The Rudolf Steiner Archive

After the introductory remarks last Thursday, I would like to begin by giving you a sketch of world development according to theosophical knowledge. I ask you to bear in mind that as there are only a few hours available, I can only give a sketch in which much can only be briefly indicated. There may be an opportunity later to elucidate further.

Before we pursue the history of the development of the universe and, above all, the formation of our planet Earth, we must make our own certain concepts that westerners no longer possess because they have occupied themselves for so long with only physical phenomena. In every book that deals with cosmology, we are told that we only need to look into space to see thousands and thousands of worlds unveil themselves before our eyes, worlds that are similar to our solar system, and that our Earth, the planet on which life has existed for millions of years, is like a particle of dust within these many worlds; and that man is merely a tiny being on this particle of dust. Natural science has considered this to be the case ever since the advent of the Copernican theory. Science tells us how erroneous it was that man in ancient times saw the Earth as the center of the universe and believed that cosmic evolution was only a preparation for human existence. Science has drummed into us how small the human being is compared to the universe, that is was arrogant of man to believe that the world is fashioned the way it is because of him. Schiller wrote the following beautiful words against this way of thinking:

To the Astronomers

Don't blab so much to me about dust clouds and suns!

Is nature so grand only because it lets you count?

Your subject is surely the most sublime in space;

But, friends, the sublime lives not in space.

And Goethe, about whom you know from other lectures that he possessed occult knowledge, expressed his thoughts about this point as follows:

“For what purpose would the world exist with its solar systems and stars if it didn't direct itself to the human being, so he could edify and be edified by it?”

So you see, people like these with their true spiritual world conception could not be satisfied with the idea of the insignificance of man and the dust particle nature of the universe.

Let us now consider the human being in relation to the history of evolution from the theosophical point of view. I must, however, anticipate this with some thoughts. Let's look for a moment at contemporary humanity's standpoint concerning cosmology. Everything that man can grasp with his senses—be they the rough senses of daily life or the more exact ones that natural science offers us by means of its microscopes and analytical methods—is ultimately merely the exterior, physical human being. Those of you who have heard theosophical lectures more often know that this exterior human being is only the wrapping, the outer manifestation of the inner man. What is the inner man actually? When you study the physical man anatomically, you find that he is composed of various systems: the skeletal and muscle system, the nervous system that has developed into the brain, and so forth. You also know that the brain is the organ of thinking. As Theosophists you also know that it isn't the brain that thinks, but that the brain is only an instrument, that the brain only serves the true being of man as a thinking instrument. This being who thinks in man cannot be discerned with physical sense instruments; not even someone who has opened his astral [soul—tr.] senses can see it. A highly developed clairvoyance is required in order to perceive what it is that thinks in a human being. In a theosophical sense we call that which thinks in man the true Self. This inner nucleus of being, this true Self, is spiritual in nature. It isn't something that extends in space, nor does it flow in time. It is timeless and spaceless, it exists beyond space and time, it is eternal. You have heard a description of this Self in my lectures about the Devachan [spiritual world-tr.], and you will find an exact description in my forthcoming book, Theosophy.

In order for the human being to live and think in the present stage of evolution, the spiritual Self needs a physical brain. We could perceive with this spiritual Self in the astral world and in the Devachan, or mental world, without a physical brain, but in the outer, physical world we can only perceive with the physical brain. If we wish to understand contemporary man correctly, we must say: The contemporary human being is a spiritual Self embodied in a physical brain. This physical brain had to first originate, it had to develop; it isn't eternal as is the spiritual Self. We can follow the spiritual Self back into infinitely remote times, and forward into the infinite future. From a certain point in time this spiritual Self clothed itself in a brain, created it, formed this brain to correspond to its own being. Such an organ cannot be formed just like that, however. It would be impossible for someone to simply create a viable brain through some process or other. It would be an artificial thing, but not a viable brain that could serve as an instrument for a spirit. In order for a brain to arise, other organs had to develop first. A brain can only develop in a physical body, such as the human one. Therefore it was necessary that the evolution of the rest of the physical body precede the brain instrument. When we look back on the preceding evolutionary stages we see how slow and gradual this process was. That the human being with his spiritual Self received such an organ with which he can come to understand the world, that is the goal and meaning of our present earthly development. Everything that has happened since millions of years had as its goal that evolution reach the point in which a brain can serve a spiritual Self.

Let us go back for a moment to the beginning of the earth's evolution. He whose spiritual vision has been sufficiently trained will have the following perception: At the beginning of our planetary evolution, our spiritual Self had reached a certain stage in its evolution. Every one of us was at a certain stage of evolution when the Earth was in its germinal stage. You can think back to the time when the earth's evolution began, and to all the spiritual Selfs that are incarnated today on Earth. You were all there, not as you are now, but at a completely different stage of evolution. During the Earth's evolution we have a distinct task; the human being must became something through this earthly evolution. Allow me to indicate in a descriptive way what the spiritual Self was when it entered into earthly evolution. Our spiritual Self had a completely different consciousness when it stood before the gates of our earthly existence than it does now. We can comprehend this if we imagine that we were dull dreamers who were not able to turn the images that flew by us into concepts, but could only see them as a panorama. Every individual spiritual Self had such a dream consciousness, and it had to pass through earthly evolution and must pass through future evolution in order to develop a bright, clear, conceptual picture-consciousness. The dream-like consciousness in which the spiritual Self was immersed at the start of earthly evolution is comparable to that of the animal's, but the consciousness level is not the same. The task our spiritual Self is to perform during the course of this planetary period is that consciousness brightens more and more—and when we complete this earthly evolution in the distant future, we will have brought this bright, clear consciousness to its zenith.

The beings who entered into earthly evolution at that time we call Pitris, which mean “Fathers”. We were those Pitris then; that was our nature during that earlier phase of evolution. Before we entered into earthly evolution, we passed through preliminary stages, and we worked ourselves up to the dream-like Pitri stage. That is where we stood when earthly evolution began. The Pitris had to gradually develop all the organs they needed in order to become acquainted with and understand their physical environment by means of a physical brain within the physical corporality we know today. The last thing man had to accomplish was to become a physical thinking being in order for his Self to be able to think within the physical world.

Now I come to the second preliminary thought. When you examine the human brain scientifically from all sides with the senses only, you will find that it is composed of the same matter and is ruled by the same energy as that of all other earthly physical systems. If you take a crystal, a piece of limestone or rock-salt, a plant, an animal, and you examine them chemically, you find that all physical nature, insofar as it is seen with the eye and touched by the hand, consists of the same chemical and physical energies—those that are active in the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms. Therefore, in order for the human being to reach his present stage of evolution, he had to clothe his spiritual Self with a physical body. That took a long time and the process is not yet complete. In the future the human being will develop further in this mineral wrapping. There are germinal organs in our bodies that are still to develop, new senses that are now only present in outline. So you see, the human being—his spiritual Self—needed a long time to clothe himself in the physical body which he now has.

Let us go back to the time when the human spiritual Self began the work of forging this mineral body, that can walk and stand, that possesses growth and reproductive faculties, a nervous system and the kind of brain a human needs. Go back to when all that was in a germinal stage, and then go forward to a time when the human being will have reached his highest point of evolution, when in the center of his head an organ will have developed through which he will have other perceptions than those we know today. In the segment of time between these two points flows the mineral evolution of man. In Theosophy we call such a time segment a “Round”. The Round I have just described to you—this evolutionary segment—we call the “Mineral Round”.

Before the human being could form this body in order to create the brain, however, he first had to prepare other parts of his being. The spiritual Self, this purely spiritual entity, could not have managed such a mineral body. Consider the spiritual Self as a point. And think of the point as being inside a mechanism such as our body; this point would never have been able to think by means of a physical brain.

So we have two things: we know that our spiritual Self had a dream-like consciousness in the beginning, but could never have managed the physical body. It had to create an intermediary in order to move its body. How do I move my hand? I first have the thought: I want to move my hand. If I only had the thought it would live in me, but it could never raise up a physical hand, just as a mere thought could never lift up a bottle, for example. If you want to move the bottle, energy must be added to the thought, which is the intermediary between the thought and my physical body. And we call this energy an astral [soul] energy. This is an energy present in the astral world. I would not be able to move my arm if there wasn't an astral energy in me that acts as intermediary between my thought and my physical arm. There must be an intermediary between my spiritual Self and my physical body and this intermediary is an astral essence. If I move my leg or my hand, if I put my brain into action in order to hatch thoughts—my physical body must be integrated with my thought through the astral organism.

You know from previous lectures that man has such an astral body that the clairvoyant sees in its astral cloud, which we call the aura, and in which his will and his desires live. When I have a thought, it alone is powerless to act. If it is accompanied by a wish, the will, it becomes an energy, a radiation, which is recognizable to the clairvoyant. The human being had to create an astral body, a desire-body, which could be the intermediary between his thoughts and his physical-mineral body, before he built up the physical body he now has. Before the evolutionary period, which I called the “Mineral Round”, another evolutionary period in which the astral body developed, had to precede it. We must therefore go back to the period in which the astral body was prepared. Only then could the physical-mineral body impregnate the astral body. This period, that also had a beginning and an end-point, we call the “Astral Round”.

As you can see, we have two “times”. One is that in which we now live: the mineral round. Another one preceded it: the astral round. But the human astral body also required preparation. A certain method is required to insert it into human nature. The astral body wasn't there when we were born and will not be there a short time after we die. It comes into being and it expires, it is subject to certain laws of origination and expiration. Consider a child. The child's astral body is correspondingly small; it grows according to the child's physical growth. Growth and reproduction are functions of the mineral-physical and the etheric [vital or life-tr.] essences of man. The human being must develop in earthly life according to the laws of growth and reproduction. That we are born and grow, that we survive at all, is not due to our astral bodies. Only wishes, wants and desires reside in the astral body. We are astral beings, just as animals are astral beings, and with the plants and animals we have that essence in common which is capable of bringing forth its own kind and making it grow from small to large. To use another expression: it is the form-giving element. Our physical and etheric bodies must have a very certain form when they are born, and this form must grow. You can conceive of this better if you take a seed ... [gap in the manuscript].

The forming energy is not an astral function. The astral can live within this energy, but it must be formed first itself. The human astral body could not have originated if another evolutionary period had not preceded it—the period in which the human form was prepared. Allow me to call this period the “Formation Period”; in Theosophy it is called the “Rupa-Round”. It is the period in which the form of man was prepared, so that his present form could develop.

All that we can observe in these three “rounds” are the wrappers for the spiritual Self of man. During the mineral round the human being “clothed” himself with the mineral wrapping. In the preceding period, the astral round, the human being prepared the astral wrapping, and during the period preceding that, the “rupa” or formation round, he acquired the ability to give himself the form he needed to perceive, think and act as a human being.

When we were still “Pitris”, when we still lived in a dream-like consciousness at the beginning of our earthly evolution, we were, if I may use the expression, result, fruit. In a way similar to a plant that grows from a seed planted in springtime in new earth, we had to prepare ourselves in order to evolve on the earth. We were the result of another world, and we had then to be the beginning of a completely new world, in which we had to first find ourselves. Just as you receive a seed in the autumn and let it rest over the winter, then plant it in new earth in the spring, so acted the Pitri-natures. They had to be replanted in a new environment, in the matter of the earthly world that was not present in the previous planetary stages. In order for this to happen another evolutionary period had to precede the one we just referred to. We now arrive at a very ancient evolutionary period.

The farther back we go from the present, the harder it becomes to imagine the conditions. The theosophist does not believe that he can go back to the beginning of the world with his questions. When people hear about Theosophy for the first time, they often ask: How did the world begin? Mostly such questions are not answerable, for we cannot go back to the very beginning of the world. You have seen the point in time where we have come from the Pitri-nature. The clairvoyant can follow this point in time by using certain methods. But the human being did not originate there; he was already at a certain phase of evolution. The theosophist does not speculate about this or indulge in abstract concepts. He follows up his experiences, his intuitions in the super-sensible region, and he describes his experiences insofar as he has them. In the same way as a geographical investigator would only describe what he has seen, say about Africa, and not what he has not seen, so the theosophical investigator would not describe the beginning of the world that lies very, very far back. The theosophist can only follow a part of our evolution through experience and does not indulge in speculation.

It was a seed that came from an earlier time into our evolution. Man was a formless seed. We call this point in time the “Arupa-Round”, the formless round. Thus we have three time segments before the one we are in now. We call these segments “Rounds”. The first, second and third rounds have gone by; we are now in the fourth round, and three more rounds will follow in the future, of which we have still to speak. We call the humans of the fourth round the humans of the mineral realm because they were formed by mineral energy; and we call a human of the previous round, the astral round, in which he formed his astral body, a human of the third elemental realm. We differentiate the humans of the third, second and first elemental realms. During the first elemental realm, or the first round, men's thoughts moved in a formless thought-matter. During the second elemental realm, or the second round, human thoughts moved in a formed thought-matter. And in the third elemental realm human thoughts could already form into wishes; they could take on the form that we can follow as astral energy in the astral world. Only in the fourth round is man advanced enough to dominate the mineral realm. Just as in the third round he formed an astral brain from astral matter, so in the fourth round he was advanced enough to form a physical brain with which he could think.

Thus we have three elemental realms and the mineral realm. The human being of the past lived in the three elemental realms. I can only hint at what followed, but you will understand the analogy. Another round, during which man will reach a still higher stage of evolution, will follow our present one. He will then not only think with his physical brain, but also with what we call astral energy. He will not only be able to command physical matter, he will also be able to dominate astral energy. I will give you an example for clarification. If I want to move this glass from here to there, I need a physical intermediary—my hand. Man has advanced far enough in the fourth round that he can consciously act in the physical, mineral world. He cannot yet, however, consciously handle astral energy. He has not yet developed an astral organ of will. He will be able to do so during the fifth round. In the fifth round the human being will be able to command the astral world as well as he now commands the physical world. He will be even more advanced during the sixth round. He will then be able to command the form-giving world, as he today commands the physical world, and in the fifth round will command the astral world. In the fifth round he will not only be able to realize a wish in the place where it is wished, but will also be able to send a wish to distant places. In the sixth round he will be able to form himself. After the sixth round our earthly evolution will have reached its culmination, and by then the human being will have taken unto himself all that he is able to learn on the Earth.

The human being has seven rounds to go through. I could only describe these rounds approximately—but we must be clear about this: During our mineral round man and the earth were not always physical, but had to evolve to that stage. They had to reach this stage in order to be physically perceptible. From our mineral round we look back on previous evolutionary stages. We can thereby conclude that there is a seven-stage evolution of our Earth and that the spiritual Self has seven stages or rounds to go through. During each of these seven rounds the spiritual Self was in one of the nature realms. Look at the human being. He has gone through the first, second, third elemental realms and finds himself now in the fourth round, which is our contemporary world.

Next time I will show that during this fourth round it is only man who has reached the mineral stage. Everything that is already mineral, non-living natural matter such as crystals, rocks, and so on, already reached the culmination of their evolution during the first round. Plants reached the culmination of their evolution during the second round, and today's animals reached their evolutionary culmination during the third round. Man has reached his physical-mineral evolution during the fourth round.

We see, therefore, that our Earth was preceded by another one millions of years ago. Man first appeared in the first elemental realm. The plant nature appeared during the second elemental realm. Then came the third elemental realm and animals were included in earthly evolution. The human being as such was, however, still an astral being, not yet able to descend to a physical incarnation. Only during the fourth round, when minerals, plants and animals already existed, was man able to descend to a physical incarnation. Therefore, in the four rounds we have four coexisting realms: the mineral realm in the first round, the plant realm in the second round, the animal realm in the third realm and the human realm in the fourth round. The human realm had sent out the three other preparatory realms in advance. Goethe was right when he said: “What would nature amount to if it weren't directed towards man?” The great cosmic event had to occur; the human being had to evolve through three realms in order to take on a mineral form during the fourth round. The human being was the co-creator in invisible form. As “Pitri” he came from another evolutionary stage. We worked with our dream-like consciousness during the first round. We worked in the preparation of our Earth in order that a realm could be formed that would be the foundation of our evolution.

That is the path of evolution up until now. We will continue next time.

A week ago, I tried to explain the manner of thinking, so strange to western minds, through which the theosophist attains his insights and knowledge of the cosmos. The sketchy character these lectures necessarily have prevents me from delving more profoundly into theosophical cosmology. Nevertheless, I will attempt today to give you at least a picture in descriptive form of the origin of the world based on Theosophy. I beg those who have scientific bents to bear in mind that in the course of three short lectures it isn't possible to go into scientific explanations of what I will say today. These scientific explanations will be included in a subsequent lecture cycle, in which I will speak in more detail about this subject. Also, in the second volume of my Theosophy, which will soon be published, cosmology will be discussed.¹

Allow me first of all to mention an important thought, which is basically very simple, but which must be clear to whoever wishes to understand evolution in the theosophical sense. When we speak of development, or evolution in a broad sense, we don't only mean the development of animal or plant life from a previous form, but we also mean the great transformations within the universe, and we include the origin of matter, the matter we can today perceive with our physical senses.

We said last time that in the history of the evolution of our planet there are seven consecutive stages, and I also briefly described these to you. You must therefore think of how our earthly planet goes through seven stages, which we call Rounds, in rhythmical sequence. Everything that exists and lives on our Earth was also existent before our present Earth come into being; it was existent in a kind of seed state, just as a whole plant is present in a seed, sleeps in the seed, so to speak, before it takes on form in the outer world. Such a slumber stage is called a “Pralaya”. On the other hand, the state in which everything awakens, gradually emerges and progresses from a beginning to a high point of perfection, we call “Manvantara”. When the state of perfection is reached, a Pralaya, a sleeping state, occurs once more, and this is followed again by a state of waking and growth. Thus the planet goes through this sequence seven times, reawakening seven times to a new Round.

The time between one Manvantara and the next passes in a state in which everything living on the earth sleeps, so to speak. But it isn't comparable to normal human sleep. In normal sleep only the activities of understanding and sense are interrupted, but you can see the physical body. The sleeping state of the Earth must be thought of differently. No earthly being is visible during this sleeping state. This state would be perceptible only to the opened eye of the so-called Dangma, the highest developed seer. This state is indescribable in words, for our words are inadequate for this kind of existence. I find no words in any language for this state. Therefore the developed seer says something quite different in order to give an idea of this state. He says: imagine a plant. You see this plant. Now imagine a kind of plaster impression of the plant, but in such a way that the plant itself is empty space and a Round is the plaster. Consider that the plaster is spiritual and only perceptible for certain senses. Whoever can see the plant cannot see the plaster impression at the same time, that is, the negative of the plant. Something similar is what the developed seer would perceive of the Earth during the Pralaya sleep. The Earth is not there. It is the hollow form, swimming in a great, mighty sea of the highest spiritual beings that is gradually disappearing and out of which the Being of the Earth itself flows.

Then something begins to originate within this hollow space, something not yet perceptible to the physical senses; it is only perceptible to the highly developed seer who can consciously move in the spiritual plane. At the beginning of the Earth's existence he would see a sphere in space, a purely spiritual sphere in which only the spiritual is present. Every time before a new Round begins, our Earth exists in such a spiritual state. When it awakens from the Pralaya sleep, it does so as such a sphere. The spiritual seer perceives it in a wonderful reddish glimmer. But that Earth contains everything that later becomes Earth. The densest bodies are also contained in this sphere.

How can we imagine this? It can be made clear by means of a simple process. Imagine a glass full of water. The water is fluid. When you cool the temperature sufficiently, the water becomes ice. You have the same thing in front of you as previously—ice is nothing other than water, only in another form. Raise the temperature and the ice reverts to water, with higher temperatures even to steam. By this example you can imagine how all matter derives from the spirit through densification. The spiritual sphere—seen only by the seer's developed eye—densifies gradually after it passes through a small Pralaya. It can then be seen by a less developed seer's eye. Then follows a kind of short sleeping state, and now the sphere is visible to the astral eye, that is, for whoever has developed this sense on the astral plane. Again a Pralaya state follows, and the sphere appears again as physical solid matter. Only now can physical eyes see it, physical ears hear it, physical hands grasp it. That is the fourth stage. Then a short Pralaya comes again. This stage disappears and again an astral sphere presents itself, but with much more highly developed beings. An analogous state appears in the sixth Round, also only visible to the spiritual seer. Thereafter another Pralaya and then a state only visible to the highest developed seer. Then follows what is invisible even to the Dangma. A long Pralaya follows and then the whole process begins again. This happens seven times. In this way the Earth is transformed from the lowest to the highest level.

Let us now follow the first Round. We can study it best by observing what exists on our Earth where it is most solid. In the first Round there were no mineral forms yet, no physical nature energy and no chemical energy. The Earth had carried out the previous evolution only to create a foundation for physical existence; it created this foundation in order to prepare a physical existence in the fourth Round. Our Earth looked like a fiery mass, with such tremendous temperatures that none of our present substances could have the form they now have. All substances were jumbled up in that fiery primal porridge—allow me to use that trivial word—in homogeneous, undifferentiated matter. Theosophy says: the Earth was in the fiery stage. Common fire is not meant, however, but fire of a higher, spiritual nature. There were no chemical elements involved. But what was in the interior of this matter was active. Two kinds of spiritual beings were active: those we call “Dhyani Chohans”,² and those beings who had not yet descended to physical materiality, who had a partially spiritual body, and who flowed through the fiery matter with tremendous rapidity. We see here a continuous emergence and disappearance of irregular forms, also of forms that remind us of those that will exist on Earth at a much later time.

The emerging and disappearing seems to follow a pattern. Forms arise which are reminiscent of later crystals and plants—even something that takes on human form, and then disperses. The humans who would later incarnate lived in that fire, modeling and preparing their bodies. That is how the Earth's first Round appears to us. Then followed the transition from this fiery, flowing Earth to the sleep-state.

The second Round began in the same spiritual way. “Ether” is finer than our present-day gas, but denser than the Earth was in the previous stage. In this very fine matter what we call chemical elements formed. You can find this second stage wonderfully described in religious books, where it is written that the divine beings ordered everything according to mass, number and weight. What had earlier been irregular was now organized in chemical elements according to number. The chemist will understand me, for he knows the regular periodic system of the elements. The individual substances were not yet related to each other. Now, however, as matter became differentiated, we see the most wonderful forms coming into existence which remind us of later forms, only they are not yet solid: star-like forms, angular forms, tetrahedrons, polyhedrons, round forms and so on. The forms that will later constitute nature are intimated. As in the first Round crystal forms were prearranged, the plant forms were constituted in the second Round. Then all flowed away; the astral and spiritual natures went through a Pralaya stage again and re-appeared in the third Round.

When we consider the physical state of the third Round, we find matter in a quite different state. It is not yet differentiated as air and water, but forms a kind of mist, or steam. It is no longer an ether form, but rather somewhat as cloud formations are today. And within these mist formations, which we find described in old sagas—the sagas of Nebelheim (home of mist) and Niflheim describe this state—we see matter in another form, no longer organized according to number, but equipped with energy. The esoteric researcher speaks here of the Law of Selected Relationships. The chemical substances organize themselves according to the Law of Selected Relationships. Now, however, in the third Round, energy emerged, which allowed the small to become larger and expand. The substances could organize themselves from within, energize themselves. Not only the first plant forms, which we met in the second Round, appeared, but growth was also possible. The first animal forms appeared, which we would consider to be extremely grotesque today. Gigantically large, colossal shapes formed themselves out of the mass of mist. For the occultist there is something of truth when he looks at the clouds and sees that one cloud looks like a camel, another like a horse. In the third Round the beings were mist-like forms, which reproduced by one transforming itself into the other, one deriving from the other, like the lower cell organisms, which are reminiscent of this process. These animal bodies, which formed out of the mist, could now provide the basis for those individualities who came from previous worlds to find bodies. The human being could now incarnate. He found a body which allowed him to appear, at first in an imperfect, primitive, groping way. Failed incarnations were also possible. We could say that during the third Round beings existed on the Earth who were intermediate beings between man and animal, in which the human being did not feel completely right, but could nevertheless incarnate.

Then another Pralaya occurred, and then the fourth Round. That is the Round to which we belong today. The Earth passed through the spiritual state, went through the astral and etheric states and finally arrived at the physical state which we have now reached. During the first Round the foundation for the mineral kingdom was formed, during the second Round the foundation for the vegetable kingdom was formed, during the third Round the possibility for animal forms was established. And now, during the fourth Round, the human being acquired the ability to take on the form he has today.

Let us consider the state of our physical Earth somewhat more closely. The state of the Earth in this fourth Round must be described as being much denser than the states of the previous Rounds. First there was a fiery state, then a misty one, then one between air and water. Still during the beginning of the fourth Round we had a kind of gushing matter, similar to protein. Gradually it all condensed, and what we have today as matter is nothing other than the condensed, originally gushing matter, exactly as ice is condensed water. At the beginning of the fourth Round all beings were created so they could live in this gushing matter. Man had a form similar to the one he has now, but his consciousness was extremely dim, comparable to that of a dreaming person. He dreamed his being in a kind of sleeping consciousness; the spirit was still lacking. Let us consider this state more closely. The human being was possible in that flowing, gushing state. We call these people of the first race³ dream-men. It is difficult to describe them. Another stage followed this one, in which matter became denser and separated into a more spiritual and a more physical materiality, comparable to the North and South Poles.

Now I ask you to consider the difference between the esoteric and the usual understanding of Darwinism. We have the human being present in the indicated stage of the earth, as well as the vegetable kingdom. The animal kingdom was also present, but without sexual reproduction capability, without warm blood and not yet capable of bringing forth sounds. The human being was also mute. He could not yet think, not even dim thoughts. The spirit had not yet entered the bodies. In the following, second race, matter separated into two poles. The human beings withdrew the matter that was useful to them and separated out the less useful matter, from which a kind of lateral branch of the higher animals formed. The lower animals were similar to today's mollusks, even fish-like forms developed.

The human being developed further and at the third stage discarded the matter that would not enable him to become the bearer of a higher consciousness. He gave it up as material for the animals, which now looked like amphibians with gigantic forms. They are described in fables and myths as flying dragons and so on. Until then, no being possessed sexual reproductive capacities. Not until the middle of the third race, the Lemurian epoch, does this appear, albeit primitively. The scene of this development, Lemuria, was in Asia in the Indian Ocean.

During the middle of the Lemurian age the great event occurred which allowed man to become a human being. The human beings who came over from previous planetary states were not all at the same level of development. Those who had reached a normal evolution during the previous misty earth cycle were able to incarnate during the third epoch. Among them, however, there were some who had already reached a higher stage; they could not incorporate during the third race at all. During every Round there are humans who develop to a normal stage and others who are more advanced. These are the masters. They are more highly developed individuals. In Theosophy they are called solar pitris or sun pitris. They had reached a higher spirituality, but could no more incarnate in the bodies of the men of those times than a contemporary person could incarnate in a plant. They waited for further evolution until the appropriate time had come, during the fourth race, when their incarnation could take place. Thus a spiritually highly developed humanity arose. The sagas and myths relate how at that time personalities existed who rose far above their fellow men. Individuals such as Prometheus, the Indian Rishis, Fire-Rishis, who were the leaders of humanity, including Manus, who gave later humanity laws. Only these solar Pitris could incarnate as adepts.

I already mentioned that at the start of the fourth Round sexuality did not yet exist. The separation of the sexes occurred only during the Lemurian time. Therewith the first incarnations were possible, the taking over of a body which hadn't already existed. Previously one being derived from another. With the separation of the sexes during the middle of the Lemurian age, birth and death arose and therefore the possibility of the effects of karma. The human being could burden himself with guilt. Everything we know as “human” arose at that time.

The Lemurian continent was destroyed by a fire-like catastrophe, and the Atlantean continent arose on the floor of what is now the Atlantic Ocean. During the Atlantean time another important event occurred to which I drew your attention when I spoke of the Whitsun holiday. I said that, with the exception of the solar Pitris, all beings lived in a lower spiritual condition. The solar Pitris could only take on selected bodies. Other bodies would only have allowed them to live with a dim consciousness. Dull-minded individuals would have resulted had they used the existent bodies. The Pitris therefore waited until certain animal-like forms evolved further. On the one hand they sank deeper into instinctual desires, but on the other hand, by this means the prerequisites for the later development of the brain were given. Matter was differentiated into nervous matter and sexual matter. The Pitris who had waited for that later time incarnated in this inferior matter. Religion indicates this as the biblical fall from paradise: the incarnation in worsened matter. If that hadn't happened, they would have remained in a much less conscious state. They would not have attained the clear thinking we now posses, but would have remained in a much duller state. They paid for this by allowing their bodies to be inferior, which however was compensated for by refined brain matter, thereby allowing them to achieve a higher level of consciousness and spirituality. A particular result of the evolution of the Atlantean race was the development of a phenomenal memory.

After Atlantis was destroyed by water, continued evolution resulted in our contemporary fifth race, during which deductive reasoning was a special achievement. This enabled the human race to bring art and science to a high level of development, which previously had not been possible. During the fifth sub-race of the fourth Round humanity reached a high-point: control by the spirit, which had incarnated in matter, so that humanity could ascend to higher and higher stages of evolution.

We have seen how the cosmos evolved in rhythmic stages to the point where we now stand. In previous Rounds the following developed:

1. the mineral kingdom

2. the vegetable kingdom

3. the animal kingdom

and then—

4. the human being

Theosophical cosmology is a self-contained whole, derived from the wisdom of the most developed seers. If I had a little more time I would be able to indicate to you how certain natural scientific facts are conducive to testifying to the accuracy of this image of the world. Look at Haeckel's famous phylogenic trees, for example, in which evolution is materialistically explained. If instead of matter you consider the spiritual stages, as Theosophy describes them, then you can make the phylogenic trees as Haeckel did—only the explanation is different.

In order that you do not confuse what I have said with what is described in many theosophical books as the various astral or physical states, I would like to bring the following to your attention. Evolution is often described as if they were concurrent stages. You find spheres placed next to each other, so that it appears as though life went from one sphere to another. In reality only one sphere exists, and only its conditions change. It is always the same sphere which goes through the various metamorphoses: spiritual, astral, physical, and so on.

We have seen that the introduction to these lectures, which we took from Goethe's words, is completely justified—that it is after all the human being who is the goal, the task of the earthly planet. The esotericist knows that every planet has its specific task. Nothing in the cosmos is coincidental.

The task of physical evolution is that what is created for us humans achieve its objective. You will not find a human being as he is today on Earth on any other planet. Beings, yes—but not human beings. The Earth exists in order that “I”-conscious human beings could be created. Through the first four Rounds the kingdoms of nature evolved in order that in the fourth man could be made a self-conscious being, who could reflect himself in his body. He will rise to higher levels of evolution, something that few can understand correctly. In the next, the fifth Round, the mineral kingdom will disappear. All mineral matter will be transformed to vegetable matter. Then the vegetable kingdom will reach its culmination and in the next Round the animal kingdom will form the lowest kingdom. During the seventh Round the human being will achieve his highest level of evolution. He will have become what planetary evolution intends.

Whoever understands this can have a profounder insight into the religious documents. There was a time when people believed like children in the religious documents. Then the Enlightenment came, and nothing is believed any more. But a time will come when people will learn to understand the images preserved for us in religious documents, fairy tales and fables. Thus we have the seven Rounds as the seven days of creation in the Bible. The first three days of creation have gone by, we are now in the fourth day of creation and the last three days of creation are yet to come. The first three days of creation in Genesis represent the past Rounds, and the last three indicate what is to come in the future. Rightly understood, Moses wanted to say with the description of the first three days, that we live in the fourth Round; he describes the fourth day of creation in a quite special way. That is why you find a double creation in Genesis.⁴ Those who judge the Bible with their intellect only will never understand it. The human being of the seventh day of creation has not been created. That man was made of clay is a symbol of our fourth Round. The double creation tells us in images of what has been created, the stage in which we now find ourselves, and of the stage at the end of the seventh Round. When we see the Bible's message in this way, a meaning of these documents suddenly arises which we could not have previously understood. Humanity will finally see that there is such a profound meaning there that one would almost have to become a different person in order to understand it.

It is necessary that in our times the high, spiritual meaning of these old documents be revealed, and that is the task of the theosophical movement. It doesn't criticize the materialism of our times because it considers it to be necessary. But it strives to enable people to again recognize the spiritual meaning of these documents. We will work on this during the coming winter. Today's lecture is the last of this cycle. We will, however, still meet here every Monday at eight o'clock.

• 1. The second volume of Theosophy never appeared. Instead, Steiner's An Outline of Esoteric Science, which includes a detailed description of cosmological evolution, was published in 1909.
• 2. Dhyani Chohans: in Christian terminology these are archangels.
• 3. “Race” in this sense is a theosophical term. Steiner later used the expression “cultural epoch” and similar ones.
• 4. Double creation: This may refer to Genesis 1, 26, where God creates humankind. In Genesis 2, 7, this creation is described again, albeit differently.

Today I would like to return to a few things concerning human principles. We must seek out what is in the world as it is in ourselves. A clock is a device that is only possible because of an intelligence that has designed it and put it together. It is foolish to say that the clock has given itself this wise arrangement. It would be equally foolish to say that man has created himself in his design.

We have a small organ in our ears, the 'Organ of Corti'. There are hairs on it; and the hairs are tuned to a certain tone. This sounds when a note is struck on the piano. The vibrations of the air are transferred to the hairs, which then resonate. The same is true of the eye. The eye is also a complex apparatus that has come into being through wisdom. Man is wisdom materialized in this way. The world has been made according to thought.

We call the wisdom in space 'cosmic wisdom' or ['Mahat']. Mahat is the sum of wisdom that is spread throughout the world. So it is a distillation of wisdom from the clock. This is just as man draws wisdom from nature.

Mahat is the archetype of wisdom. “Mala” is the image of Mahat in man. According to Indian teaching, it was like this: Brahma was initially alone, slumbering, then he awakened. One night of Brahma was over. The creative wisdom awakens in him. Nothing else existed yet except for the creative wisdom of Brahma. And this creative wisdom is Mahat. A solar system exists as a thought in the mind of Brahma. We think this cosmic thought after him.

Wisdom is present everywhere in the world. It flows from a kind of spiritual seed into our soul. Cosmic wisdom is in the soul. Mala lives in many. Mahat only lives once. When Mahat becomes individual, that is, becomes Mala, it needs a connecting link. That is Ahankara. Through Ahankara, every person is connected to the general wisdom of the world.

I withdraw into myself and step back from the external sense world. By breaking this bridge, I am allowed to look inward. Through Ahankara, I have within me that which is common to all. I have to go back to world wisdom. First, man finds Manas within himself and then he finds Ahankara, which leads him back to unity, to divine wisdom. When we go through Ahankara, you will realize that we are going through an important spiritual process. We generally go up more. It is the awareness that one's own self is a piece of the divine self. I then do not persist in my self, but I begin to feel as a link in the general Mahat. I am only because I was originally brought into the world by a divine thought. Ahankara leads to absorption in the world of God's thoughts. I and the Father are one. I do not speak because I want to, but because I let Ahankara flow in. For the physical sense world, we would be wrong to say, “I and the others are one.” Mahat is at the same time what we call Atma in Theosophy.

I think two thoughts. First: “I want to go to town tomorrow”; and second: “I want to visit a friend.” These are two thoughts that are present in my soul as one. So people are thoughts of Mahat. People are together in Mahat. Mahat has many Atmas, but all Atmas are together in Mahat. This Mahat of the world system in which we develop is the “third Logos”. And so we can say: we consist of three principles, firstly of Manas, secondly of Budhi and thirdly of Atma. When we rise to this, we are no longer individuals.

At the level of the Atma, we call the thought an image. Let us now try to grasp the difference even more clearly. What lives in us as thought is, in its true significance, a shadow image, in its true essence. It behaves like a shadow in relation to an object. The shadow image is only there when the lamp is there and I am there. But one can also sit in such a way that one only ever sees the shadow images. If we could go out into that sphere where the true essence of these shadows is, we would recognize the archetypes. And we also call these archetypes “spirits”. Spirit is a spiritual essence that is both thought and will. Thus it is a creative thought. The living entities are realities, they are individuality. An intellectual thought is what lives with kama manas. If we free the intellectual thought from the symbols, we are left with only a gray generality, an abstract thought. The soul must have passed through this abstract thinking. Then, instead of from below, new content flows in from above. When we walk down the street, our thoughts are stimulated from the outside. But they must also be able to receive impressions from within.

We can make ourselves passive, that is, we can surrender to Mahat, the third Logos. We then call this “spiritual” or “intuition.

In this way, the spiritual flows into us through Ahankara, through Manas. Therefore, Manas can be influenced from above, by Budhi, and from below, by Brahma, by the sense world. We thus have nine principles. Then we still have to deal with the tenth. The seventh principle is the third Logos. We can [also] only speak of seven principles. When a principle disappears downwards, one must enter from above.

Man has currently developed four principles. The fifth principle is emerging, and the following two are still quite undeveloped. What we discard below must be replaced above. Our consciousness does not fill the whole body. We have as little control over the manas body in Kamaloka as you have over the physical body here. After Devachan, Ahankara or Budhi occurs.

It is not as cold in Devachan as it is often made out to be, because the spirits that pass through do not feel. While we are attached to the particular in physical life and Kamaloka, here we feel the great, the whole, the great primal essence of the world, in which all things flow together. Ahankara comes to life all the more once we have freed ourselves from particularity in Kamaloka. The more Kama disappears, the more Budhi arises in us.

The development of Budhi is an essential development of the emotional life, but in such a way that the world of special interests is transformed into the world of common interests. The mystic calls this the purification of the astral body. It would be wrong to think that the mystic should become insensitive. On the contrary, one should not be cold towards the world, but aligned with the center, of which every single being is a part. We must become objective.

Justice in feeling is the same as what St. Paul calls the law. St. Paul says: Through the law sin entered into the world. Without the law sin would have been dead.

You will not be able to call the Kama nature of the lion or the tiger sinful. Because the animal is not capable of awakening in itself, ennobled, that which lives outside as Kama. It is different when the being is capable of uniting all special interests under the law. Budhi is subject to the law. If there were only animal kama natures, there would be no sin in the world.

Out of Budhi is born the law. So long as Kama appears only in nature, there is no sin. Only after there were beings through whom Budhi could work, that is, beings who could shape the law, was there sin. I use the power of feeling to come to the great unity of nature. The animal can find satisfaction in sensual pleasure. Man cannot, because Budhi demands more. Budhi is the sum total of the world of feelings. This has been distributed among the individual creatures. Not a single drop of the world of feelings should be lost. What remains unrefined is still alive, but our task is to lead it back to the common reservoir from which it emerged. That is why Theosophy demands joint action. Our task is to collect the feelings so that they can pass over to the new planet as a unity. What is left over from the moon has been left behind as the eighth sphere, unprocessed. This remainder of our moon is connected with the unprocessed part of our ancestors. It is what pulls us down. These are milestones that have to be dragged along, and this is what causes the delays in cosmic development. This also has to do with what we have come to know under the Brothers of Shadow and their influence.

Today is the fifth race of humans in the fourth round. Each round has seven races. In earlier rounds, we were designed differently. Our moon today is the remnant of a planet where we developed into the beings we are today.

Moon = Cosmos of Wisdom, Earth = Cosmos of Love. Fourth round Earth, third round Moon. Moon dwellers without brain and nerves, beings of a lighter nature, with the 'solar web'...

A spiritual shell surrounded the moon, guiding the beings – like today's bees, which act wisely without the individual being wise.

After this round had ended, the seed remained and guided the beings over to the emerging Earth. The now-finished moon planet became our Earth's moon.

From the “seed” developed man - and from the spiritual cover, which surrounded the moon and guided the beings from the outside, a drop descended into each human being. This enabled man to want and create something himself and to develop further.

In the great cosmic context, the earthly cosmos is called the cosmos of divine love, the preceding cosmos is the cosmos of wisdom, and the following one is the cosmos of divine fire. Apart from these three states, it is quite difficult for the seer's eye to see forward or backward.

In this cosmic development, too, a kind of parallelism with human development can be observed. The cosmos that preceded the lunar cosmos is called the cosmos of divine omnipotence. This would be preceded by the cosmos of being. The sixth is the cosmos of divinity, the seventh the cosmos of being. In Sinnett's “Esoteric Buddhism” you will find a term that always remains unexplained: the so-called eighth sphere.

We would then have to distinguish between the earthly sphere, then the three that precede it, and the three that follow it. Let me explain a cosmic law to you by describing what a cosmos looks like at the end of its development. During its development, it develops seven rounds and seven races. What happens when existence or wisdom enters the pralaya and is to be pushed over into the next epoch? The sum total would enter into a germ and pass over into the new cosmos. During the transition from one cosmic development to the next, a certain result is sent to the pralaya and the rest remains. The remainder of our former cosmos is the Moon. The forces in and upon it also belong to it. It is surrounded by cosmic forces. It will be the same when the Earth passes into its next state. All the Kama and Kama-Manas present will be purified in the higher Manas. The future inhabitants will have a more active sense of sight. There will be an astral seeing of the subhumanly developed and an astral seeing of the superhumanly developed. The astral seeing of the moon people was undifferentiated compared to our seeing. The seeing of future people will be even more differentiated.

The rest, the eighth sphere, is therefore still present in the seven other cosmic spheres. It is the case that the moon with the Kama mass forms our eighth sphere. The moon is connected with the chemical development of the human being, with the development of the embryo and with the whole of sexual life. The foundations for this are laid in the lunar epoch. The physical body of the human being is prepared wisely long before. The instinctual life must be prepared in such a way that it can express itself as it manifests on earth. The instinctual life must feel hunger, and the physical body must be such that the hunger instinct is stimulated. The stimulus to hunger comes from the astral sphere. The effect is seen in the physical body.

The dual sexuality only occurs in the fourth round. Before that, it does not exist. I remind you of Adam-Kadmon. In nature as such, the dual sexuality is not intended. It does not really need it. We know that dual sexuality is not necessary for reproduction. Today there are many beings that do not have dual sexuality. One being emerges from the other. Nature only accommodated the higher mental plan. It worked in the direction of creating beings that were as differentiated as possible. After two thousand years, a human being would not find a significantly different body, but rather a mixture between father and mother character traits. This results in a greater mixture of qualities. Physical development is only the other pole of mental development; it is the mirror image.

The Moon, still clothed with all lunar epochs, is constantly endeavoring to draw man back to the lunar epochs. It is therefore constantly working in man to stop him in his striving for the higher Manas.

The moon separates (top of right figure). The forces that black magicians are able to extract are contained in this section. The great astral body of our Earth, before the physical body of the Earth is formed. (bottom of right figure)

Mars is represented as a preceding planet, Mercury as a following planet in “Esoteric Buddhism”. Mars is in a state that is still astral. Mercury is in a state that is already astral again; but it is difficult to distinguish.

Every human being still has powers that come from the eighth sphere. That is why people always oscillate between Kama and Manas.

A person consists of body, soul, spirit, of three epochs of the cosmos: past, present and future.

Our present round: present; the preceding past; what will come, the subsequent rounds: future. [...]

'Past' as an expression of the original spirit. Imagine the original spirit as water; everything physical is the solidified state of water. 'Present' is the soul; the 'future' lies within us as a seed. We cannot yet see the soul, but we are approaching the time when the soul can be seen. The past is the same as the future – the content of both is the present. The content is different and manifold – originating from the One – the multitude returns to the Unity. – The original spirit, conceived as the power of creation, as the center.

Now the power of creation emits thoughts as rays emanating from the center. Each such ray is a soul. Now, not every soul [...] is the creative power, but a part of it [...] is active and strives towards the whole again. If we could compare the soul itself to this creative power: the soul continually produces thoughts and sends them out into space; but not every thought is independent and can work independently as a being like the soul as God's thought. The path of development is twofold: the primal source as creative power – and thoughts.

We cannot fathom the reason for God's devotion. We can know how a machine works by studying it. With a plant, although we can also study the laws here, it is more difficult to determine its form and development. It is even more difficult with animals. In the lower man we can still determine by observation what he does, which is no longer possible with the more highly developed. There it is an act of freedom. So the highest act of the Creator's freedom is this causeless devotion to the world out of love. No compulsion. So there is no logical reason for us with the great spirit. Plato as an initiate - like other sages - called love the reason of the universe.

Present as the connection between past and future is the power in us as an astral body.

Third Logos Wisdom. Therefore renunciation of Why? Because God as Creator in the act of His highest freedom created the world:

God, the Primordial Source, Unity, through devotion to the world out of love a multiplicity. — Example: water sprinkled in many drops; the drop is still the same water —, then Annie Besant: fire, and bursting out — sparks.

Now that we are thoughts – drops, sparks – of the Most High, we remember our origin. Memory = remembrance – Plato.

In the beginning was the Word—inexpressible! When I utter it, it consists of letters; each letter has a different sound. We are—every being is—such a letter of the Word. The diversity of beings is because, in order to speak a word, different sounds are necessary.

Word – diversity – that art Thou – it is I – I am I!

I. Logos omnipotence – II. Logos power – III. Logos wisdom.

There are two objections that are often made. They are easiest to grasp right now. Sinnett's book was the first popular [Theosophical] book. This book has acquired many members, who are now well-known, for the society. The book was written under the influence of a master. The master wanted to make these teachings accessible to the West. It was also partly inspired by questions that Sinnett himself addressed to the master. The connection was established through Mrs. Blavatsky.

The book first won a great many people who are now leading figures for the cause. The book “Isis unveiled” was much too heavy a book. The “Secret Doctrine” was published much later.

This book by Sinnett contains all the questions – at least hinted at – including those I have just mentioned, but not in the form of the explanations I have given. Instead, they are presented in two forms: firstly, from the wisdom itself, the secret knowledge of the masters of our lodge from time immemorial; and secondly, from the other part, the outer form. This form is adapted to the ways of looking at things and the way of thinking in the Occident. The book arose out of these two needs. The book has, to a certain extent, distorted ideas. This is due to the fact that they could not be understood in their full depth at the beginning. The work in detail always depends on the personality of the editor concerned. That which is inspiration is the core of wisdom, a comparison from higher regions. Wisdom is not preserved in the form in which it appears in our books. It is received in the form of arupa. The editor in question has to bring it into form, so that it still differs from what was originally received.

Today we may be able to express things even more clearly than they are in the “Secret Doctrine”. The same esoteric teachings also live in the secret teachings of the Rosicrucians. A few have studied Sinnett's book. Eduard von Hartmann wrote a treatise about Sinnett's book at the time. This treatise culminates in the fact that one has to deal with fantasies, and in a sentence that warns against it. But he approaches the book with a certain impartiality that is otherwise not found in the West. Eduard von Hartmann has familiarized himself with the sevenfold division. He has grasped that the higher part of human nature consists of Atma, Budhi, Manas, and that it becomes immortal when it is drawn to a higher one. In this way, it also becomes immortal. Eduard von Hartmann correctly says that only in the course of the third round does a fertilization of the individuality occur, so that one cannot speak of a survival of that which develops from the third round onwards and in the same. He cannot see what it is in man that re-embodies itself when you have not yet developed the sixth part. So they are not immortal. So he cannot see how one can speak of an immortality of the beings from the first, second and third rounds. Then come the fifth, sixth and seventh rounds; from the beginning, that is, from the first epoch of our first earthly developmental series, it is lunar. Then comes the earthly epoch and after our earthly epoch we still have three following ones. In each round we have seven races. Even if the sixth basic part has not yet developed in our humanity – from the very beginning, what is immortal in man was already present and in a much more perfect, more brilliant way. It was there. What has now, so to speak, submerged was also present in an earlier epoch, but in a liberated state, not yet having entered the body. All of us who are now alive may be called thoughts of the divine primal spirit. The physical basis, the etheric and the kamic basis, is developing below. This is the first chain of development.

And now imagine that at the beginning of development all individual souls were present as spirits. Imagine this original sphere, which is now scattered, of coarse matter. This sphere was in an atmosphere of a purely spiritual nature, in which the individual souls lived. They were still virginal and untouched by any materiality. These individual souls then still lived in close harmony with Atma. They were still one with Atma. The first stage of soul development is still 'being with Atma'. The formation of matter continues, but the development of the spirit descends. The Budhi comes to meet the physical. The moon epoch develops Manas in the floating atmosphere, so that Atma, Budhi, Manas are already emerging, and have been prepared: body, life force, Kama. In the third round they unite, the two, in Kama and Manas they can devour each other.

In the development of our group and our race, two currents have merged. One that descended and one that ascended. Imagine a crowd gathered in a meadow; they are led by a guide. Each individual builds a tent and makes windows in it. The group soul thinks the individuals. The individuals were related to the group soul as my left and right hands are to the human organism. From the very beginning the entities were there. At first the tent is still together and comfortable. Then it changes into physicality. Think again of the lamp reflected in many spheres. The mirror images then become luminous themselves. Each individual sphere becomes luminous and a selfish being.

And now something about the purpose of the world process: we have to compare the two concepts of 'intention' and 'achievement'. The intention is what wants to come to the outside, and the end is what the intention has realized in. It is best to look at a specific case to make this clear. Let us take a moon manvantara or an earth epoch and, within it, the pralaya. In the moon manvantara, the following has developed: Kama. How did these people come about? They were put together from the outside by Kama. Kama worked with love in them to bring them into being. They go out of the manvantara with a specific goal. What has been drawn in is universal Kama; what flows out is now love. It is a reversal of the current. In the beginning, Brahma has the tendency to emanate all Kama. This then comes back in a different form. It passes through special beings. Emanated wisdom and emanated love come back to Brahma again. That is the purpose of the world. Hunger is like nourishment, because before saturation the same condition exists as afterwards.

Because God gives people the power of creation, they give it back to him. What has been given as a sacrifice is given again as a sacrifice.

On the whole, the world can only be understood as an act of love, as freedom and as sacrifice. One should not criticize the world process on one's own initiative. The gift of thought is only given to people of the fifth round, during the fifth round it will still have a completely different development, and in the sixth it will

[termination of the transcript].

Today I will talk about the development process of the three human races up to the initial stages. Let us first stay with our round and our race. It is the fourth round and the fifth race in which we live. I will describe the development of our present race. The [Atlantic] race precedes it. This lived on a continent between America and Africa. Parts of Africa still belong to it, at certain times also Egypt - although Egypt has repeatedly been under water - and Greenland. This race was preceded by the Lemurian race. In this race, man received the Manas from Kama. This was preceded by two other human races. It is an exaggeration to call the preceding races human races.

The individualities that make up our causal body – that was before the middle of the third race – they were not actually incarnated, but were in a state of spiritual-cosmic descent at that time. Try to visualize this correctly for now. I will use an image to make this completely clear.

Imagine: a child is learning to write, and you start by taking a certain book, let's say a book about physics, and having sentences from physics copied out. However, it is not important that we write a, e, i, u, because the content of the physics book floats over everything, so to speak. The teacher is the mediator. Let us assume that I have the child write the sentences of the physics book so that he gets used to recognizing the content. At first, the content will remain outside. But the time will come when the content is absorbed into the child, and the child then writes the content from within, which has been imposed on him from the outside. Now imagine the living content of all the causal bodies that have been incarnating continuously since the third human race as the content of the physics book. Also, imagine that they will also incarnate. This content was not yet incarnated at the time, as a virgin individuality [hovered] over what is now taking place down here.

First of all, we have to imagine that everything that later incarnates is present in a complete unity. It was, as it were, all world soul, which still contained everything that later developed as a causal body. The idea of Giordano Bruno will make this clear to us in a very wonderful way. The idea is not in the book, but you have to form it. We compare the world with the individual human soul, and then we imagine the world soul with its thoughts instead of the human soul with its thoughts. These are living beings. Human thoughts must be expanded into living entities. They would then experience the causal bodies as the entities of thought.

Everything that lives in us was once in the third human race, which was full of thoughts of the world soul. Then the cosmic descent happened. It was all like currents coming out of the divine center. Christian esotericism says: The angels proclaim the glory of God. Every thought proclaims the glory of God. It is, so to speak, the mouthpiece of God. This now descends into the Rupa-region of the mental world. It takes shape in the most diverse ways. Only now can we speak of the individual being formed. Now man begins to feel himself. He is in the Rupa-region. Now he descends further into the astral region. The beings have then become astral entities.

Now there is a law in the spiritual cosmos that says that the lower connects with the upper when the lower and the upper have become similar. The upper has become astral. Just as human thoughts surround themselves with astral matter, so do world thoughts surround themselves with material and astral entities.

Entities had come from the moon that had already been physically real before, entities that were clumsy entities that were not only similar to animal forms. They were gigantic figures, entities that could not think, in which only chemical forces had formed. What was manasic worked like a thread from the outside, just as the individual bee is guided by the bee soul. What guides here is the same as what descends later. That is already doing the work. As Kama develops, the reaching down happens from above. They have become astral from the physical form, they have returned to the state of the germ.

The beings we call Pitris pass over to the Pralaya and are fertilized by that which had previously hovered above them. Everything that is chemical in us comes over. The Moon Pitris had no brain; they had no intellect. They were only ruled by what has now receded as the sympathetic nervous system and now performs the unconscious functions.

Now that which is Kama-Manas splits off first from the effervescent part of the world soul. This now passes through three elemental realms. It develops arupically, rupically and astrally. And at the moment when the intellect has become astral, our round begins. The Moon-Pitris come from the planet like seeds. The first sphere is an arupic sphere. There the seed-bodies float first. There the arupic intellect is formed. Then there is a small pralaya. The second sphere follows. They work into each other in such a way that now strange formations arise, formations which are more finely shaped on one side. The outer clumsy entities of the moon Pitris are preserved. This contracts during the time when the second sphere is forming. In the third sphere, the intellect becomes astral and the former Kama nature also becomes astral again. Now they are together and now the fourth sphere also begins, the actual human race.

Now man develops into the etheric form. In the first race, the beings or human beings were entirely etheric, until in the third race the I descended, where that which is worked into it can connect with manas and work with manas, the intellect. Externally, kama-manas appears. Man recognizes good and evil. Now he begins to incarnate further and further. In the second race, the further development is prepared. We begin to form incarnations only in the middle of the third race in the Lemurian race.

What I will use now is a correct image. We first exist in the world soul, as it were in a cornucopia. Then we descend deeper and deeper, and as this descent happens, there is a mysterious affinity with some body down there. Because I am now Atma, there is a physical body down there that belongs to me in an occult way. Then I descend into prana, then comes kama, which evolves into manas. Together: the egos in Atma are distributed among the beings evolving in kama.

When the Lemurian race unfolded, there were not yet animals in the sense that we know them today, but they were very different beings. What was ready was the entire mineral kingdom. These were not individual minerals, but a jumbled realm. The mineral kingdom also froze into solid forms. Inside, KamaManas developed in man, outside the mineral kingdom. Now the principle of the plant kingdom was dissolved in the generally floating mineral kingdom. They were not yet individual plants - as in the “Opodeldok” the etheric plant forms interweave - because the plant principle lives in it. Likewise, that which became animals does not yet live in physical forms, but was a swelling, soft mass, although individualized to a certain degree.

The spirit hovered over the waters. The world spirit had not yet sunk into the individual beings. First the mineral kingdom solidified, then the plant kingdom and then the animal kingdom. The consolidation of the human kingdom took place simultaneously. One must not assume that humans have developed from the animals we call monkeys. The apes are those beings who missed the connection at the time, who were therefore not incarnated with Manas. The ape egos are taken up by decadent bodies. Within the mental realm, there are still countless other animal souls that would incarnate if animal bodies were to arise within the present time. We must not imagine this in a moral way, but more cosmically, concerning the world soul.

Let us assume that our Theosophical Society does not succeed now, then the American-European development would come to a standstill. But if we triumph, then [gap in transcript]

A culture was established in the Gobi Desert, and from there all the development of that time was broadcast. Now, not a geographical closure is to be formed, but more of a moral one; a core is to be formed that will serve as the foundation for the next race. If the right egos are not found now, a failure would be recorded and there would be a delay. In the normal development, Nirmanakayas can only develop when the physical body has dissolved back into the mental.

Plato is a so-called five-rounder. This state has been artificially achieved. But then you will have all astral bodies. The Buddha or Christ natures are not just five-rounders or six-rounders. They work from the mental body. These are then a kind of double nature, which now develop in the physical body what others will only achieve in much later periods of time.

First, the purely physical theory that is usually taught in our schools. According to Kant-Laplace's theory, it is assumed that at the point where our solar system is today, there was once a thin, gaseous nebula, similar to the mass of the Orion Nebula, so that the entire planets such as Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, Venus, Earth - in analogy - were like simple fat globules, like fat globules floating on water.

[Dr. Steiner takes a card sheet that is as large in diameter as a fat globule, pushes it through the fat globule, which is then divided into two parts. Then he pushes a needle through it as an axis, puts it in water and sets it in rotation. It becomes a lens, and then fat globules split off and move around the original drop.]

Kepler replaced the circular motion with the ellipse. All physical theories are built on analogies. There is no other evidence. As long as we remain within the physical mass, we can transfer the process we have described to the large scale and accept it. If someone had sat outside the process of creation to observe its development, they would not have seen anything different.

But suppose that something that would not be visible to the physical eye would become visible in the preceding and subsequent for someone who begins to see brightly, who could say: Now something is present in the moment when the ethereal condenses into the physical. He completely disregards what precedes it. And that is the secret, that everything else is eliminated and only the physical remains. Such a physical representation cannot be challenged. It is a partial truth. The Kant nebula could never have been there if it had not condensed out of something else. Can you imagine organic germs separating out of a mass of gas? From this you can see that within what Kant describes, something must have been present that Kant does not describe. If we trace back the states of our earth: today it is solid, before that it was liquid, even before that it had a gaseous form. But before it took on the gaseous form, it was an astral sphere.

And this cannot be described by physical theory. You have to imagine the space where the earth is now as being filled with astral matter. At a certain point in time, Kama is divided into two poles. One of these is the physical-material, the other the kamic-manasic. Now the material emerges, as it were, out of nothing.

He cannot recognize the Kama-Manas. This forms the human being, and the human being forms the animals as side branches. Something else must precede the astral earth. This is preceded by a mental earth, the rupic-mental earth. But when the rupic-mental earth was formed, the rupic-mental sun, Venus, and so on, the whole planetary system, was formed at the same time. All planets became rupic-mental at the same time. The original was the Sun. The first division that arises is developed out of the Arupic. The segregation of the planets takes place in such a way that this is a purely mental process. The Dhyan-Chohans are the mental spirits of the planets.

Let us consider Jupiter. The Arupic mental Sun has become the Rupic mental Mercury and so on. We have designated as rupic-mental all the processes that relate to the planetary system. Everything that enters into the individual planets is astral. The astral-earthly has nothing to do with any other planet. On the other hand, we have the rupic-mental sphere in common with all the other planets. The kamic entities are those that belong only to our physical existence. The observer sitting on the chair could only see the bodies shine when they have entered the physical-material. A Christian who imagines God as a man with a long beard is spiritually superstitious. Those who believe in the Kant-Laplace theory we call materially superstitious.

If we follow the lunar cycle, we are dealing with a physical moon. It becomes astral. Take the earth. It was first arupic, then rupic, then mental, astral, physical, then astral again, rupic, arupic. We have already been through this.

The Pitri nature is astral and so on. In the astral state, we would never be able to make the transition from one planet to another. Only when we rise to the mental and there again reach the roupical-mental, which still belongs to the same planet, and come to the formless, only then can we pass into the pralaya and ascend to another planet. We have to reach the arupical stage to be able to go from one planet to another.

I will now describe the process by which the Earth was formed from the Moon. In today's physics books, the process is described very crudely. The conditions are described as being similar to those on our Earth. Our Earth makes one revolution in 24 hours. The Moon completes the same in 29 days. That is one lunar month. It revolves around its axis once. Its day lasts half of 29 days = 14¾ days day and 14¾ days night. When the sun shines for so long, such heat is generated that the lead, if it exists on the moon, would melt completely at noon and would flow on the moon. Lead could never stay put for a day. The other metals would all be water. And if we look at the night, it would have become so cold before sunset that the thermometer would be 150 degrees below freezing. Everything that looks like earthly life would have to perish every moonlit night. You see, the conditions are radically different when we look at them purely physically.

Now I will show you what conditions were like before our Earth was formed. The body that is the Moon today is not the Moon we speak of in occult science. That was a world body that no longer exists today, on which the soul ancestors lived, who had a highly developed Kama nature, were long-haired, gigantic in size, and in certain races even looked similar to a Nikelmann [...], moist, the ancestors were enclosed in the germ. Their physical form had become astral; from there rupisch, arupisch, then germ [...] and from there over to earth. The seeds were fertilized by Kama-Manas. Then the astral formed, and then we had the astral earth.

In this line were the Pitris, who were essentially already merged with Kama-Manas, and most of the Pitris were merged with such Kama-Manas seeds. But there were also a number of Pitris natures who had not reached their level of development in the earlier lunar epoch. Not those that had gone mad, that disturbed the development, but those that had remained behind, that had not achieved the development. They were there with the full amount of kamic power that belonged to them, that was not usable by others. This was excreted, and the sphere that was present lengthened, becoming an ellipsoid, an egg-shaped form.

In this form, two solid cores formed, one large and one small. And now the small sphere and the large sphere were separated. The moon lost its astral shell, a mass of slag that contains only those kamic forces that are more firmly embedded in its mass than the magnetic forces are in a magnet. Lunar magnetism is a very condensed kamic force. The outside then also condenses and becomes solid earth. This process of casting out takes place in the astral state. The Rupa earth differs from the earlier moon in that the seed of Kama-Manas is added. The fact that we do not make moral demands on cosmic bodies in the mineral kingdom is because the astral body of the same has come to rest. You will not blame Vesuvius for overflowing and spewing fire.

The more one has burnt [kama], the more one's human body will resemble a star. The astral body will not appear as a surging battlefield between the astral and the physical, but will come to a uniform rest within itself. The burning of [kama] consists precisely in the thorough astralization of the astral body.

As soon as we go beyond the conditions of the earth, all knowledge becomes somewhat patchy and complicated, even for those in the know. If I say anything today about connections that are outside of the sun and the earth and go beyond them, then it is possible that it will be one-sided in some respects – if only because they are little known and sometimes too complicated. But some things will arise that are illuminating for the question that Franz Seiler has asked.

We must hold on to the fact that for the consideration of our solar system, the most important point of view is that, with the Copernican system, the sun is moved to the center of our solar system. And present-day astronomy regards the earlier world system, the Ptolemaic system, as an outdated and, as such, downright false system. However, it is only a difference in perspective. Astronomy presents all calculations with respect to the Earth, and Copernicus presents them with the Sun as the center, as if one were to describe a region with respect to one mountain and the same region from another mountain. Things are entirely relative. What we call rest and motion is more correctly represented in the Copernican system. But as far as rest and motion in the astral is concerned, this is more correctly represented in the Ptolemaic system.

The Middle Ages are not to be understood in exactly the same sense as our present-day conceptions. When you find the earth in the center in Dante, and then the spheres of the moon, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and then the sphere of the fixed stars, this does not mean the same physical sense of space as that understood by astronomy in the physical sense, but rather it means spiritual, mental connections. By the physical the medieval astronomer, who was not really an astronomer but a theosophist, understood only a sensualization of the spiritual connection. He did not understand the same, did not give the rough facts as the modern astronomer gives them, but he wanted to understand them as a sensualization of the spiritual connection of the world. Only another point of view was put in the place of the old point of view.

And now a few words about the connections themselves. We must be clear that the planets the ancients spoke of are not at the same stage of their development. While the Earth presents itself to us from the standpoint of Kama-Manas, the planet Mercury is today in a far more advanced state. It has already reached the point where earthly development will have arrived when we have developed the Budhi principle in all of humanity, when the Budhi principle will set the tone within earthly development.

Mercury is completely immersed in Budhi. On Venus we have Manas, pure Manas, which plays the same role as Kama-Manas on Earth. Venus and Mercury are planets that shine ahead of our Earth. They are therefore models for earthly development. [...] The Venusian and the Mercuryan are basically present throughout the solar system. They do not need to work, but they can work. So that on our Earth could occur what we call the appearance of the so-called Venus Sons. They could become teachers for the Earth as in the third Lemurian race this took place because the Earth needed this influence. It only requires the opportunity from outside for the Venus Sons. If the Earth does not need the influence, it is not there, if it needs it, it is there. That is the influence between Earth and Venus.

Then there is the planet Mars. In a certain respect, it represents a state that the Earth had already outgrown before it entered the lunar epoch. But that would not be today's Mars. It is no longer in the state that the present Moon is in. The Moon represents an externally overcome state of earthly development. Mars was already a moon and has entered a new line of development, so that it once represented the state and today is, so to speak, only at the place where our earth went through its pre-lunar epoch, the epoch in which it was in the state of pure prana. The lunarian epoch in Kama, the Mars epoch in the state of pure Kama. Plants and human beings, who have now developed the pranic principle as the highest principle. This took on the same role for them as Kama-Manas does for us. It would be a false idea if we believed that this was linked to pleasure and displeasure. That only came in the lunarian epoch.

These beings were purely engaged in reproduction. Even before that, the earth was in a state in which it developed the physical, purely elementary principle. So at that time, before the Mars epoch had come, the earth, or rather the forerunner of the earth, was purely physical. At that time, the forerunner of man was also already present. But he was only changeable in the physical life. He was an automaton, an automatic human being. All spiritual life was above man. He himself was only an automaton. The world body that man inhabited at that time was so elementary that it had no cohesive force, so it shattered. And that formed the ring of planetoids: the many planets that circle the sun like a ring.

How is it that Mars was able to develop further, although the body was shattered? Mars already had the life principle within it and therefore continued to live, while the other was only physical and had to disintegrate. So we have the four stages of development before us.

Our moon will later have completely disappeared, and in its place a new world body will shine, which will fertilize the kamic principle in a different way. In this way we have advanced to the planetoids and now come out of the circle of the planets, where we encounter Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus. There is no reason to speak of Neptune yet. It occupies a special position. It does not belong to our planetary system alone, but to another as well. It is a border planet. In contrast to this, we have to look at Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus. You may say that Uranus was not yet known at that time. It was only discovered in the eighteenth century. But it was known in esoteric teaching. The three outer planets, Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus, counted. The planetoids, however, represented the fragmentation of the elemental realm.

Everything else is the reincarnation of what was there before. Our entire planetary chain was nothing more than the re-embodiment of states that had existed before. Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus represent the three higher cosmic principles, which simply reincarnated, first in the elemental, then in the pranic and so on, so that in Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus we have to recognize the three principles Atma, Budhi, Manas - Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus.

Now I will characterize Saturn. He represents this upper triad in a very special way. I characterize him from the point of view of the spirit of our earth. He presents himself as the desire to reincarnate in the earthly chain of planets. You can imagine that the upper triad harbors the desire to become the earthly chain of planets. Saturn represents this aspiration. Imagine that it says to itself, “I want to form a planetary chain in which Kama-Manas becomes the middle principle: elemental-physical, pranic, kamic - Kama-Manas, Manas, Budhi.

The earth will become a kind of Venus-Jupiter-Sun when it is in the Sun. This wish is essentially expressed in the configuration of Saturn in that Saturn contains all the principles laid out next to each other. Actually, there are not seven, but nine principles. This also helps us to understand the configuration of Saturn. Man is three times threefold. He consists of body, soul and spirit. Each part consists of three parts again. Let us take the body first. It consists, firstly, of the physical body, secondly, the life body, and thirdly, the bodily form. First, think of the physical body. You have the stomach as a chemical laboratory, then the heart, a pumping station, and so on. The prana must work in this. These pranic parts must then be joined.

Secondly, the soul: it consists, firstly, of the sentient soul; secondly, of the mind soul – it can understand what it feels; thirdly, it is aware as the consciousness soul.

Thirdly, spirit: firstly, All-Spirit; secondly, human spirit; thirdly, human self-spirit-self. What the human spirit is is expressed by Christian esotericism as follows: the angels proclaim the glory of God. The human spirit is only aware of the glory of God, it is not itself.

[Stage] 3, 4, 6 and 7 combine and form only one. This gives us one. At the time when it was decided to form the chain of worlds, there were still nine. Saturn represents this plan. It represents the Kama-Manas, which stands in the middle. So we have four principles in front and four behind. Therefore Saturn has eight moons. That makes nine in total, and these nine together represent the preliminary plan for the creation of the world, while the ring signifies the process of becoming unified into a single entity. These unified principles are the archetypal human being. The ring is therefore also called “spiritus mund”. Thus Saturn would be the preliminary sketch of the planetary system. It looks like our solar system set apart. It is the archetype of our entire solar system. Within the upper triad, only one remains as Atma. This is Uranus.

And now Atma as unity, as upper triad with the Tetraktys. This presents itself as a common sphere for the upper principles, which are grouped around below as the four exemplary moons that Jupiter has. They are therefore not yet moons in our sense, but they are the principle of the moon before the moon is there. Our moon is a precipitated part. The four moons of Jupiter are driving, which can only be absorbed into Jupiter. Our principles apply only to our development. The deva development is already such that we cannot say that it has the same principles. Kama is already so different that we could not use it. The manasic principle of the devas is quite different, has quite different characteristics, although it is allied with us and we are able to understand it.

These indications are to be observed under certain conditions. But much has come to our knowledge only through tradition. Even Masters know about such things only because records are available from times when these things were still known. In the middle of the Lemurian race, the great teachers had come. We can know something about the Dhyani-Chohans. The Secret Doctrine is drawn from these records. Originally, it was only the Dzyan verses. These were only available in ancient records, accessible only under special conditions.