Lecture II-XII

Every age between the Atlantean catastrophe and the great war of all against all has its own unique task for our development. In a new incarnation a human being never has the same task as in the last one. From incarnation to incarnation new tasks approach us, and so this post-Atlantean evolutionary age has worked on human beings in a special way. The whole epoch of earth evolution exists to make human beings fit particularly to develop the human I. In the last third of the Atlantean age, human beings were first equipped to draw the I toward the physical head. That is, the I, the spiritual basis for the experience of self that was only like a seed at the time, was pulled “down” toward the physical body, specifically, toward the human head. But the most significant impulse to have an effect on the I came through the event of Golgotha. All the preceding epochs had already worked in that direction. When we look back at the last third of Atlantean evolution we see that a certain point in the etheric head and the physical head did not then coincide, whereas today the etheric body of the head is approximately the same as the physical head. Because of this, human beings gradually came to develop their I, their sense of self. The rest of Atlantean evolution was used to make the human being fit to be a proper bearer of the I. Even at the end of Atlantean culture the brain was entirely soft, more or less like that of a hydrocephalic today, as part of an atavistic inheritance. The physical brain could only become firm enough through the arrival of the etheric brain. Still, even when the etheric head had fully entered the physical head in the ancient Indian age, it was not yet possible for this head to be a perfect bearer of the I. For this reason the ancient Indians longed for the spiritual world and had to be educated so that the I could gradually develop in them.