood in one region, and at our dotage in another. Here on earth, mankind lives in such a way that what happens in the sphere of eternity rays down into what happens in the temporal sphere, and vice versa, both being mixed up with each other.

The task of initiation wisdom is to separate what is mixed up, because only by being held apart can it be understood. Initiation wisdom has always called what is in the sphere of eternity – Above, and what is in the sphere of transitoriness – Below. But as the human being lives here on earth, he views a mixture of Above and Below, and can never come to an understanding of his own being when he sees it mixed up in this way. He can only understand himself when he understands how to separate what is mixed up.

So you can appreciate why the point of view that ordinary life provides makes it impossible to grasp in normal consciousness how things are the way I described them yesterday and today. Someone basing things on normal consciousness might say: “Yesterday, you outlined something about mankind that we can’t see, that isn’t reality at all, because people don’t develop the way you described; there are many people who are quite mature in their youth”, and so on. But this is an objection based on a deception, since reality is as I described it, and people today slip into dualism because they do not see what is Below as mobile and fluid in the way I presented it yesterday. The normal view is to look at a person as he stands before us, while the initiate considers the course of events that take place between birth and death and sees the human being in flux, taking the rigidity of what is Below and bringing it into flowing movement.

On the other hand, when an initiate considers the fluidity of thinking, feeling and willing, he brings this movement to a halt, and what is bound to the physical body apparently happening in time, he views in the sphere of eternity, the region of spiritual juxtaposition.

People strive towards initiation wisdom, and openly admit that the perceivable environment is maya, a great deception, an illusion. But when it gets serious, then they don’t accept it, and would rather describe the region Above with the same idea of maya that they use for the region Below. One should make beautiful schematic drawings based on the ideas of maya, and move about the spiritual world with them, up or down, above or below consciousness. People say to me: “Yes, but you’re not describing things so that I can understand”. But behind this lies “You challenge me with ideas and thoughts that are different from the ones in maya; you challenge me to come to grips with ideas which are in the sphere of reality.”

As another objection, someone might say: “Yes, but in the end, what concerns me in all this is what happens here below! If we just use the concept of time seriously in relation to human development, or we gaze out from life into the sphere of eternity, then one can get by quite well, thank you very much”. You could say this if you remained in maya, and if you formed concepts from what is all mixed up; and yes, you can survive, you can of course continue to live albeit asleep by remaining only in the sphere of eternity.

...

Now the doctrine of emanation became known in Western culture indirectly through the Gnosis. However, the manner in which it became known in the West – the underlying literature has been largely destroyed – means that the doctrine of emanation has become distorted, because within Catholicism only its distortion is known, which gives rise to great misunderstanding. Because what one knows as the doctrine of emanation – the outcome of one eon from another, where the less perfect always stems from the more perfect, which is usually described exoterically as the Gnosis – is in fact already a distortion. It points back to a completely different world view, particularly to ancient times when it was possible for spiritual teachers to instruct mankind directly out of the supersensible. The doctrine of emanation – although a corruption – points back to a wisdom that in its old form referred to the sphere of eternity, to what is Above. As such, one can to a certain extent defend emanation, not in the corrupt form that we know, but in the form where only a perspective within time is described and not from the point of view of true evolution. But if it cannot speak about real evolution, then neither can it speak about creation from nothing, because that too is a kind of evolution, albeit an extreme case. The idea that something stems from something else – as we have discussed today – is inappropriate for describing the sphere of eternity which consists of interrelationships between spiritual beings.

1918-09-20-GA184

is called 'the threefoldness of space and the unity of time'

1918-10-04-GA184

describes how

• irregular or backwards luciferic SoW create time 'illusion' (whereas regular SoW are in duration)
• irregular or backwards ahrimanic SoF create space 'illusion' (whereas regular SoF are spaceless)

For an illustration see Schema FMC00.472B

See also: Cosmic fractal

[Space]

Now, with regard to these Beings, we are interested above all in the archai. We know that in the ranks of spiritual beings, the Spirits of Form come immediately above the archai. Hence we find that in the course of Man's original evolution the forces of the Archai are to a certain extent in the service of the Spirits of Form. Into the being of Man there work Archai and Spirits of Form. Besides this, however, there are also certain Spirits of Form who are disguised as archai. They can be SoF, but they act only as archai; they take on that role. This is an essential fact we discover — how spiritual beings can take on a certain role which differs from the actual stage of their own evolution.

This has a quite definite consequence. Earthly form can be just as dependent on those archai who are really Spirits of Form, as it is upon the ordinary Spirits of Form. But the important thing is that everything in our earthly existence which is connected with space through taking shape in space is shaped out of the non-spatial. We comprehend the spatial only if we trace it back in its picture-nature to primal pictures that are outside space. Naturally, one of the difficulties for Western thinking is to form a conception of the spaceless. Yet it is true that everything connected with our primeval manhood, everything proceeding from the Spirits of Form, when it takes shape in space, is an effect of the spaceless. To speak concretely, when as individual human beings, who first crawl on all-fours, we learn to stand upright and thus overcome gravity in our upright posture, we place ourselves into space. But the force that is fundamentally responsible for this makes its way into space out of the spaceless.

If therefore as men we were subject only to the Spirits of Form proper to us, we should in every way place ourselves into space, bring the spaceless to realisation in space, for the Spirits of Form do not live in space. Anyone who seeks the divine in space will not find it ... that goes without saying. Anything which arises as form in space is a realisation of the spaceless.

Those beings who are Spirits of Form but act as archai should really, according to their essential nature, belong to the spaceless. But they enter space, they work in space. And this is characteristic of the Ahrimanic - that spiritual beings who in their true nature are intended to be spaceless have preferred to work in space. This enables forms to arise in space that do not ray in directly out of the spaceless. Thus the spatial is portrayed in the spatial, so that one spatial form reflects another.

• Perhaps I may take a concrete case. We men are all different from one another because we are placed here out of the spaceless. Our archetypes are in the spaceless. Everything is different from everything else. You have heard the famous story of how, at the instigation of Leibniz, certain princesses — for sometimes princesses have nothing better to do — searched the garden for two leaves absolutely alike and did not find them, for there are no two identical leaves. We also are forms created out of the spaceless, in so far as we do not resemble each other. But from another aspect we are alike — especially when we are blood relations. We resemble one another because there are spiritual beings who form the spatial according to the spatial, not merely the spatial according to the spaceless. We resemble each other because we are permeated by Ahrimanic forces. This must be recognised, or we shall merely inveigh against Ahrimanic and Luciferic forces without any wish to understand them. This example illustrates very clearly how Ahriman plays into our life. In so far as you can venture to say to yourself, “According to my form I am individual man, different from any other,” you are in the direct line of evolution. And were this the only fact valid in the world, and if there were no Ahrimanic side-streams to it, a mother would not be able to rejoice that her little daughter resembles her so wonderfully, for it would strike her that each individual human being is a spatial image of something outside space, that nothing spatial is a replica of anything in space. The entry into space of certain Spirits of Form gives the Ahrimanic its opportunity. Naturally this Ahrimanic element is not confined to similarity among human beings — it extends to many other things; we have simply taken one example of it.

[Time]

Now I will ask you to call to mind what I added — not for your comfort but as arising out of our subject — after having told you that man really becomes apt for self-knowledge only in the second half of life. I said: In so far as our life takes this course in time, and if nothing else worked upon us, we could, in fact, arrive at self-knowledge only in the second half of life. But — so I said at the time — in the first half of life Luciferic forces work on us and produce a self-knowledge that is not the result of our own original human nature. In contrast to human life as it would be if it followed its original pattern, I set what I have called the realm of duration. In regard to everything that belongs to our original human nature we are different persons at fifty from what we were at twenty; we develop. In regard to everything in us that we do not develop, we belong not to our bodily nature but to the realm of soul and spirit and are connected with the realm of duration, with that realm in which time plays no part. Just as the spaceless lies at the basis of everything spatial, so at the basis of everything temporal there is duration.

We should be quite different human beings if we were not connected with the realm of duration. As I said a short while ago, we should wake out of a certain life of dreams only at twenty-eight or twenty-nine years old. We live, however, in the realm of duration, and this gives balance to our dozing through the first half of life and the terrible intellectual brightness of the second half.

Now to this realm of duration belong, as we know, all the spiritual beings of the higher hierarchies, with the single exception of the Spirits of Form (SoF). They play into the kingdom of evolution in time. But because they live both spatially and spacelessly, because they pass their life between space and the spaceless, they call spatial forms into existence out of the spaceless. This admits of a time-process; their life plays into time. The other Beings, however, of a higher rank than the Spirits of Form among the Hierarchies, belong entirely to duration. It is only by way of comparison that they can be spoken of as beings of time; if this is meant to correspond to reality, it is nonsense. It is most difficult to talk about these things for the simple reason that, at the present stage of evolution, so very few men have any lively sense of concepts and ideas developed outside space and outside time. Most people would explain away the spaceless as sheer fantasy; and it is the same with the timeless, the enduring, the imperishable, and even the immutable.

Beings above the rank of the SoF, accordingly, belong only to the realm of duration. But there are those among them who take on the role of beings in time, who enter time. Just as those other beings, the Ahrimanic beings I have described, enter space, so there are beings who enter time. These are Luciferic beings, who really belong to the ranks of Spirits of Wisdom, but because they work in time they do so in the character of Spirits of Form. And that which would otherwise work timelessly in Man's soul during life is brought into time by these spirits. Hence it comes about that certain things which could always be in existence for us were we allowed to take our course according only to the realm of duration, succumb to time. For instance, we may forget them, or remember them either more or less well, and so on, and this remembrance depends only upon our bodily-soul nature, not upon our soul-spiritual nature.

Spirits of Duration, therefore, who act as Spirits of Time — they are Luciferic powers; in the cosmic order they are really of a much higher rank than those powers of whom many clergymen, however highly educated in theology they may think themselves, speak when they talk of the divine. ... In reality they are referring to much less exalted powers, as I have indeed said before.

These Luciferic beings are able to transfer into time what would otherwise appear to our human perception as purely spiritual and timeless — they give it the semblance of running its course in time. And this temporal semblance, imparted to certain phenomena in ourselves, is the sole reason why people maintain that their spiritual activity has a material origin. Were we not permeated in our souls by Luciferic beings, our spiritual activity would appear to us as coming directly from the spiritual. We should never imagine that spiritual activity could depend on the material.

• We should see that the image I often use is the only right one — that whoever believes his spiritual activity arises from the material is like a Man who goes up to a mirror and thinks that the reflection arises from a being behind it. Certainly the image depends upon how the mirror is constructed, and so is our thinking dependent upon our bodily nature. The body, however, does nothing more than the mirror does; if the Luciferic semblance were absent, the mirror would directly reveal to human perception that spiritual activity is merely given its form by the material. In so far as Lucifer is implicated in our super-consciousness, he calls forth the semblance that leads us by the nose in the same way as if we were to go up to a mirror and break it in order to find out how whoever was behind it had managed to get a hold there.

This illusion that the spiritual can originate in the material is essentially Luciferic. And anyone who maintains that the spiritual is a product of the material is in fact declaring — though he may not say so — that Lucifer is his God. The assertion that the spiritual comes forth from the material, which is exactly the same as saying that a mirror produces a reflection, as if there were beings behind the mirror ... this assertion that the material produces the spiritual, the spiritual in man, is identical with declaring, even if not in words: Lucifer is God.

Now we can also seek knowledge about the opposite pole. A Luciferic misrepresentation is that the mirror, the material, drives out the spiritual from itself. The opposite pole is this — the illusion also exists among men that the content of the physical world of the senses has power to work upon the inner being of Man. If the Ahrimanic illusion, which arises through forces entering space out of the spaceless were not present, Man would perceive how no influence could ever be exercised upon his inner being by forces anchored in the material. The assertion that in the material there are forces, energies, which are able to work on further in Man, is an entirely Ahrimanic assertion; whoever makes it, even without words, is declaring Ahriman to be his God.

Nevertheless Man sways between these two illusions.

• First, the [Luciferic] illusion that repeatedly deceives him — that the mirror itself produces pictures of real beings, as if the material were able to bring forth spiritual activities.
• And the other [Ahrimanic] illusion — that in the external existence of the senses energies are contained which are somehow transformed so as to bring about human activities.

The first is the Luciferic illusion; the other, the Ahrimanic.

What is so characteristic of our present time is that it has no inclination to go into the spiritual in the same way that it goes into the natural order. It is certainly easier to speak about the spirit from the standpoint of a nebulous mysticism, or in terms of abstract ideas, than to enter concretely into spiritual processes and spiritual impulses in a truly scientific way, as is done in the case of nature itself.

We live now in an age when man must consciously begin to make clear to himself what is working in his soul. We know why the time is past when man could draw from an unconscious source the impulses he needed to guide him further. Today he must begin consciously to enter the realm in which lives his soul-nature, and this soul-nature is generated by consciousness.

Thus we are able to say that if man were to follow in his evolution only his original nature and the good spiritual forces in the world, he would be a very different being from what he now is, when he pursues this age-old development in conjunction with the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic forces working upon him in time.

The question now is this: How is a balance set up between these three forces? In order to set up this balance, or at least to recognise how it can be done, we must look at the following.

...

When we study human death — and we have very often talked of it — then we find that it can be looked upon in a certain sense as the counterpoise for the Luciferic forces. Death, as you know, is not just a once-only phenomenon, for a Man actually begins to die the moment he is born. The impulses of death are already laid in him and death itself comes about at a certain point of time. Everything in the way of impulses leading to death is at the same time a force which sets up a counterpoise to the Luciferic forces. For through death man is led out beyond the temporal into the realm of duration.

Now we know that the Luciferic forces really belong by nature to the realm of duration, and that what they are meant to do in the realm of duration they carry into the temporal. This would not be balanced if death, which leads man out of the temporal into the realm of duration, were not introduced into the kingdom of the temporal. Death balances the Luciferic. The Luciferic force carries duration into time; death carries time out into duration. There we have it in abstract words — but in this abstraction there is a very great amount of the concrete.

1920-04-17-GA201

And we have to do not only with an aggregation (in the Sun) of this absorbent ether in the outer Universe, but also with the fact that this ether is distributed far and wide, Everywhere we find, coexisting with the force of pressure, the absorbent force. We ourselves carry this force of suction in our own etheric bodies.

With this we completely exhaust all that we call Space. Pressure and suction, these two, we find in Space. But not only do we possess our physical body, composed of ponderable matter which it assimilates and again expels, not only have we also an etheric body, composed of absorbent ether, but we have in addition an astral body — if we may use the term ‘body’ in this connection.

What does the possession of this third body imply? It means that we have within us something that is no longer spatial, though it has a certain relation to space. This relationship can be proved when we realise that during waking hours the astral body interpenetrates the etheric and physical bodies. But the etheric body acts very differently when we are awake and when we are asleep. A different relation is established between the etheric and physical bodies when we wake, and this is caused by the astral body. It is active, and works upon the spatial, though it is not itself spatial. It brings order and organisation into the correlations of space. This organising activity of the astral body within us takes place also in the outer Universe, where it manifests in the following way.

Try for the moment to consider Space alone, and out of the whole visible Heavens, let us consider the regions that are indicated by the Zodiac. I do not intend here to deal in detail with the several Zodiacal signs, but let us consider the directions to which we look in the heavens when we turn, for instance, towards Aries (Ram), in the Zodiac; then Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius and Pisces. All we have to note, in the first place, is that the space that lies before us as our visible Universe is divided in this way. The signs merely indicate the division, in so far as each of them denotes the boundary of a certain section of Space.

Now we must not imagine that these directions of space can be treated in such a manner that one might say: ‘There is empty space, and I just draw a line somewhere into it’.

There simply does not exist such a thing as mathematics calls ‘Space’; but everywhere are lines of force, directions of force, and these are not equal, they vary, they are differentiated.

We can distinguish between these twelve regions by realising that if we turn in the direction of the sign Aries, the force we experience is a different one than it would be had we faced the sign Libra or Cancer. In each direction the force differs. Man will not admit this, as long as he lives merely in the world of the senses; but as soon as he ascends to the Imaginative life of the soul, he no longer experiences the directions in space as the same when facing Aries or Cancer, but feels their influence upon him as greatly differentiated.

To give you a parallel, I might put before you the following. Imagine that you arrange round you a circle of twelve persons in such a manner that those most sympathetic to you occupy one part of the circle, then come the less sympathetic, until on the other side you have all those who are antipathetic to you. (We are not, imagining the degree of sympathy or antipathy to result from any personal emotion; it may be merely a matter of outward appearances.) Now if you turn round within the circle, twelve pictures pass before your vision and at the same time you experience a graduated series of differentiated sensations. Man becomes aware of such a series of sensations if, after attaining to Imaginative perception, he moves around within the Zodiac. A similar gradation of sensation, a similar gradation of vision is produced in him, and it takes place within him the moment he escapes from the indifference of ordinary sense-existence. So when we are dealing with these various sections of space there is no sameness, for we must realise that each of these directions exerts a different influence upon us.

You see, here comes to light a fact intimately connected with the whole evolution of Man. Had he remained at the stage of the old consciousness, the atavistic picture-consciousness, he would still experience strongly the actuality of this differentiation in the various sections of the heavens; he would have been conscious of a sensation of sympathy towards one direction of Space and antipathy towards another. Man has however been extricated from this play of forces by which at one time he was consciously surrounded, and he has been extricated from it just through the fact that his present organisation has placed him into the sense-world. But that Man is really organised in accordance with cosmic laws can even now be proved, and by quite external experiments, if attention is paid to certain phenomena.

• For it is by no means mere nonsense to say that certain sicknesses can be cured more quickly if the bed of the patient is placed in the direction of East to West. It is no superstition but a fact capable of definite proof. But this is not intended as a recommendation to each of you to place your bed in a certain position! I have had so many experiences in this direction, that I feel it necessary to interject here a word of warning! It once happened to me in Berlin, for instance, that at the end of an anthroposophical discourse. I laid a certain emphasis upon the fact of being able to put on my galoshes when it was raining, without sitting down, saying that this could be done by first standing upon one leg and then upon the other, and I added ‘And one ought to be able to stand upon one leg!’ This was taken by some anthroposophists in such a way that I found upon returning from London to Berlin, that members of the Anthroposophical Society there were being recommended, as esoteric training, to stand upon one leg for a short time at midnight! Many assertions made about us have just as good a foundation. Time and again things of this sort get said and then find their way into this or that newspaper article by the pen of some well- or ill-disposed person — generally the latter. So I repeat, I have no wish at all to recommend you each to place his bed in one particular position. Nevertheless, this fact and many others show that even today, in the inner or subconscious part of his being, Man still stands in a certain relation to these exterior spatial differentiations, into which he has been placed.

Now through what means does Man possess these relationships?

He possesses them through his astral body, which establishes these relations. They are only possible to him because through his astral body Man is a denizen of an astral world, a world which though acting upon Space is not itself spatial. We only conceive the Zodiac in its full meaning when we treat it as the representative of the astral world beyond.

And now, without having regard to present-day astronomical theories, let us examine these phenomena which appear to our sense of vision. We know that either actually or apparently the Sun passes through the Zodiac in various ways; in its daily course, in its yearly course, and again in its course through the Platonic year, through the precession of the equinoxes. This points to the fact that the effects upon us of that absorbent ether ball called Sun vary greatly, as they come from the different directions of Space.

1922-06-24-GA213

title: On the dimensions of space

1922-08-05-GA214

In his onward-flowing stream of existence Man is contained within the ocean of the spiritual world. During the period between death and a new birth his existence continues within this spiritual world. But there are times when with his head he comes forth from the spiritual world. In other words, with a part of his being he leaves the spiritual world like a fish that tosses itself above the water. This is earthly life. Then he plunges once more back into the ocean of spirit and later on again returns to an earthly life. Man never leaves this ocean of spiritual existence with the whole of his being but only with his head. The lower part of him remains always in the spiritual world, although in his ordinary consciousness he has no knowledge of what is really going on. Spiritual insight, then, tells us the following: Between death and a new birth man lives in the spiritual world. At birth he peeps out with his head, as it were, into a physical existence, but the greater part of his being remains in the spiritual world, even between birth and death. And it is well that this is so, for otherwise we should have no memories. Memories are only possible because the spiritual world is working in us. An act of memory is a spiritual process appertaining to an objective and not merely to a subjective world.

In his ordinary consciousness man does not regard memory as being a real process, but here he is in error. It is as though he were looking at a castle on a mountain just in front of him and seeing it actually there, believes in its reality. Then he moves away a certain distance, sees the castle in greater perspective, and says to himself: Now I have nothing but a picture, there is no longer any reality. And so it is in ordinary life. In the stream of time we imagine that we get further and further away from reality. But the reality of the castle in space does not change because our picture of it changes, any more than does the reality of that which has given rise to our memory-picture. It remains, just as the castle remains. Our explanation of memory is erroneous because we cannot rightly estimate the perspective of time. Consciousness which flows with the stream of time is able to open up a vista of the past in perspective. The past does not disappear; it remains. But our pictures of it arise in the Perspective of time.

...

[evolutionary]

Man’s relation to the more spiritual processes in his being between birth and death has undergone a fundamental change in the course of earthly existence.

If we were to regard man as a being consisting merely of physical body and etheric body, this would be only the part of him which remains lying there in bed when he is asleep at night. By day, the astral body and I come down into the physical and etheric bodies. The Iof those men who lived before the Mystery of Golgotha – and in earlier incarnations we ourselves were they – began to fade in a certain sense as the time of the Mystery of Golgotha drew near.

After the Mystery of Golgotha there was something different about the process of waking. The astral body always comes right down into the etheric body and in earlier times the I penetrated far down into the etheric body. In our modern age it is not so.

In our age the I only comes down into the head-region of the etheric body. In men of olden times the I came right down and penetrated into the lower parts of the etheric body as well. Today it only comes down into the head. The outcome of this is Man’s faculty of intellectual thinking. If the I were at any moment to descend lower, instinctive pictures would arise within us. The I of modern man is quite definitely outside his physical body. Indeed his intellectual nature is due to the fact that the I no longer comes down into the whole of his etheric body. If such were the case he would have instinctive clairvoyance.

But instead of this, modern man has a clear-cut vision of the outer world, albeit he perceives it only with his head. In ancient times man saw and perceived with his whole being – nowadays only with his head. And between birth and death the head is the most physical part of his being. That is why in the age of intellectualism man knows only what he perceives with his physical head and the thoughts he can unfold within his etheric head. Even the process of memory eludes his consciousness and, as I said, is interpreted falsely.

In days of old, man saw the physical world and behind it a world of spirit. Objects in the physical world were less clear-cut, far more shadowy than they are to the sight of modern man. Behind the physical world, divine-spiritual beings of a lower and also of a higher order were perceived. To state that ancient descriptions of the Gods in Nature are nothing but the weavings of phantasy is just as childish as to say that a man merely imagines something he has actually seen in waking life. It was no mere phantasy on the part of man in olden days when he spoke of spiritual beings behind the world of sense. He actually saw these beings and against this background of the spiritual world, objects in the physical world were much less clearly defined. Thus the man of antiquity had a very different picture of the world. When he awoke from sleep his Ego penetrated more deeply into his etheric body and divine-spiritual beings were revealed to him.

He gazed into those spiritual worlds which had been the forerunners of his own world. The Gods revealed their destinies to him and he was able to say: ‘I know from whence I come, I know the divine world with which I am connected.’ This was because he had the starting-point of his perspective within him. He made his etheric body an organ to perceive the world of the Gods.

Modern Man cannot do so. He has no other starting-point for his perspective than in his head and the head is outside the most spiritual part of the etheric body. The etheric counterpart of the head is somewhat chaotic, not so highly organised as the other parts of the etheric body, and that is why modern Man has a more defined vision of the physical world, although he no longer sees the Gods behind it. But the present age is one of preparation for what lies in the future.

Man is gradually progressing to the stage where the centre of his perspective will be outside his physical being. Nowadays, when he is really only living in his head, he can have nothing but abstract thoughts about the world. It may seem rather extreme to say that man lives in his head, for the head can only make him aware of earthly, physical existence. But it is none the less a fact that as he ‘goes out of his head’ he will begin to know what he is as a human being. When he lived in his whole being he had knowledge of the destinies of the Gods. As he gradually passes out of himself he can have knowledge of his own destiny in the cosmos. He can look back into his own being. If men would only make more strenuous efforts in this direction, the head would not hinder them so much from seeing their own destinies. The obstacle in the way of this is that everyone is so intent upon living only in the head. It is simply an unwillingness to look beyond what the head produces that makes people loath to admit that the wisdom which anthroposophy has to offer in regard to the being of man is something that can be understood by ordinary, healthy intelligence.

And so Man is on the way to a knowledge of his own being, because he will gradually begin to focus his perspective from a point that lies, not inside, but outside himself. It is the destiny of man to pass out of his etheric body and so, finally, to attain to knowledge of himself as a human being.

But obviously there is a certain danger here. It is possible for Man to lose connection with his etheric body. This danger was mitigated by the Mystery of Golgotha. Whereas before the Mystery of Golgotha, Man was able to look out and see the destinies of the Gods, after that event it became possible for him to see his own world-destiny. In the course of his evolution, man’s tendency is more and more to ‘go out of himself ‘ in the sense described above. But if, as he does so, he understands the words of Paul: “Not I but Christ in me” in their true meaning, his connection with the Christ will bring him back again into the realm of the human. His link with the Christ sets up a counter¬balance to the process which gradually takes him ‘out of himself.’ This experience must deepen and intensify. In the course of world-destiny the outer Gods passed into twilight, but just because of this it was possible for a God to work out His destiny on the Earth itself and thus be wholly united with mankind.

...

Now so long as we are between birth and death and are not strong enough in our I to perceive all that is going on down there even with our memories—so long are we quite unaware of how it is with us as humanity in modern time. But when we die, then it becomes a very serious matter, this spiritual world from out of which we lift ourselves in physical existence, like a fish that gasps at air. Then we no longer look back on our life imagining that we perceive unreal memory-pictures, giving ourselves up to the illusion that the perspective of time kills the reality.

For that is how man lives in relation to time when he gives himself up to his memory. He is like one who would consider what he perceives in the distance, in the perspective of space, as unreality, as a mere picture. He is like one who would say: ‘When I go far away from it, the castle there in the distance is so small, so tiny that it can have no reality, for surely no men could live in so tiny a castle. Therefore the castle can have no reality.’ Such, more or less, is the conclusion he draws in time. When he looks back in time he does not think his memory-pictures realities, for he leaves out of account the perspective of time. But this attitude ceases when all perspective ceases, that is to say when we are out of space and time. When we are dead it ceases. Then that which lives in the perspective of times emerges as a very strong reality.

Now it is possible that we had brought into our consciousness that which I call the consciousness of Christ. If we did so, then as we look back after our death we see that in life we united ourselves with reality, that we did not live in a mere abstract way. The perspective ceases and the reality is there. If in life we remained at the mere abstract experience, then too, of course, the reality is there. But we find that in earthly life we were building castles in the air. What we were building has no firmness in itself. With our intellectual knowledge and cognition we can indeed build, but our building is frail, it has no firmness. Therefore the modern Man needs to be penetrated with the consciousness of Christ, to the end that by uniting himself with realities he may not build castles in the air but castles in the spirit. For earthly life, a castle in the air is something which in itself lies beneath the spirit. The castles in the air are always at their place, only for earthly life they are too thin and for the spiritual life too physically dense. Such human beings cannot free themselves from the dense physical, which in relation to the spiritual, after all, has a far lesser reality. They remain earthbound. They get into no free relation to earthly life if in this life they build mere castles in the air through intellectualism.

1922-12-17-GA219

Time plays the most essential role in all these world-pictures. A much less important part is played by Space.

.. It is not until the age of Galileo, of Copernicus, of Giordano Bruno, that Space actually begins to play its great role in the picture of the universe.

Even in the Ptolemaic system which admittedly is concerned with Space, Time is a more essential factor than it is in the world-picture familiar to us since the fifteenth century, in which Time actually plays a secondary part. The present distribution of the stars in cosmic space is taken as the start­ing-point and through calculation conclusions are reached as to what the world-picture was like in earlier times. But the conception of Space, the spatial world-picture, becomes of chief importance. And the result is that all human judgments are based on the principle of Space. Modern man has elabo­rated this element of Space in his external world-picture, elaborated it too in all his thinking. And today this thinking in terms of Space has reached its zenith.

Think how difficult it is for a man of the present day to follow an exposition purely of Time. He is happy if Space is brought in at least to the extent of drawing something on the blackboard. But if the feeling of Space is conveyed by means of photographs, then the modern man is verily in his element ! "Illustration"—and by this he means expression in terms of Space—is what man of today strives to achieve in every exposition.Time, inasmuch as it is in perpetual flow, has become something that causes him discomfort. He still attaches value to it in music ; but even there the tendency towards the spatial is quite evident.

...

We need only consider something that has become a definite feature of modern life and this mania of modern man to cleave to the spatial is at once apparent. In the cinema he is utterly indifferent to the element of Time in the picture. He is content with the merest fraction of the Time element and is entirely given up to the element of Space. This orientation of the soul to the spatial is very charac­teristic of the present time and whoever observes modern culture and civilization with open eyes will find it everywhere.

...

On the other hand, in anthroposophical spiritual science we are striving, as you know, to get away from the spatial. To be sure, we meet the desire for it in that we too try to give tangible form to the spiritual, and that is justifiable in order to strengthen the faculty of ideation. Only we must always be conscious that this is purely a means of illustration and that what is essential is to strive, at least to strive, to transcend the spatial.

...

Space 'devotees' among us often cause difficulties by mak­ing diagrams of the consecutive epochs of Time, writing "First Epoch with Sub-Epochs," and so on. Then follow a great many captions and what is sequential in Time is dragged into a spatial picture.

Our aim, however, is to transcend the spatial. We are striving to penetrate into the temporal and also into the super-temporal, into the element that leads beyond what is physically perceptible. The physically perceptible exists in its crudest form in the world of Space and there thought is led in a certain direction.   

1924-02-16-GA235

discusses the concept of causality in timespace experience, in the context van the karma studies and Man's cycle of reincarnation

.. we enter the concept of time. To put it trivially, we must go for a walk in time. In the physical world, when we are looking for the causes of things that happen there, we move about in the physical. We do not need to leave the physical. And if we are seeking the causes of anything that is brought about in the living kingdom of plants, we must go very far away. We must sweep through the ether-world, and only where the ether-world is at an end — where, as in fairy-tale language, we come to the end of the world — there do we find the causes of plant-growth. But we can wander there as we will; we shall not find there the causes of the faculties of sensation or of movement. To do so, we must set out on a pilgrimage in time. We must go backward in time. We must go out of space, and into time.

As to causation, therefore, we can place the human physical body in its lifeless condition side by side with external lifeless Nature. And we can place-the human ether-body — both in its life and in its outward passage after death into the ether-spaces — side by side with the etheric life of the plants; for this too comes in from the ether-spaces, though from the simultaneous constellations, of that which is beyond the physical, above the earth. Moreover, we can relate the human astral body to the outer animal world.

Now, when in further progress from mineral nature to plant and animal, we come at length to the human kingdom proper, perhaps you will say, “We have already considered it.” Yes, but not altogether. We have considered it inasmuch as the human being has a physical body; then inasmuch as he has an ether-body; and thirdly, inasmuch as he has an astral body. But you will recognise: if man merely had his physical body, he would be a crystal — even it perhaps a very complicated one. And if in addition he only had his ether-body, he would be a mere plant — no matter, perhaps, how beautiful. And if he even had the astral body added, then he would go on all fours; he would have horns, or the like; in a word, he would be an animal. All this, he is not. He has the form and figure he possesses as an upright-walking being, because he also possesses the Ego-organisation, over and above the physical, etheric and astral. To this being alone, who also has the organisation of the Ego, we can apply the name: human kingdom.

Let us observe once more what we have already seen. If we are seeking the causes for the physical, we can remain within the physical. If we are seeking the causes for plant-nature, we must go out into the wide ether-realms. We can still remain within space — though, as I said, this “space” becomes a little hypothetical, so that we have recourse to fairy-like conceptions, as when we say “the end of the world — where the world is boarded up.” Yet it is so. Why, even they who only think along the lines of present-day research are now beginning to divine that in some sense there is such a thing as the end of the world — “where the world is boarded up.” It is of course a childlike and crude expression. But we need only remember the childlike way in which people are wont to think: There is the sun, it sends out its rays, on and ever on. The rays grow-weaker and weaker, it is true, yet the light goes on and on, ever away, into the infinite.

.. I have long ago explained what nonsense it is to imagine that the light goes on and on in this way, into the endless void. .. I have said, the expansion of light is subject to a kind of elasticity. If you have an india-rubber ball and you indent it here — you can continue pressing up to a certain point; then it springs back again. There is an end to the elastic pressure; then it recoils. It is the same for the light: it does not go on and out into the endless void. When it has reached a certain limit, it comes back again.

..

So likewise we may say: Out there, if we think our way far enough outward, sooner or later we must think back again. We must not assume a mere endless space which is a fantasy and moreover, one which we cannot grasp. Some of you may recall what I related in my autobiography of the deep impression it made on me, when I attended classes on modern Synthetic Geometry, and when for the first time it was shown me through Geometry itself that a straight line should not be conceived as though it went out into the endless void and never ceased. The line that goes outward in this direction, actually returns from the opposite side. Geometry expresses it by saying that the infinitely distant point to the right is identical with the infinitely distant point to the left. This can be found by exact calculation — not by the mere analogy of a circle, where, if you set out from here, you will eventually get back again to the same point, and if you then imagine the diameter infinitely long the circle will become a straight line. That would be a mere analogy, of little or no value to one who can think exactly. I was impressed, not by this trivial analogy, but by the possibility of real arithmetical proof, that the infinitely distant point on the one side — to the left — is the same as the infinitely distant point to the right. So that one who begins to run from here and runs on and on along the line will not run out into the endless void; if he only runs on for long enough, he will come back to meet us from the other side. To physical thinking it may seem grotesque. The moment we set aside physical thinking it is a reality. The world is not endless. As physical world, such as it lies before us here, it is limited.

Once more then, we may say: To deal with the plant-nature and with the etheric nature in man, we must go to the very limits of the ether. But if we wish to explain the animal nature, and the astral in man, we must go right outside all that there is in space. We must go for a walk, in time — beyond all that is contemporaneous; we must move forward in time. And now we come to the human kingdom.

When we thus come into time, you see, we are already transcending the physical in a twofold way. In order to describe the animal you must move on in time. But at this stage you must not abstractly pursue the line of thought; you must continue concretely. I beg you now observe, how we continue the line of thought concretely.

People think, when the sun sends out its light, that the light goes endlessly on and on. Oliver Lodge, however, shows that this kind of thought is already beginning to be left behind. They are beginning to realise that you get to a certain limit and thence come back again. The sun receives its light sent back to it again from all directions — though in another form, in a transmuted form, still it receives it back again.

Now let us apply the same kind of thought to the progression we have just followed. We stayed, to begin with, in space. Then, earthly space remained there within, while we must go out into the universe. But even that was not enough, for at the next stage we go out into time. Now, someone might say, we must go on still further — on and on. No, on the contrary; now we come back again. Just as it is when we go on and on into space: we get to a limit and thence return; so do we here come back again. Having looked in the distances of time for the past super-physical causes we must return again into the physical.

What does this mean in reality?

It signifies that out of time we must come down again on to the Earth. If we would seek the causes that apply to Man as such, we must seek them once more on Earth. Only we have gone backward in time, and I need hardly say: when, going backward in time, we come again on to the earth, we come into a former life of man. We come into a former life. For the animal we have to go on and on. It dissolves away in time, just as our ether-body dissolves away to the utmost limits ... Man, at this point does not dissolve away; we must come back again, even into his former life on earth. Therefore, in Man's case, we can say: Past physical causes, for present effects within the physical.

1924-06-04-GA236

see: Top five problems with current science#1924-06-04-GA236

see also: Pentecost#1924-06-04-GA236

include the quote

Now we may draw near to a still further realisation. We look out into the far Cosmos which goes out beyond earthly reality, even as the Earth with its physical substance and forces goes down beneath cosmic reality. As in the Physical the Earth has a sub-cosmic element, so in Spirit-Selfhood the Cosmos has a super-earthly element. Physical science speaks of a movement of the Sun; and it can do so, for within the spatial picture of the Cosmos which surrounds us, we perceive by certain phenomena that the Sun is in movement. But that is only an image of the true Sun-movement — an image cast into Space. If we are speaking of the real Sun it is nonsense to say that the Sun moves in Space; for Space itself is being radiated out by the Sun. The Sun not only radiates the light; the Sun creates the Space itself. And the movement of the Sun is only a spatial movement within this created Space. Outside of Space it is a movement in Time. What seems apparent to us — namely, that the Sun is speeding on towards the constellation of Hercules — is only a spatial image of the Time-evolution of the Sun-Being.

and:

Out there in the cosmos the physical is nowhere to be found. The physical exists only on the Earth, and it is but empty fancy and imagination to speak of anything physical in the far universe. In the universe there is the etheric and the astral.

1952 - Walther Cloos

Walther Cloos, in Chapter 16 of his book 'The Living Earth' discusses the concept of time as related to the development of Earth:

As we have seen the Earth has passed through stages of development arising from creative deeds of spiritual beings. These stages took their course in a cosmos which did not have the settled state of our present world. To enable the present order of our solar system to arise, one by one the plates and finally the Sun and Moon had to separate from the developing Earth (which included Man and the emerging kingdoms of nature).

Thus, up to the separation of the Moon, 'time' could not be reckoned in our present years since the Moon as a heavenly body was not yet incorporated in the system. Only after this event could our planetary system begin to assume its present order and rhythms including its relation to the zodiac.

Between the separation of the Moon and the attainment of the present calculable periods of revolutions, time periods approximated more and more to our present years, but they are nevertheless not be reckoned in exact years.

In this connection Rudolf Steiner repeatedly observed that vital turning points in evolution, such as when 'time' in the modern sense of calculable rhythms began, are always 'connected with certain positions of the heavenly bodies' (1911-12-31). Naturally such constellations could only occur after the Sun had separated from the Earth and begun its course through the zodiac. A predictable and exact path was however not achieved immediately after the separation of the Sun. One can say it took thousands and thousands of years (though not measured in years, since they did not exist) until day and night periods, and therewith approximate yearly rhythms, harmonised. To complete the organic process towards calculable 'time' the Moon had to separate from the Earth and start on its own orbit, exerting its influence from outside.

He makes reference to Elisabeth Vreede's 'Astronomical letters' to say that, from her calculations taking into account precession of the equinoxes, variations in the eccentricity of the Earth's orbit, obliquity of the ecliptic, etc .. she times the beginning of time (as we currently know and experience it) to the 20th millenium BC .. a point approximately in the middle of the Atlantean epoch. Some 4000 years later ie in the 16th millenium BC the ice age began.

1970 - Albert Riedel

Albert Riedel is the name for the alchemist and author known as Frater Albertus. In his work at the Paracelsus Research Society, he points at something interesting when he asks the question: "Why the year 19.717 BC and why Sagittarius at the beginning of the grand cycle?" .. and then he does not give the answer but .. gives a (hence probably relevant) full page example of a student's answer, and stresses that this question "is worthy of most thorough consideration and contemplation". One clue in the student's answer is reference to the zodiac at Dendera showing the goose at the beginning of Sagittarius, and "records left by the ancients that this sign is connected with the beginning of manifestation and the birth of time". And another student writes: 'Whereas the vernal equinox point marks the beginning of the influence of Aries in the tropical zodiac, the corresponding point in the sidereal zodiac begins the influence of Sagittarius. This correlates with Hindu astrology where the beginning of Purvashadha at 0 degrees Sagittarius was anciently the beginning of their sidereal zodiac. The vernal equinox point intersected this sidereal point in 19,717 B.C."

Now Riedel (or Frater Albertus) himself states in both his books '(The seven rays of the) QBL' (1985) and 'Men and the Cycles of the universe' (1970):

The beginning of this cycle is given at 19.717 BC. A point of utmost importance must be stressed here: time is only a man-made concept, as such it has no foundation in reality. Time, as a duration of consciousness, represents a mode of relating to passing occurences. Therefore, a date has meaning only when in conformity with accepted precepts.

and, somewhere else:

The date given here has proven itself with a great degree of accuracy in our investigations and tests.

Discussion

Note 1 - Regarding 1916-10-02-GA171 and example of electromagnetism and nature's forces

Nature's forces: Proserpina, Demeter, Rhea; Eros; Hectate (1917-11-02-GA273, 1911-08-18/19-GA129)

Steiner describes how the Greeks had a description of three Mothers .. Proserpina, Demeter and Rhea, by which they referred to the fundamental forces that worked during the previous three planetary stages of evolution (Old Saturn, Old Sun, Old Moon)

Maximilian Rebholz continues to describe:

• how these forces are of course still at work in the spiritual spheres, and how – what we currently know and denote as physical forces – are but reflections of these spiritual forces.
• how electricity is the first of three sub-material forces, that was discovered in the fifth cultural age; whereas the two others will be discovered in the sixth and seventh cultural ages

See also 1921-06-03-GA204 on Blood is a special fluid, relating how the Luciferic impulse was an electric impulse that entered Man in the blood in the Lemurian epoch.

Note 2 - Time is relative to our waking consciousness

Time is an astral experience of physical reality with waking consciousness and sensory perception with the physical senses.

For the adept who has become a master of the higher planes, it becomes possible as a spirit to 'freeze' time, or 'step outside' of time, and then re-join the current of time. There are various different techniques and states of what is meant by this.

1/ For a first example, read the quote here: Kundalini#Shelly Trimmer

2/ A second example follows below

Jef C. 2001-2

taken from forum posts 2001-2

As far back as 1975, my sponsor taught me how to 'stop the world' by degrees, or stop just a portion it. ... By that I mean removing myself and my immediate surroundings from everyday existence, step by step. ... In practice, 'stopping the world' is living between moments in time.

...

An interesting side effect of pore breathing [editor: see Bardon IIH initiation exercises], is that it can be the first step towards removing yourself from existence and re-inserting yourself again. I know that last part won't make sense to you, but that's just the way it is.

..

The method I was taught requires one to be enclosed in a room with stray energies are banned. The formula [removed] is vibrated to slow time to a stop and open the portal. When time has stopped, one levitates and crosses the threshold into nothingness where there is no time and space as we conceive it. ... On returning through the border and recrossing the threshold no time whatsoever will have elapsed. Then, the formula is reversed and all returns to normal. ...

When I speak of removing myself from and re-inserting myself into existence, my terminology is not exactly correct. What I trying to describing is my complete physical removal from time and space .. it is not simply the consciousness which leaves, but also the physical body that passes through the portal unchanged in that way.

For the profiles of both individuals, see More sources on the topic of initiation

Note 3 - Regarding physical reality as a projection

Regarding: Lemniscatory time and space#physical reality as a projection

Introduction

This is about: infinity in the physical world: the ouroboros, alpha and omega (IAO), Pi ... from which follows an understanding of light, time and space. (Indeed an amazing 'big ticket' scope.)

Though it may require rigorous study, this is an essential cornerstone for a good understanding of the spiritual worldview, centered around a picture Rudolf Steiner used on at least eight occasions (maybe more).

If one puts the seven Schemas listed next to eachother, and studies the various lectures (in full, in depth), something ought to dawn.

Such exercise is also a nice example for gaining respect for the depth of a symbol used for no less than six millenia in the ancient Mysteries, and that was part of so many different cultures of humanity that we have somewhere been part of.

Commentary

This section will

• document in a more structured way some of the information to be found on the seven schemas and some dozen of lectures referenced, and
• provide some additional comments for a guided walkthrough
• include information from Q&As on the whole.

As with many of these topics, there is a complexity in the gathering, assembling and the assimilation/integration process of all the snippets of information from various lectures, whereby one gathers insight through one's soul work.

The vision and intention is to use this as a basis for new/modern didactic materials (eg multimedia movies). The purpose is to simplify this again once one has gone through the process described above, and explain in one's own words, in a comprehensive way, using the Schemas as illustrations with a voice-over narrative .. to bring home the key points with enthusiasm as often these insights can be quite exciting.

draft section initialized - goal also to make a more didactic meta-schema as this info comes from so many different perspectives

Related pages

• Clairvoyant research of akashic records
• Worldview spiritual science
• Zodiac clock
• Spiritual hierarchies and their eigenperiods
• Spirits of rotation of time
• Cosmic fractal

References and further reading

• N.A. Kosyrev: Possibility of experimental study of the properties of time (1967)
• Christian Lazarides: Vivons-nous les commencements de l'ère des poissons ? (1990)
  • see eg p 178-179
• Kristina Strom: Further reflections on time, space and reality (Fulcrum magazine, v3n4 of 1995)
  • PDF freely downloadeable via the links in the Further reading section on Walter Russell page
• Roland Schrapp: The lemniscatory path system (parts 1 to 3): An evolution of the Copernican worldview based on statements and sketches by Rudolf Steiner on the planetary movement (2012)

• Gunther Hildebrandt: Zeiterleben und Zeitorganismus des Menschen (The experience of time and the time organism in human beings)
  • published in G. Kniebe: Was ist Zeit? Die Welt zwischen Wesen und Erscheinung (What is time? The world between being and embodiment)

.

See further references in the 'Further reading' section on: Zodiac clock