Lecture Four

Here we step over into the other side, the other aspect of three-dimensional space—we pass from pressure to suction. That which immediately surrounds us in this world, that of which we are constituted as physical man and ether man, is both pressing and sucking or absorbing. We are a combination of both; whereas the Sun possesses the power of suction only, being nothing but ether, nothing but suction. It is the undulating wave of pressure and suction, ponderable matter and ether, that forms in its alternation a living organisation. And the living organism continually breathes in the astral; the breathing expresses itself through the Moon's motion or nutation. And here we begin to divine a second member or principle of the world's construction; the one member—pressure and suction, physical and etheric; the other, the second—astral. The astral is neither physical nor etheric but is continually inhaled and exhaled; and the nutation demonstrates this process.