II. The Physical World and the Moral-Spiritual Impulses

GA 84/1923-04-21/p034 ·1923-04-21 · English MediumMedium alignmentSome paragraph re-numbering between this translation and the German original — the locus may slip by a paragraph or two.
Record: unknown. How this text was taken down (shorthand transcript, listeners' notes or manuscript) is not on record here. Unknown is not an assurance of a stenogram: check the edition's own notes before resting an argument on one word.

Knowledge of man expands to knowledge of the world. As in our physical life on earth there can never be inhalation alone or exhalation alone, because the alternating in-and-out breathing must penetrate and flow through us—living as we are in, this rhythmic in-and-out breathing, we likewise cannot on a higher level acquire only a one-sided knowledge of man or knowledge of the worlds As the inhaling calls for exhaling, knowledge of man demands knowledge of the world; as the exhaling calls for inhaling, knowledge of the world demands knowledge of man. Systole and diastole, contraction and expansion of the great physical-soul-and-spirit life of the world is knowledge of the world and knowledge of man, not side by side, but ever in an eternally changing rhythm, together-apart, together-apart, penetrating each other and functioning like the immortal life of the Cosmos itself, to which immortal man also belongs.

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Cite: GA 84/1923-04-21/p034 · edition English