When we passed the winter solstice or the shortest day of the year, we passed the culmination of darkness or the stage where the sun or the day's source of light is furthest away from our latitudes. No terrestrial human being is left untouched by this passage. It, so to speak, alters our mind and our entire way of thinking. While, before our passage of this shortest day of the year, we prepared for a continuously deepening winter darkness against which we had to safeguard ourselves by means of outer, artificial physical light, and as far as the mind is concerned, by inner, mental light, so, after this passage, we are now preparing for the light itself. We now know that the sun comes closer and closer every day in order finally to envelop our latitudes in the brilliant clarity and colours of a summer day. The winter solstice or the culmination of darkness has thus lit an enormous star of hope in our minds. We are waiting for summer and sunlit days. Since this passage of the winter solstice is an unfailing, recurring phenomenon, after which a passage of the culmination of light or the summer solstice comes just as unfailingly, this hope of ours is thus not built on imagination but on a living fact. We have an abundance of experience that our passing of these solstices is merely the cycle of night and day in a yet greater format, hence the Bible's words: "While the Earth remaineth, seeds time and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease".

But what can this cycle now tell the advanced or intellectually gifted human being? What can it tell the seeking spiritual researcher? We all know, of course, that day follows night, and that summer follows winter, indeed, even the animals know that. If the opposite were the case they would not of course to such an extent prepare themselves for the coming of summer or winter as they do. Some animals gather supplies and go into hibernation; others, for example the migratory birds, seek milder regions. But providence's intention or purpose with these cycles is not completed or finished with this. These cycles do not exist merely in order that we should learn to subordinate ourselves or safeguard ourselves against them. It is true that they give life colour, create contrasts and multiply the living beings' possibilities for experience. But behind all this there is yet another special great experience or a specific answer that the Godhead or Providence, by means of the principle of the cycle, wants to introduce into and quicken in the consciousness of the thinking being. This answer is the declaration of its own immortality and the Godhead's eternity behind the cycles.

How can one then come to experience or see this declaration in the cycles? Indeed, the first prerequisite for a truly more elevated clear view of the daily and yearly physical phenomena in Nature and life in and around us is of course the ability to think absolutely logically. If one cannot think logically, all experiences become of course merely suppositions, dogmatic beliefs, figments of the imagination, which can often be one hundred percent false or illusory. In opposition to this false state or perception of life exists on the ability to think logically. To the same degree as one really possesses it one cannot be deluded or taken in by false ideas. If one has once found or experienced Nature's special structure and eternal laws, one knows that everything has to fit into this structure and these laws. If an analysis or account, a dogma or an assertion does not fit into this structure or these laws, one knows that these are merely human inventions, mistaken ideas or presumptions, regardless of whether these ideas are hundred-year-old traditions or any other particular powerful position, they may have taken up in culture or society. Every culture, tradition or phenomenon that is based on such an illogical answer, will inevitably sooner or later fail in relation to the nature or the life that it misrepresents with its false answer or foundation. Life or Nature moves in particular eternal paths according to just as particular eternal laws. Everything in life or Nature that is given a direction deviating from this cannot follow the rest of Nature's paths and cannot fulfil the eternal laws. Its appearance becomes therefore evident as more or less abnormal in order finally to be able to take root or find nourishment in the normal life or Nature from which it emanated. It must then, like a plant that has been pulled up from its nourishing earth and thrown to the sun, wither and perish. Thinking logically will therefore be the same as being able to think and find answers that are completely in harmony with these eternal paths and laws of Nature. And we will thus by virtue of this logical ability have a look at what lies hidden in the experience we call the turn of the year or the new year, and thereby acquire an answer that fits eternity or expresses the eternal laws and paths, which are life's unshakeable structure.

It has of course long since become a fact for us that the winter solstice is the end of a cycle, and that the new cycle begins therefore after this solstice. This solstice thus marks for us the turn of a cycle. It is this turn of a cycle that we call "the turn of the year" or "New Year". Such a cycle, which is thus the same as a year, has the great characteristic that, in a brief, clear physical area it expresses a cosmic principle of far greater dimensions. This principle is known from my analyses as the "spiral cycle". But such a cosmic spiral cycle is of such huge dimensions, and its lifetime is such a vast period of time that it can be experienced only through hundreds of thousands upon hundreds of thousands of lives. That the ordinary terrestrial human being has no idea that it is in a process of traversing such a gigantic cycle before the world redemption or the representatives of wisdom make it aware of this, ought to be a matter of course. It does not of course have cosmic consciousness, and is not familiar with its hidden superconsciousness or eternal spirit. But despite this mental impecuniosity or as yet unfinished state, these beings are all the same not unfairly treated by the Godhead. It is true that they cannot directly see the enormous cycle that, with their rows of rebirths and lives, they are in the process of traversing, but the Godhead has all the same lifted a little corner of the veil aside for this, their vast cosmic expedition. So what they see where this little corner has been pulled aside is that the whole of life and existence appears exclusively in the form of cycles. They see that the passage of substances through solid, liquid and gaseous states exists in reality only as passages in cycles. What is night and day, summer and winter other than the passage of the cycle of time through eternity? What is people's nutrition, their digestion, the satisfaction of their desires, other than the fulfilment of cycles? Indeed, what is the life span of their physical body, its passage through childhood, youth, maturity and old age, other than the passage of stages in a cycle? And it thus becomes an unshakeable fact that everything that we are able to sense or experience in life can occur only as identical to cycles.

The Godhead has thus allowed this supreme principle to be accessible to our senses. But thereby he has of course given us a vast cosmic insight into eternity itself, into the foundation of life. Through the access to the physical sight of this subjection of matter to cycles, purely physical access is opened so that we can see beyond our present physical body's lifetime, indeed, the sight of our immortality even appears as a shining star in the middle of our physical life's spiritual night. But here, where the being has still not passed the great birth and is not initiated, this can happen only with the help of "logic".

It is thus logical or in harmony with the facts to suppose that matter or the substances must normally pass the various stages of these cycles. We can therefore calculate or precisely judge the position of the substances in the cycle. We know precisely that a piece of ice is water in its concentrated state and that in the air we breathe the same substance is in a liberated or gaseous state. All substances have thus their concentrated and porous or gaseous and ray-formed (electrical or spiritual) state. But then it would also be only logical to suppose that we ourselves by virtue of this sovereign principle, must find ourselves at one or other of these various stages of the cycle. Since we know that substance in the cyclical path can be transformed only in the following order: solid, liquid, gaseous and from here to the ray-formed (electrical) state, we can simply physically see which stage in the cycle must be our next stage. Since all we terrestrial human beings are almost at the cycle's liquid stage - a body constitutes 90 percent water - our next stage must be "gaseous", and the next again "ray-formed". This is thus logical. But it does not mean that everyone can accept it immediately as such. On the contrary, many would simply stamp such an analysis as sheer nonsense, even if nothing whatsoever exists in the entire universe with which they can really or absolutely motivate their assertion. The logical assertion comes from the fact that logic is love - love without logic is not love. The display of love in daily life is the contact with the laws of the spiral cycle. When we all display this sunshine towards our neighbours, the divine world will have emerged on Earth.