Self-Knowledge and God-Knowledge I

GA 90a — 12 January 1904, Berlin

XI. The Formation of the Aura I

We understand the cosmos best if I say something about the human aura first, and this will enable us to better present the development of the rounds and races with regard to the influence of the so-called Pitris. You will see why I am including this.

What is called the physical human being is only part of the human being; the complete human being consists of a number of members that are actually visible to those whose sense organs are open to them. Although you know all of this in essence, I still have to link it to what I have to say in order to describe it accurately. The physical human being then has what I would call an etheric double body within him, which is visible to someone who has ether vision. It is a true double image of the ordinary physical body.

Then a so-called soul body or astral body penetrates both of these. This astral body extends beyond the physical body, is slightly larger and has the shape of an oval, of an egg, because it extends a little further beyond the body at the head and is a little narrower. It contains all the feelings, passions and desires that make up a person's inner life. All things that are caused by physical life are contained in it as dark clouds. The purer it is, the more it resembles the stars. It has a color that ranges from orange to yellow. If you imagine the physical body away, you have a kind of elongated circle that has an orange color as its basic tone. You can see the most diverse cloud formations flickering in it and the tiniest figures playing in it. In the human being, as he exists today as the average human being, this is visible to the seer.

You then find this astral body permeated with another form, with what we call the mental body. This mental body has only existed in human beings since the middle of the third race; the Lemurians, who were at the beginning of their development, did not yet have a mental body. If we go back to the area south of the front and rear India towards Australia, where the Lemurians lived, they had a physical body, something condensed in the middle, and then the astral body. Otherwise, nothing could be seen in them. The more the Lemurian race developed, the more a dark, black, spherical spot appeared inside these astral bodies, at a point - and if you want to describe this point, it is where our physical brain has its center. This black point, this spherical spot within the astral body, is what is actually referred to as the human ego, which has developed since the Lemurian period. This is the outer form of the ego!

Since the development of the Lemurian race, the beginning of what I have called the mental body has been located within this point. From this point begins an emanation that grows ever larger and larger and permeates the aura, so that the aura is animated from within. In the Lemurians, the point was still very small; it grew larger and larger, and now, in the average person, it protrudes above the astral body to the extent that it gains predominance over the passions and drives through thinking, through the mind, through moral feeling; that is what has developed since the Lemurian race.

We must now ask ourselves: why is this developing? The answer to the question of the “why” of this mental body lies in the fact that it is only now that what one is actually entitled to call spirit is emerging in humans. Since that time, since the spiritual impact on humans has taken place - that is, since the middle of the Lemuria - the emergence of the human mental body has been taking place.

Now I ask you to consider that the driving force behind what causes the mental body to emerge is the higher self: AtmaBudhi-Manas; this wells up. If we could see it alone in its swelling, it would be a blue mass, which, the further it comes outwards, becomes more and more violet. Because it is also mixed with the earlier formations of the astral body, it takes on various other nuances; it is mixed. That which is the I in man was only at that point during the time of the Lemurian race, because in reality this point then becomes the boundary of the mental aura, so you have to imagine - let us say - the astral body of the Lemurian Age in such a way that what was initially just a black dot formed a spiritual skin that became bigger and bigger [see sketch]; and in the spiritual skin is the I.

We have so far progressed in our development. Now let's go back to the point where, apart from the astral body, the Lemurian human being was completely in absolute darkness and only the astral body was luminous, in that the black dot appeared and the astral body began to radiate.

Before that, the astral body was surrounded by a bluish shell. They were in an astral body that was surrounded by a blue shell on the outside. However, this was not present on its own; it continued until it reached the blue shell of the next Lemurian. This blue atmosphere represents the collective human spirit, which holds together from the outside what was organized there. The development consists in this blue mass being drawn in and absorbed; the entire blue auric mass is finally drawn in and completely absorbed. Then the Lemurians are pure astral bodies. This also comes to the fore at the point I mentioned and wells up from within. Then the whole mental world is drawn in, and the astral body now glows in the dark.

We are now going back more and more. All the astral bodies were enclosed in the general aura that belonged to them. If we go back to the beginning of our development on earth, we would have what underlies development. When we look at these natures, these astral spheres, they are the descendants of what we call the Pitris. Everything in these astral auras comes from the Pitris, who came over from the Junarian epoch into our development. This total matter in the aura comes from the Lunarian epoch.

In the interval between the Lunar and Earthly epochs, these entire astral entities are present as seeds and slumbered over. So that you now have to imagine the total blue aura as a total mass that is drawn in, that appears as a total mass in a very dark violet, so that it could be seen even during the pralaya, so that it could be seen as it developed from the lunar to the earthly development; one would see how it exists in a dark violet.

When earthly development begins, the earth is red; it glows reddish; but it has the blue atmosphere around it. The reddish earth is what has formed from the Pitri seeds. The Pitri seeds form the reddish Arupa sphere, and that which is spirit surrounds this Arupa sphere as a blue atmosphere. This spirit, which was present, is differentiated as such; it is differentiated in itself, that is, it already carries the spiritual seed for every human being that will arise later. Just as our soul contains individual thoughts, so the spirit carries the individual human being as a thought. At the intersections there are dark spots (see sketch).

When the old moon was in its nirvana, the individual Pitris were completely separate from each other; they had the most perfect astral bodies imaginable. What I have just described comes from the lunar epoch. What comes across? The Pitri seeds and their entire auric atmosphere; they undergo the Pralaya there. However, they would not be able to develop further in earthly evolution if they did not now encounter something that is present everywhere in the universe, but which can only be suitable for them in a certain form, namely that which can later become physical matter and which is present everywhere in the universe as cosmic dust.

Worlds are constantly being created and destroyed, filling the entire universe with cosmic dust. Take, for example, the comet discovered by Biela. It split into two parts, then into several parts, and finally into many parts; it will eventually disintegrate into world atoms. Cosmic dust was discovered in the nineteenth century. It makes it so that when we calculate a planetary orbit, we get a number that is slightly too large because the planets have to overcome the dust masses.

Now you have to imagine that what comes across as the Pitri seeds and the auric atmosphere combine the world dust, but such world dust, which is attracted by them with a magnetic force, is what they need so that they can integrate it and become firm. This is how they get the physical body. So the Pitris organize the world dust; the Pitri is dependent on absorbing the world dust like the plant absorbs the earth dust from the soil. This process is expressed in the theosophical scriptures as follows: the Pitris form the seed forms and then build out the forms with matter so that the blue spiritual atmosphere can be absorbed.

The building is done from two sides: from the inside, from the Pitri seeds, the physical body is built; and the blue atmosphere, flowing in from the outside, forms the mental body.

The Pitris are present in various degrees of perfection; not all have reached the same high level. It is exactly the same as with Plato, Pythagoras and so on, who, when Nirvana of the Earth is reached, will be further along than the general human race; they were simply more advanced. The most advanced were the solar Pitris. There are two types of them. But then there are also two types of lunar-Pitris who had reached a fairly normal level of development, namely such that they were able to develop a kind of karma within themselves, a karma that was similar to the karma of our animals at the end of our earth development. Certain animals will have reached the point where one can speak of guilt and atonement in relation to them. Our animals do not yet have this, but at the end of their development they will. The karmic principle was already present in some species. In other species it was only in the process of development, and in still others it was only present in a rudimentary way. There are seven levels here, which are again related to the seven human rounds. In the very first stage the Solar-pitris were unable to intervene; they had no need to. They were there, but they hovered around the earth, as it were, waiting to be admitted. I will compare this with the following:

Imagine yourself back in the old days of the pile dwellings in Germany. Imagine that there would have been trained engineers there; they would not have been able to start anything, they would not have been able to do anything; there would have had to be more primitive natures: these were the still imperfect Pitris. When a later stage of development was reached, only the more perfect Pitris had the ability to take in. This continued until the Solar Pitris were able to intervene during the fourth round. It was only during the Lemurian race that the Solar Pitris were able to incarnate. The entire auric atmosphere was drawn in to make them swell from within. This was something that had nothing to do with Earth at all, but it gained influence. Then the more perfect beings, who already had the power to draw forth something from themselves, and whom we know as the Venus Sons - the Manasa-Putras, higher entities that were not intended within earthly development - had to intervene. They were there, and when they had incarnated, the first of the still lower human beings could receive the first teaching.