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.These are the thoughts they use to think about something that is supposed to be spiritual.But such thoughts do not have that capacity.For that, one has to go to true spiritual science.That is why such strange things appear and today it is not even noticed that they are strange.A person like Driesch, for instance, recognized officially by the outer world but in reality a dilettante, holds forth to the effect that one must accept the term “psychoid.” Well, if you want to ascribe to something a similarity to something else, that something else must itself be around somewhere.You can't speak of apelike creatures if there are no apes to start with.You can't speak of the “psychoid” if you say there's no such thing as a soul! And this silly nonsense is accepted today as science, honest science, science that is really striving to reach a higher level.These things must be realized.And the individuals in the anthroposophical movement who have had scientific training will be of some value in the evolution of our civilization if they don't allow themselves to be blinded by the flaring-up of will-o'-the-wisps but persist in observing carefully what is now essential to combat materialism.Therefore the question must be asked: How is it possible for active, creative thinking to arise out of today's passive thinking? How must priests and physicians work so that creative impulses can now flow into the activity of individuals who are led and who want to be led by the spirit? Thoughts that evolve in connection with material processes leave the creative impulse outside in matter itself; the thoughts remain totally passive.That is the peculiar characteristic of our modern thought world, that the thoughts pervading the whole of science are quite passive, inactive, idle.This lack of creative power in our thinking is connected with our education, which has been completely submerged in the current passive science.Today human beings are educated in such a way that they simply are not allowed to think a creative thought — for fear that if they should actually entertain a creative thought they wouldn't be able to keep it objective but would add some subjective quirk to it! These are things that must be faced.But how can we come to creative thoughts? This can only happen if we really develop our knowledge of the human being.Humans cannot be known by uncreative thoughts, because by their very nature they themselves are creative.One must re-create if one wants knowledge.With today's passive thinking one can only understand the periphery of the human being; one has to ignore the inner being.It is important that we really understand the place humanity has been given in this world.Today therefore, let us put something before our souls as a kind of goal that lies at the end of a long perspective, but that can make our thoughts creative — for it holds the secret for making human thought creative.Let us think of the universe in its changing and becoming — say in the form of a circle.We may picture it like this because actually the universe as it evolves through time presents a kind of rhythmic repetition, upward and downward, with respect to many phenomena.Everywhere in the universe we find rhythms like that of day and night: other, greater rhythms that extend from one Ice Age to another, and so forth.If first we confine our inquiry to the rhythm that has the largest intervals for human perception, it will be the so-called Platonic year, which has always played an important role in human thoughts and ideas about the world when these were filled with more wisdom than they are now.We can come to the Platonic year if we begin by observing the place where the sun rises on the first day of spring, the twenty-first of March of each year.At that moment of time the sun rises at a definite spot in the sky.We can find this spot in some constellation; attention has been given to it through all the ages, for it moves slightly from year to year.If, for instance, in 1923 we had observed this point of spring, its place in the sky in relation to the other stars, and now in 1924 observe it again, we find it is not in the same place; it lies farther back on a line that can be drawn between the constellation of Taurus and the constellation of Pisces.Every year the place where spring begins moves back in the zodiac a little bit in that direction.This means that in the course of time there is a gradual shift through all the constellations of the starry world; it can be seen and recorded.If we now inquire what the sum of all these shifts amounts to, we can see what the distance is from year to year.One year it is here, the next year there, and so on — finally it has come back to the same spot.That means after a certain period of time the place of spring's beginning must again be in the very same spot of the heavens, and for the place of its rising the sun has traveled once around the entire zodiac.When we reckon that up, it happens approximately every 25,920 years.There we have found a rhythm that contains the largest time-interval possible for a human being to perceive — the Platonic cosmic year, which stretches through approximately 25,920 of our ordinary years.There we have looked out into the distances of the cosmos.In a certain sense we have pushed our thoughts against something from which the numbers we use bounce back.We are pushing with our thoughts against a wall.Thinking can't go any further.Clairvoyance must then come to our aid; that can go further.The whole of evolution takes place in what is encircled by those 25,920 years.And we can very well conceive of this circumference, if you will — which obviously is not a thing of space, but of space-time — we can conceive of it as a kind of cosmic uterine wall.We can think of it as that which surrounds us in farthest cosmic space.Now let us go from what envelops us in farthest cosmic space, from the rhythm that has the largest interval of time that we possess, to what appears to us first of all as a small interval, that is, the rhythm of our breathing.Now we find — again, of course, we must use approximate numbers — we find eighteen breaths a minute.If we reckon how many breaths a human being takes in a day, we come to 25,920 breaths a day.We find the same rhythm in the smallest interval, in the human being the microcosm, as in the largest interval, the macrocosm.Thus the human being lives in a universe whose rhythm is the same as that of the universe itself.But only the human being, not the animal; in just these finer details of knowledge one finally sees the difference between the human and the animal.The essential nature of the human physical body can only be realized if it is related to the Platonic cosmic year; 25,920 years: in that span of time the nature of our physical body is rooted.Take a look in at the tremendous time periods, at first determined otherwise than by time and space as we know them, through the metamorphosis of sun, moon, and earth.Look at all the things that had to be brought together, but not in any quantitative way; then you can begin to understand the present human physical body with all its elements
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