The Rudolf Steiner Archive

11. About the group Egos of Animals, Plants, and Minerals

[ 1 ] It cannot be emphasized enough that theosophy must become a way of life—in the sense that through theosophy, a person does not merely learn this or that, but learns to think, feel, and perceive differently in relation to their entire environment. This happens when a person truly takes in the theosophical impulses. They must learn to empathize and share in the lives of all beings. Of course, this must apply most of all to other human beings. But we learn best to empathize with people when we first learn to do so for the rest of the world.

[ 2 ] Human beings gradually come to know the entire world around them. They gradually come to realize that they are surrounded everywhere by spiritual beings, that they pass through spiritual beings everywhere. They come to understand this in terms of feeling and sensation. They learn to recognize what surrounds us in the three kingdoms of nature. They learn to recognize the beings in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms. They walk through meadows and forests, across fields and pastures, differently than those who have not undergone theosophical training.

[ 3 ] If we look at other beings, we might at first believe that animal beings do not have a soul like humans do. However, the human “I”—the human soul—differs from the animal “I.” The human “I” lives on the physical plane. When we consider the animal as such, the individual animal has a physical body, an etheric body, and an astral body. In humans, in addition to these three members, we also have the “I.” Thus, in the waking state, the human “I” is present within the person. The animal, however, does not have the “I” on the physical plane. To find it, we must delve somewhat deeper into the so-called astral world. There, just as we find a population of human beings here on the physical plane, we find a population of animal “I’s” on the astral plane. Just as a human being encounters other human beings here, so too can the seer encounter distinct personalities on the astral plane; these are the animal “I’s.”

[ 4 ] Your mental image is of ten fingers of a person sticking through a wall. They are moving. We see the ten fingers moving, but not the person himself. He is hidden behind the wall. We cannot explain how the ten fingers come through the wall and move on their own. We must assume that some kind of being is involved. So it is with animals in the physical world. All animals of the same species have a group-I. Here in the physical world, we see the animals moving about. What we see there has a physical body, an etheric body, and an astral body. If, for example, we see lions here in the physical world, these lions are the manifested organs of the lion-I living in the astral. The lion-I—the group-I of physical lions—is just as much a distinct entity on the astral plane as we are distinct entities here. Thus, every animal group has an I on the astral plane; a lion-I, a tiger-I, and a vulture-I exist on the astral plane. The individual animals are here in the physical world, just as fingers are extended through a wall.

[ 5 ] When we observe the individual animals here, many of them appear to us to be extraordinarily intelligent. These animals are governed by the astral plane. There are the animal “I’s,” the group “I’s.” This population of the astral plane is much more intelligent than humans. The animal group-I’s on the astral plane are very wise beings. Let us observe the flight of birds—how they migrate through different regions, how their flight is organized, how they migrate to warmer regions in the fall and gather again in the spring. When we look deeply into these wise arrangements, we must ask: Who is hidden behind the wall, orchestrating all of this? — These are the group-I’s. When we see a beaver building, we observe that the beaver builds with greater wisdom than the greatest feat of engineering. People have observed how the intelligence of bees works by throwing sugar at them instead of honey. Then they watched them. The bees cannot carry the sugar away. They summon other bees, fly first to a water source, and each little bee brings back a drop of water, soaks the sugar with it, and transforms it into a kind of syrup. It then carries this back to the hive. The spirit of the hive is behind this work of the bees. The individual bees belong to a single bee personality, just as our limbs belong to us. The only difference is that the individual bees are more separate, while our individual limbs are closer together and more compact. Invisible to ourselves, we pass everywhere, even through beings—through the collective “I”s of animal groups—that elude physical observation.

[ 6 ] Just as we begin to feel a connection with beings of which human beings are completely unaware, so too can we feel a connection with the plant souls. The plant “I”-beings live in a world even higher than that of the animal “I”-beings. The plant “I”-beings—those self-contained group “I”-beings, each of which encompasses a series of plants—are on the so-called Devachan plane. We can also specify the location where all these plant “I’s” actually are. All plant “I’s” are at the center of the Earth. The animal group “I’s” circle the Earth like the trade winds. Thus, the plant “I’s” are at the center of the Earth. They are beings who all interpenetrate one another. In the spiritual world, the law of interpenetration prevails. One being passes through another. We see the animal group-I’s moving across the Earth like the trade winds and observe how, through their wisdom, they carry out what we perceive in the actions of animals. When we observe the plants, we see the head of the plant—the root—directed toward the center of the Earth, because their group-I is located at the center of the Earth.

[ 7 ] The Earth itself is the expression of soul-spiritual beings. From a spiritual point of view, plants appear to us much like the nails on our fingers. Plants belong to the Earth. Anyone who observes individual plants never sees them in their entirety. Every plant belongs to the sum of beings that constitute the plant-I. In this way, we can immerse ourselves in the sensations and feelings of the plants themselves. What grows out of the earth from the plant—what strives from the earth’s interior toward the surface—has a different nature than what grows beneath the earth. Cutting off the flower, stem, and leaves of a plant is different from pulling out the root. Cutting them off is a kind of sense of well-being, like a delight for the plant’s soul. This delight is similar, for example, to what a cow feels when her young calf suckles at her udder. What grows out of the earth from the plant is truly something akin to the milk of animals. When we walk through the fields in the fall and the stalks fall beneath the reaper’s scythe, when the scythe sweeps through the sheaves, then feelings of well-being, of delight, flow and waft through the fields. It is something immensely significant when we do not merely see the falling sheaves with our physical eyes, but when we see how these feelings of well-being sweep across the earth as the reaper moves through the fields with his scythe. But when the roots of the plants are torn out, this is a feeling of pain for the plant soul. In the higher worlds, the same laws do not apply as in the physical world. We arrive at different mental images when we ascend into the spiritual worlds. Even here in the physical world, the principle of beauty sometimes contradicts the principle of pain or pleasure. It may be that, driven by a sense of beauty, someone pulls out their white hairs, but it still hurts. So it is with plants as well. If you pull them out by the roots, it may look neater, it may be more beautiful, but it still causes the plant pain.

[ 8 ] Even stones are lifeless only in the physical world. In the higher worlds, they, too, have their group-I’s. In the higher regions of the Devachan plane, the group-I’s of the minerals are present. They, too, experience joy or pain. We cannot learn anything about this through speculation, but only through Spiritual Science.

[ 9 ] When we see a worker in a quarry breaking off stone after stone, we might think that this causes the stone’s soul pain. But that is not the case. Precisely when the stone is blasted apart, feelings of well-being burst forth from the stone in all directions. From the quarry where the rocks are blasted out, powerful feelings of well-being flow out in all directions. When we have a glass of water and add salt to it, and the salt dissolves, the water is filled with pleasure, with a sense of delight. Joy flows through the water when one views the dissolution of the salt from a spiritual perspective. But if we allow the dissolved salt to solidify again, this occurs amid a sense of pain. In the same way, it would take place amid the stone soul’s sense of pain if we could bind the shattered rocks back together again.

[ 10 ] The seers have always revealed these mysteries to humanity in their secret writings—the religious texts. But people have forgotten how to understand these secret writings. Let us think back to distant, bygone eras of our Earth’s evolution. We see the massive rock formations of the mountains, layered from various clays, basaltic rocks, and so on. Going further back, we find that the substances on Earth become increasingly soft. Then we arrive at a time when the Earth was filled with powerful masses of heat and fire, when iron—and all metals and minerals—were dissolved into the spiritual realm. Human beings were also spiritual beings at that time. If humanity was to continue developing and take on its present forms, that soft mass had to solidify. The mountains arose, the mineral masses separated from the soft substance, and the Earth became the dwelling place of modern humanity. The lifeless rock mass crystallized out of the molten Earth, just as salt crystallizes out of a salt solution. Everything unfolded in such a way that the solid masses took shape from the liquid state. This did not happen without pain. The entire process of the Earth’s solidification was accompanied by the suffering of the soul of the stone.

[ 11 ] In the future, the Earth will once again become spiritualized. The entire Earth will disintegrate once more, as radium already demonstrates today. The process of the Earth’s dissolution will begin—a spiritualization, a deification, the adoption as children. Let us now hear what the Apostle Paul says: “The whole Earth, all beings, groan in labor pains, waiting for the adoption as children.”

[ 12 ] Here we have a depiction of what happens on Earth, where the soul of stone suffers until the state is reached on Earth where it is accepted as a child. It could be painful to the soul when those who proclaim religious texts to people project all sorts of things into those texts because they do not want to make the effort to penetrate the depths of these religious texts. For those who guide people, it is nothing short of a dereliction of duty if they do not wish to delve into their religious texts.

[ 13 ] The Apostle Paul understood the significance of the events unfolding on Earth. In our new age, theosophy is meant to guide people into the depths of the religious texts. It is sad when the appointed representatives of these texts make no effort whatsoever to delve into them—but they lack even the will to understand them. All the arrogance of the present day—which proclaims, “How wonderfully far we have come!”—must fade away. How many believe that our ancestors knew nothing! People come along and interpret the writings of Paul and the religious texts as they please, yet they are filled with arrogance, feeling that they know more than our ancestors did. But how do these words affect us: “All creation groans in labor pains, waiting for adoption as sons”—when we allow the realization of the sentient soul of stone to take hold of us, as it waits in pain, anticipating adoption as a child? People with a materialistic mindset believe that, out in the world, they merely pass through air, wind, and fog—through oxygen and nitrogen. But the person who possesses spiritual insight knows that he passes through spiritual beings everywhere, that with every breath he inhales spiritual beings and becomes one with them.

[ 14 ] Thus we have seen how the animal “I”s move in circles around the Earth like the trade winds, how the plant “I”s are gathered at the center of the Earth, how the Earth itself feels something when we uproot the plants, and how the Earth itself is alive, animated, and capable of feeling. Everything outside is animated and full of life.

[ 15 ] Just as the physical body is born of physical substances and forces, so too are our spiritual members born of the great universe. There we begin to see within ourselves a small world that rests within the great world. This evokes a blissful feeling within us. Only when we learn to empathize with minerals, plants, and animals do we also learn to feel how our “I” rests within the entire universe.

[ 16 ] Thus we see how theosophy leads us into the spiritual depths of existence. It is something that transforms our attitude toward life and our life impulses, so that we thereby become different people. Theosophical mental images are seeds, impulses of the will for genuine experience.