The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Thirteenth Lecture

[ 1 ] It has already been said here in these lectures that, over the course of this winter, we intend, so to speak, to gather the material—the building blocks—in the individual branch lectures, which will ultimately come together to form a deeper understanding of the nature of the human being and various other matters connected with human life and the entire development of the human being, and which will lead us ever deeper into the mysteries of the world. Today I would like to remind you of the penultimate lecture in our series and build upon it. You will recall that we spoke of a certain rhythm that exists in relation to the four members of the human being. Let us take this as our starting point today and answer the question: How can we, with such knowledge and from a deeper perspective, understand the necessity and the goal of the anthroposophical spiritual movement?

[ 2 ] Today we will have to connect two things that seem very far apart. You will recall that certain relationships exist between the “I,” the astral body, the etheric body, and the physical body of the human being. What can be said about the fourth member—the “I”—becomes, one might say, most tangibly apparent to us when we recall the two alternating states of consciousness that the “I” undergoes over the course of a twenty-four-hour period, that is, a day. We regard this single day, with its twenty-four hours—during which the “I” experiences day and night, sleep and wakefulness—as a unit in a certain sense. So when we say that what the “I” goes through in a single day corresponds to the number one, we must also say that the number which corresponds in a similar way to the rhythm of our astral body is the number seven. While the “I,” as it is today, returns to its starting point, so to speak, within twenty-four hours—within a single day—and arrives once again where it was, our astral body undergoes the same process in seven days. Let us examine this in a little more detail.

[ 3 ] Think for a moment about waking up in the morning, which consists of your rising—as one says, albeit incorrectly, in everyday life—from the darkness of unconsciousness, and of the objects of the physical-sensory world reappearing around you. You experience this in the morning, and you experience it again after twenty-four hours, barring exceptional cases, of course. This is the regular course of events, and we can say: After a day of twenty-four hours, our “I” returns to its starting point. If we examine the corresponding conditions for the astral body in the same way, we must say: If the regularity inherent in the human astral body truly manifests within it, then it returns to the same point after seven days. So while the “I” completes a cycle in one day, the astral body moves much more slowly; it completes its cycle in seven days. The etheric body, in turn, completes its cycle in four times seven days; it returns to the same point after four times seven days. And now I ask you to bear in mind what was already said the time before last: For the physical body, this does not proceed as regularly as it does for the astral body and the etheric body. However, we can also establish an approximate figure here: It completes its cycle in about ten times twenty-eight days, so that it returns to its starting point. As you know, there is a significant difference in human beings: the female etheric body has a masculine character, and conversely, the male etheric body has a feminine character. From this it will already be understandable that, in a certain respect, an irregularity in the rhythm must occur for the etheric body and the physical body. But in general, the numbers 1 : 7 : (4 x 7) : (10 x 7 x 4) are the ratios that indicate, so to speak, the “rotational speeds” for the four members of human nature. This is, of course, only a metaphor, for we are not dealing with rotations but with repetitions of the same states; these are rhythmic numbers. I already had to point out two weeks ago how phenomena of our everyday life only become understandable when we know such things that lie behind the sensory-physical world. And in a public lecture, too, I drew attention to a remarkable fact that even the most materialistic natural scientist and physician cannot deny, nor can they dismiss it as a “ghost of superstition,” because it simply exists as a fact. This is the fact that should actually prompt people to reflect: that in cases of pneumonia, a particular phenomenon occurs on the seventh day—a crisis sets in—and the patient must be helped through this seventh day. The fever suddenly subsides, and if the patient cannot be guided through this crisis, recovery may not occur under certain circumstances. This is, of course, a generally known fact, but as a rule, the starting point of the illness is not always correctly identified, and if one does not know the first day, one generally does not know the seventh day either. But the fact remains. Why, one must ask, does the fever subside on the seventh day in cases of pneumonia? Why does a particular phenomenon occur on the seventh day at all?

[ 4 ] Only those who look behind the scenes of existence—who look beyond physical and sensory phenomena into the spiritual world—know about these rhythms and, at the same time, understand what causes such phenomena—such as the symptoms of a fever. What exactly is fever? Why does fever occur? Fever is not the disease itself. On the contrary, fever is something the organism produces to fight the actual disease process. Fever is the organism’s defense against disease. There is some kind of damage present in the organism—let’s say, damage to the lungs. When a person is healthy and all their internal functions are in harmony, these functions naturally become disrupted when any organ or part of the human body experiences a disturbance. Then the entire body attempts to pull itself together and muster the forces from within that can counterbalance this isolated disturbance. So what is taking place is a revolution throughout the entire body. Otherwise, the body would not need to muster its forces, because there is no enemy for it to fight. The manifestation of this mustering of forces within the body is fever.

[ 5 ] Now, anyone who looks behind the scenes of existence knows that the various organs of the human body took shape and then developed at very different stages of human development. What is called, from the standpoint of spiritual science, the “study of the human body” is the most complex thing imaginable, for the human organism is a highly diverse entity, and its individual organs were predisposed at very different stages of development. Later, this predisposition was taken up again and further developed. Everything that is in the physical organism is an expression, a result of the higher members of the human being, so that the respective physical members always express the higher orders found in the higher members. What we today call the lungs is, in terms of its predisposition, connected to the human astral body and has a relationship to it. As for what the lungs have to do with the astral body—how the very first, original lung structure entered into human beings on the predecessor of our Earth, the ancient Moon, and how the astral body was, so to speak, “implanted” into human beings by higher spiritual beings—we will have much more to say about all of this. Today we want only to bear in mind that the lungs, too, are an expression of the astral body. The true expression of the astral body is, of course, the nervous system. But human beings are complex, and developments always proceed in parallel. With the development of the astral body and the integration of the modern nervous system, the foundation for the lungs was also laid. As a result, the lungs are already, in a certain way, integrated into the rhythm of the astral body—that rhythm which is governed by the number seven. What is known as a fever is connected to certain functions of the etheric body. Something must be happening in the etheric body when a certain course of fever is present. Fever is therefore, in some way, embedded within the rhythm of the etheric body. Every fever is embedded within this rhythm, but how? We must now make the following clear to ourselves.

[ 6 ] Since the etheric body completes its cycle in four times seven days, it moves considerably slower than the astral body, which completes its rhythm in seven days. So, when we compare the rhythmic cycle of the etheric body to that of the astral body, we can draw a parallel with the hands of a clock. Take the hour hand of a clock: it makes one full rotation, while the minute hand makes twelve full rotations in the same amount of time. That gives you a ratio of 1:12. Now imagine that you are paying attention when, at twelve o’clock noon, the hour hand is positioned over the minute hand. At that moment, the two hands align. Now the minute hand makes one full revolution. When it returns to the twelve o’clock position, it can no longer align with the hour hand, because the hour hand has since moved on to the one o’clock position. The two hands can therefore only align again after about five minutes, so that after one hour, the minute hand is not back over the hour hand, but only after one hour and a little more than five minutes. Now you have a similar relationship between the rotation of the astral body and that of the etheric body. Suppose your astral body—which is, of course, always connected to the etheric body—were in a certain state relative to the etheric body. Now the astral body begins to rotate. When, after seven days, it returns to its original state, it no longer coincides with the etheric body, for the etheric body has advanced by a quarter of its circumference over the course of those seven days. Thus, after seven days, the state of the astral body no longer coincides with the same state of the etheric body, but rather with a state that has lagged behind the original by a quarter of its circumference. Now suppose the illness in question occurs. A very specific state of the astral body is linked to a very specific state of the etheric body. At that moment, through the interaction of these two states working together, fever arises as a call to arms against the enemy. After seven days, the astral body aligns with a completely different point on the etheric body. Now, it is the case that the etheric body must not possess only the power to produce fever; for then, once it had gained momentum in producing fever, the fever would never subside. But now, after seven days, this point in the etheric body—which now coincides with that point in the astral body that caused the fever seven days earlier—has the tendency to counteract the fever, to reduce it again. So if, after seven days, the patient has recovered to the point where the disturbance has also been overcome, then all is well. If the disturbance has not been overcome—if the astral body now lacks the tendency to dispel the illness—then it encounters the unfavorable condition in which the etheric body has the tendency to alleviate the fever. The point is to pay close attention to these two superimposed points, these two points of coincidence. We could identify such points for all manner of human life phenomena. And it is precisely through these rhythms, through these inner, mysterious mechanisms, that the entire human being would become clear to us. The etheric body truly has a tendency that expresses itself in four times seven. In the case of other disease symptoms, you can again observe how the fourteenth day, in particular, is of special importance—that is, two times seven. We can even specify how, in certain cases, the paroxysm must be particularly severe after four times seven. And the point is this: if the condition then subsides, there is hope for a cure under all circumstances. All these things are connected with rhythms—specifically, those rhythms we touched upon three weeks ago and which we have now brought more clearly before our minds. It is through such things—which may seem difficult but can nevertheless be grasped—that we begin to penetrate just a little way beneath the surface of the physical-sensory world. This must go deeper and deeper. Now let us ask ourselves about the origins of such rhythms.

[ 7 ] The origins of such rhythms, in turn, lie in the great cosmic relationships. We have, after all, pointed out time and again how precisely what we call the four human members—the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, and the I—have undergone an evolution through Saturn, Sun, Moon, and Earth existence. If we look back at our ancient Moon, we find that even this ancient Moon had become detached from the Sun for a certain period of time. At that time, however, a large part of what is now the Moon was connected to the Earth. But there was a Sun out there, and when such celestial bodies belong together, their forces—which are, after all, merely the expression of their beings—always influence the regularity of life among their beings. The orbital period of a planet around its sun or of a satellite around its planet is by no means random or unrelated to life; rather, it is governed by those entities we have come to know in the hierarchies of spirits. We have seen, after all, that it is by no means the case that celestial bodies orbit as if of their own accord through mere inanimate forces. We have previously pointed out how grotesquely today’s physicists illustrate the Kant-Laplace theory using the experiment with the drop of fat: a cardboard disc is placed in the direction of the equator through the floating drop of fat, and a needle is inserted from above; the whole assembly is then rotated; small droplets then split off from the large droplet and rotate along with it. The experimenter thus demonstrates how a planetary system on a small scale comes into being, and from this the physicist generally concludes that the planetary system on a large scale must have arisen in the same way. What is otherwise good to forget—namely, oneself—is not good here. For the good man usually forgets in the process that the small planetary system could not come into being if he did not turn the crank. One may certainly conduct such experiments—they are very useful—but one must not forget the most important thing in the process. How many people suffer from such suggestions! They do not consider that “Professor So-and-so” is the one who set this up. Out there, it is not a gigantic “Professor,” but rather the hierarchies of spiritual beings who regulate the movements of the celestial bodies—who actually bring about the entire arrangement of matter in the cosmos—so that the individual celestial bodies revolve around one another. And if we could go into this—the time will come for that as well—we would recognize in the movements of the celestial bodies, which form a coherent system, the rhythm of our own human limbs. For now, we need only point out one thing.

[ 8 ] Modern people, with their materialistic way of thinking, laugh at the idea that certain aspects of human life in earlier times were linked to the phases of the moon. Yet it is precisely in the moon that the cosmic relationship between the astral body and the etheric body is reflected in a wondrous way. The moon completes its cycle in four times seven days. These are the states of the etheric body, and the four times seven states of the etheric body are reflected very precisely in the four phases of the moon. It is by no means nonsense to seek the connection in what we previously characterized as a feverish state precisely in the phases of the moon. Consider that, in fact, after seven days, a different lunar phase corresponds to a different phase of the etheric body, and that the astral body falls into a different phase of the etheric body. In fact, this relationship between the human astral body and the etheric body was originally governed by those spiritual beings causing the Moon to orbit the Earth in a corresponding manner. And you can infer how these things are connected in a certain way from the fact that even modern medicine still takes into account an ancient remnant that has remained to it from rhythmic knowledge. Because the rhythm of the physical body amounts to 10×28, and the physical body returns, so to speak, to the same point where it was before after 10×28 days, there are approximately 10×28 days—ten sidereal months—between the conception of a human being and their birth. All these things are connected with the regulation of the great cosmic relationships. As a microcosm, the human being is a faithful mirror of the great cosmic order; he is formed from this great cosmic order.

[ 9 ] Today we want to focus on the middle of the Atlantean epoch in the course of Earth’s evolution. This was a very important point in Earth’s development. We distinguish three previous races in human evolution: the first, the Polar race; the second, the Hyperborean race; and the third, the Lemurian race. Then comes the Atlantean race. We are now in the fifth race, and two more races will follow us, so that the Atlantean period lies exactly in the middle. The middle of the Atlantean era is the most important point in Earth’s evolution. If we were to go back to a time before that, we would find there, too, in the conditions of outer human life, an exact reflection of cosmic conditions. Back then, it would have been very detrimental to human beings if they had done what they do today. Today, human beings no longer orient themselves very much toward cosmic conditions. In our cities, life often has to be organized in such a way that people stay awake where they should otherwise be sleeping, and sleep where they should be awake. If something similar to staying awake at night and sleeping during the day had already occurred during the Lemurian epoch—if people had paid so little attention to which external phenomena correspond to certain inner processes—then they would not have been able to survive at all. Of course, something like that was not possible back then, because it was entirely natural for people to align their inner rhythms with the outer rhythms. People back then lived, so to speak, in accordance with the cycles of the sun and moon; they had precisely attuned the rhythms of their astral and etheric bodies to the cycles of the sun and moon.

[ 10 ] Let’s take the clock as an example again. In a certain sense, it is also aligned with the grand cycle of the universe. When the hour hand aligns with the minute hand at twelve o’clock, this is because a certain constellation of the sun and stars is present. That is how the clock is set, and a clock runs poorly if, on another day, it fails to bring those two hands back into alignment as soon as the same celestial alignment occurs again. From the observatory at Enckeplatz, Berlin’s clocks are regulated daily via an electrical connection. We can therefore say: the movements, the rhythms of the clock hands, correspond to—and are even adjusted daily in accordance with—the rhythm of the cosmos. Our clock runs correctly when it corresponds to the standard clock, which in turn corresponds to the cosmos. In fact, in ancient times, human beings really had no need for a clock; for they themselves were a clock. The course of their lives—which they could sense quite clearly—was entirely governed by cosmic conditions. Human beings were truly clocks. And if they had not aligned themselves with cosmic conditions, then exactly the same thing would have happened to them as happens today to a clock when its rate does not correspond to external conditions: it would simply run poorly, and human beings would have fared poorly as well. The inner rhythm had to correspond to the outer one. This is precisely the essence of human progress on Earth: that since the middle of the Atlantean epoch, this absolute correspondence between external conditions and inner ones has no longer been the case. Something else has taken its place. Just imagine if someone had the odd habit of not being able to stand it when the hands of his watch align at twelve o’clock noon. Let’s assume he would set it so that it would then read three o’clock. When other people have one o’clock, he would have four; at two o’clock, he would have five, and so on. But this would not change the inner mechanism of his watch; it would merely be shifted relative to external conditions. After twenty-four hours, it will be three o’clock again for him; his watch will therefore not coincide with cosmic conditions in its progress, but its rhythm will nevertheless correspond to them internally, for things have merely been shifted. In the same way, human rhythm has been shifted. Human beings would never have become independent beings if all their activity had been bound by the constraints of cosmic conditions. It is precisely by breaking free from the external rhythm while retaining their inner rhythm that they have gained their freedom. They have become like a clock that no longer coincides with cosmic events at their key junctures, yet is internally in harmony with them. Thus, in ancient times of the distant past, a human being could only be conceived under a very specific constellation and born ten lunar months later. This coincidence of conception with a cosmic relationship ceased to exist, but the rhythm remained, just as the rhythm of a clock remains even if one sets it to three o’clock at noon. However, it is not only the conditions for human beings that have shifted in this way; the times themselves have also shifted in turn. If we set aside this latter cosmic shift, something quite special has occurred inwardly for human beings as a result: they have, so to speak, detached themselves from cosmic conditions, so that they are no longer a “clock” in the true sense of the word. It has been much the same for humanity as it would be for a person who sets their watch three hours ahead, but then no longer remembers by how much they have set it forward, and now can no longer find their bearings. In the same way, humanity fared in the course of Earth’s evolution once it had stepped out of the relationship in which it stood as a “clock” to the cosmos. As a result, for certain things, it did indeed throw its astral body into disarray. The more human living conditions were oriented toward the physical, the more the old rhythm was maintained; but the more conditions turned toward the spiritual, the more disorder was introduced into them. I would like to clarify this from another perspective as well.

[ 11 ] We are not only familiar with human beings, but we also know of beings who are superior to the human beings of today’s Earth. We know the Sons of Life, or the angels, and we know that they underwent their human stages on the ancient Moon. We know the fire spirits, or archangels, who passed through their human stages on the Earth’s ancient solar phase, and furthermore, we know the primordial forces that passed through their human stage on ancient Saturn. These beings have gone ahead of humankind in cosmic evolution. If we were to study them today, we would find that they are far more spiritual beings than humankind. They therefore also live in higher worlds. But they are in a completely different situation than human beings, particularly with regard to what we have discussed today. In spiritual matters, they align themselves entirely with the rhythm of the cosmos. An angel would not think as haphazardly as a human being, for the simple reason that the course of its thoughts is governed by the cosmic powers and it aligns itself accordingly. It is utterly impossible for a being such as an angel not to think in harmony with the great spiritual, cosmic processes. Within the harmony of the worlds, the laws of logic are inscribed for the angels. They have no need for textbooks. Human beings need textbooks because they have thrown their inner thought processes into disarray. He no longer recognizes how to align himself with the great cosmic order. These angels know the course of the cosmos, and their thought processes correspond to its orderly rhythm. When human beings first set foot on Earth in their present form, they fell out of this rhythm—hence the disorder in their thinking, their perceptions, and their emotional life. While regularity continues to prevail in the realms over which human beings have even less influence—the astral and etheric bodies—chaos, irregularity, and a lack of rhythm have crept into the realms they have taken control of: the soul of feeling, the soul of understanding, and the soul of consciousness. The fact that people in our large cities turn night into day is the least of it. Far more significant is that, inwardly, in the course of their thoughts, people have torn themselves away from the great rhythm of the world. The way people think every hour, every moment—all of this, in a certain sense, contradicts the great course of the world.

[ 12 ] But don’t think that all this is being said to advocate a worldview intended to bring people back into such a rhythm. Humanity had to break away from the old rhythm; that is, after all, the basis of progress. When certain prophets go around today preaching a “return to nature,” they simply want to turn back the clock on life rather than move it forward. All that amateurish talk of a return to nature shows a complete lack of understanding of true evolution. When a movement today instructs people to consume certain foods only at specific times of the year—arguing that nature itself indicates this by the fact that foods grow only at particular times—this amounts to nothing more than abstract, amateurish talk. Development consists precisely in humanity becoming increasingly independent of the external rhythm. Yet one must not lose one’s footing in the process. True human progress and salvation do not lie in returning to the old rhythm, in asking oneself: How do I live in harmony with the four phases of the moon? For in ancient times, it was necessary for human beings to be like a seal impression of the cosmos. But it is also essential that human beings not believe they can live without rhythm. Just as he has internalized the external, so must he rebuild himself rhythmically from within. That is what matters. Rhythm must permeate the inner being. Just as rhythm has structured the cosmos, so must humanity—if it wishes to participate in the building of a new cosmos—permeate itself once more with a new rhythm. Our age is characterized precisely by the fact that it has lost the old rhythm—the external one—and has not yet gained a new inner rhythm. Humanity has outgrown nature—if we call the external expression of the spirit “nature”—and has not yet grown into the spirit itself. Today, humanity is still floundering back and forth between nature and spirit. This is precisely what characterizes our time. It was precisely this wavering back and forth between nature and spirit that reached a climax in the second third of the 19th century. That is why, around that time, the beings who recognize and interpret the signs of the times had to ask themselves: What must be done to prevent humanity from falling out of all rhythm, so that an inner rhythm may take root within humanity?

[ 13 ] Everything you can observe today as characteristic of intellectual life is disorder. Wherever you see a product of the intellect today, the first thing that must strike you is the disorder, the inner irregularity. This is the case in almost all fields. Only those fields that still have good old traditions retain some of the old regularity. In the new fields, people must first create a new regularity. That is why people today see the fact, just as the fever subsides on the seventh day of pneumonia. The explanation for this, however, is pure chaos of thought. When people reflect on it—since they do not think in a regular manner—they haphazardly pile up a hodgepodge of thoughts around the fact. All our sciences take an external fact from the world and stir up a jumble of thoughts around it, all without inner regularity, because people wander about as if in an abyss of the world of thought. Today, people have no inner lines of thought, no inner rhythm of thought, and humanity would fall completely into decadence if it did not adopt an inner rhythm. Consider spiritual science from this perspective.

[ 14 ] You can see what path you’re embarking on when you begin to study spiritual science. At first you hear—and gradually come to understand—that the human being consists, in its essence, of four members: the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, and the “I.” And then you learn how work proceeds from the “I,” how the astral body is transformed into Manas, or the spiritual self; how the etheric body is transformed into Budhi, or the life spirit; and how the physical human being, in his very principle, is transformed into the spiritual human being, or Atma. Now think for a moment about how much we have, so to speak, considered through this basic formula of our spiritual science. Think of the many topics that were fundamental themes—how we had to build our entire structure of thought time and again by starting from this basic schema: physical body, etheric body, astral body, and “I.” You know that in certain public lectures, some people may even grow weary when these basic facts have to be repeated over and over. But this is and remains a reliable thread on which to string our thoughts: these four members of human nature, their interaction, and then, in a higher sense, the transformation of the lower three members—the third into the fifth, the second into the sixth, and the first into the seventh member of our being. Now take all the members of human nature as we know them: physical body, etheric body, astral body, ego, spiritual self, life spirit, spiritual human—that makes seven. And take what underlies them—namely, the physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego—and you have four. And in your thoughts, you repeat the great rhythm of 7:4, of 4:7, as you contemplate these trains of thought. You bring forth from within yourself the great outer rhythm once more. You repeat the rhythm that once existed on a grand scale in the cosmic world; you give birth to it anew. You are thus laying out the plan, the foundation for your system of thought, just as the gods once laid out the plan for the wisdom of the world. Out of the chaos of the life of thought, a cosmos of thought develops from within the soul when we allow what we have just described—the inner rhythm of the number—to come alive within us once more. Human beings have freed themselves from the external rhythm. Through what is, in the true sense, spiritual science, we return once more to the rhythm; from within, we build for ourselves a world structure that carries this rhythm within it. And when we turn our attention to the cosmos and look at Earth’s past—at Saturn, the Sun, the Moon, and Earth—we find a fourfold structure, followed by the Moon in spiritualized form as Jupiter in the fifth stage, the Sun as Venus in the sixth stage, and the ancient Saturn in the seventh, the volcanic stage. Thus, in Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus, and the volcanic stage, we have the number seven representing our evolutionary phases. Our physical body, as it is today, has developed through the number four—through Saturn, Sun, Moon, and Earth. It will gradually be completely transformed and spiritualized in the future. So that here, too, when we look toward the past, we have the number four before us, and toward the future, the number three: here, too, 4:3—or, if we consider the past in conjunction with the entire process of development, 4:7.

[ 15 ] We are, after all, only at the beginning of our work in the spiritual sciences, even though we have been engaged in it for years. It was only today that attention could be drawn to what people meant when they referred to the “inner number” that underlies all phenomena. Thus we see how human beings, in order to win their freedom, had to break away from the original rhythm. But they must find within themselves once again the laws to regulate the “clock,” that is, their astral body. And the great regulator is spiritual science, because it is in harmony with the great laws of the cosmos that the seer perceives. With regard to the great numerical ratios, the future—as created by humankind—will reveal the same patterns as the cosmos did in the past, only on a higher plane. Therefore, humankind must give birth to the future from within itself—from the number—just as the gods formed the cosmos from the number.

[ 16 ] This is how we come to understand how spiritual science is connected to the great course of the world. When it becomes clear to us what lies behind human beings in the spiritual world—the number four and the number seven—then we understand why we must also find in this spiritual world the impulse to carry forward what we know as the entire course of human development up to this point. And we understand why, precisely in an age when human beings have fallen deepest into inner chaos with their inner lives of thought, feeling, and will, why it was precisely then that those individuals charged with interpreting the signs of the times had to point to a wisdom that enables human beings to build up their soul life in an orderly manner from within. We learn to think rhythmically within ourselves, as is necessary for the future, when we think in the way these fundamental conditions dictate. And human beings will increasingly take on that from which they were born. For the time being, they take from it what must be regarded as the fundamental blueprint of the cosmos. They will go further and will feel permeated by certain fundamental forces and, ultimately, by fundamental beings.

[ 17 ] All of this stands today at its starting point. And we sense the importance and global significance of the anthroposophical mission when we do not view it as an arbitrary act of this or that individual, but when we set out to understand it from the very inner workings of our being. Then we can come to say to ourselves: It is not up to us at all to accept or reject this anthroposophical mission; rather, if we want to understand our time, we must recognize and let ourselves be permeated by what underlies anthroposophy—namely, the thoughts of the divine-spiritual world. And then we must let it flow out from us into the world, so that our actions and our being may become not a chaos but a cosmos, just as it was a cosmos from which we were born.