Inner and Outer Evolution

GA 91 — 26 August 1904, Graal

7. The Three Realms of Nature

We want to submit some more questions in relation to the three kingdoms of nature. We know that every being must pass through these three kingdoms. To each mineral belongs the form; from this formed being of nature the plant is to arise. If it were to evolve in the same direction, without new impetus, it would of course always remain mineral - at most it could become more perfect as a mineral.

If the mineral is to become a plant, this mineral must acquire the special power for plant existence - the abilities which form organs to draw this individual life into itself. Now, however, it remains mineral for the time being; it will still retain the property that when the forces of nature are overcome, it will decay. It cannot transfer the form it already has to a new individual. It must incorporate its form and the newly acquired organs and transfer them to a germinal state. Now, when it passes to life recently, it has acquired to its former property of having form a new one of breathing in life, and when it now passes into germinal state, it has to draw this life into its own. Now we have vegetable essence. The mineral has added to its own essence, which consists in having form, the new property of having life. This is the essence of a round or cycle.

As the plant being progresses, it takes the kama from the environment, forms organs. We have plant being with the ability to take in desire, but this being, while able to take in desire, cannot keep it inside. It flows desire in and out. This goes back to the germinal state, and after revitalization, animal being is formed. This is the process of a cycle.

Now a mineral would always remain mineral if there was no driving force to take care of the same, There has to be something taking care of the mineral for all this to come into being, and that is the monadic essence. It is the driving element. If it had only the drive to be plant, it would stop here. As high as the being is to develop, so high the drive must already be. No mineral can move up to a higher level than it already has in itself according to the plant. The mineral, which later becomes a plant, is already a plant according to its disposition, a latent plant. The mineral, which later becomes animal, is already latent animal. We can also say: The mineral, which later becomes plant, is already plant according to the spirit; the mineral, which later becomes animal, has always been animal according to the spirit; it was only not according to the physical reality animal, but mineral. Every being, from which something becomes, must have an invisible spirit nucleus in itself. What we now call a mineral is not like minerals of yore: each had an astral body. Now it has none, is in a dead end. When we speak of man having once passed through the mineral kingdom, it is not to be understood that he was mineral like the minerals of today; we must never say that man was mineral, plant, animal as he is today. It follows: Man has never been anything but man, he has only in previous periods of evolution always developed parts of his full reality, the physical parts, and the spiritual he has retained.

He has always been present in a higher spiritual way; only he [evolves] in the first round visibly in the mineral, [in the] second round visibly in the vegetable kingdom, [in the] third round visibly in the animal kingdom, and [is] only in the fourth round also visible as man.

Common Darwinism says: before was mineral, then plant, then animal. And he explains that man has emerged from these three. So it looks from an external point of view, for the one who does not see the invisible. Darwinism is a half-measure; but when it is recognized in its right meaning, it has its good sense. In descending, that which is acquired as a faculty is absorbed into the being. Now we are in the ascending line and have to acquire new abilities. Memory, as we know, develops in the Atlanteans. There man begins to absorb what he receives through the mental images. The abilities acquired during the ascending arc are new parts of the entity during the descending arc. And since since the middle of the Atlantean time the ascending arc has been begun, and on this ascending arc thinking as a faculty is more and more developed, so in the next round during the descending arc thinking will be absorbed in the beingness of man.

The Upanishads reckon one round as the day of Brahma. "What you think today, you will be tomorrow." This is true of man in his present round. Thus we can imagine the rhythmic course of the world, that a being sucks in an element from the environment or universal world and then gives it to the outside world. Man sucks in thought - he will send out the thought from himself in the next round. During one half of the round, a being sucks in what it gives out during the next. That is why esoteric philosophy calls a whole round an inhalation and exhalation of the Supreme Being. "Brahma breathes a world in and out."

It is not a mere comparison; what was originally taught is the world process. The first teachers taught these great truths - man later added his lesser realizations. The macrocosm came first, the great nature - then the microcosm, the small nature.

The knowledge of the earlier time referred to the higher world (Brahma breathes in and out). According to this revealed cosmic truth, people later named the process noticed in humans as inhaling and exhaling. Then people forgot the cosmic process and considered the naming more a figurative one.

Even the Greeks did not attribute their knowledge to experience, but to the revelation of higher beings.

If we keep evolution in mind, we find that man has been quite ascendant since the Atlantean period. The Ursemites have passed from memory to combining thought. The Aryan, the fifth root race, had to train thinking - working from manas to kama. Right thoughts have an effect on the astral body like higher natural forces. At the end of the round, the astral body must be formed. At the end of the fifth race, the astral body must be formed regularly. In the sixth root race, social love will have been formed and the astral body must be ennobled; the pull upward, toward the spiritual, will be the achievement. And at the end of the seventh, he will be completely purified.

Sixth race: purification, refinement of kama-manas,

Seventh race: purified kama-manas.

By advancing in this way, man is able to gradually acquire abilities for higher worlds. These worlds, to which man acquires a kind of ideal relation, are called:

Bhurloka fourth race
Bhuvarloka fifth race
Svarloka sixth race
Maharloka seventh race

These four worlds really exist, the heavenly worlds to which we form the earthly one. During the ascending evolutionary epoch they are developed as an annex in human beings