Awareness - Life - Form
GA 89
19 October 1904
Translated by Steiner Online Library
Planetary Development II
[ 1 ] We left off with human evolution at the point where it enters what is called the mineral kingdom. Humanity is now a mineral being. A brain has been forming since the middle of the Lemurian period. The mineral kingdom has attained its highest capabilities, as the brain developed within it, along with the intellectuality it embodies. This descent of humanity into the mineral kingdom was only possible because, in earlier stages of its development, humanity had passed through the three preceding kingdoms—the first, second, and third elemental kingdoms. Before passing through the three elemental kingdoms, human beings were pure monads, pure spirit—Atma, Budhi, Manas. Then they descended through the three elemental kingdoms into the fourth elemental kingdom. The mineral kingdom is the fourth kingdom. Who was active in this process of formation?
[ 2 ] The so-called Dhyanis of Wisdom were active in this process, building the body from the outside using mineral substances; and only when the brain was complete could the stream of development continue from within. If, at that point, the Dhyanic Beings of Wisdom had continued to act from the outside on their own, then humanity would have become even harder than the mineral kingdom. It would have had no inner life, no spirituality to counteract the material hardening, and it would have been lost to cosmic life; it would have fallen away from evolution like dross, cast out of the sequence of the natural kingdoms. Without the intervention of spiritual life from within, a world of completely petrified human shells would have emerged, incapable of any evolution. Such a rigid world falls out of the sequence of the kingdoms. In occultism, this hypothetical world is called the “eighth sphere.”
[ 3 ] Because the Dhyanis of Wisdom were caught up in this delay, they would have led humanity into a dead end. Now the ascending Dhyanis—who had previously been left behind—took hold of humanity. This spiritual principle took control of humanity, which was moving toward hardening, in order to spiritualize human development. The Dhyanis acting from within strove to spiritualize humanity more and more, so that only wisdom would prevail. Humanity now stood at a crossroads: either to descend into the eighth sphere or to become fully spiritualized. Both paths would have led to something other than what present-day humanity is—either to humanity’s disappearance into the eighth sphere or to its steady spiritualization. These two currents have been working against one another since the middle of the Lemurian epoch. This would have remained so had the Dhyanic beings—who had built up humanity from the outside and guided it further into the eighth sphere—not incorporated Budhi, that is, love. (In Marie Steiner-von Sivers’ notes, this sentence reads: “This would have remained so had not the Dhyanic beings of love incarnated in order to permeate matter with love as well.”) In this way, they preserved the material side of humanity from destruction. They join the others as a third current; these currents act from the outside.
[ 4 ] Because the three currents converge, a part of the material realm—the mineral kingdom—becomes part of this threefold human being, who is at once material, soulful, and spiritual—body, soul, and spirit. What cannot be carried along due to the unevenness of the currents truly becomes dross. This is the [present-day] Moon. It is a fragment of the eighth sphere, dross. In the Moon we see a provisional symbol of what the first Dhyanis had been able to achieve, so that those Dhyanic beings who had until then shaped the form of the human being are symbolized in their activity within the Moon. Collectively, Jewish esotericism calls them Yahweh or Jehovah, the God of macrocosmic wisdom, the God of form. That is why H. P. Blavatsky calls him a lunar deity, as the deity of form. In *Esoteric Buddhism* [by A.P. Sinnett], the Moon is counted as part of the eighth sphere. However, it is only a fragment of it, a symbol of what humanity would be in the eighth sphere. Yahweh is the Elohim of the fourth round, the Lord of wise form, the fourth Elohim.
[ 5 ] From the middle of the fourth round onward, the Lord of Love is at work: Christ, the Love of the World, the Second Logos. The Lord of Form, the Fourth Elohim, was Wisdom, the Third Logos; Jehovah is the Spirit of the Third Logos. The Christ principle, the principle of love, began spiritually in the middle of the Lemurian era. At the same time, Lucifer intervened.
[ 6 ] We must learn to distinguish between the transitory and the imperishable. In Greek sculpture, for example, magnificent, marvelous works have been created, yet by a certain point in time they will all have perished. If these works were everything, one would have to say that they are transitory; everything on the physical plane is transitory in this way. But the fact that the artist works on the physical plane brings about something lasting for the artist’s spirit—something that would not exist if the artist had not worked on the physical plane. The expression of achievement on a lower plane is the capacity of the being on a higher plane; that is evolution. Only through incarnation does a human being gain an enrichment of the spirit that he would not otherwise receive. That is the significance of the transitory for the imperishable.
[ 7 ] The most mineral aspect of the human being is his skeletal system. This is also in its most perfect form in the present-day physical human being. In the future development of the Earth, digestion, the heart, and so on will also become increasingly perfect, but the skeletal system will not; it will gradually disappear. Stability in the physical realm through the skeletal system is important. What a person acquires during this time, they carry over with them.
[ 8 ] The fact that Christ’s bones were not broken means that whatever belonged to the mineral world in him was not to be destroyed but had to remain intact. The symbols of the Mysteries were lived out externally for the first time back then.
[ 9 ] In the fourth subrace of the fifth root race, the Incarnation of Christ is one of the most important cosmic events. The earlier founders of religions were teachers of wisdom; Christ is the teacher of love.
[ 10 ] Overview of the sub-races of the fifth root race:
[ 11 ] 1. Subrace: the Indians, the race of spirituality
[ 12 ] 2. Subrace: the Persians (Zoroastrian religion), the Race of Flames.
[ 13 ] 3rd subrace: Chaldeans, Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, the earliest Greeks, Romans, Celts. Remnants of the second subrace include Zeus and the heroes Heracles, Theseus, Jason, ‘they are the sun heroes of the third subrace. The race of the stars.’
[ 14 ] 4. Subrace: The later Greek and Latin peoples, the race of personality.
[ 15 ] 5. Subrace: The Germanic, Anglo-Saxon nations, which transform the individual into a free personality that conquers the world—the so-called “race of the world.”
[ 16 ] 6. Subrace: The Slavic race.
[ 17 ] Addition by an unknown note-taker: 7. Subrace: The American peoples. The race of egoism.