III. Man and the World

Something is also gained for feeling through spiritual science. For the one who wants to think as spiritual science makes necessary, who must become accustomed to this much more mobile world, releases something that otherwise only lives [hidden] in the human being, so that it unfolds out of the human being. In our feeling, as we brought it with us at our birth, the rhythm of the world lives. More than we realize, the entire rhythm of the world lives in us. This can even be proven mathematically, but very few people know about these secrets of existence. Do not be afraid to join me in considering how the entire rhythm of the world lives in our own organism, in what goes on within us. You know that the sunrise moves a little further each year. If we go back in time, the so-called vernal point of the sun was in Taurus; then it came into Aries, but in Aries it moved further every year; now it is in Pisces. The sun does not rise at the same point every year on March 21; that's how it comes around the whole circle. And after about 25,920 years, the sun goes all the way around, apparently, of course, describing the whole ellipse. If it rises today at a certain point in Pisces, it will return there in 25,920 years. The strange thing is: if you consider these approximately 25,920 years as the great cosmic year, as the ancient Greeks did, and you now look for one day of this cosmic year, you have to divide by 365. What is one day of this great cosmic year? That is approximately 70 to 71 years. That is, on average, a human life when a person grows old. If you think of a human life as it is spent here on earth as one day, and take the whole Platonic year, it is 365 times as much. That is how long it takes the sun to make one revolution around the world: 365 days, of which a person lives through one in an earthly life. It is a beautiful rhythm, but this rhythm goes much further. Consider that we take about 18 breaths in one minute. These 18 breaths multiplied by 60 give the number of breaths in one hour; this multiplied by 24 gives the number of breaths in one day and one night. If you calculate 18 times 60 times 24, you get: 25,920. That means you take as many breaths in one day as the sun takes [Earth years] to go through its own year. The same rhythm is in your breathing inside that is in the course of the sun outside. And again, the strange thing is: you spend a day breathing 25,920 times in one day. Take a day and treat it as if it were a breath: in a sense, a day is a breath, because in the morning our body and our etheric body breathe in our ego and the astral body, and in the evening, when we fall asleep, we breathe out our ego and the astral body; it is one inhalation and one exhalation. How often do we do this in a single day, in about 70 to 71 years? We do this breathing, which means that we live – calculate it in a day – almost exactly 25,920 times. That is how many days we live in 71 years. The individual breath is therefore related to the breaths of the whole twenty-four-hour day like the advance of the vernal point in one year to the advance of the sun through 25,920 years. In relation to the great solar year of 25,920, a single human life on earth is like a day, a day of our life, a twenty-four-hour day occurs as many times in our 71-year life as there are years in the solar cycle. Imagine what it actually means that we are part of the wonderful rhythm of the sunlit cosmos, that our life, insofar as it is inner human life, is purely mathematically expressed in the great music of the spheres of the cosmos!