George Adams
The contemplation of infinite universal space the starry Heavens is one of the few mystical, transcendental, ultimate intuitional experiences which scientific materialism has not been able to destroy in the human soul. On a clear night when looking out into the open sky, even the least thoughtful man will at some time in his life become philosopher, even the most earthly-minded grow religious. Hence the interpretation given to the celestial Universe by the prevailing culture of the age - theological as in the Middle Ages or would-be scientific as in modern time - is of untold importance. For it attaches itself to one of the deepest and most intimate sources of man's inner life.
A new experience of the great World is coming to mankind today - an experience at once scientific and religious, of deep significance for individual and social life. In every age, the good in human life depends on how man feels himself to be placed in the great Universe. Long, long ago he was aware of manifold Divine-spiritual forces in the surrounding world, weaving in and out of his own life. In later monotheist times there was a more stern and silent feeling of the Divine immanence. During the last few centuries this in turn gave way to a sense of cosmic isolation. Man was cast back upon his own resources. What had once been an element of daily thought and speech, explicit belief and observance - the feeling of himself as a spiritual being, beholden to the Divine Universal spirit, - grew more implicit now. It was retained in the moral bearing of many of those for whom the old beliefs had largely faded. It lived on still, in this indirect way, in many an avowed sceptic and agnostic, though even in this form it has been tending to pass away.
In our century, however, a new awakening to the spirituality of of the Universe and of his own relation to it is coming near to man.
All that mankind is undergoing contributes to this change; the social upheavals, the shocks of war, the new relation between East and West, the very disillusionments, searing away the all too confident rationalism of the 18th and 19th centuries - all of these will play their part. There is no aspect of the history of our time which is not relevant to the impending change.
One of the greatest realms of influence in which the change is being wrought is that of Science, and it is with this that the present article will deal.
I shall be writing about the scientific approaches to an experience that is of more than scientific import. Some of these learned approaches will no doubt melt away as the direct experience. Like scaffolding, needed for the erection of the Temple, they will be dismantled and forgotten when it is completed.
Yet even those who in their deepest intuitions are perhaps beyond the seed of these ways of access should, out of sympathy with the spirit of the time, respect them.
Science is the outcome of man's active and disinterested approach to the material, sense-perceptible world. If Western humanity had not brought with it into the age of materialism the spiritual gift of thought, the edifice of modern Science with all its technical applications would not have been possible. But in the process, thought itself undergoes a change. Fresh impulses and forces are awakened in the soul; the questions are intensified. The time has now come when from the depths of man's thinking life a new and more intimate relation to the underlying spiritual reality of the World will be evoked. During the period from the 17th to the end of the 19th century, the vigorous application of man's reasoning powers to the elucidation of the sense-world was sustained, consciously or unconsciously, by a religious force inherited from the preceding two to three thousand years of monotheism, in its Judaic and in its exoteric Christian forms. In the 20th century this heritage has faded. Today is needed a renewal of the bond - religious in the literal meaning of the word - between the conscious human spirit and the Divine-spiritual in the great universe.
Along a number of convergent lines Science itself is today tending towards an essential change, lifting out of its too rigid bearings the Newtonian world-picture of recent centuries. Among the factors working in this way, three may be mentioned. First are the changes that have come about, less by speculation than by the experimental discoveries of physics, in our conception of matter and of the matter-moving forces. Second is the deepened understanding of Space itself through progress in pure Geometry. Third is the far more versatile and much enriched idea which we are gaining of the principles of form and structure of what is often referred to now as Gestalt, or of what Goethe called Bildung und Umbildung, the forming and metamorphosis of forms. This deepened experience of form comes from at least two directions - from the vast range of biological discovery, notably in the field of Embryology, and, once again, from the development of pure Geometry and other branches of Mathematics.
Space, Time and Matter: these three fundamental concepts were essential to the Newtonian world-picture. Infinite three-dimensional space was peopled, so to speak, with material entities - vast as the heavenly bodies, infinitesimal as the imagined atom - in size and shape self-contained and of finite volume, each with its own gravitational and dynamic centre. Through sundry forces they reacted on themselves and one-another, moving in space, undergoing change in time. With an instinctive materialism, the scientific thinkers of the last few centuries attributed to such entities, whether large or. small, seen or unseen, movements and impacts, attractions and repulsions analogous to those observed among tangible earthly objects, ready to hand and commensurate with man. The modern form of atomism was the outcome.
In the last fifty years the atomic theories have experienced many triumphs - a Pyrrhic victory however, for in the process the supposed atomic world has lost the mechanical and common-sense attributes assigned to it when first conceived by an instinctively realistic and sensual way of thinking. In fact the progress of atomic and electronic physics since Rudolf Steiner's death has justified what he was saying as a young man in the 1880's, in his introductions to Geothe's scientific writings: that it is philosophically unsound to attribute sensory qualities to entities which in the nature of the case cannot become objects of sense-perception. The 'particles' of modern Physics no longer admit of being pictured on the analogy of minute sense-perceptible objects behaving in a 'sensible' way.
This fundamental change in the accepted foundations of Science is only masked inasmuch as work-a-day scientists still find it convenient to retain the mental fiction of tangible electrons, protons, etc., conceived as quasi-sensible objects. Still more is it masked in the public mind, for in the popular presentation of the more recent discoveries the naively realistic character of the atomic entities is upheld, often - it must be admitted - more than is consistent with intellectual sincerity and truth.
Within its given limits, the world-picture of Newton and Laplace, Lavoisier and Dalton, howsoever materialistic, was intelligible and satisfying. At the infinitude of space and time the scientist would pause and go no farther. Here was the common frontier of Science with realms of metaphysics and mystical divination - a frontier agreed and respected. Nay, the existence of this frontier might even enhance the intellectual and moral satisfaction which thoughtful men derived from the classical world-picture of scientific materialism, with its Space and Time and Matter.
But this is of the past. The scientist today has penetrated farther into the Universe of stars, deeper into the mysterious interior of matter, 'un-earthing, in the literal sense of the word, the abysmal powers that lie hidden there. And he is at a loss. What he finds in stars and atoms is no longer matter in any realistic sense of the word; it is a pure nexus of relations, an intellectual shadow of spiritual thoughts and deeds which as yet elude him. Meanwhile in its outward form, the reality belonging to this shadow impinges on him all the time - often the more painfully for his discoveries.
With these thought-shadows he cannot bring forth what is given here - cannot still his hunger, nor even weave the Earth about with electric currents. Something existing independently of all his intellectual conceits must still provide the carbon and the water, the oxygen and sunlight to build his food; the copper and the dielectrics for his apparatus; even the uranium and the hydrogen for his atom-bombs.
Thinner and thinner grow the intellectual abstractions of scientific theory; more and more potent for good or ill the material and sub-material powers which it exposes.
The outcome of all this is that without abandoning the sceptical and undogmatic frame of mind which it professes, Science today is ready for a deep philosophic change. And there is also a more specific outcome.
Most of our scientific analysis is an ascertainment of forms - not only forms at rest but forms of movement in Space and Time, forms of dynamic action, forms also of relation pure and simple.
In the Newtonian era the ideas of form were dominated by Euclidean Geometry, and by the instinctive realism which attributed reality to self-contained, point-centred bodies and therefore gave preference to forms which might be capable of being filled with matter. Recent developments should free the scientific mind from this bias. Whatever forms in Space and Time or even purely algebraic forms of relation -can be co-ordinated with the facts, are today 'scientific' if they fulfil this purpose better than others do.
The scientific lessons of the last two generations have made the scientific mind more open; at least they can have done so. The limiting conventions of 19th century materialism are no longer binding.
Discovery of the Ethereal
Discoveries of recent times in other realms notably in pure Geometry and the morphology of living forms can come to meet this situation in a positive and fruitful way. While the developments of modern Physics (including Astrophysics) tend to make the scientific prospect of our time an uncharted sea, a realm of boundless possibilities wherein one scarcely knows which way to turn, the new Geometry contains at least one fundamental notion in which lies hidden the seed of a clear world-outlook. This is the notion of polarity in spatial structure - not in the limited external sense, the point-to-point polarities of matter as in the bar-magnet or the positive and negative electric poles, but in a deeper and subtler meaning of the term. The Goethean experience of polarity in this deeper and more universal sense is re-born in the thought-forms of the new Geometry, raising it on to a scientific level which was not yet possible in Goethe's time.
The era of Galileo and Newton tended to blind men to an aspect of Nature and human experience which is in truth as elemental and natural as is the realm of heavy, point-centred bodies on which the Newtonian svstem was built. It is the aspect of the vast expanse of the expanding, buoyant and uplifting forces which pervade the World. The day is near at hand when it will be scientific commonplace that the one is not possible without the other, any more than outbreathing without inbreathing or systole without diastole.
For the Newtonian cosmology, the vast distances of the spatial Universe were, to begin with, mere empty space. Space in its limitless expansion was the mere containe - as in the packing-case without sides or top or bottom. Material objects, howsoever loosely packed, were the real contents of the spatial hamper.
That in the vast expanse as such there is something active - that there are influences streaming inward from the celestial periphery towards each living centre and not only the other way did not occur to the materialistic imagination. (The latter speaks of cosmic influences only when they come from other point-centred bodies, however far away from Sun or stars, or from some cosmic dust pervading the interstellar spaces.)
Yet the existence of these forces from the vast expanse is not foreign to man's elemental feeling. Intuitively every one of us who breathes more deeply when going out under the starlit sky, or from a hilltop looking out over a wide horizon to the sunset, is aware of these expansive forces.
But the instinctive bias of attention in Western civilisation during the last five hundred years, has been the other way. It was as though the spirit of the time diverted man's thinking from the ethereal vast and made him rather concentrate his personality by an enhanced attention to the solidity and weight of earthly things.
A glance at the decorative arts of the 17th and 18th centuries the ponderous furniture, the strange overload of ornament, the preference for spherical and heavy forms - confirms this, the more so when contrasted with the delicate aspiring forms of Gothic architecture.
Such was the trend of man's spatial feeling during the time when the Newtonian cosmology was taking shape. That time is at an end, and, incidentally, there are features in modern art - in sculpture and in plastic treatment - which bear witness to it. The spirit of mankind is ready now to re-awaken to the ethereal reality which pervades the World. It needs only a clear scientific way of access; man of today would lose the ground beneath his feet if he could not take with him into each new phase of his experience the scientific clarity which he has gained. I have described in other writings* the part which modern Geometry is destined to play in this transformation, and will but briefly recapitulate one or two essential features. During the 19th century it was discovered that the ideal structure of space is, as it were, self-polar; that in this structure the infinite expanse, in other words the plane, plays an equivalent part to the infinite contraction, the point.
Thus it is wrong or at least arbitrary - to conceive space as though the point alone were the ultimate entity from which all spatial dimensions must take their start. Space is formed inward as well as outward; it is a balance of expansive and contractive principles of formation.
From this discovery in pure thought it is but a further step to the perception that in the real Universe there are potent forces, the spatial character of which is peripheral or planar, in polar antithesis to the centric (gravitational, electro-magnetic) forces of earthly matter. The way is thus open to the re-discovery of the 'ethereal; and then the simple phenomena of Nature show that receptivity to the ethereal is the essential characteristic of Life. An open vista here confronts the scientific mind, which for the last hundred vears has had to wander through a tangled undergrowth of argument and counter-argument, often fruitless, as between mechanist and vitalist interpretations.
In the present essay I will not enlarge on this again, but will sum up by saying that the inherent polarity of space, seen to begin with in pure thought, will from now onward be discerned also in the real phenomena of Nature and in the motive forces which pervade the ever-changing scene.
This is a scientific step for which the time is ripe. It coincides with other interesting features in the psychological development and in the spiritual interests of modern man.
During the last hundred years, for example, there has been a newly awakened interest in man's latent powers of supersensible cognition, and in the 'supernormal' phenomena which became the subject-matter of 'psychical research'. Many of the so-called 'physical phenomena' of this domain will cease to appear miraculous or contrary to Nature when the dynamic and geometrical structure of the ethereal forces becomes known. It is convenient in this connection to use a technical term, the scientific meaning of which becomes obvious once the reality of the ethereal forces is recognized. Out of the universal field of the ethereal - in other words, peripheral-forces - a single living entity gathers to itself, focussed in its own physical existence, a certain portion, more or less complex, more or less potent according to its kind.
This, while remaining in connection with the universal field, is relatively self-contained and lasting during the period of the creature's life. It can therefore be called the 'ethereal or vital body' of the creature - a term which need no longer be taken merely as an item of doctrine, theosophical or anthroposophical, for it has ascertainable scientific meaning in the present context. ('Body' implies self-containedness, without separation from the wider field from which the body derives its sub-stance. The present use of the term is indeed not unlike the use of the word 'body' in other fields of Science, as for example in the Theory of Numbers.)
In this sense, therefore, man himself has an 'ethereal body,' and it will now be seen that at least some of the physical phenomena of psychical research are due to a diversion from its normal functions of a portion of the ethereal body of the medium or other human agent.
The levitational phenomena are brought about by a displacement - often achieved at the expense of normal vigour in mind and body-of ethereal forces, in spatial and dynamic action polar-opposite to gravity, which in normal bodily life and volition we are constantly applying to the movement of our own body. The seemingly magical character of these phenomena is found to have its true home in the normal and healthy life of every man, and, indeed, in varying degrees, of every living creature.
Yet more important than this: the discovery of the ethereal in surrounding Nature is coming at a time when in their ethical and aesthetic ideals human beings are intuitively seeking to develop the more imaginative faculties of the soul. In the West, and no longer only in the East, methods of meditation are being looked for, whereby those powers of the mind will be awakened which can experience the active life of thought even when unsupported by the material stimulus of sense-perception.
To describe what this modern phase of spiritual endeavour signifies in relation to Natural Science, a slight digression is necessary, explaining the terminology which cannot be avoided if one desires to speak of these things in a natural and simple way.* In polar contrast to the centric realm of weight and matter, the ethereal, expansive forces may be described as a 'domain of universal light' - light in the double signification of light and lightness. Present-day physical definitions bring in a difficulty here, but it can be surmounted.
Just as the word lightness' or levity in this connection does not mean merely a relatively small weight but the very opposite of weight-a force of positive buoyancy, planar and not centric in character, the qualitative opposite of gravity so the word 'light' refers not to electro-magnetic vibrations but to a primal activity of quite another nature, peripheral in origin, of which these vibrations are in some sense a reflection, a kind of resonance, evoked in the Euclidean and centric realm. The relation is not yet fully understood, but the phenomena of life and the ideas of modern geometry make it increasingly clear that there is this primal realm of light,' which was intuitively known to Goethe and of which occult traditions have always told*.
In all conscious life the soul lives in this ethereal element of universal 'light.' External sense-perception is awakened where this light is thrown back by the darkness of matter. In the materialistic consciousness man is not aware of the light directly, but only of this reflection. Yet even here, thought is ethereal in origin and nature.
Intensified by meditative practice, the life of thought awakens in its own primal element. Applied to material phenomena alone, it is held spellbound by its own shadow, stung toawareness by impingement on what is different from itself. Thought, conscious only in the immediate wake of sense-perception, is like the wave that breaks when dashed against the shore, shining as foam in the moment of its destruction.
Man is about to awaken to the ethereal light that pervades the lice af surrounding. Seture: the very progress at external Science
inner life, he feels impelled to evoke what is deeper than the splash and spray of ever-changing, passively received impressions; to go down into the silence where from the depths of his inner nature the yet unexhausted source of universal life, which conveyed him as a Ittle child 'out of the everywhere into here', springs into conscious realization.
Polarity of Earth and Heaven
Let us now try to imagine what will be man's cosmic outlook when the things here foreto - which, once again, lie near at hand - have been achieved. A liberation will be experienced, comparable to what was felt at the beginning of the Copernican era. The Copernican world-outlook enhanced man's consciousness of self in admiration of the vastness of surrounding worlds, setting him free as it were by separation from the world. That which will now ensue will be, on the contrary, a liberation from this loneliness, and from the sense of meaninglessness in face of an indifferent Universe. Man who awakens to the ethereal inpouring, as it flows inward to the Earth from the surrounding Heavens, will recognize in this fount of life what is akin to his own inmost origin and being.
For a long time to come he will still say 'I' to what finds expression in his earthly body. Yet he will now begin to know that this is partly Maya: that the true 'I' is not only here, where the body is, but is at one with the ethereal life of the Universe. The feeling of 'I' is in a way turned inside out - to use a mathematical expression, polar-reciprocated - in passing from the physical to the ethereal experience of the world. For in the latter the 'I' is outpoured over all the world. This is the well-known early stage in mystical experience, of which a modicum is given to all truly religious natures. The feeling of at-one-ment with the world is due to a momentary liberation of the ethereal body from the physical, to which in the normal conditions of our time it is closely bound.
We are here touching on a transmutation which will take long historic times for its completion and will also not be free from pains and perils. Yet even the now dawning scientific recognition of the ethereal in the spatial Universe will bring to modern man, however bound to the earthly body he must still remain, a new feeling of oneness with the Universe around him. In ancient and medieval times man's knowledge of the world was regional or local. At the beginning of modern times this was changed to an Earth-consciousness - an awareness of the entire globe. So will it now be changed from an Earth-consciousness to a consciousness of the Cosmos.
The modern interest in cosmology is an indication of this. How many people are reading learned books about cosmic radiations, distant galaxies and an expanding Universe, the scientific arguments for which they are scarcely able to understand, however popularly stated? Yet in so far as the thought-pictures are material and earthly - which for the most part they still are in the orthodox astronomical speculations - the consciousness they evoke is still an earthly one.
The difference lies not in the scale of magnitude but in the quality of the experience. A truly cosmic experience, not dependent on scientific technicalities but more immediate and naive, springing from everyday perception of surrounding Nature, will be the outcome when the vast periphery of the Heavens is recognized as the ethereal ocean whence spiritual gifts of life pour inward to the Earth.
It is not merely by gazing out into the Heavens, even with the aid of telescope and spectroscope, that we awaken to the celestial realities.
It is by contemplation of the living creatures which surround us upon Earth, every one of which is like a focus of ethereal and universal life in its own kind, in form and metamorphosis and habit bearing the signature of the peripheral forces with which it is endowed.
It is a fundamental and purely human experience; the scientific hindrances only need to be removed for it to become accessible to all human beings of finer feeling. Without falling back on doctrinal language - without departing from the simple data of experience - we can describe what is felt when the ethereal in the great Universe is recognized in its reality. In these inpouring forces of life and light man feels what in former times would have been called the bounty and sustaining power of the Divine Father.
In the realm of matter, all heavy bodies on the Earth are sustained by the ground beneath, on which they lie. But life is not sustained in this way from below upward. A body which needs only this kind of support is in fact dead and not alive.
What is alive is sustained by the peripheral and not only by the centric forces. This other sustenance, belonging rather to the realms of buoyancy than of weight, is a sustaining from without inward, from above downward, and is a sign of the living body's continued impregnation with the peripheral and cosmic - in other words, with the ethereal forces.
In the spiritual structure of the world the latter are more nearly related to the continuing activity of the Divine creative powers than is the dark world of matter. This too is spiritual in origin and essence, but here the Divine-spiritual is far more deeply hidden.
Cold and indifferent matter is a realm in which the spiritual finds expression, to begin with, as the antithesis of spirit: it is the opposition, the negation with which the spirit confronts itself in order thereby to achieve its more distant evolutionary purpose. In the very existence of inert matter the greatest riddle, that of suffering and evil, is involved. In the ethereal on the other hand, as it pours in from the far reaches of the Heavens, we meet to this day what comes as a direct emanation of the Divine and spiritual life to which the Universe is due. It is the age-long renewer of life. Life for this very reason is transient, due as it is not to a substance inertly present, materially stored since the beginning of time, but to an ever-fresh infusion from a realm immaterial-dependent on the gift, ever and again renewed, of Divine creative bounty.
In the ethereal, therefore, when the spirit of man awakens to it, he cannot but experience a flood of thankfulness for the gift of life.
He finds again, not in mere pious convention or in a shadowy echo of the devotional life of pre-scientific times, but in his own genuine experience, the coming of the daily bread from Heaven, the immanence of That, which in the beautiful language of olden time was named the Heavenly Father. He finds the living Ground of the World, sustaining life not in the way of matter from below upward but from the Heavens inward, to the end that living creatures upon Earth do not crumble into dust of atoms, and that the Spirit is not lost in the Abyss but is held poised between weight and light.
Poised between weight and light such is the essence of the life of man, in the new cosmic experience which is now approaching. For the awakening to the ethereal expanse will not mean that the earthly-material concentration to which man owes his personality is forgotten or that the material phase of his life, enhanced as it is by modern technics, is abandoned. It rather means that man will have found the necessary other pole - we cannot say, the 'counter-weight', for by its very nature it is the opposite of weight - with which to balance the descent into the hidden powers of the sub-material realm which is his destiny, by no means yet completed, amid the technics of an electro-magnetic age. He will discover the polarity of the spatial universe centre and periphery, or weight and light - reproduced in his own nature. As a fulfiller of the Divine intentions of evolution he has to live his life between the opposites - matter and spirit, Earth and Heaven. In the very form and polarity of his earthly body he will now find the signature of universal structure.
His free and upright carriage, the straightness of his limbs, the unique way in which the lines-of-force of earthly gravity pass through the axis of his body, relate him more deeply than any other earthly creature to the hidden depths of matter even to the powers of the Abyss. By this descent into the very depths of Earth with his own powers of will, he achieves his manhood. His head, on the other hand - organ of light-filled thought, which is ethereal, celestial in nature - reproduces even morphologically the spherical form of the celestial periphery. In this respect, in his head-nature he is a stage nearer to the Divine creative wisdom, the origin and source of all things; his limbs, on the other hand, connect him with the future - with the inscrutable purposes of evolution, for the sake of which an outer world is there at all. Thus there emerges a cosmology embracing past and future, giving essential meaning to the course of Time and to the suffering and striving in which man's earthly destiny involves him.
When he experiences the ethereal aspect of the vast Universe, man is also awakening to a realm which transcends the limited span of his earthly life. The changed experience of Space gives rise to a new feeling of Time. In the ocean of the celestial light man is brought nearer again to his own birth and death - not as barriers but as gateways from and to another form of being. The whole conception of what physical incarnation means, undergoes a change.
The evidences of another branch of Science will reinforce this direct feeling of the human heart. The facts of Embryology reveal that the formative process in its early stages works peripherally, moulding the living body from the surface inward, as though the germ-cell were acting not as itself a complicated source of form but as the inmost focus of a surrounding formative space. For such a process, as I have shewn in other writings, the concept of 'negative or 'ethereal space' gives a very clear theoretical foundation. In every form of life, animal or plant or human, generation represents a fresh infusion of the material world with life from cosmic sources. When this is understood the physical and spiritual aspects of the entry of a human soul into earthly life will appear in their natural relation. It is once more, even as to the forming of the outer body, a coming out of the everywhere into here.
The difference in this regard as between plant and animal and man concerns the way in which this gift of universal life is or is not accompanied by a more or less individualized life of soul, or as in man by a self-conscious spirit seeking incamation. For man, the forming of the 'ethereal body" becomes as it were the ark in which he himself, a spiritual individuality from spaceless and timeless realms, sails the celestial ocean to alight on an earthly shore.
So too the gate of death: when man looks out into the starry spaces, not as mere physical emptiness but as the ocean of the ethereal, he will relate himself in a quite different way to that future moment when his ethereal body will be released from physical anchorage and on the wings of the expanding ether he will sail forth again into the Spiritual realm whence he came.
The Middle, Rhythmic Realm
Awakening to the ethereal will therefore signify a release for modern man, who is imprisoned in a space-bound world. For all its infinitude, the purely physical (Euclidean, Newtonian) idea of space is a confinement, a separation of the spirit from the cosmic life. Ethereal experience of Space will release man into a more intimate partaking in the life of Time. Here, from the scientific aspect too, a new gateway is being opened.
Aware only of the pointwise aspect of space, picturing matter in its atomistic aspect, a merely physical Science makes of Time the irreversible co-ordinate, with the progression of which, ordered and differentiated forms are levelled out. Less probable but more vital forms give way to more probable and less vital; the world runs down, to the dead level of maximum entropy.
Precisely this relation between Space and Time, whereby the onward course of Time tends like an all-consuming flood to annihilate individuality of form and to confuse the atoms in a turbid stream, is radically changed when the ethereal, the other pole of space-formation, becomes known. In the ethereal the flow of Time does precisely the opposite; from the periphery inward, individuality of form is ever and again renewed. Space is not stocked from the beginning with so much created matter, hedged in by an infinite yet rigid framework; in the ethereal foci - the seeding centres of fresh life the gateways are for ever being opened, and Space becomes the open garden through which the springs of life pour in and out.
For the mere physical concept of Space-from Newton to Einstein -Time had the tendency to become an added spatial dimension. Not so when the polarity of Space is experienced. Time and the polarity of Space are the interpreters of one-another. Hence Rudolf Steiner gave two seemingly distinct explanations of the ethereal body. He described it on the one hand as the Time-body, and on the other hand in its spatial aspect as peripheral in nature a product of forces working inward from the vast reaches of the spatial Universe and thence endowing the physical body with life and form.
The new experience now coming to mankind will therefore also be an entry into the inwardness of Time, both in the individual span of human life and in the consciousness of cosmic cycles and historic times. These, for our life on Earth, are measured out by the rhythms of the solar system - the day the month the year the interweaving planetary cycles and the precession of the equinoxes, a realm of the circling in- and out-breathing movements is intermediate between the Heaven of fixed stars and the depths of Earth. The simplified heliocentric picture all too easily makes one forget the in- and out-breathing, so that we think in terms of circles only, or circles slightly modified into ellipses. A comparatively abstract geometrical thought-picture replaces the more realistic geocentric aspect. The actual phenomena - the planets in their circling and looping movements drawing in towards the Earth and away become significant when it is recognized that the visible planet marks the approximate boundary of an ethereal planetary sphere concentric with the Earth, breathing out and in as the planet recedes and draws near again. The same applies, though in another way, to the seasonal relations of Earth and Sun. The far more concrete and organic interplay is too exclusively replaced in the modern mind by a geometrical thought-picture - the inclination of the Earth's axis to the ecliptic.
The recognition of the ethereal will here be opening the way to an even more essential experience. Man will become aware of the direct relation of his own heart and breathing - the middle, rhythmic system of his life - to this middle region of the Universe, the organism of the Sun and planets. A comparison will make the connection clear. In the realm of those polarities which are known to Physics - positive and negative electricity, north and south-seeking magnetic poles, or even the play of kinetic and potential energies in mechanics. rhythmic processes arise, to the mastery of which our modern technical devices are largely due. Yet all of this - from the simple swing of the pendulum to the most complicated harmonies, the alternating currents of electricity, the subtle pulsations of the electro-magnetic field - is still within the earthly, physically spatial realm, material or closely bound to matter. The Universe, involving not a dead and isolated Earth but the Earth in its living relation to the Heavens, is imbued with quite another kind of rhythmic process, wherein the swing of the pendulum - to use this simplest image - is no longer to and fro from one point to another along a line, but between centre and periphery in concentric spheres.
This is the primary, physical-and-ethereal, earthly-celestial polarity, giving rise to those in- and out-breathing rhythms whereby the spirit from the celestial Universe descends into matter and the material world in its living forms aspires to receive the spirit: whereby again at other times each of them tends to withdraw into its own domain. The movements of the planets, the annual changes in the relation of the Sun to the northern and southern hemispheres, the rhythm of the lunar phases: all these belong to the manifold and subtle 'rhythms of the spheres' whereby the Earth is in communion with the Heavens.
The relative validity of the Copernican, physically spatial explanations is not here in dispute. In their disarming simplicity, however, these explanations act as a blind, masking another and more vital aspect which will be scientifically understood when the mutual relation of centre and periphery in the spatial Universe becomes known.
A rhythmic interplay between polarities cannot be recognized if one is conscious only of the one pole and unaware of the existence of the other. This is precisely the situation man has been in during the last few centuries with respect to those activities as between Earth and Heaven which are in fact nearest to his own heart and life. Conscious of the centric, earthly, gravitational pole alone, he is obliged to relegate this ebb and flow of cosmic life to a realm scientifically unexplained, related to the deeper, more poetic levels of his inner life; or else he re-interprets it as the result of outward and indifferent causations, such as the angle of twenty-three degrees which 'happens to have been established' between the planes of equator and ecliptic.
Knowledge of the ethereal will be most of all important inasmuch as it awakens man to these melodies and rhythms of the Earth's intercourse with the Heavens. For in this realm the human soul is nearest to the Divine ensoulment of the great Universe:
In man's relation to the encircling round, through which the Sun and sister planets weave the celestial virtues in and out of the life of Earth, we experience a human realm which the wisest and the simplest among men have in common. Receiving from the living Universe, man feels in his heart the pulse of universal life.Sit, Jessica: look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold.
There's not the smallest orb which thow behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins.
Such harmony is in immortal souls,
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.
In the Calendar of the Soul - a book of weekly verses for meditation through the year - Rudolf Steiner tried to convey what the human being of our time can become conscious of in this middle realm.
It is the realm where man encounters that aspect of Divine and universal being which has to do not only with his own destined span of life but with the Avatars - the loving inclination of the Gods from time to time towards men - and even with the deepest, ultimate descent of the Divine into human life. For in the course of earthly evolution the universal Love was prepared to enter into the winter of our discontent, to share with mankind the phase of uttermost contraction. Thus since a certain moment the Earth herself has been imbued with celestial power, no longer merely receiving from the Heavens but responding with a gift of resurrection.
In a new way, and by direct experience, this will become known to modern man when, by awakening to the ethereal, he achieves that communion with universal Nature towards which the scientific age in its deep underlying impulse has been tending. Thus a renewal of Christianity is drawing near from a quarter which, though little dreamt of in evangelical tradition, will in the true sense of the word be an evangelical fulfilment. In this fulfilment the extreme spiritual trials of the present century may find their meaning and their resolution.