The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Lecture VI

[ 1 ] Today we want to demonstrate the sequence of stages of the beings to which human beings belong. Human beings, as they are now, are beings that have come into being, that were not always as they are now. They not only have other stages before and after them, but also beside them, just as children today have old people beside them as another stage of development. Today we want to demonstrate seven stages of beings. To do this, we must first clarify the difference between receptive and creative beings.

[ 2 ] With our eyes, for example, we perceive a color, red or green. In this respect, we are receptive beings. However, the color must first be produced so that we can perceive it; we are therefore faced with a being that produces the color, for example, red. This allows us to recognize the sequence of stages of the beings. If we summarize everything that comes before our senses, the soul must be there so that it can be received; but the opposite must also be there so that it can be brought before us. There are beings that can reveal. These have a more divine or devic character. Beings that are more suited to receiving have a more elemental character. Divine beings are of a revealing nature. Elemental beings are of a receiving nature.

[ 3 ] Here we have, in this realm, the creative wisdom that creates outside, and the wisdom that is received by the human soul. Wisdom is in the light, and it reveals itself in all sensory perceptions. Behind what is revealed, one must assume the revelators, beings with a will nature; wisdom is what is revealed.

[ 4 ] Human beings are beings who stand in between. On the one hand, for example with regard to all sensory impressions, they are receptive beings, but with regard to thinking, they are creative beings. Nothing gives them thoughts unless they add them to their perceptions. So, on the one hand, they are receptive beings, and on the other, they are creative beings. This is an important difference. Let us imagine that human beings were able to create everything they perceive, sounds, colors, and so on, in the same way that they create thoughts today. Today, they are only creative in one area, in thinking, and need creative beings around them in order to have sensory perceptions. At the beginning of this development, humans were creative in the realm of producing their own being. At that time, they created their own organism. Now they need other beings to do this. Humans now have to incarnate in a physical form that is determined from outside. In this respect, they are even more inclined toward elemental beings than in the realm of perception and thinking.

[ 5 ] Let us now imagine that human beings could also produce sounds, colors, and other sensory perceptions, as well as their own essence. Then we have the human being who existed before the Lemurian race and who is called the “pure” human being. Human beings become impure because they do not create their entire being themselves, but incorporate other things into their essence. This pure human being has been called Adam Kadmon. When the Bible speaks of humans at the beginning, it speaks of this pure human being. This pure human being had nothing kamic in him yet. Desire only came after he had incorporated other things into himself. This is how the second stage of humanity, the kamarupic human being, came into being. Only a subdivision of this is the higher animal. Without warm blood, there is no independent kamarupa in beings. Animals that are not warm-blooded are directed by other entities. All warm-blooded animals are descended from humans.

[ 6 ] So first we have the pure human being, who actually led a supersensible existence until the Lemurian period and produced everything that is and lives in him from himself.

[ 7 ] Today's cold-blooded animals and plants have developed in a different way than warm-blooded animals. Those that exist today are remnants of powerful, gigantic, strange beings. Science can prove the existence of some of these. They are decadent, degenerate animals descended from those that pure humans used to incarnate themselves in, so that they had a body for the Kamic. At first, pure humans had not yet found incarnation on Earth. They still hovered above incarnations. Of these large, powerful beings (animals), humans used the most perfect ones to incarnate themselves in them. They affiliated themselves with these beings, and through this they were able to bring in their own kama. Some of these beings developed further and became the Atlanteans and the present-day human race. But not all of them succeeded in adapting. These became the lower vertebrates; for example, kangaroos are such failed formations on the way [to becoming human], like pottery that is left behind.

[ 8 ] Now attempts were made by humans to bring the kama into the animal forms. Kama is actually only present in the current human form, namely in the heart, in the warmth of the blood, in the blood circulation. Attempts were made again and again, and so it went higher and higher from stage to stage. We see failed attempts, for example, in sloths, kangaroos, predators, monkeys, and prosimians. All of these fell by the wayside. Warm-blooded animals are failed attempts at human kama formation. Everything that is kama in them could also be in humans, but humans have dumped it in them because they could not use this type of kama.

[ 9 ] There is an important occult principle: every quality has two opposite poles. Thus we find how positive and negative electricity complement each other, or heat and cold, day and night, light and darkness, and so on. In the same way, every kama characteristic has two opposite sides. For example, humans have projected their anger onto the lion, which, on the other hand, when refined, is the force that can lead them to their higher self. Passion should not be destroyed, but purified. The negative pole must be raised to a higher level. This purification of passion, this raising of its negative pole, was called catharsis by the Pythagoreans. At first, man had within him the anger of the lion and the cunning of the fox. The rage was then fixed in the lion, so to speak, and the cunning in the fox. Thus, the warm-blooded animal kingdom is a picture book of kama qualities. Today, the view is widely held that “Tat tvam asi,” “That is you,” should be understood as something vague and general, but one must think of something specific. For example, in the case of the lion, man must say to himself: That is you! Thus, in the warm-blooded animal kingdom, we have the Kama-like human being spread out before us. Before that, there was only the pure human being: Adam Kadmon.

[ 10 ] The natural philosopher Oken, who was a professor in Jena in the first half of the 19th century, recognized all these ideas and expressed them in a grotesque way in order to provoke people. He gives an example that points to an even earlier stage of human development, before humans had separated from the cold-blooded animal kingdom. Oken related the octopus to the human tongue. If one considers the analogy between the tongue and the octopus, it has an occult meaning. Now we also have beings that are only just beginning to be created, as it were, as by-products. Humans have emphasized the cunning of the fox and retained its opposite pole. But in the cunning of the fox, the seed of something else also begins to form; for example, similar to how the black shadow of an object has a penumbra due to the light entering from outside. We separated the cunning from our inner being into the fox. Now spirit is brought to it from the periphery. The beings that work in this way from the periphery in the kamic realm are the elemental beings. What the fox has received from us is animal in him; what is attached to him from outside by the spirit is elemental being. He has come into being on the one hand through the spirit of humanity and on the other hand through an elemental being.

[ 11 ] We therefore distinguish between: first, elemental beings; second, the kamic human being; third, the pure human being; fourth, the human being who, in a certain sense, has overcome the pure human being, who has absorbed what is around him and is creatively active. He has touched and absorbed everything that exists around him in earthly existence. This brings him the plans, the rules, the laws that create life. Man was once perfect, and he will be so again. But there is a great difference between what he was and what he will be. What is around him externally will later become his spiritual property. What has been acquired by him on earth will later become man's ability to be creatively active. This then becomes his innermost being. One who has absorbed all earthly experiences, so that he knows how every thing can be used and has thus become a creator, is called a Bodhisattva, that is, a human being who has sufficiently absorbed Bodhi, the Buddhi of the earth, within himself. Then he is ready to act from his innermost impulses. The sages of the earth are not yet bodhisattvas. Even for a sage, there are still things in which he cannot yet find his way. Only when one has absorbed all the knowledge of the earth in order to be able to create is one a bodhisattva. Buddha and Zarathustra, for example, were bodhisattvas.

[ 12 ] When human beings develop further, so that they are not only creators on Earth but also have powers that extend beyond Earth, they are free to use these higher powers or to continue to work on Earth. They can then bring something from other worlds to Earth. Such a time existed before human beings began to incarnate, in the last third of the Lemurian epoch. Human beings had developed their physical, etheric, and astral bodies. They had brought these parts of their being with them from earlier Earth development. They could not have found the next two impulses, Kama and Manas, on Earth; they do not lie in the chain of Earth's development. The first new impulse (Kama) could only be found as a force on Mars. Shortly before humans incarnated, it was added. The second impulse (Manas) came from Mercury in the fifth sub-race of the Atlanteans, among the Ur-Semites. These new impulses had to be brought to Earth by even higher beings, by the Nirmanakayas from other planets. They brought Kama from Mars and Manas from Mercury. The Nirmanakayas are one step higher than the Bodhisattvas. They can regulate ongoing development, but they cannot introduce anything foreign; only the Nirmanakayas can do that. One step higher than the Nirmanakayas are the beings called Pitris. Pitris = fathers. For the Nirmanakayas can indeed bring something foreign into development, but they cannot sacrifice themselves, sacrifice themselves as substance, so that they can bring forth a new cycle on the next planet. The Pitris, the beings who had developed on the moon and had now come over, can do this; they have become the impetus for the development of the earth. When human beings have gone through everything, they are able to become Pitris. The next, even higher level, which can only be called the actual gods, is the next level.

[ 13 ] So we have seven stages of beings: first, the gods; second, Pitris; third, Nirmanakayas; fourth, Bodhisattvas; fifth, pure humans; sixth, humans; seventh, elemental beings. This is the order Helena Petrovna Blavatsky speaks of.

[ 14 ] Here we can add the question of what kind of organ it is that has made humans kamarupic. It is the heart with its veins and the blood that pulses through the body. The heart has a physical part, an etheric part — Aristotle speaks of this, since in the past only the etheric human was considered important — and an astral part. The etheric heart is connected to the two-petaled lotus flower. Not all physical organs have astral parts; for example, the gallbladder is only physical and etheric, lacking the astral part.