"Fractal geometry is not just a chapter of mathematics,
but one that helps everyone to see the same world differently."Benoît Mandelbrot
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Let us proceed from numbers. In former times, and here we actually go back as far as the second post-Atlantean epoch, all thinking concerning numbers was dealt with in a significantly different manner from the way we treat it today in the outside world. People then really had concepts of 1, 2, and 3. For us, 2 is nothing but the presence of two units of 1; 3 is the presence of three, 4 that of four units of 1. Thus we continue counting by always adding 1 more. hence repeating the same act of thinking. We can repeat it indefinitely.
This was not the case in the second post-Atlantean epoch. Back then, people sensed the same difference between, let's say, two and three that we today feel only between different objects. In the number 3, one sensed a significantly different element from that in the number 2. Not only was it the addition of one unit; rather, one sensed something integrated in the 3, something where three things relate to one another. The 2 had an open element, something where two things lie indifferently side by side. People recalled this indifference in lying side by side when they said “two.” They did not sense this in the number 3, but only something that belongs together, where each thing relates to all the others. Concerning 2, a person could imagine that one thing escapes to the left, the other to the right. The 3 could not be pictured that way; instead, it was felt that if one unit would disappear, the remaining two would no longer be what they had been, for then, they would exist indifferently beside each other. The 3 combined the 2 in a totality, so to speak; it made them a whole. The form of arithmetic we have today, our elementary counting, this repetition of the same act, did not exist at all in those former times. Only now, through spiritual science, we are once again directed in a certain sense to the qualitative element of numbers.
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Therefore, we can say that, outwardly, counting is something quite abstract for us today; inwardly, the reason we count is connected with the fact that we are counted in the first place, for we are counted out of universal being and are structured according to numbers. It is most interesting to trace the various methods of counting among the different folk groups in the world — according to the number 10, the decimal system, or the number 12 — and how this relates to their different etheric and astral constitutions. Numbers are inborn into us, woven into us out of the cosmic totality. Outwardly, numbers are gradually becoming a matter of indifference to us; within us, this is not the case. Within ourselves, each number has its own definite quality.
The spirits of the universe do not count like that. They create forms according to numbers, and they do it in the manner formerly connected with numbers during the first and even the second period of the post-Atlantean epoch. The development of abstract numbers out of the quite concrete concept of the element and quality of numbers is something that only evolved in the course of humanity's evolution. We have to realize that it has profound significance that the tradition handed down to us from the ancient mysteries relates that the gods fashioned man according to numbers. The saying that the world abounds in numbers implies that everything is fashioned according to numbers and that the human being, too, is formed on the basis of numbers. Hence, the modern way of counting did not exist in those ancient times; on the other hand, an imaginative thinking in the qualities of numbers did exist.
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Finally, consider the unit of measure that still plays a certain role today, namely the so-called golden mean or golden section. It is not connected with measurements but only with a qualitative element. The smaller element is to the medium-sized one as the medium-sized one is to the whole. The smaller element may be any size, but it must always be to the medium-sized one as the medium-sized one is to the whole. We do not have a measurement in mind but something that reveals a certain interrelationship when we look at it. Yet, we speak of the harmonious measure that comes to expression in the golden mean. We cannot base the golden mean on any kind of unit of measure in the abstract sense as we do otherwise. Therefore, as we examine the various periods of humanity's evolution in regard to measuring, we find that in the fourth post-Atlantean period, the Greco-Roman age, this vivid awareness of measure and symmetry gradually transformed itself into abstract measuring. This was actually not the case until the fourth post-Atlantean period. In the third period people experienced the relationships of measure, the proportions, much more the way we only experience the golden mean. Likewise, as we go back into ancient times, our abstract counting can be traced back to an experience of the inner quality of numbers.
Materialism and the Task of Anthroposophy
https://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA204/English/AP1987/19210423p01.htmlSOURCE
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