1. The Nature and Significance of Karma in the Personal and Individual; and in Humanity, the Earth and the Universe

We can look back to a time in the evolution of our earth when there was as yet no mineral kingdom. The evolution of the earth was preceded by the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions, where as yet there was no mineral kingdom in our sense of the word. It was on this earth that our minerals first took on their present forms. But because the mineral kingdom became separated in the course of the earth's evolution, it will remain a separate kingdom to the end. Before that, men, animals, and plants had developed without the mineral kingdom. In order that later the other kingdoms might make further progress, they had to separate the mineral kingdom out of themselves, but after they had done this, they could only develop on a planet which had a firm mineral form. They could have developed in no other way than this, if we admit that the formation of a mineral kingdom took place in the way we have said. The mineral kingdom is there, and the subsequent fate of the other kingdoms depends on the existence of this mineral kingdom which was formed within our earth in remote ages of antiquity. So something happened connected with the fact of the formation of the mineral kingdom which must be taken into account in all the later evolutions of the earth. What follows as the result of the origin of the mineral kingdom finds its fulfilment in later periods of what happened in earlier ones. On the earth is fulfilled what was on the earth prepared long ago. There is a connection between what happened earlier and what came to pass later—but this is also a connection which in its effects reacts upon the being which caused it. Men, animals, and plants have separated from the mineral kingdom, and the latter reacts upon them! Thus we see that it is possible to speak of the karma of the earth.