Knowledge of Soul and Spirit

GA 56 — 9 April 1908, Berlin

The Beginning and End of Earth

What distinguishes humans from the other beings that surround them on this earth, apart from many things that are less relevant to us today, is that humans organize their lives not merely according to dull, instinctive drives, but according to clear ideas and thoughts, that they derive strength, strength, and security for their work when they are able to look not only at the present but also to determine their own future based on ideas or ideals. Humans can only achieve this if they are able to look around in life, to look beyond what the moment encompasses, into the past and the future. We learn from the past; and we work best for the future by anticipating what we want to do in the future in our ideas and ideals.

It might now seem that today's topic, “The Beginning and End of the Earth,” reaches too far into the past and the future, as if we wanted to deal with ideas that float high above our everyday existence. However, Germany's great philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte already said something very true about those people who, based on their apparent practical approach to life, turn against ideas and ideals because they believe that practical people have no use for ideals and ideas. As has already been mentioned here in another context, Johann Gottlieb Fichte coined a beautiful phrase against them when he spoke to his students in Jena about great ideals and the destiny of mankind: We idealists know just as well as the so-called practitioners, perhaps even better, that ideals are not directly applicable in real life. But when they claim that life, if it is to be truly practical, must not be organized according to ideas and ideals, they only show that they are not counted on in the course of life. May a benevolent deity therefore grant them rain and sunshine at the right time, the necessary food, and, for my sake, if possible, wise thoughts as well.

However, we are not concerned with ideals and ideas and their justification today; only one thing should be touched upon: some may think that ideals and ideas that span such long periods of time as the beginning and end of the earth may perhaps lead too far, blurring into the nebulous and impractical. But this is what a spiritual worldview makes people increasingly aware of: the higher the ideals are taken from, the more directly they can be applied in life, and the further we penetrate with our ideas and ideals, the greater forces they develop, not only for the more comprehensive things in life, but also for every moment of everyday life from morning to night. Small ideals give us little strength for this or that occasion; great ideals always fulfill us, strengthen us, and invigorate us. It is not a matter of immersing ourselves theoretically in such ideas and ideals, but of something flowing out of them, something streaming out. When ideals are great, more vivid and powerful feelings flow from them than from small ideals. And these more vivid and powerful feelings and emotions strengthen us mentally, emotionally, and physically, and imperceptibly creep into what we do in everyday life, making life possible for us in the desirable way.

When we look back today on the development of our Earth, our earthly home, then of course the people of the present first think of the wonderful, powerful achievements of scientific thinking. As on other occasions, it should be emphasized here that it can never be the task of Spiritual Science — if it understands itself correctly — to object in the slightest to the justified findings and results of modern natural science. Therefore, before we tackle this comprehensive topic from the perspective of Spiritual Science, let us first, as in other considerations, make a few preliminary remarks.

Let us give a brief and sketchy answer to the question: What does modern science have to say about our topic today? — Natural science reveals the earthly past with great, comprehensive acumen. From what the earth is now, from what remains of lost worlds and lost beings, our natural science can deduce what our earth may have looked like millions of years ago and what beings walked upon it. As you know, history and historical documents only take us back a short time in the earth's development, only a few millennia. Then it becomes dark, so to speak, if one wants to rely solely on historical documents. A further period takes us back to that which could not be entrusted to written documents, nor to other documents, that which our ancestors gave to their dead in their graves in the form of objects of their culture, which they made themselves and which have remained as remnants. But then natural science goes back even further. It shows us, in the skeletons and other remains of prehistoric plants and animals contained in the layers of our earth, which beings lived on our earth one after the other. It is easy to see that what lies in the upper layers of our earth must have found its grave last, that what lies in the deeper layers, which have been covered by later ones, must contain the documentary remains of older, earlier times. Of course, it is not so easy to conduct scientific research in this way. Geology, or the study of rock strata, has many difficulties. For what has been layered within the Earth's surface has, for the most part, not remained as it was originally layered. Overlaps, thrust faults, and all kinds of undulations of the whole have taken place, so that sometimes what was originally at the bottom has come to the top as a result of the faults. It sometimes takes great acumen to form a picture of how our earth has developed from what is enclosed in the layers of our earth.

We do not want to go into more detail than the spiritual researcher is able to justify; nor do we want to go into detail about what we would have to say about this from a spiritual scientific point of view. There are still some things that need to be corrected. But we do not want to get involved in that. On the contrary, we would rather gratefully accept what diligent natural science has observed and what scientific acumen has achieved in this field as a great achievement for humanity. We would like to use natural science to transport ourselves back to an earlier state of the Earth, when our planet looked very different from today and when the simplest living creatures must have lived on our Earth, of which no remains have survived. Together with natural scientists, we trace the development of our Earth from the layers at the bottom to the layers and remains at the top. There we find simple animals, which are among the vertebrates, among those with a skeleton. We go further and see how the various classes of animals and plants gradually develop, just as they gradually appear on the changing Earth. We go back with the naturalist to the time when fish appeared in our Earth's evolution. Many have completely different forms than today's fish. If we go further back, we come to a strange phase in the development of our Earth, when it was inhabited by those monstrous, wonderful animals, some of which belong to the amphibian and reptile classes. These were animals that were enormous in size, with eyes perhaps as large as a child's head, equipped with gigantic feeding apparatus, animals called ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs and so on, whose remains are excavated in various parts of the earth from the strata known as the Cretaceous and Jurassic periods. This brings us to the time when more perfect plant formations arose, in a relatively young period, although it still spans thousands of years. We come to the point where, according to scientific opinion, humans appeared, where, according to the documents contained in the relevant strata, they first appeared on our earth, after the higher mammals closest to them had preceded them. In short, if we take the image we used recently on another occasion when we looked at the sun, moon, and stars from a spiritual scientific perspective, if we apply that image again and imagine that someone could be watching from a seat in outer space, through millions of years, as the surface of the earth gradually takes shape, as the distribution of earth and water heat and cold changes, how the most diverse classes and forms of animals and living beings emerge, then the physical picture for such a hypothetical observer, sitting somewhere in outer space, would essentially be exactly as natural science describes it. But again, it must be emphasized that spiritual science cannot go beyond the point where natural science itself will be forced to correct things in the future.

Where is the conflict between natural science and spiritual science? Time and again, natural science claims that spiritual science is not based on natural science. Can one stand on more scientific ground than by admitting that everything that natural science knows and can recognize is also recognized by us?

Now there are people who say they stand firmly on the ground of scientific facts. They demand that scholars of Spiritual Science know nothing other than what they themselves know. They demand not only that we agree with what they themselves say, but also that we submit to the dogma that we cannot say more than they say. These people do not realize that such inner intolerance has never existed in the entire history of human development, not even in times when outer intolerance went so far. Certainly, as we were able to say last time when considering the sun, moon, and stars: the external sensory image gives no cause for dispute between Spiritual Science and natural science. — But does it follow from this external sensory view that behind the sensory, behind the physical, there are no supersensible, superphysical forces at work? Last time, we were able to cite Plateau's famous experiment, which shows how a miniature world system can be created in a liquid from a drop of oil by turning a crank. But the good man completely forgot that he himself turned the crank! It is not considered at all that this is completely impossible without the thoughts of the person turning the crank. What we see with our physical eyes is the outer expression, the outer process of what is happening inwardly and spiritually, and what human beings can never know by merely learning about the world with their eyes and their aids, that is, merely with their outer physical tools. But if we want to look back to the physical beginning of the world and not just consider the physical, then we must first bring the true nature of the human being before our soul. Anyone who considers this true nature of the human being from a spiritual scientific point of view will, as I have often emphasized, see this human being broken down into a series of members. Above all, Spiritual Science shows us that the true reason for the changing states that human beings experience every day within twenty-four hours between waking and sleeping lies in the fact that one part of the human being separates from the other part during sleep. Every night, when human beings fall asleep, we see them sink into dreamless sleep, into an indeterminate darkness, which throughout the day has flooded the soul with the most varied images and impressions. We see everything that human beings experience inwardly in terms of instincts, drives, desires, and passions, in terms of pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, sinking down. Everything that floods through the soul throughout the day in all these inner soul experiences sinks down into an indeterminate darkness when we fall asleep. For those who stand on the ground of Spiritual Science, as of course for anyone who stands on the standpoint of common sense, it would naturally be a great folly to claim that with falling asleep the bearer of pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, of drives, desires, and passions would disappear and be resurrected again in the morning upon waking. Spiritual Science shows that when a person lies in dreamless sleep, the part of the human being that the person has in common with all the lifeless, mineral beings around them, which we call the physical body, lies in bed, and that during sleep the etheric or life body, which the human being has in common with plants, but no longer with the minerals, the lifeless beings around them. Two other members of the human being are lifted out of the human being during dreamless sleep. Pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, urges, desires, and passions, all the fluctuating sensations and feelings, everything that is silent at night, has the astral body as its carrier, and this is lifted out of the physical and etheric bodies, which remain in bed, during dreamless sleep. The astral body and the I are lifted out.

How does the existence of this astral body at night differ from its existence during the day? We can understand how the existence of the astral body during the day differs from its existence at night if we remind ourselves — as I have done in other series of these lectures — that the astral body has its reality outside, in another world that surrounds it. What determines whether we perceive something? There may be countless worlds around you, the world of sounds, the world of light, the world of smells, the world of tastes, and so on, but if you did not have the sensory organs for them, these worlds would not exist for you. It is the most illogical thing one can do — yet most people today do it — to claim that a world one does not perceive does not exist. Spiritual Science shows that during dreamless sleep at night, the human astral body is lifted out of the physical and etheric bodies and enters another world; not a world beyond, hidden somewhere, but a world that permeates us like light and air permeate space. For spiritual scientific observation, that world differs from the physical-sensory world only in that it requires other organs through which it can be perceived. This astral body of the human being is in a spiritual world that is in our environment, just like the air around us. Those who have no idea that there is air around them say that there is nothing around them. Similarly, those who have no idea that they are constantly living in the spirit say that there is no spirit in our environment, that there is no spiritual world, no spiritual facts, no spiritual beings. The astral body, the bearer of pleasure and pain, is in this spiritual world at night. It does not perceive it because, in the present evolution, in the present cycle of human development, it does not yet have any organs, any instruments of knowledge for this world in which it exists.

Now it might seem like a hypothesis to say that there is an astral body and that during dreamless sleep, human beings are in a spiritual world outside their physical and etheric bodies. But apart from the fact that those whose spiritual eyes have been opened through the initiation we have discussed know the astral body through its separation from the physical body, through their own observation and experience, apart from that, it can be shown experimentally, so to speak, that such an astral body exists, even if not through ordinary instruments. For the only instrument that truly leads human beings into the spiritual world, that reveals to them the secrets of the higher, supersensible world, is the human being itself, in its full and complete essence. This instrument, the human being, is capable of infinite perfection, of infinitely subtle development, and it is precisely initiation itself that perfects the human being. It provides those who wish to apply it with experimental proof, so to speak, that there is an astral body of the human being that can become independent of the physical body.

Let us recall some of the points we discussed during the initiation. We said that human beings can do certain exercises, exercises in meditation, in inner contemplation, according to very specific methodological rules, through which they can strengthen their world of thoughts, feelings, and will internally, more strongly and powerfully than thoughts, feelings, and will can be strengthened through any external sensory observation. There are instructions, as we saw in the lecture on initiation, through which people can gain more than they can through mere external observation of reality. Something very special becomes apparent in a human soul that applies these instructions to itself. It becomes apparent that even those who, like people today, have no spiritual eyes or spiritual ears, can actually receive these spiritual eyes and spiritual ears through the subtle inner work of the human being. We can show how immersion in inner thoughts and feelings, immersion in impulses of the will, make the feelings and impulses of the will more energetic. We can show how they affect this astral body: after a while, if the person has patience and perseverance, the astral body shows, upon returning to the physical body and the etheric body in the morning, that it has acquired spiritual eyes and ears and can now experience what is called enlightenment. By working here in waking consciousness through contemplation according to certain methodical rules — by carrying out certain feelings and certain impulses of will within themselves — human beings can thus influence their astral body in such a way that it proves capable of influencing us in return. In this way, the reality of the astral body is demonstrated. We influence it and it influences us. It proves its existence through the fact of initiation.

Just as the human astral body is separated from the physical body at night, so too is that which we call the human being's actual ego carrier, the human being's actual self-consciousness, separated from it. This too disappears into an indeterminate darkness in the state of development of the present human being.

In the sleeping human being, we have before us the physical body in bed, which the human being has in common with all minerals, as well as the etheric body, which he has in common with all plants. Lifting out of the physical body and the etheric body, we have the astral body, which humans share only with animals, and the ego, which humans, as the crown of creation on earth, share with no other realm of nature within the earthly realm. In the current cycle of development, where no higher senses, no “spiritual eyes” and no “spiritual ears” have been developed, to use Goethe's words, the impressions that humans have during the day sink into oblivion when they fall asleep, and others do not emerge in the world for which they have no senses. Therefore, at night they are surrounded by darkness, lightlessness, and silence. In the morning, upon waking, the human being sinks into the physical body and the etheric body. These are equipped with physical eyes and ears. The spiritual human being sinks into the physical-sensory human being, uses the instruments for the physical-sensory world, and thus has this world around them. One should understand — and if one wants to, one can — what Fichte said: Do not believe that the eye sees, but that the human being sees through the eye; do not believe that the ear hears, but that the human being hears through the ear. The same applies to the senses of smell and taste as to the eye and ear. They are all tools for the inner human being.

In this spiritual, inner human being, in this I and this astral body, Spiritual Science sees, and must see, the original, the first part of the human being. Not in the physical body and not in the etheric body, but in the astral body and the I is that which existed before the physical and etheric bodies. Certainly, some who are more deeply influenced by the powerful, materialistic mental images of the present will object: Do you imagine in your fantastical Spiritual Science that this spiritual being, this bearer of pleasure and pain, of joy and sorrow, of drives, desires, passions, and self-consciousness, once floated freely somewhere without being bound to a physical body? Spiritual Science answers: Yes, that is the case! This astral body, the bearer of pleasure and pain, of joy and sorrow, preceded everything physical, even everything ethereal. The inner life came before the outer life.

This would take us back to the beginning of the Earth. — Can you form the mental image that someone, even under strong materialistic suggestions, can completely deny that there could be something like a spiritual state underlying what only later condenses and comes into being? It has often been emphasized here that, for Spiritual Science, matter is condensed spirit. Let us use a comparison that we have often used to show how the spiritual researcher thinks about spirit and matter. Imagine that someone has transparent air in front of them and clouds form in this transparent air as a result of cooling. What was previously transparent becomes clouded by the formation of clouds; what was previously water vapor and invisible becomes water. Perhaps it goes further: the water freezes into ice. The ice falls down in pieces. Let us suppose that someone came along and said: Nonsense, it is foolish to say that the water was previously distributed in the air. I didn't see any of that! The first thing I saw was clouds. Then someone comes along who can't see the clouds yet, who only sees something when the water freezes, when ice forms. If you say to him, “What is there today as ice was there before as water,” he replies, “I didn't see anything, there is ice and nothing else.”

The answer must be taken from such thoughts when someone wants to accuse a spiritual researcher of fantasy who says that at first, human beings did not exist materially, not even as etheric bodies, but that the astral body and the I existed first. At the beginning of our earthly existence, the astral body and the I existed. Yes, as we will see in a moment, human beings existed on Earth as spiritual beings before animals, plants, and minerals existed on Earth. At first, the Earth consisted of a collection of such spiritual human beings, who consisted of the I and the astral body. That is the beginning of the Earth. Now the spiritual researcher goes on to describe: Just as water, which is dissolved and invisible in the air, condenses into clouds, so the astral once condensed into the etheric. And now, in the further course of Earth's development, there were human beings who had an ego, an astral body, and an etheric body. Finally, like ice formed from water, which in turn was formed from water vapor, the physical body emerged as the densest part of the human being. This is how we see the course of Earth's development: first, the human being exists as a spiritual being, then as an etheric being, and finally, the spiritual crystallizes into the human physical body.

Let us hold on to the image of the condensing water vapor. Suppose you had a lump of water. You would artificially treat this lump of water in such a way that part of it freezes in the middle. Suppose you had many such lumps of water, with part of them freezing in the middle, thus creating many ice grains. And now something very peculiar happens: from some of these lumps of water, the ice grains fall out and remain on their own, covered with only a little water, while the parent substance, the water from which the ice was formed, recedes. In the other water clumps, the ice grains remain in the water clump and continue to freeze. More water is converted to ice, forming larger ice nuclei. In a number of the structures thus formed, such larger ice nuclei fall out and retain some water, while the parent substance withdraws from them. This process continues. Again and again, such ice clumps rise to higher levels, that is, they form more ice from the water. And ice levels always form on the earth, while other clumps transform more and more of the water into ice, until finally they have ice clumps that have transformed all the water into ice and whose mother substance is, so to speak, only contained between the pores of the ice.

Let this image arise in your soul for the course of earth's becoming from the beginning of the earth to our time. At the beginning of our earthly existence, think of man as a spiritual being and existing only as a spiritual being. He first begins to crystallize a small, insignificant part that becomes denser. There are certain beings who remain at an early stage, like ice crystals, by separating themselves from their spiritual mother substance. These are the most imperfect animals, which were once created when only a part of the human mother substance, of the astral human, became material and condensed. These are the lowest animals. The other humans have developed further to higher stages. Higher animals have again fallen out of the spiritual mother substance. And so, as ice formed from the lump of water, increasingly differentiated, more and more perfect creatures developed in the course of Earth's evolution, physical beings, up to the present-day human being, who in his outer physical expression is an image of the spiritual dispositions and possibilities that were already originally contained in the spirit, that is, in the astral body of the human being at the beginning of the Earth. And just as the lumps of ice that have fallen out represent the stages of the formation of the great lump of ice, so all beings that are more imperfect than man, the entire animal and plant kingdom, represent the stages of human evolution on earth that have been left behind. Human beings are the firstborn of the earth as spiritual beings, and gradually, as spiritual beings, if I may use the expression, they have crystallized the material out of themselves, stage by stage. At each stage, the subordinate beings have remained behind, so that in the whole series of less perfect earthly beings we must see not the ancestors of human beings, but on the contrary the descendants of spiritual human beings who have not come along. They are the brothers who have been left behind, beings who have remained at the preliminary stages and who, by continuing their lives into our time, have fallen into decadence.

Thus we see that, when we look at the series of development, some links have been left out. If someone could place a chair in outer space and observe the Hyperborean human beings, they would, if the assumptions of Spiritual Science are correct, see externally and physically the image that the spiritual researcher shows: how the human being first left behind the imperfect animals and then the increasingly perfect ones. In fact, externally, the human being emerged in its present form last, as the youngest of creatures; spiritually, it is the firstborn, spiritually it precedes all beings. All other beings have developed from humans, falling away, as it were, at an imperfect stage of human development, representing the rejects of human evolution. Thus, in earthly beings, everything imperfect goes back to the higher. The higher, the original, is not in our physical form, but in the spirit. Today's natural science suffers from the question it asks over and over again, which is so closely related to our theme of the beginning of the earth: How could living things have developed from non-living things? If there is only non-living matter on our earth, how could living things have developed from it? The only answer to this is that the question is wrong. Living things never developed from non-living things, but all non-living things arose from living things. You can easily understand how non-living things arise from living things if you look at what you still dig out of the earth today in the form of coal. These were once plants, ferns, and field horsetails that stood on certain areas of the earth's surface, sank into the ground, and which you now dig up after millions of years, after they have turned to stone. For the spiritual researcher, not only coal but all mineral soil, all mineral matter, can be traced back to an original plant form, even if, as I said, today's materialistic researcher cannot form a mental image of a plant kingdom without a mineral basis. Such a researcher simply cannot imagine that the denser, coarser processes arise from the finer processes.

There is an example of how such a materialistic view can fly in the face of all common sense, how materialism haunts some scholars in Europe. There is, for example, William James' materialistic theory of mental phenomena, which even claims to be idealistic, but in which materialistic mental images interfere with the whole way of thinking. I have already mentioned the symptom that lies in the sentence: “Man does not cry because he is sad, but he is sad because he cries.” Here, the person concerned assumes that existence has a material effect on man: it affects the tear glands, then man feels the process and becomes sad. This is the case in our present time: the inventor of this theory is consistent in his materialism, even when it flies in the face of common sense. In truth, these are processes in the spiritual world, and the material processes are the consequences of them. The spiritual processes are the original ones. Everything that is solid, everything that is material and mineral around us, originated from the spiritual, just like coal. The question is therefore not how the living arose from the non-living, but how the non-living arose from the living. But just as the non-living arises from the living, just as the living existed before the non-living, so too did the spiritual exist before the living. This brings us back to the beginning of our Earth, where we see that our Earth itself was a spiritual being at its starting point. It was a spiritual being and developed the material world in stages, so that the living arose from the spiritual and the dead arose from the living. The dead is the latest product.

So we look back to the beginning of our Earth and feel ourselves, in our own origin, at the beginning of the Earth as human beings, as the firstborn of the Earth, spiritually at the starting point of Earth's evolution. Now, from here, we let the spirit look into the future. The easiest way to understand how the spiritual researcher arrives at a picture of the future perspective is to realize, as has already been hinted at in other lectures in this series, that in today's human beings the individual organs are of very different values. It is not as it appears to materialistic anatomy when examining the human being. For the materialistic anatomist, everything is only there as it appears according to its physical properties. But for those who observe the organs of the human being with spiritual vision, there are some that are in decline, withering, dying, like the bark that forms on a tree, and others that, as they appear today, are at the beginning of their development. Certain lower organs, which today serve the reproduction of mankind, are dying out. But we have an organ that is in the beginning stages of development and will attain a much higher level in the future. This organ is the human heart. Not only the spiritual part, but also the physical organ itself, the heart offers a wonderful perspective for our future. This heart is a crux for anatomists, because every other organ that is moved voluntarily has striated muscles. The heart is an organ that is used involuntarily, but is structured like a voluntarily moved muscle. Where does this come from? Physical anatomy cannot explain this! It comes from the fact that this heart is destined to be a much higher organ in the future. It is striated because in the future it will be a voluntary muscle like our hand muscles are today. In the future, we will voluntarily respond to what the soul perceives as an impulse with a movement of the heart. Humans will not only perform their work with the tools of their hands, but the heart will be a tool of the soul in a way that humans cannot even imagine today.

Take another organ, the human vocal organ. What is it capable of today? When I speak to you, what happens? What I say to you, my words, first live in my soul. If I did not utter them, they would not penetrate your soul. I utter them, setting the tools of my larynx in motion. This causes the air in this room to vibrate, and each of my words sends out waves of vibration in this hall that reach you. What is language? It is the embodiment of thoughts in air. When I have spoken something, the thought resounds, it is embodied in the air, and anyone who could see the air waves in this room would see the physical form of my thoughts whirling around here in the room. Spiritual Science shows us that in the future, human beings will not only be able to produce airy forms through their words, but also to transform denser matter into the image of what lives in their souls. They will learn to create ever denser and denser forms, and in the future, human beings will produce their equals through their transformed vocal organs, through their words. As humans continue to evolve, important transformations will take place in their physicality. Certain organs will fall away, while others will develop further. The heart will become an important tool for the stirrings of the soul. The vocal organ will become the reproductive organ of the human being of the future, who will produce his equals from his thoughts. Just as he embodies his thoughts in the air today, he will embody himself through the organ that is on its way to becoming the reproductive organ of the future. What it is today is like a shadow of what our head will be. The connection between the human vocal organ and the reproductive organ is indicated by the fact that in the male individual the voice changes, a change in voice occurs at sexual maturity.

May people take a closer look at such changes, which are communicated to us by Spiritual Science! What Spiritual Science says points to what humanity will have in later times to create its equals: it will be the word. A human being will speak the word, and the word will be a human being. This will happen when human beings have become increasingly spiritualized. For by placing their physical instruments, as we have seen with the heart and larynx, at the service of their spirit, human beings spiritualize themselves and return to the spirit at the end of their earthly existence. This was the case with the predecessors of human beings, the creators who began their earthly existence at the beginning of the earth, who stood at the beginning of the earth where human beings will stand at the end of the earth. And human beings will one day become, through the Word, at the end; human beings will speak the Word at the beginning, and the Word will be a human being. Of those beings, the divine-spiritual beings who already stood at the beginning of the earth at the height to which humans will one day develop, we are told correctly and appropriately in one of the deepest religious documents, the Gospel of John: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God. — Just as in the beginning the Word and the Word was God, so at the end of time the Word will be a human being, and the human being will be the Word.

When we look back at the beginning and see how man arose from the spirit and became the human being of today in the sense of this earthly becoming, and when we look at the transformations of our earthly human being, the perspective of this earthly becoming opens up to us in the direction of spiritualization. There we have spirit at the beginning and spirit at the end. Spirit was the origin and spirit is the goal. That is the mystery of earthly evolution. And when we see the ever more densifying matter in the middle, we know that this matter is transformed and reshaped spirit, if we do not see it as an external dream image, but enter into its essence. It is nothing other than what has emerged from the spirit and what will transform back into spirit. When we look ahead, we see spirit everywhere. According to Jakob Böhme, we originated in spirit, and we strive toward the spiritual. Action, as an activity of the spirit, is the knowledge of the spirit that truly elevates human beings, making them useful, because they are full of hope, capable of work, and spiritually and physically healthy. It is the knowledge that everything is rooted in the spirit and that what we perceive and see in the becoming of the world are the deeds of the divine spirit.