24 QUESTION: In the last lecture, you explained that the physical existence on this Earth sphere for the fallen spirits was not chosen in an arbitrary form but is, in fact, a result of the degree of density they had by that time. Was there a reverse procedure of this when the Fall occurred? Or was it sudden?
ANSWER: No, it was not sudden. It cannot be sudden. I even mentioned that the Fall was also a very gradual process. But the Earth sphere did not come into existence in the process of the Fall. Its existence is a result of redevelopment. The various stages of the Fall manifested in other forms. In explaining part of this, I will take care of another question on the agenda. Some of you have wondered whether a spirit, before being ready for incarnation, has to go through these various stages.
Here are the facts, as well as I can transmit them to you, at least in a condensed form. I have mentioned that in the Fall [Lecture #21 The Fall], a plurality came into existence from a unity. In other words, a splitting occurred. It is not only that the one being, the dual being, split into half, but as the Fall continued, the split multiplied and multiplied.
Some of these part-souls became, as an expression, mineral, plant and animal life. Before the Earth sphere existed, these expressions existed in other worlds or other forms, and when the world of matter came into existence, these part-souls incarnated in these various forms.
In other words, mineral, plant and animal life on Earth are, to some degree at least, expressions of manifestation on the downward curve until they reach the stage where they are ready for human incarnation, with longer or shorter periods in-between – this varies with the individuals – of existence in lower worlds than the Earth sphere. The higher the curve goes upward, the more these particle-souls unite again.
For instance, the split is stronger in the mineral kingdom than in the plant kingdom, and the latter is a further split than the animal kingdom. The part-soul does not always have to go through the same forms of existence on the downward curve as on the upward curve, but sometimes it must go through the same types of incarnation. This varies and happens perfectly and minutely according to law.
Now, you may wonder about this insofar as you have beautiful mineral, plant and animal life, and why these forms of existence should in many cases be still on the downward curve, and thus be further back in development than some souls who are obviously in a less harmonious state. To this, my answer is: not all beings are equally guilty in the Fall.
Besides, it was never the entire personality of the unified beings that was responsible for the Fall, but certain personality trends that lend themselves to the deviation from divine law. Nevertheless, the entire being fell.
Now, the beautiful and harmonious manifestations in nature – whether on the downward or on the upward curve – are expressions of the parts of the spirit that were not, or only to a lesser degree, involved in the deviation from divine law. You all know that certain animals, for instance, have been and still are dying out, and other forms of animal life come into existence.
The same applies to plant and mineral life. This is due to the fact that the expression of manifestation is also influenced by other beings who, as you know, are able to create worlds and types of manifest life force. The more your desires and goals are purified, the more you automatically contribute at the same time to the Creation, and thus are able to change it for the better, even as far as the part-souls on the down-curve are concerned.
QUESTION: It is terribly difficult to understand, but I somehow grasp that they have to collect themselves later in order to incarnate as humans?
ANSWER: Yes. The fluids of the several particles will connect when they reach a higher form of existence, just as when the dual beings, once having reached that state of perfection, will flow together and become one. It is the same process in principle.
QUESTION: Yes. And my question was: The spirits in darkness, do they have to go through all these stages and then…
ANSWER: They do not have to go through all these stages again, but just some of them. This is again according to individual characteristics and individual considerations. I could not possibly go into all the details of what is considered, how this works, etc. You could never understand it.
QUESTION: Between incarnations, is the density there indicative of the development? Can one become suddenly so high or so low that one cannot see them?
ANSWER: In ordinary circumstances, unless special measures are taken, as I said, you can only see those of your kind – in spirit too, unless you reach a certain stage of development. Then you can see those which are of lesser development.
QUESTION: Does that mean that there is an equivalent of spirit density for the incarnated density?
ANSWER: Certainly. As I explained last time, your physical matter with this kind of density is one type. And spiritual matter, according to the various spheres, is of another type. It is all matter in different degrees of density. It is only for your human conception that you think this is physical and then you imagine just one other category – the spiritual. But this is wrong. There are all different degrees.
63 QUESTION: There are two theories in the world today. They are in a quandary. In the scientific world they say that man is an evolved animal, evolved from the fish through the amphibian and reptilian to the mammalian stage of today, and here is the human race today after two billion years of developing life on Earth. The other theory, which is still held by orthodox religious people, is that God created each species in itself on the Earth.
ANSWER: The way of evolution is correct. Evolution goes through mineral, lower animal, plant, higher animal, human being, spirit being. I explained that many times to my friends. Since the Fall, the created beings split into many parts. The further the split, the lower the development.
The more development progresses, the less remains of the split of the original being; the soul particles melt together. But there is spirit in all created beings. There is just less of spirit-matter in the lower forms. In this respect, science is closer to the truth, although science interprets it a little differently. It leaves out many important angles.
QUESTION: May I add perhaps that in this connection, it is true that originally, before the Fall, each spirit was created separately. But incarnated humans are evolving in a slow re-climbing from the Fall?
ANSWER: That is correct.
120 QUESTION: You mentioned [Lecture #120 The Individual and Humanity] that millions of years need to come in order to complete the cycle of humanity. In what way can infancy and childhood be counted from your vantage point? Also in millions of years?
ANSWER: Of course. Just think how long the Earth and humanity are known to have existed already.
QUESTION: How do you account for the rise and fall of civilizations and races if you generalize now the state of adolescence? Did they rise and die?
ANSWER: Part of the answer is that some of the souls in these civilizations have already completed their development in this specific sphere. Others come again in different civilizations and races for the completion of their evolution. It is not necessary to come back into the same environment.
Another part of the answer is a comparison with the individual. Let us assume that as a young person, you adopt a way of life, an attitude to life and to others, in which you wish to cope with your personal difficulties and the world’s difficulties. This attempt may combine a number of facets, constructive and destructive, realistic and unrealistic.
For a while, you appear to get by with this solution, but as you grow older and circumstances change, the solution no longer works. So you discard it in order to adopt a new way of life, perhaps still distorted, so that, at a still later period, you have to discard it again. We may liken civilizations which have risen and fallen to the young person’s outer or inner pseudosolutions, ways of life which combine conflicting elements in the self and in the world.
QUESTION: Could you explain the role of Egypt? I can see the theory of pseudosolutions where Greece and other cultures are concerned, but with Egypt, something has been lost where there seems to have been an inner knowledge.
ANSWER: Nothing real can ever be lost. It may perhaps appear to be lost because of not associating it with Egypt, but that does not mean it is lost to the world. It is just as in the individual who is bound to retain constructive facets of an attempt to resolve problems, even if the whole nucleus does not work out.
When you preserve this constructive element, you do not recall each time that, at a particular period, you combined a temporary way of life that proved unsatisfactory with this specific constructive trend. One individual or one civilization does not invent truth. Truth is. It exists, to be used by the created beings. It cannot be extinguished.
My dearest friends, specifically at this time of year, receive very special blessings for your continuous development and self-realization. This time indicates one of those times of crisis I have spoken about. The spirit Jesus Christ acted out visibly one of those crucial periods of change. This marked, in history, a shift between childhood and adolescence.
It may seem disproportionate that so much more time has elapsed from infancy to childhood, and again from childhood to adolescence, while only two thousand years have gone by and humankind is now on the threshold of maturity. I repeat that phases of growth cannot be measured in fixed states as with the physical organism.
Besides, as I have also said, the individual too may be more or less adult and mature, while continuing to harbor very immature and destructive elements. The fact that humankind is on the verge of entering maturity as a whole, is bound to bring a great deal of betterment in this world. But it does not do away with its destructive aspects.
There is a significance in the fact that I chose this particular topic for this night. The incarnation of the spirit of Jesus Christ indicated the same kind of upheaval and turmoil that the human organism goes through when a child reaches puberty. At such periods, the entity discovers a great deal of idealism. Young people are full of strength and ideals and, at the same time, they have violent, rebellious and cruel impulses. This is exactly the stage humankind went through at that period.
QA121 QUESTION: I was never able to accept the extent of the Fall that occurred, not even talking about the first manifestations of life on Earth, which I can more readily accept than the period of dinosaurs, for instance, that it was necessary for those beings to be incarnated in dinosaurs and that for millions of years those dreadful creatures had to live. Can you say something about this?
ANSWER: Yes. Again it is not a question of necessity. Again it is a question of cause and effect. And the dreadfulness is only relative and according to your human vantage point. These life expressions were only dreadful in terms of taking life – human life or weaker life. But do you not have the same, in the energies of the constructive findings of life forces right now on this Earth, that you can turn these energies into destruction of much greater extent?
These prehistoric animals might perhaps, in the times when they lived and inhabited the Earth – along with all the other Earth phenomena at this time – best be likened to the various stages of embryonic life. If you investigate embryonic life, it goes through all sorts of forms, manifestations, that are far away from the ego consciousness of the fully grown human being.
QUESTION: Yes. So at the end of the cycle – if a human entity’s life is compared to a life of mankind – are we going to reach a point when everybody will be in a state of decay? And there will just be comparatively few people, as there are so few old people who are really on the top of their spiritual powers. Most of them are really quite difficult to look at. Is this what humankind will look like?
ANSWER: You mean when humankind grows?
QUESTION: Yes.
ANSWER: Of course not. Decay is a product of lack of life. And lack of life is a result of misunderstanding, of error, of immaturity. When the world psyche, the world personality of this Earth, fully grows and matures, old age will not be ugly, sick. It will not diminish the faculties. Quite on the contrary.
The time will come when physical death – but this, of course, will be millions of years more, counted in your time – will undergo a transformation and be a much more gradual process. The curtain will not be so strong.
It will be something perhaps more of what might be called, in terms of psychic phenomena, a dematerialization. In that case, there is no decay – which is of course, no sickness – which was symbolized after the death of Jesus Christ – the form of dying that there is no decay.
QUESTION: Would a more spiritually developed soul transition quite easily to going over? And that indicates already that that person is higher developed?
ANSWER: Of course. Yes. That is right.
QA136 QUESTION: May I ask a question about the first human being? I imagine there was a point when a soul or several souls were developed to the point that they needed a human body in order to be incarnated. And that, on the one hand, the body was developing, and on the other side, group spirits were developing – and at one point they met. But still, how was that? Was the first human being, after all, born from parents which were not yet human?
ANSWER: You see, it is a very gradual process. You must not imagine that this is a sudden appearance. It is a very gradual thing that these prehistoric human shapes, little by little, gradually changed into the present human form. So it is not one human being in the present form who suddenly appears. No. Evolution is a very gradual process.
QA165 QUESTION: When you spoke in the last lecture [Lecture #165 Evolutionary Phases in the Relationship Between the Realms of Feelings, Reason, and Will] on the layers of consciousness, did you really mean that there’s less and less consciousness from the spiritual point of view? And then you state “at the dawn of mankind.” Did you mean that there’s a point of intersection where consciousness is so thick, so to speak, that man acts out his destructiveness in full, with the beginning of the thinning of the over-layers of consciousness? If so, can you give a parallel between what happened in spiritual terms while this transition was happening on Earth from the first hydrogen atom through the creation of algae, to homo sapiens. And before even that, how did the initial separation from God disintegrate us all the way down to these very first forms of life? Or did man sort of jump right from a spiritual existence into the body of the primitive man?
ANSWER: The last part of the question is the most difficult to answer. I have made several attempts in the past, and whenever I have done so, I was perfectly aware of the fact that I was unable to convey.
The words are much too limited, because the human language does not make room for the concepts, or truth, that exist in spiritual life. Therefore, the terms always sound very primitive or anthropomorphic.
You know, it is impossible to find the way. But the time may come where it will be easier to come through, for this is also a question of the development of this instrument, to what an extent I can come through with such very, very deep and far-reaching questions. So I will shelve the answer to how the individual consciousness came into existence. I will reserve that. Maybe later on we can come through with that.
But as to the other answer, as far as it can be given, I would begin by asking: What really is that separation? The separation is a separate individualization of the cosmic divine principle. This is a separate manifestation. In this separate manifestation that formed itself as a result of various processes, the degree of consciousness varies. The further the separation is, the less consciousness exists. Therefore, the inanimate matter would be the most condensed energy in which there is least consciousness.
You may be surprised when I say least, rather than none. For none would not be correct, since everything is energy, and energy must always be consciousness to a certain extent. Even inanimate matter is conscious to some degree. It contains a consciousness, since it contains energy, or is energy.
The whole spectrum – from inanimate, the first life, the algae, the plant matter, mineral matter, animal, up to the human being – these are all, roughly speaking, varying degrees of consciousness. The higher differentiated the consciousness is, the more acutely does disharmony with the universal forces manifest.
In other words, the disharmony in the living structure would be experienced as much more painful in the higher-developed consciousness than in the less-developed consciousness. So as long as destructiveness exists, the lesser consciousness can tolerate it more than the higher consciousness. Therefore, the development must make certain adjustments. And this is really what the last lecture was all about [Lecture #135 Mobility in Relaxation – Suffering Through Attachment of the Life Force to Negative Situations].
Let us assume the primitive person who experiences very destructive impulses would be unable to resist them if there would not be a certain infringement of his capacity to act. Whether this infringement comes from within or from outside, it is really all the same. Only as man’s consciousness expands can he dispense with the superimposed morality, for an inner rightness develops forth. Does that answer your question?
QUESTION: Yes, but you said that you would maybe discuss later how it got to the point of what we call inanimate matter.
ANSWER: Well, let me put it this way. Let me give you this comparison. When you, in your path of self-confrontation and self-realization, discover that you are blind in a certain respect, this blindness is always connected with a feeling of tightness in you.
When this tightness dissolves, you feel a living energy going through you. To some degree, this energy is made into, so to speak, inanimate matter within you. It is the same principle in the creation. Inanimate matter is held back, condensed energy.
Only as the energy is made to flow again does the inanimate matter become creative flowing substance. And this is what evolution is really all about.