Self-Knowledge and God-Knowledge I

GA 90a — 12 June 1904, Berlin

XXVIII. The Principle of Correlation

Imagine an animal in which one group of organs is highly developed. This is not possible unless another group is less developed. We see this principle of correlation everywhere in nature. The most diverse things come into consideration, not spatial relationships, for example, as one might object with the elephant. Goethe says it well: “Something can be added to no part without something being taken away from another.”

The entire seven-round formation of the earthly planet has the purpose of bringing the human being to recognize itself in the outside world. We have the task of entering into mutual exchange with the outside world through the senses, mind and other activities.

For this we need a nervous system that absorbs and forms a central point: the spinal cord. We could not feel pleasure and pain, not through interaction with the outside world, through perception alone. Cognition must be added to pleasure and pain. Cognition of the cause of pleasure and pain is impossible without a nervous system. The nervous system did not exist in the lunarian epoch, although pleasure and pain were felt even more finely. The lunarian epoch developed what became the bed of the nervous system: the skeleton. Pain lived dull in the astral consciousness without perception. Nature forms more completely in the lunarian epoch without using the strength of its budget on the nervous system. Now the law of correlation enters here.

The purpose of the earthly epoch is to form the nervous system, and the knowledge of the external world that is thereby imparted is to be carried over to the other epoch. For this purpose of forming the nervous system, the organs must be trained in such a way that they become subservient, aligned with it; education must be rebuilt. Three rounds had to be used to repeat what had happened earlier. Kama must be suppressed in order to develop knowledge and perception. Lungs and heart were developed in such a way that pleasure and pain could be felt in a sophisticated way; subjectively raised to the highest possible level. Now they had to be suppressed to such an extent that perception and knowledge were developed – certain parts were suppressed in order to put the others at the service of the others. These extracted parts formed the mineral kingdom in the first round. Growth and reproduction, the vegetable kingdom, were also more complete in the lunar epoch; these were expelled in the second round. We had this within us earlier, but now we could not cope with it and so we expelled it, leaving it to the elemental spirits.

Then we had to release the animal kingdom and leave it to its own devices in order to be able to form the human kingdom. To develop our nervous strength, we had to work with a different kind of strength on the material that he had in abundance - the abundance of astral life, of pleasure and pain that he was still allowed to experience in the lunar epoch. Man had to externalize some of the lion's rage, for example, so that the power that overcomes it remains behind for other purposes - cosmic guilt! We have withdrawn the taming power in order to form a power capable of cognition; thus we owe our human height to the withdrawal of a power which would otherwise have organized Kama. So that this Kama remains unorganized, it would be nonsense to speak of guilt in the context of the furious struggle for existence among animals. Let us continue the thought in earthly development; the ascetic must give and thereby replace what he withdraws.

The devotional nature of man could therefore not emerge in the lunar epoch - the empires existed in a completely different way - the lowest became the eighth sphere, which is now scattered.

Man now has the spiritual part of the animal that was still in him at that time, so that we do not have to imagine man directly as an animal in the lunar epoch. It was the highest flowering of passion, while now its degeneration appears in the animal. So back then there was no “good and evil for passion; that is only a characteristic of our epoch. Only now can it become evil because a power has been withdrawn from it and it has been pushed down.”

Now reason, which used to be guided, begins to be left to its own devices and sometimes lapses into atavism; in the Atlanteans, development was in their midst. In our fifth race, we have somewhat passed the low point, and relapses occur: an unconscious memory of good and evil that lay beyond consciousness. For example, Nietzsche's philosophy. It was right at a time when there was no philosophizing, but this power to guide passion was – that is why evil appears as a displaced good. It is disharmonious because it is out of place at the moment. Now what had the educational instinct back then is out of place. “Whoever says there is an evil in itself blasphemes God,” says the Bible. ‘Why do you call me perfect, only the Father is perfect.’

So there is no such thing as an evil in itself, evil is only the misplaced good. Only he who takes the power to rule by overcoming can be a ruler.