43. Consciousness – Life – Form

The Earth human has minerals, plants and animals around him as objects of perception. He regards these entities as being below him, and regards himself as a higher being in relation to them. With the Saturn being, the opposite was the case. It had three groups of entities above itself and had to consider itself the lowest link in the realm of what was perceptible to it. In The Secret Science, these three higher groups of entities were given different names, depending on the language of the people and the time to which the secret teachers belonged. The designations of Christian esoteric science, listed from top to bottom, are: dominions (Kyriotetes), powers (Dynamis) and authorities (Exusiai). The being characterized joins as the fourth and lowest link, just as the earthly human being joins the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms as the highest link. In keeping with these very different conditions, the nature of perception itself was also different. The initiate knows this nature from experience, for it is equivalent to what he reaches as his third stage, beyond waking day-consciousness: spiritual consciousness. It is as if the impressions do not come to the senses from external objects, but as if they push their way to the senses from within, flow outwards from them and encounter objects and beings out there, in order to reflect on them and then appear in their reflection to consciousness. This was the case with the Saturnian being. It poured its life-force out upon the things of the planet, and from all sides the reflection was thrown back to it in the most manifold ways. It perceived its own life from all sides in the form of a mirror image. And the things that reflected back its essence were the beginnings of the physical human body. For the planet consisted of them. What was otherwise perceived did not appear on the planet, but in its surroundings. The beings called Exusiai (forces) appeared as radiant beings that illuminated the world body from all sides. Saturn itself was a dark body in itself; it received its light not from dead sources of light, but from these beings that inhabited its surroundings and illuminated it as radiant beings. Their light revealed itself to the perception of the Saturn being in the same way that the animal body is presently perceived by man. The beings, which are called Dynamis (Powers), revealed themselves in a similar way from the periphery through spiritual tones, and the Kyriotetes (Dominions) through what is called in esoteric science the world aroma, a kind of impression that can be compared to the present smell.