01.007 Rhythms in the nature of humans

Rudolf Steiner
Geisteswissenschaftliche Menschenkunde (Spirit-scientific study of humans), 1909
Pages 199-201 Rhythms in the nature of humans

You see, into what fairway you enter when you start to be up to spirit science. There you hear first – and gradually realize -: Man consists in his entity of four members, physical body, ether body, astral body and I. And then you hear how working from the I is done, how the astral body is reworked to Manas or spirit self, how the ether body is reworked to Budhi or life spirit and how the physical man in his principle is reworked to the spirit man or Atma. Now think about how much we really have looked at so to speak with this basic formula of our spirit science. Think of the many subjects which actually were basic subjects, how we again and again had to build up our thought building by starting out from this basic scheme: physical body, ether body, astral body, I. You know that it can even come to fatigue with individuals at certain public lectures when these basic facts have to be repeated again and again. But that is and remains a sure thread with which we list our thoughts: these four members of the nature of man, the cooperation of them, and then in the higher meaning again the reworking of the lower three members, the third member into the fifth, the second into the sixth and the first member into the seventh member of our entity. Now take the whole members of the nature of man, as we know it: Physical body, ether body, astral body, I, spirit self, life spirit, spirit man, then we have seven. And take that on what it is based, namely physical body, ether body, astral body and I, then you have four. And in your thoughts you repeat the great rhythm of 7:4, of 4:7, by looking at these trains of thought. You again produce the outer great rhythm out of yourself. You repeat the rhythm, which once was in the world cosmos in the Great; you again give birth to it. You therefore lay there the plan, the base to your thought system, as once the gods have laid the plan to wisdom of the world. Out of the chaos of the thought life develops from the inside of the soul a thought cosmos when we again let that, what we just have quoted, the inner rhythm of the number, become alive in us. Men have released themselves from the outer rhythm. Through that what is spirit science in the true meaning, we again return to rhythm; out from the inside we build up a world building for us which bears the rhythm inside of it. And when we go over to the cosmos and look upon the past of the Earth, on Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, then we have a fourfold, then the Moon in spiritualized form in the fifth level as Jupiter, the Sun in the sixth level as Venus and the old Saturn in the seventh, the Volcano level. So we have in Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus, Volcano the seven-number of our evolution phases. Our physical body, as it is today, has developed through the four-number, through Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth. It will gradually be completely transformed and spiritualized in future. So that we also here, when we look towards the past, have the four-number, towards the future the three-number in front of us: also here 4:3 or when we bring the past with the whole development together, 4:7.

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