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called an aggregation of physical objects, but he lives in sensations of heat arising in him and in
sounding tone; in these heat streams and tone waves he perceives the Spirits of Personality and the
Archangels. He cannot, however, perceive these beings directly; he can only sense them through the
veil of heat and tone. While these perceptions coming from the Earth penetrate his soul, still rising and
falling within it are the images of the higher beings in whose bosom he feels his existence.
The evolution of the Earth now advances further and its continuation expresses itself again in
condensing. The Earth receives the watery substance into its body, which now consists of three
members the fiery, the airy, and the watery elements. Prior to this an important event takes place.
An independent cosmic body severs itself from the fire-air Earth. This becomes in its subsequent
evolution the present sun.1 Previously, Earth and sun were one body. After the separation of the sun,
the Earth2 still contains within it all that comprises the present moon.
The separation of the sun takes place because exalted beings can no longer endure the matter now
condensed to water in their own evolution and in their task for the advancement of the Earth. They
extract from the general Earth mass the substance alone suited to their purposes and withdraw in order
to establish a new habitation in the present sun. They now send down their activities from the sun to
the Earth. Man, however, needs for his further development a place of action in which substance
continues to condense.
The incorporation of the watery substance into the Earth body is accompanied by a change in the
human being. Not only does fire stream into him and air play about him, but watery substance is
incorporated into his physical body. At the same time his etheric part undergoes a change and he
perceives it now as a delicate body of light. Previously he felt the streams of heat arising from the
Earth, he experienced air pressing upon him through tones.
Now the watery element also penetrates his fire-air body, and he perceives its instreaming and
outstreaming as a flashing up and dimming of light. In his soul also a change has taken place. To the
germs of the sentient and intellectual souls is now added that of the consciousness soul. In the water
element the Angels are active; they are also the actual producers of light.
The human being feels as though they appeared to him in light. Certain higher beings who were
previously within the Earth body now work down upon it from the sun; through all this there is a
change in the effects on the Earth. Man chained to the Earth would no longer be able to sense the
effects of the sun beings within himself if his soul were constantly turned toward the Earth from which
he has received his physical body. An alternation now takes place in the states of human
consciousness.
The sun beings tear the human soul away from the physical body at certain times so that man now
lives alternately within the bosom of the sun beings, purely as a soul, and at other times in a condition
where he is united with the body and receives the influences of the Earth. If he is in the physical body,
the streams of heat surge up to him; the air masses sound around him; the waters flow in and out of
him. If he is outside his body, his soul is then permeated by the images of the higher beings in whose
bosom he lives. At this stage of its evolution the Earth experiences two alternating periods. During
the one, it is permitted to weave its substances around the human souls and invest them with bodies;
during the other, the souls desert it and only the bodies remain.
It, together with the human beings, is in a sleeping state. It is entirely possible to say that at this time
of the far distant past the Earth passes through a day and a night period. (This expresses itself
physically and spatially in the movement of the Earth in relation to the sun as a result of the mutual
action of the sun and Earth beings. In this way the alternation in the characterized day and night period
is effected. The day period occurs when the Earth surface upon which man is evolving is turned
toward the sun. The night period, that is, the time during which man leads a purely soul existence,
occurs when this surface is turned away from the sun. It should not, however, be imagined that in that
primeval epoch the Earth's movement around the sun was at all like that of the present.
The conditions were then quite different. It is, however, useful to realize here that the movements of
the heavenly bodies arise as a result of the relationships the spiritual beings inhabiting them bear to
one another. The heavenly bodies are brought into such positions and movements through soul and
spirit causes that the spiritual states are enabled to unfold themselves in the physical world.)
Were we to turn our glance toward the Earth during its night period we would see its body in a corpse-
like state, for it consists in large part of the decaying bodies of human beings whose souls dwell in
another state of existence. The organic, watery, and aeriform structures constituting the human bodies
fall into decay and resolve themselves into the rest of the Earth mass. Only that part of the human
body, which at the very beginning of the Earth evolution took form through the co-activity of fire and
the human soul, and in consequence became continually denser, remains in existence like an
outwardly inconspicuous germinal nucleus.
What is said here about day and night should, therefore, not be taken to be at all similar to what is
indicated by these terms at the present earth stage. If at the beginning of the day period the Earth again
is a participant in the direct effect of the sun, then the human souls penetrate into the realm of physical
life. They come in contact with the nuclei mentioned above and cause them to germinate so that the
latter assume an external form that appears like a copy of the human soul nature.
It is something like a gentle fructification that occurs between the human soul and the germinal human
body. These souls thus embodied now begin also to draw in the surrounding air and water masses and
to incorporate them into their bodies. The air is expelled from the organized body and then drawn in
again; this is the first indication of what is later to become the breathing process.
The water is also drawn in and then expelled; this is the origin of the process of nutrition. These
processes are not yet externally perceived. A kind of outer perception occurs through the soul only in
the already mentioned fructifying process. Then the soul feels dully its awakening into physical
existence by coming in contact with the germinal body the Earth offers it. It hears something that may
be expressed in the words, "That is my form!" and this feeling, which might also be called a dawning
of the ego-feeling, remains in the soul during its entire connection with the physical body. The process
of assimilating air, however, is felt by the soul as something entirely of a soul-spirit nature, entirely
pictorial.
It appears in the form of an up and down undulating tone-configuration that gives shape to the
developing embryonic body. The soul feels itself surrounded completely by undulating tone, and it is
conscious of how it fashions its own body according to these tone forces. Thus, at that stage, human
forms took shape that are not observable by present-day human consciousness in an external world.
They fashion themselves in plant and flowerlike structures of delicate substance that are inwardly
mobile, appearing like fluttering flowers, and during the Earth period the human being experiences the
blissful feeling of being fashioned into such forms.
The absorption of the watery parts is felt in the soul as a source of power, as an inner strengthening.
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