When Healing Becomes Educating, Vol. 2 - Waldorf Research Institute

section has a special connection to chaos. Rudolf Steiner considered
the significance of the pentagram in a lecture he gave in Stuttgart on 13
September 1907. The pentagram is based on the principle of the golden
section (Fig. 4). According to Steiner,
The ether body is characteristically made up of currents going
in various directions. It is the architect of the human body. Just
as ice forms out of water, so the physical body arises out of the
ether body; currents move in all directions through it, as in an
ocean. The direction of the five main currents, which are hidden
in every human being, can be clearly established. They form a
pentagram, move in the directions indicated by the arrows and
are the skeleton of the ether body, as it were. These currents move
continuously within the ether body, even when the individual is
moving. Whatever posture the person assumes, one current goes
from the center of the forehead, the point between the eyebrows,
down to the right foot, from there to the left hand, then the
right hand, the left foot and finally back to the forehead. The
“pentagram,” as it is known, is just as mobile inwardly within
the ether body as the human physical body is mobile. When
occultists refer to the pentagram as the human figure, this is not
some brainy invention; they speak of it the same way an anatomist
speaks of the skeleton. This figure is truly present in the ether
body; it is a fact. 13
If the new science addresses itself to the level of the etheric, the question
we have to ask is whether this is an indication that modern science has now
entered into the necessary process of development. We must also consider
the potential problems and danger of this and of the fascination which
chaos theory holds for people.
As already stated, the roots of chaos theory go back 100 years. The Koch
curve has been known from 1904, and the algorithm Mandelbrot used to
produce his famous tree image, the Julia set, was developed during the First
World War. At that time, computing capacity was limited, so that the full
potential for mathematics did not emerge. Work based on chaos is therefore
inseparably bound up with present-day computer technology.
Characteristically, computer technology evolved from solid-state physics,
that is, research into crystalline structures. In the second half of this century
it grew with tremendous rapidity to become a power that encompasses and
rules the world. It bases on the silicon crystal, which is also why the present
age is called the “silicon” or “crystalline age.” The crystals used in modern
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