Spring Wirbeling
When I stepped out into the day yesterday morning, I ran into a blast that reminded me once again of how Windmill Hill got its name. Before I had walked a dozen paces, a dust devil appeared at my feet, and danced furiously down the road. It instantly made me think of a little slip of paper in Rudolf Steiner’s hand, written in about 1905.
That single slip of paper offers a unified map of both Nature and human destiny. In the upper half of this elegant formulation, Rudolf Steiner simultaneously expressed the Alpha and Omega of Earth and human evolution – as beginning and end points of an involuting and then evoluting double Wirbelbewegung, or vortex:
Picture of the development of the human spirit
At the beginning humans are God
At the end humans are the image of God
The diagram and its three explanatory lines give a concise picture of the human being’s origin as part of the Creator’s being, and destiny as an independent spiritual creature who has taken on the “image” of that Creator. The lower half gives a set of rules for the realization of the long journey put forth in the upper half:
The World is a Vortex.
Every inward spiral must become an outward spiral [Life must be a lesson]
The human being must become a Vortex.
All that is brought to completion as a Vortex is magic.
The first axiom gives both a Cosmogony and a “Planetology,” for Steiner used Welt (“world”) both in the sense of planet Earth and the entire Cosmos. It also effectively offers a natural history, an organizing principle for comprehending all of the phenomena of the physical world. The second axiom gives a universal injunction for moral and spiritual growth, as well as for biological existence. The third axiom gives a goal for human evolution, pointing toward an end point of both bodily and consciousness development. The final axiom, even as the culmination of the three that come before it, is a profound enigma: “All that is brought to completion as a Vortex is magic.”
The son of a gamekeeper turned telegraph operator, the young polymath Rudolf Steiner (1861 – 1925) was every inch a man of his time, and thus above all, a scientist. He received a technical school education at the Vienna Institute of Technology, where he studied mathematics, physics, chemistry, botany, zoology, and mineralogy. After six years service editing Goethe’s scientific works, and another eight working as an editor at the Goethe Archives in Weimar – during which time he wrote two books about Goethe’s worldview and completed his PhD in philosophy – Steiner became part owner and chief editor of the Berlin literary magazine, Magazin für Literatur, for which he penned dozens of articles on the latest developments in both the arts and sciences.
Still, there is no evidence that he ever made any special study of the Wirbelbewegung, either out of Helmholtzian mathematics, Lord Kelvin’s ideal ether atoms, and certainly not out of misty notions of Reichenbach’s Od or Baraduc’s tourbillons de la force vitale cosmique du Zoéter. And yet there is this mysterious document of 1905, declaring a bold and wholly unique Theory of Everything, not as theory, but as fact. Pronounced to an intimate circle of perhaps a half dozen people, Steiner’s vortex axioms show absolutely not a single trace in the historical record, as influence direct or indirect, as inspiration for research, or as dogma to be refuted. Like an evanescent eddy in a flowing stream, that little slip of paper and its outrageous claims whirls round about its own axis, then totally vanishes.
One characteristic of vortex motion in both air and water is that it seems to appear out of nowhere, for its antecedent generative conditions – the slightest variations in temperature, humidity, salinity, viscosity, etc. – are almost entirely undetectable in the absence of focused attention by way of the senses or instrumentation (the spinning eddies in the video clip above mark the place where, at low tide, outrushing water from Hudson’s North Bay meet the Hudson River ebbing tidal current).
Tornados and waterspouts and whirlpools leap into existence as if by magic, and yet their unstoppable force always finds its origin in the most subtle gradation of initial conditions. Chaos theory’s “butterfly effect” is an apt picture for the power of magnification of the Vortex, and – in yet another instance of hiding in plain sight – it is wholly fitting that its explanatory efficacy lies in that same exponentially augmenting characteristic that turns the accumulation of a thousand gentle eddies into a maelstrom. Even the slowest beat of a butterfly’s wings manufactures a flurry of invisible vortical motions in the surrounding air, and under the right conditions, these trivial whirls just may magnify themselves into movements of immense proportion and influence.
So it is with our wirbeling, whirring thoughts, every single one of which sets up subtle vibrations in the ethers as sure as the first warbling red–winged blackbirds and song sparrows out there clinging to the reed grass in the dancing, wirbeling winds, or the train of eddies left by a passing otter.
Here is our hypothesis (osim forensic cosmology hypothesis v2.2): We tried to phrase this so everyone could get a visual of how it would work:Think of the universe not as a digital computer program, but as a giant, perennial tomato plant.
a tomato plant grows, produces fruit, dies back in the winter, and its seeds wait in the soil to sprout again. It does not need a programmer to tell it how to grow; it follows an internal, biological blueprint. Our independent research group is investigating whether the universe might follow a similar, naturally cyclical pattern.
Rather than a one-time Big Bang, recent discussions in the scientific community are exploring the Big Bounce an infinite, cyclical process. Our hypothesis suggests that instead of expanding forever, the universe might reach a limit, contract, and bounce back, with biological systems potentially acting as the most efficient way to store and reset information through each cycle.
A tomato plant does not stop at one fruit; it branches out, growing multiple stems, each producing its own fruit. If our universe follows this biological blueprint, it would not just seed our own galaxy. Instead, we may be looking at a system that grows fruit—galaxies—along every stem of the cosmic web. Each galaxy could be a localized site for life to bloom within the larger, cyclical structure.
Dark matter may act as the trellis for our cosmic tomato plant. It provides the gravitational structure that guides the growth of these stems, serving as a road map that ensures the system develops and resets in a way that allows life to re-emerge across the entire plant.
The Oklahoma Constant ($\Omega_{os}$) is the focal point of our research. We propose this constant as a way to measure Goldilocks Entropy—the narrow, stable energy range where life can persist without the system stagnating. It may be the tuning knob that explains why the universe stays just right for consciousness to emerge on every stem, cycle after cycle.
Because this model emphasizes biological efficiency, we suggest the possibility that we are the hardware, not the software. If this is a biological system, our consciousness and our physical form may be the fruit of this cosmic garden, essential to how the system functions.
We are currently tracking data from the Simons Observatory. They are looking for specific ripple patterns in the ancient light of the universe—echoes of a Big Bounce. If they find these signatures, it would provide evidence that our hypothesis is on the right track.
This is Forensic Cosmology. We are moving away from the who—a creator—and focusing on the how—the blueprint.
Our hypothesis is strictly falsifiable. If evidence confirms the universe will continue to expand indefinitely toward a Big Freeze, our Life-Raft model is incorrect. If a non-biological material is ever proven to exceed the efficiency of biological systems, the premise of the Oklahoma Constant ($\Omega_{os}$) fails.
We are not looking for a coder. We are documenting the physical fingerprints of a system that may be preserving life through an infinite, natural cycle.
Beautiful photos and very informative post! Thank you.