The moment the waking human I first postponed sleep and work out of step with sun and moon, trading dreamlike clairvoyance for self-awareness.
Deviation From The Rhythm Of Nature in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for the point in human evolution when the awakening ego began ordering its own day instead of obeying the cosmic clock of sunrise, sunset and moon. Steiner set it out in the Rotterdam lecture of 8 March 1908, printed in the cycle Introduction to the Basics of Theosophy (GA 111), placing the shift at the transition from the Atlantean epoch into the fifth, post-Atlantean age. In Lemuria and Atlantis, he taught, sleeping, waking and certain bodily functions were bound with great precision to sun and moon, and turning night into day was a physical impossibility. Self-consciousness announced itself precisely by postponing those activities. The old dreamlike clairvoyance lapsed as the price, which makes the deviation a cost of the waking I rather than a moral fall. Esoteric training, in Steiner's account, restores rhythm deliberately, through meditation held at fixed daily hours.
Deviation from the rhythm of nature marks the point where human beings stopped living inside the day that sun and moon set for them. Steiner treats it as the birth certificate of ordinary self-awareness: the ego proved it was awake by moving sleep, work and ritual off the cosmic clock. What it paid was the old dreaming perception of the spiritual world, which the esoteric path then sets out to earn back consciously.
In Steiner's Own Words
In ancient Lemuria and also later, in the Atlantean era, as the Akashic Records teach us, man felt the influence of his surroundings much more than he does today. The physical possibility of sleeping depended on the sunrise or sunset. In another way, people were subject to the influences of the moon. Certain bodily functions depended with great precision on the cosmic clock. Certain events occurred at sunrise and sunset. It was physically impossible at that time to turn night into day, as it happens now in our big cities. Mankind lived in harmony with the rhythms of nature. The fact that this harmony was lost in Lemuria was due to the unconscious ego. It was only with the conscious development of this ego that disharmony arose. The ego began to show its self-awareness by deviating from the rhythms of nature.
What it Means Today
Chronobiology now measures the condition Steiner described in 1908 as turning night into day. Till Roenneberg and his colleagues at the Institute of Medical Psychology at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich built the Munich ChronoType Questionnaire, and in a 2006 paper they named the gap between the clock the body keeps and the clock the schedule imposes: social jetlag. Roenneberg's Internal Time (Harvard University Press, 2012) reports that most people in industrial societies live hours out of phase with their own internal day, and that wider mismatches have been associated with smoking, poorer metabolic markers and lower well-being. The machinery underneath was recognised with the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, awarded to Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael Young for isolating the molecular clock of the circadian rhythm in the fruit fly.
Steiner and the Munich data describe one event from two sides. The questionnaire records a physiological cost. Steiner records a deed, the first act by which the I showed it was awake. Thalira synthesis: because the deviation was earned rather than merely inflicted, the repair Steiner prescribes is not obedience to sunrise but a rhythm the I sets for itself, which is why the instruction in GA 111 is meditation at the same hour every day rather than an earlier bedtime.
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