43. Consciousness – Life – Form

When the sun has completed its seven cycles, the time begins when the human body is so far developed that it can not only receive the influxes of light and be enlivened by them, but it acquires the ability to let the world of sound that flows around it, which is formed from the “powers”, take effect within itself and to reproduce it as sounds. At this stage of existence, which is called the development of the moon, the human body becomes a resounding entity. While the sound reflected back from the planet into the environment at the Saturn level was only an echo of the surroundings, it now sounds out into this environment in a changed way. It is so changed that it reflects what is going on in the human bodies in the most diverse way. These human bodies have thus taken up a third element into their being, the sentient body. For it is their inner nature: their world of feeling that resounds outwards. — But the seven entities that developed out of the Saturn spirit during the development of the sun have become seven times seven. Their environment has now become such that they experience their own world of feeling in the sentient bodies that have formed. These sentient bodies are the bearers of their bright day consciousness. They now feel themselves surrounded by two realms that are below them, and one that is above them. This realm hovering above them can be sensed from the realm of space as the aroma of the world; they experience themselves as sounding beings, and the two realms that are below them have come about because one area of human bodies has remained at the Saturn level, and a second at the sun level. Thus these moon beings are surrounded by automaton-like beings, who continue their Saturnian maturity on the moon under completely different conditions than they existed on Saturn itself; and furthermore, by plant-like sun bodies, which are in a similar situation. Thus, three types of beings are present in the actual mass of the moon. Those automaton-like beings that are dark within themselves and that have retained from Saturn the ability to radiate life around them. They are not inanimate beings in the sense of the present minerals. A mineral foundation such as the earth has did not exist on the moon at all. In its place was one that consisted of the characterized being. One gets an idea of it if one imagines it with a life that runs through it completely, so that on the moon, for example, instead of the mineral arable soil of our planet, there is a living, pulpy mass; in this, lignified parts are inserted like the rock masses into the softer rock of our earth. In this living foundation, which in its parts can be called plant minerals, the characterized solar beings were rooted, standing on a level between the present animal and the present plant. And the mobile beings that inhabited the moon were the human bodies, standing in the middle between animal and human in terms of their development. They were the hosts of the descendants of the Saturn planet spirit. But this could not have developed an alert day-consciousness in them. To live in such a consciousness, these beings had to step out of their bodies each time. When they were within the body, that is, when they were living its life, then they were only imbued with a consciousness filled with dream images. In this consciousness, they saw nothing of their physical surroundings; but they sounded their inner experiences into the environment. What was expressed in sounds during the sleep of the moon beings were their passions and desires. To emphasize only one aspect of this experience, it should be noted that what is now called the love life, for example, and which underlies reproduction, took place on the moon during the dream-filled sleep. The waking life of the day was without love or desire, devoted entirely to observing the world around him. The human ancestor on the moon knew nothing of sexual relationships in his waking life. What man today feels in sexual love was played out on the moon in dream images that only expressed in symbols what is now objective reality. Thus it was not the human forebears who experienced the world of images in an awakened state on the moon; rather, the beings who stood immediately above humanity, the angels, lived in this world. For them, the dream world of humanity played out, as it were, as bright reality of day. They watched over the dreaming world of humanity as the archangels watched over the world of the sun as it slept in a plant-like state.