World knowledge and knowledge of the human being are the systole and diastole of eternal life

 

"And this is life eternal: that they might know"
— John 17:3

Rudolf Steiner:

In this way we can distinguish the four members of man's constitution, and as we experience the reality of these four members in the human being, we gain at the same time a picture of human life as a whole. As I showed yesterday, the life which is earthly widens out into the life in the universal ether, which reaches to the boundaries of a kind of outer global shell, but radiates back the astral in the cosmos from all sides. With our astral body we live in this astral world, which remains hidden from earthly observation; but when, in the way I have described, we have reached the stage where we can experience the astral world, it does not only resound as the World Logos, but there emerge from the words of the Logos, as from the very foundations of spiritual life, the beings of the higher and lower hierarchies themselves — and among them our own spirit-being from long-past earthly lives.

Thus the knowledge we gain about man at the same time widens our soul's spiritual conception of the cosmos, of the universe, not only in the physical and etheric sense, but of the Cosmos as living soul-and-spirit as well.

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.

Source: April 21, 1923. GA 84