Space and time

Our sense-perceptions and our thoughts and concepts are based on the spatial imaginations. When we look at our watch, time is also being visualized in a spatial way - if we use old-fashioned watches, with the twelve hours in a circle... Space has a kind of reality for us; time is much less a reality. Of course, we have to live in time, it is a rather strict medium, but we don't have a sense of it like our eye sees the space around us. There are people with more sense of time, others have less sense of time,  they always come too late for instance...  But whether time is something real, or something just found out to regulate our lives in day and night - it is not immediately clear to us.

In spring the plants sprout out of the earth, they seem to 'know' that is time for them to come out, they also seem to know when they have to flower and to fruit. What is this mysterious phenomenon that is there in nature - and that is also there in our mind: time? During the winter the power of thinking is a in an individual, human form. We feel the inner light of thinking and the possibility to form thoughts and concepts all by ourselves. In springtime there is a turning point. We change so that in summer a kind of perfect turnover is made: what was in the inner life turnes outward, what was outward turnes inward. That happens to all of us, we don't have to strive for it. But we don't have a natural consciousness of it - this has to be striven for. Man has the capability to bring all his faculties into the light of freedom - by bringing them into conscious knowledge.

A path to achieve this consciousness has been given in the calendar of the soul of Rudolf Steiner. Here he gives a maxim for every week of the year. By identifying oneself with it, one finds how the human being transforms in his position to himself and to the world throughout the year. Every week there is a very slight change in this position - and by identifying with these slight changes, one feels as being transferred into the going of time. Normally we are feeling ourselves as living in space, accompanied by the phenomenon of time. Now, however, time becomes the leading phenomenon, the soul feels like being incorporated in time.

In the utmost outward of the sense-all
The power of thought loses its own being;
Spiritual worlds find back
The human sprout
Who finds his germ in them, 
But who must find the fruit of his soul
In himself.

In the past week after Easter we could feel our joy unified with the light of the sun, and we could also feel how thoughts go into the wideness of the cosmos and bind us to the being of Spirit.

Now this is felt a little bit more reinforced. Whatwas the power of human individual thought  in the winter is now diluted; it flows to the outward limits of the visible cosmos. The pure but spiritual deprived human thinking reaches the spiritual world and one can try to feel how one is being found by the spiritual worlds. Like the waves, that are originated by a  stone falling into the water, come back to the centre when they have reached the widest periphery, so the spiritual worlds come back to the human being. Man is a sprout of the spiritual worlds; he sprouts from them and has his germ in them. We can try to feel that. But we will have to care for it that we find the fruits in our own soul. So we can try now to feel ourselves as being found again by the spirit, which lets us sprout from it and gives us the freedom to find our own fruits.

Space and time by Mieke Mosmuller