Supplements to Member Lectures

GA 246 — 12 December 1906, Munich

5. The Concept of the Group Soul

Only man has an individual soul; other creatures have a group soul. Man's individual soul belongs only to this one entity, just as this individual form of man is also the bearer of the self-contained soul. This is not the case with animals; there the individual physical animal forms are only the individual members of this one soul, the group soul. The group soul lives on the astral plan. We live here on the physical plan side by side. With the group soul on the astral plan it is somewhat different. The astral plan is the field of permeability; the astral plan has four dimensions, the physical plan has three dimensions. There are no spatial difficulties on the astral plan because the law of permeability prevails.

The differentiation of animals into cats, lions, tigers and so on is not as great as one might think. One group merges into another. As a result, these group souls are not so strictly separated from each other. The grouping of souls on the astral plan is such that they can interpenetrate in the most varied ways. There are not only group souls on the astral plan, there are also animals whose group soul is very high, for example the group soul of the ants; it is very high and can be found in the upper parts of the devachan. There is also the group soul of the beehive; it lives on the buddhi plan. In the past, man also had a group soul. There were seven kinds of such group souls when man did not yet have an individual soul. In the sevenfold division of the races you still have the expression of these seven group souls.

What is an individual soul? When the soul is split off from the divine, when it is cut off from above and receives its experiences from outside, then it is an individual soul.

The group soul multiplies into the individual souls according to the law of number. This is a very significant, important truth. Therein lies the individualization of the soul, that the soul perceives through eyes on the physical plane.

The sense of direction, the inheritance of mathematics, the inheritance of talent [- all this] lies more in the senses, not [in] the brain.