"I am come to send fire on the Earth" : Etheric bodies are cosmic fireballs

 

Rudolf Steiner:  "So, world thoughts as forces work in this etheric body of man, and we are only ever able to use something - it is always very little - of what is spread out in our etheric body, in proportion to what we have in our astral body. And yet, what are we as physical and etheric bodies when we remain in bed when we sleep and have withdrawn our ego and our astral body? We are then in bed a being of physical body and etheric body, and thus we carry within us only the laws of the plant kingdom. And the same thing that we can observe in ourselves, when we look back, as it were, and see the wisdom of the whole world radiating from our sleeping etheric body, in what we could observe in a backward glance in a human being, we basically have before us on a small scale everything that we also have before us when we look at the earth, in that it exists as a physical sphere, but out of itself lets the plant world sprout and has sprouted, and this plant world is ethereally stimulated on all sides by the world thoughts that are weaving in the world ether. This is the infinitely sublime image of the cosmos; of the cosmos that lies before us when we are only able to look at everything that springs from every single plant on our earth as if, I would like to say, from spiritual flames of fire, drawing lines and waves into the farthest reaches of space. So that we actually have before us the globe, the forces that bring vegetation out of the earth, sprouting from the farthest point in space and repeating this earth formation in every single sleeping human being."

Source: The Rudolf Steiner Archive

July 11, 1923