VII. Group Ego and Individual Ego

We emphasized yesterday that only humans, as they live here on the physical plane, have an individual soul, an ego, and that the animals that surround us have a group ego, a group soul, which lives on the astral plane and can be found there as a closed entity. Thus, when we look at them spiritually, the animal kingdom and the human kingdom are on opposite sides, the animal kingdom as group soul or group ego and the human kingdom as individual ego. We must not imagine that there are no transitions between the individual entities in the universe. Although the saying that nature does not make leaps is not at all correct for the occultist, transitions can be found everywhere. And so you will also find a transition between the group souls of the animal kingdom and the individual soul of the human being. It would be wrong to imagine that a person, upon entering earthly existence, had a fully developed individual soul, and that this soul would then incarnate again and again in the same form here on earth. It is much more the case that the human being today is in a gradual transition from a group soul, which he had in ancient times, to the fully developed individual soul, which he still does not have today. He is only on the way to the complete integration of his individual soul into his physical body. He will only have this completed individual soul when the earthly existence is more or less complete. For the vast majority of people today, their ego is an intermediate product between a group ego and an individual ego. The further back we go in the past, the more the human ego is still a group ego. At the beginning of their existence on earth, when the souls first descended from the divine worlds into our physical plane, human souls were still group selves. Several people belonged together to a group that had a communal soul, a group self.