Self-Knowledge and God-Knowledge II

GA 90b — 17 January 1905, Cologne

XXIV. About the Book of Genesis

Initially, people became acquainted with their religion through the scriptures, which they understood literally. Today, it is considered enlightened to have outgrown religious documents. Regarding the Old Testament, it has always been said that it is impossible to reconcile the biblical concepts with an enlightened consciousness. People started to understand the scriptures figuratively; they still held on to the symbols. This understanding of biblical symbolism then led people to still take the biblical spirit with a certain seriousness. But even theologians today can hardly decide on anything other than to take the first chapters of the Old Testament only as a figurative representation. A rather cozy view can arise from it, but as man progresses, he cannot remain with this view. It is a kind of path of development: first to move away from the orthodox view, then from the figurative view and to move on to another, again in a sense literal view.

But for this we must learn to understand the language of the old wisdom teachings and recognize that the old teachers did not invent stories, did not create fantasies, but that they had a different conception of the truth than we have today. They wrote down the eternal truth in their teachings. This cannot be brought directly to every person, while the sensual truth can be brought to everyone.

The great teachers of old had themselves undergone an inner development. Their vision was a spiritual one. They knew that what they saw in the spirit could not be seen by everyone around them. The nations were still childlike in their perception. Accordingly, the great truths had to be given to them in a special form suitable for their understanding. Now all great teachers approached people with the awareness that the soul is immortal. It must be developed towards the truth. Moses, for example, knew that when he linked to the ideas of the people, he was planting something lasting in the soul, in the causal body. The materialistic thinker believes that the soul perishes at death. But Moses said to himself: If I communicate the truth to man today in a certain form, it will have an effect in his soul. Later he will be ripe to recognize the truth in its true form. Moses knew that later others would come who would interpret what he taught. He prepared the form. That which he prepared has gone through the incarnations of the souls. He did not consider it right to tell people the final form of the truth right away.

He himself had the truth in the background. He expressed this in the seven days of creation. He brought the truth into the form that corresponded to people's childlike understanding at the time. If he had spoken of the “round” days, he would not have been understood. He therefore spoke of days, as in ancient India one speaks of the days and nights of Brahma.

On the moon, man had a dream-like consciousness. There he had developed dream consciousness to its highest level. Each of us had come there in a kind of germinal state; there he had perceived in a dream-like way, absorbed it and developed it into a germ. These germs slept over from the moon to the earth. A spiritual germ was the human being who came to earth. He had slept through a [pralaya] into the earthly state.

Now his destiny is to come to clear consciousness. He has to go through a long series of states. In the first three rounds, what he had gone through on earlier planets was repeated. Moses speaks of the rounds. During the first round, man is in the first elementary realm. The dream state gently transitions into a state that man has now reached. The moon man did not distinguish between himself and the other objects. For him there was a dream-like pictorial reality in the way the external world is there for us in a dream. He did not perceive through the senses. The contrast between himself and his world was to be developed by man in the first round on earth. Moses calls it the difference between heaven and earth. He was to recognize himself as an earthling next to heaven. That is what happens in the first cycle of development.

In the beginning God created heaven and earth. The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep.

Man did not distinguish between himself and the individual objects. It was all still chaos. Then, after the first round, man went through an intermediate state again and then came to the second round. There the objects already got more definite boundaries. He can already distinguish what is around him. It is no longer desolate and confused. He can distinguish between what is spiritual and what is an external object. Before that it was dark on the face of the deep; the Spirit of God hovered over the waters. All that was human was water. The human germs together formed the waters. The Spirit of God brooded over the human germs, which He called forth into forms. There was light.

As soon as we see the outside world, when the entities confront us, only then can they reveal themselves to us. There was light.

God divided the light from the darkness; he made day and night. [Genesis 1:5]

Man perceived the objects. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

Now followed the Rupic round, the formative round, in which one could perceive existence. There shall be a difference between the waters; each should have its own Kama. Every single human being was set apart by God setting a boundary and dividing the waters above and below the firmament. He implanted in the individual human germ the ability to distinguish between the spiritual and the physical. The two souls were laid in the human being; the soul that looks up and the soul that looks into the earthly, that lives in the earthly.

In the third round, man enters the third elementary realm. The individual astral bodies of human beings became more and more distinct. Now man becomes independent. He steps out of the mother soil of the earth. He reaches the plant existence. These are not our present plants. Man was in the plant existence himself. All the separated astral bodies gained the ability to bring forth astral beings like the plant. During the third round, man was called to the animal existence, but in a plant-like nature, because the animal had not yet developed the body of passion. He had no warm blood yet. This was formed in the third round of the third elementary realm. The insemination indicates that fertilization has not yet taken place.

God said: Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together to one place, and let the dry land appear.

In the beginning, the astral body was not visible. Now it is becoming distinct. The dry land is only the special, more solid form that forms a boundary around itself. The gathering of the waters signifies the general astral world in its entirety.

And God said, “Let the earth bring forth grass and herbs.” [Genesis 1:11]

This was man. The ancient Germans also believed that man emerged from ash and elm, and the ancient Persians also believed that man emerged from a tree.

And have his own seed with himself [...] [Genesis 1:11]

means that each species carried its own seeds within itself and that there was no sexual reproduction.

The fourth round is the one in which the physical human being prepares himself as he is now. Man entered the mineral kingdom, he took on a body that was subject to chemical and physical laws. In the next round, he will no longer have that, but will then control his astral body just as he now controls his physical body. He will then have astral organs, he will be able to develop his organs himself when he needs them, when the astral body will control everything physical. But now, in the fourth round, man can only act with regard to the laws of the mineral world. In the physical, mineral body we are enclosed as in a house. It was only through our becoming physical ourselves that the whole world became physical. Previously, he gained knowledge of the world around him through a kind of clairvoyance. With the fourth round, the whole world of sensual objects has emerged around him. Moses could therefore say:

There are lights in the firmament of the heaven, which divide the day and the night, and give signs, times, days, and years. [Genesis 1:14]

Kant says that space and time come from man himself. Moses said that even then. Everything that can be perceived by the senses only came into being when man became physical, mineral. Through the physical round, we make the mineral body more and more perfect and also develop our astral body. In the next round, it will be developed in the same way as the physical body is today. Man will then float as if in an airy realm. Then man will have become a free being, then he will truly have become an animal being. Only then will animality be expressed in man. The astral body of man is meant here in the image of animals because the astral man moves freely in the astral world, like whales in the water, birds in the air and so on. - That is the fifth round or the fifth day.

In the sixth round, the human Kama-Manas body is formed, the lower mind body, which we now wear hidden in the physical shell. In the sixth round, man will stand as a human being in the true sense of the word, no longer enclosed in a shell. At the same time, the higher animals are formed with man. The Kama-Manas body then reaches the higher level of animal life.

And God said, “Let us make man in our image, in the likeness of ourselves: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

Only then will man become what he is meant to become.

So God created man in his own image, in the likeness of himself; male and female he created them.

Through sexuality, the human being develops into a being that will be male and female. The original text reads: He created man male-female. Only now does man truly gain dominion over the animals. He only acquires power, magic, when the actual human being is liberated on the sixth day. - On the seventh day, man had become God-like. In the seventh round, man is in the aupa state again; he has become creative himself, has become God himself, hence it says:

God rested on the seventh day. [Genesis 2:2]

The fourth round is the most important for human life. Man used to be less dense. Moses says:

He took the solid substances of the earth. [corresponds to Genesis 2:7]

He was surrounded by dust. He adopted the mineral laws. He was formed from the dust of the earth, and the living soul was formed in him. When the human being in the Lemurian race acquired solid forms — a skeleton — sexuality also arose. The solidification went hand in hand with the division into the sexes. In the second chapter, Moses describes the human being who later emerged in the Lemurian race, in the two-sexedness. This was taught in all mysteries. It was only in the fourth round that the plant and animal forms emerged as they are today. During the development of man, the plants and animals split off from him. The lower animals had arisen before. Warm-blooded animals only arose with humans. The animals developed as a result of retarded humans splitting off. The animals are the decadent human nature. They no longer fit into today's conditions. They are creatures that have remained at earlier stages. The original animal forms split off first, only then did the two sexes of humans arise.

In the beginning, man used his entire productive power externally. In the beginning, man reproduced from within himself. When he had lost the ability to penetrate dense matter, he used half of his productive power as a thinking organ.

On the one hand, man became a sexual being, while on the other, he developed half of his productive power internally into a thinking organ. He now acquired the ability to process the spirit with his brain. The spirit now fertilized him. At the same time as the division into two sexes, the thinking human being emerged. He recognized good and evil. During this period, the spinal cord and the brain also developed.

This is the snake that originated in man himself. He went through the amphibian stage. This being was his own seducer. It began to develop with the beginning of its passage through sexuality. Spinal cord and brain first developed in amphibians, and in man in the amphibious state.