43. Consciousness – Life – Form

In this sense, esoteric science recognizes seven great world cycles, or world periods, through which passes that being which, in its fourth stage, represents the earth. Each such period is linked to an upward transformation of the human body. - Out of this knowledge, this science sees in the “fourfold” that which characterizes the present stage of world development. What, for example, Pythagoras and his school designated by the “fourfold” is characterized by this. The “four” is the number of the “great world”, that is to say, of the world which man now inhabits. It has raised him to the fourth stage of consciousness.