643. As the same four principles are repeated in every cycle of consciousness, we find them present throughout our entire experience of life. Our physical earthly life from conception until so-called "death" is also a cycle and makes up a kind of "cosmic year". In this "year" the season of "winter" can be expressed as that state in which the being exists from conception up to the physical age where it is just as much an adult as a child. This is its "vernal equinox". This period of the being's life, referred to usually as "childhood", is identical to the cycle's "principle of winter". The knowledge and activity that the I manifests here will still be rather primitive and dependent on others and will also express only the elementary form of life that corresponds to the "winter" of the spiral cycle. Here the individual lives largely in an inwardly focused world. Indeed, there may still be something of the atmosphere of the "kingdom of bliss" or the cosmic "autumn zone" about the being in the very first period of his life in the physical world. It is this heavenly glow that makes the "children" of physical living beings so charmingly "innocent", thus appealing to our wish to protect and caress them. This applies equally to tiny lambs or tiger cubs – given that one is not at a stage where killing is still a sport. There will always be an atmosphere around these tender beings that is completely absent in adults. It is not necessary to be cosmically gifted to see that this atmosphere has something about it that is "blessed", "divine" or "ethereal". It is this "blessed" or "heavenly" "something" that immediately inspires all humane and advanced civilised people to have heartfelt sympathetic and loving feelings for all such small "animal offspring". And it is the same innocence that the world redeemer referred to when he said: "Unless ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven", and further: "Suffer little children, and do forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of heaven". There is thus a far higher wisdom in these words than human beings first suppose. They reveal a scientific knowledge of the superterrestrial atmosphere that accompanies the being like a protective force on its way into the world of darkness, warming and illuminating the first stage of its passage through the cold desolation of the animal kingdom, or the dark kingdom of the killing principle.
      But it is actually the same divine atmosphere and heavenly "autumnal glow" that shines and glitters throughout the phenomena of the plant and mineral kingdoms (see Section 183). These are, in fact, more or less "children" in the cycle, which means in this case that they are the tender initial factors in the "cosmic year". The living being's physical childhood corresponds in this way to winter in the physical year. Its manifestations at this stage are the fragile and incomplete life of winter.