Self-Knowledge and God-Knowledge I

GA 90a — 11 August 1904, Berlin

L. The Task of the Second Half of Development

The connection of the individual with the whole development is now becoming clearer. We now distinguish:

1. the course of life between birth and death
2. the stay in Kamaloka
3. the stay in Devachan – with a) rupic, that is, lower mental and b) arupic.

Every human being, even an undeveloped one, enters Arupa for a short time. So we have four states. These correspond exactly to the four states of the planetary body, both when descending and when returning.

While the whole development of humanity before it became physical went through three states, we can say: All beings that came into consideration were

1. in the higher Devachan,
2. alternately on the upper and lower,
3. on the earth in four states.

Since in the next round there will no longer be a mineral kingdom, everything will be alive, and there will be no alternation between birth and death. There will be continuous life. The alternation of birth and death will no longer occur, and in its place there will only be alternation between good and evil. There may still be an alternation between the higher states; what is Kamaloka will be the lowest state. Differentiation of today, that now is only Kamaloka; but in the fifth round still physical.

Just as every person in the Kamaloka is formed plastically in the astral, with vices and virtues, so will he be on earth. So that during the fifth round the Kamaloka will be completely earthly. There will still be change, although not birth and death, but change between the astral and the mental. It will be possible for a person to withdraw from the mental every now and then, when the measure of his evil is so full that he can enter this higher state. As a rule, once someone has worked off everything, he no longer needs to return. So we pass into the devachanic state by ourselves, and only those who have brought so much evil with them that they have not found the opportunity to redeem it are eliminated in the fifth round.

Those who go along will come to the sixth round, where everything that is mental is acted out. There is then no possibility of doing evil, the highest animal nature lives itself out.

The task of the sixth round is to shape everything that is organized in the mind in a harmonious way. Everything is separated from each other, what is logical and what is illogical. So that only what is absolutely logical comes into the seventh round. An incorrect thought sounds like an incorrect rhythm, like an incorrect shape, and is destroyed by itself. That is why the occultist says: anything that is brought over into the sixth round as a lie, as untruth, means the being's suicide. Here already wrong action is self-destruction, in the sixth round wrong thinking is self-destruction. And so it follows that the earth winnows out everything that is untrue and brings only truth into the seventh round.

In the fourth round, karmic accounts have been settled. In the fifth, something remains and is separated into the eighth sphere. At most, only the untrue can be taken over, and it destroys itself. Thus, the seventh state becomes bliss, which goes over as a seed to the new planet.

You see that we are dealing with continuous purification in the second half of the earth's development. The only thing that remains is what cannot be affected by the four things just mentioned, that which goes over to the next development: the degree of development. One being may have lived a little richer and more substantial a life and have little in karma, another abundantly. The degree cannot be changed. Those who had accumulated much that was ugly had to create balance through great plastic power. The beings come over with different degrees of perfection, just as the Pitris came here. Nothing that is fulfilled in the moon has come over to us, but only what has gone through its degrees of development.