Chaos
In lecture two of the Agriculture Course Rudolf Steiner speaks of the chaos inherent in the seed. To contemporary understanding the word chaos brings up an image of something which is meaningless and random, but Rudolf Steiner uses this term in a particular way, and gives the picture that chaos is a state where the fixity of matter has been broken open, where the purely physical forces of form and crystalisation are overcome and ‘opened’ to the impress of the living ordering forces of the spiritual world that stream in from the periphery of the cosmos. The chaos in the seed is a state of raised openness to the utter potential and active creative possibility of the ever-living idea or spiritual archetype of the plant, the living Word is breathed upon the dust of matter and renews it with creative formative forces and pattern. In Anthropsophy there is a similar picture of the etheric body of living beings, which is constantly raising the material of the physical body into a state of flux, life and unity by constantly overcoming the purely physical forces. These purely physical forces, if left to themselves, as in death when the etheric body has departed, can only act to destroy the form of the body.