Inner and Outer Evolution

GA 91 — 10 September 1904, Berlin

15. The Transition from the Atlantean Race to Our Own

Let us take concepts comparatively from the human being itself. When you say something to your sister, you can distinguish three successive stages in this communication. First, a dark feeling that you want to say something, for example something loving; the second is the thought of how you want to communicate this feeling, of which the other person is unaware; third, when you express the thought through the word. So three stages: feeling, thought, word. Feeling is something you live with inside. Thought gives your feeling a form that allows you to express it, and only the word is the actual expression of it. Something is happening within you. You say, when you characterize these three states: I feel, I think, I word.

So what is inside lives from the I outwards: you feel, think, word. Once we have appropriated these three concepts, let us appropriate another concept. A human or animal sees an apple, it bites into the apple because it had desire for apple. What drives us to bite into it, we call Kama – the body of desire. If the animal had no kama, it would pass by. If an animal could express itself, it would say: I desire the apple. If we disregard the animal and look at the apple: it certainly has no desire to be consumed. You can therefore express what is going on in the animal from the animal's point of view by saying: I desire. You cannot say that about the apple. Let us reverse the case. If we think of an apple as the conscious being, looking at the animal and expressing all of its desires, the apple would say to the animal, “It desires.” This is one fact expressed from two points of view: “I desire” – the animal's point of view. “It desires” – the plant's point of view.

Imagine that both entities – the animal and the apple – follow what we have said. If an animal follows, it satisfies itself; if what the apple says, 'It desires', is realized, the apple does not satisfy itself. On the contrary: it gives itself. That which says 'it' and behaves accordingly sacrifices itself; what says 'I' satisfies itself. This is why the esoteric teaching says that man reverses the lower ego into his higher ego when 'I' becomes an 'it', when it takes the point of view not of desire but of sacrifice; not of satisfaction but of devotion. So it is reversed. If we take the three 'I think', 'I feel', 'I speak' and reverse them, we have to start from the last one: 'It speaks', - which enters into man when we repent; 'It thinks', 'It feels'.

Now, Christian esotericism expresses everything that can feel with 'the flesh'. A table and a plant cannot feel, so they are not flesh; humans and animals can. A thing that can feel is called 'flesh'. What is called 'flesh' in the Bible, we must associate with the concept: 'This is a sentient being'. If you now apply exactly the same to the 'it thinks': every being that thinks, the Bible calls an 'angel' - a being that thinks. Every being that writes is precisely the 'Word' or the 'Logos'.

Let us take the important point in time in the middle of the Lemurian race. Something happened there that the Bible expresses in a very specific sentence. It says: “Our Earth period was preceded by a Moon period.” In the Moon period, 'flesh' was a sentient substance; it did not go any further. In the middle of the Lemurian period, it went further, because the substance became thinking; this is what the Bible expresses: 'And the thought became flesh.'

And what will be the next great event? That not only feeling, but the Word will become flesh. This fact, which humanity is heading towards, is that all of humanity will have become Word.

Thought as essence is angel. Therefore, the Bible regards every human being as an angel; then later man will not only become an angel, but Logos, a word. And the forerunner who first determined the goal is the Christ. The first in whom the Word became flesh. The Christ is therefore the revelation of the Word made flesh.

When your sister is sitting in the dark, you cannot see her; light helps you to see her. So you are dealing with light, which illuminates her and which she reflects. If she were to shine by herself, you would always see her. In the middle of the Lemurian period, she would not be a spiritual being, because she would not be able to reflect a spirit. These sentient beings first had to absorb spirit in order to reflect it back. That is why spirit is called 'the light of man'. Man became spiritually visible.

Imagine that your sister, in spite of the light and the form, was not really there, but a finely made wax doll. Everything would look the same. How would you distinguish it? By her feeling, by her calling out to you. Then we come from the external to the internal. The spirit could not be there if it did not originally come from the word. The word must be there so that the light or the spirit may radiate back from the feeling being. In the beginning was the word. That was completely before, lies in the very beginning; then came the middle of the Lemurian time: it turned out that the word is the light of men. The second and third stages are that the word becomes flesh in man. These are the three great stages in which the Divine, revealing Itself to the earthly, opens up as Word, as the light of thought and as the Word made flesh.

If we know how to read the Gospel of John, we have just discussed this. The Gospel of John summarizes the three great epochs in which the Word has revealed Itself: the Word, the Light and the Flesh.

The Old Testament describes the macrocosm, that is, the evolution of the world up to man; and the sanctification of man is described by the microcosmic Gospel of John. Therefore, to explain the parallelism between macrocosm and microcosm, the same words are at the beginning: En arché.