Self-Knowledge and God-Knowledge I

GA 90a — 27 December 1904, Berlin

LXXVI. Creation of Races up to the Fertilization with Manas (Animal Separations)

Let us follow the development within our group, starting from the center. The earth is in its fourth physical stage, it is very fine matter, ethereal. In this etheric matter, the following are already present: the minerals in their formation, the lower animals in their formation, plants in their formation, and the human being as an astral being.

For he has not progressed further within the first three rounds; he has only set the other realms out; he begins to realize himself in etheric matter, and waits to incorporate the etheric matter into the astral form. Man therefore has only the etheric double body. Let us consider this connection of the astral man and the etheric matter.

Ether has only one manifestation: it can vibrate, and therefore the only organ that could develop in humans was the one that reacts to vibrations: the sense of hearing. Man could only perceive through hearing. It was still an echo of that harmony of the spheres that the Pythagoreans speak of.

Originally, this etheric body was a much more complicated being, because it still contained all the animals that later split off – amphibians, birds, lower and higher mammals. We call these etheric people the 'polar race', because they lived in the zone around the North Pole. Of course, no geological remains of this race remain.

The first thing that emerged was, of course, amphibious animals, initially fish. The reproduction of this human being was as follows: initially, he was an astral human being and incorporated matter into this astral being, thus forming himself. This is called self-generation. This process develops in such a way that, as the human being absorbs matter, he enlarges and then splits. This is called 'sprouting'.

Blavatsky calls it 'sweat birth'; the expression is not well chosen, the process is more reminiscent of the emergence of one object from another, as in spiritualistic séances.

This allows a second organ to form. Air has different densities and can be compressed, while ether is not compressible. This is the reason for the difference between heat and cold, and a sense of touch develops, with a sense of heat and cold. Of this second, the During the Hyperborean period, man was initially still united with what we know as the bird gender and the lower mammal gender. Now the bird gender separated from him first, becoming a gender of its own in the air. But it was not as it later became, because it still had the mammal gender within it. Mythology has preserved this wonderfully in symbols. It registers the deeds of the ancient past, when they still originated from the instincts of the Atlanteans, namely: the bird-man as griffin. Only then does someone understand the symbols from the secret schools when he knows that they are not allegorical straw figures, but registrations of facts. The centaur, for example, is the horse-man, the mammal-man. This split occurred in many different forms, since there were many races: into horse-men, bull-men and so on. It split off from the lower mammal in the denser air of the birds: a reminder of this are the mammals that lay eggs or incubate their young, such as the platypus and marsupials. From humans, the higher animal classes split off, and with each split, humans acquired a new trait in their makeup. When they split off the horses, their intellect developed; that is why the horse is considered a symbol of intellect. We find it in the Apocalypse, in the Indian saga: the horse Kalki; in the middle of the third sub-race, at the time of the Trojan War, with Odysseus, which subjugates this race. A vestige of this is still preserved in the fact that when the real hero, the avatar of our race, will appear, he will have something to do with Kalki, the horse. Likewise, other qualities arose from another split. For example, man could not have had his moral courage if he had not split off the lion. Let us now take a closer look at the third, the Lemurian period. Man has gone through the densification that the earth has undergone: the air condenses into a fire mist. We can imagine this state as fog in the mountains. But in some places it was as dense as hot embers: everything still flowed in it, gold and diamonds. Then the cooling occurred and with it the densification of man. And man not only had to bring forth differently, but he also had to protect. The same mode of reproduction continued until the middle of the Lemurian race. Within the glowing nebula, what is called Kama is still dissolved. We must ask why the hardening happened. Kama was still dissolved, and the astral body of man was still connected with the general Kama masses, although it already had a center. Now the severance of the individual Kama beings occurred. As a result, they withdrew their own power from the surrounding thinner Kama masses. These condensed, became solid because the human being had withdrawn his Kama, which had previously been dissolved in them; this meant that what had previously been floating in the earlier Kama mass now became active from within, and warm-bloodedness arose. Connected with this is the attraction of one being to another. In place of the former, external, chemical elective affinity, sympathy and antipathy now arose, and with that the basis was given for sexuality. We now have: amphibians, which are gradually declining; birds; then lower and higher mammals; and finally man, who is now constituted in such a way that he can enter into this condensed Kama mass. He has reached the point where this force, which was outside, now works from within him. We have the mammal man; he is much more plastic and softer than he is now, therefore subject to strong metamorphoses, malleable and elastic. With different conditions of existence and sensations come different forms. We still find an echo of this in the poets, for example in Ovid's “Metamorphoses”. The fact that man has now shed all animal forms – at least essentially, although he has not yet shed the ape – meant that a highly purified organism was available for his developed Kama body, and he was able to secrete something: a part of the organism to which he could transfer a different power. The nervous system could be developed, and so a twofold being emerged. On the one hand, it had the highest animal form with a bone structure and glandular system; on the other hand, it received the nervous system where this power will emerge – the spinal cord. This system was able to absorb something that until now had only been floating in the environment around the earth, namely manas. This is the fertilization of the human being with the manasic principle. Let us remember that man was once a Kama being, who had a closer relationship to the Kama surrounding him, to the Kama of revelation, which was not selfish and full of desire, but gave itself up. We have creative and created Kama. This Kama, from which man drew himself, has received an increase of selflessness in that man sucked in selfishness. By drawing out this selfish Kama, man has become earthly loving. And outside, divine love envelops him in increased selflessness. Within, his Manas works. Thus we have three things in man: 1. the sensual love arising in him,
2. the divine love surrounding him,
3. the manas surrounding him. Now something completely new occurs: the passing through karma in the human sense, in general an order as we have it now – the distinguishing of good and evil in the world. It is one of the most frequently asked questions: Where does imperfection come from in the world? When Manas was impregnated, it appeared in its sharpest form as evil. But how, we ask, can something imperfect arise from a perfect cosmic reason? How can something imperfect arise from something perfect? As long as we consider the matter in its abstractness, we will not be able to find an answer. However, we will be able to do so if we consider it in such a way that the origin spreads out in a diversity, a diversity in space and in time. No matter how perfect your soul may be, it will direct the right hand as well as the left – that is because it has not made the hands in its own image. But that is what befits the all-loving Deity. It is precisely because God, in infinite love, surrenders the image to the manifold that the possibility of the struggle for existence is given. We understand imperfection even more in time. We only need to think of the example of the piano maker and the piano virtuoso. Each one does an excellent job in his or her place. The piano maker is an artist in his own way. But if he were so in love with his technical work that he were also to start knocking and hammering in the concert hall while the virtuoso is playing, disharmony would arise. Transposed to the wrong place, or rather to the wrong time, the good would be. This example helps us to understand many things. A transposed good is evil. The concept of time in connection with the concept of freedom allows us to understand the different degrees of perfection or even the relatively imperfect, in that it includes the different stages of development. Let us keep in mind that beings do not reach their goal at the same speed. At the end of the lunar epoch, there were beings who had only just reached the point where development required it. Others were left behind. We have not yet considered what fertilized. We have considered the matter from which the Pitri developed and the soul of the Pitri. But not yet the drop of Manas, a piece of the higher that hovered around the earth. That the drop can sink in is only possible because these higher beings, these creative powers, which now endowed man with Manas, have also developed for this purpose. Every human manas is a thought in these beings that hover around the earth – in the Dhyan-Chohans, in the Elohim – that had to mature to this extent. That these supermundane beings became mature enough to be endowed with manas arose from the fact that they learned something on the moon. Something happened on the moon that can only be described as “supernatural artistic activity” - arranged with the greatest cosmic wisdom. Man could not have devised all his artistic structures as wisely as beings gifted with lungs, hearts and stomachs. That is why the lunar epoch is called the “cosmic wisdom”. This was replaced on earth by “cosmic love”. In terms of love, human beings are just as dependent on beings that are above them as they were in terms of wisdom. The wisdom involved here appears as Manas.