Esoteric Evolution - 14

The Descent of the I into Corporeality

Gigantic changes in human evolution

What is the I?

What is spirit?

The spirit works on different levels

The creation of the soul in the different bodies

The consciousness soul: transition to the birth of the spirit

In conclusion

The sentient soul

The intellectual or mind soul

The consciousness soul

Sources

In the previous chapter, Yahweh and the Second Creation, it is related that two originally separate paths in human evolution, the physical and the spiritual path, at one point came together and connected with each other. This laid the basis for our current humanity. This unimaginably great event happened halfway through Lemuria. For clarity's sake the diagram follows once more that shows Lemuria and its place in the context of human evolution.

The development of the Earth and its main phases:

In the Bible, this great process in the time of Lemuria is described in Genesis 2:7.

The connection between spirit and corporeality (the totality of the physical, etheric, and astral bodies) was achieved because Yahweh-Elohim (the Lord God) let spiritual substance, the I, stream into the corporeality of the becoming human being. The Bible describes this event as the Lord God "breathing into his nostrils the breath of life, and so man became a living being."

Rudolf Steiner compared the descent of the I into the corporeality of the becoming human being with water that, bit by bit, drips into vessels set up for the purpose. In a similar way, the I dripped into the different bodies during long, long periods of time.

These bodies had earlier been worked on and prepared by the Elohim to take in an I. This happened during the time that in the Bible is described as the sixth day of creation. The bodies of these becoming human beings absorbed this new spiritual power, this I, just as a sponge absorbs water, and they connected themselves with it.

The union of the I with corporeality set in motion a process that lasted millions of years, which brought about gigantic changes and totally new developments in the evolution of humanity, first of all in the situation that is described in the Bible as Paradise. One of the most important changes that took place was that, due to the unification of the I with corporeality, the originally androgenous, still becoming human being split into two sexes, male and female, Adam and Eve.

One of the consequences of this was that the powers of evil now obtained access to the human being. Lucifer, in the form of a serpent, seduced Adam and Eve to eat the forbidden fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. As a result, illness and death came into human life, and the very first beginnings of karma, the working of the law of cause and effect.

All this together led to what is described in the Bible as the expulsion from Paradise. By this process, human beings ended up more deeply into the process of descent to the physical world, and thus became ever further removed from the direct connection and envelopment of the divine world, a connection that in the time of sun-drenched Hyperborea was still strong and self-evident.

The next chapters will describe what happened in the original paradisal condition. To make that comprehensible, this chapter discusses the process of the descent of the I into the different bodies of the human being and what this brought about. It may seem like a sidetrack, but it isn't.

Rudolf Steiner tells us that we can imagine the I - which each human being possesses - as an in itself hollow form or force, within which processes occur. In the course of evolution, the I descended into the different bodies of becoming human beings, and thus established the connection between corporeality and the spiritual world, their spiritual human being.

In his book Theosophy Rudolf Steiner describes that, on the one hand, the I has its roots in corporeality, meaning the astral, etheric, and physical bodies, and on the other hand, is open to the world of the spirit, which it takes into itself.

The diagram below shows this schematically.

The part of the I that has its roots in the various bodies created in the course of evolution that which was later called the "lower," "everyday I," or ego. The other part, which opens itself to the world of spirit, with the result that this world becomes active in it, created the connection with the "higher I," the spiritual self.

Just like our various bodies, our I is also a gift from the gods. We received it from the Elohim, the Spirits of Form. During Lemuria they donated "I-substance" from themselves and let it drip via Yahweh-Elohim into the bodies of the becoming human beings. Thanks to this I, this gift from the Elohim, we were able to become true human beings.

The I and the inner connection with the world of the spirit it made possible enabled us to become autonomous personalities, I-beings on our own. We became human beings who, in the course of evolution, could give form to processes in our own soul and direct them. It created the potential for inner growth and development.

There is still much more to be said about the I. Our I is such a wondrous, lofty spiritual force that it is hard to describe it in earthly terms and pictures. Only when we are spiritually further developed will its secret and loftiness open for us to a deeper level.

"Spirit" is described in esoteric Christianity and in Anthroposophy as high, all-encompassing, creative consciousness. This spirit, this creative consciousness streamed, through the addition of the I in Lemuria, out of high spiritual realms into the becoming human being, and became active there.

"Spirit" is another name for the divine spark in us. It forms part of the divine, the Logos, the Holy Spirit aspect of God the Son, the Creator, the Sun Logos. Just as a drop of water in the sea is part of the whole sea, the divine spark in us is part of this all-encompassing divine.

The divine aspect works in us as the spiritual Self, our true being, our real, higher I. The I and the spiritual Self enable us human beings to possess consciousness and to grow in soul and spirit.

Does the foregoing mean that the spirit works only in human beings? No, that is not so.

Through the creation process of the human being, spiritual forces also work in the worlds of animals and plants. The activity and presence of the spirit can be observed wherever there is life, growth, procreation, and physical forms of expression that show wise ordering.

But the power of the spirit lives differently in every part of nature, in plants, in animals, and in human beings. That is because it descended in each of them into a particular part of their corporeality and became active there. In trees and plants, for example, it works in the physical and etheric body and there creates life, forms and growth.

In animals, the spirit works, besides in the physical and etheric body, also in the astral body. That is why in animals we meet besides life, form, and growth, also instincts and emotion. Instinct is nothing other than wisdom (working of the spirit) on an unconscious level. Instinct is what we see at work, for example, in the ways animals build their nests, and when fishes travel thousands of miles to return to their mating grounds. And in the unconscious wisdom with which animals bring up their young.

In the human being, the power of the spirit works, besides in the physical, etheric, and astral bodies, also in the I. Because of this we humans possess, in addition to what the plants and animals have, also self-awareness, I-consciousness. Thanks to the I we walk erect and have the capacity to think and to speak. These human characteristics enable us to develop to ever-higher levels of humanness, creative consciousness and existence.

Animals do not have that potential. That is because they do not possess an I. Their astral body was and is not able to take an I into itself. That is the reason why they have remained stuck at a particular level of evolution. Thus, the animal realm came into being.

The foregoing shows that we cannot consider human beings and animals the same, just as animals and plants are not the same. The animal is no plant, and the human being is no animal. Because of his I with the spirit that works in it, human beings do not belong to the animal realm but to the human realm. Hence, they are called the crown of the creation, the goal toward which the divine creative beings have worked from the very beginning.

How did this addition of the I into corporeality happen in time, and what were its consequences? First of all, through the work of Yahweh-Elohim (Genesis 2:7), the incoming drops of the I reached the astral body. That was during Lemuria. From there, the I descended into the etheric body during Atlantis. It was only after Atlantis, some 10,000 years ago, that the I came into the physical body.

During this process, the I anchored, "rooted" itself in the different bodies. In the I, the spirit that is connected with it, the spirit self, also became active. That activity led once again to tremendous steps in the creative process of the human being. For what happened?

In cooperation with other high creative spiritual beings Yahweh developed in this human corporeality an inner world, the soul world, the soul. For, if human beings wanted to live and develop on earth as spiritual beings they needed, in addition to different bodies and an I, also soul forces and an inner world of experience. Without this, they would not be able to come to any experience of themselves and their surroundings and could not develop themselves.

What happened during the addition of the I into the astral body, and later the etheric body and again later the physical body, was that Yahweh step by step transformed parts of those bodies. In these transformed parts he created the different parts of the soul, parts that would later form a whole.

Gustav Mahler by Auguste Rodin / Mona Liza by Leonardo da Vinci

First, Yahweh and other high creative spiritual beings took parts of the astral body and created the sentient soul out of these. With its passions, desires, needs, and emotions, the sentient soul forms the basis of our soul. Through it we can become aware of our elementary needs and impulses – we can sense and experience them. Through this sensing, this primary feeling and experiencing arose a very first, although still elementary form of inner consciousness. The process of creating the sentient soul took all of the further time in Lemuria and took millions of years.

The next area on which Yahweh and the high spiritual beings worked creatively was the etheric body. That took place during Atlantis. Parts of the etheric body were transformed into what is called the intellectual or mind soul. This laid the basis for thinking and a more conscious sense, as forces of consciousness in the soul.

In human evolution, thinking and feeling formed one whole for a long time. Our current way of thinking, in which thinking and feeling are separated, only begins in the Greek-Roman period in post-Atlantean times, some two thousand years ago.

By the creative activity of I and spirit during Atlantis, human beings developed an extremely extensive memory capacity.

In the course of post-Atlantean times the third and last part of the soul was created.

By transforming spiritual forces of the physical body, Yahweh and his helpers created the consciousness soul. This took place after the already existing parts of the soul - the sentient soul and the intellectual or mind soul - had been further formed and, in addition to the life of emotion and desire, thinking and the will were further developed; and in these also the working of the I.

The consciousness soul of human beings is therefore in fact still rather young. Its development began around the fourteenth and fifteenth century AD.

The development of the soul and our I enabled us human beings in the course of time to become more and more conscious of our own thinking, our feeling, our will and our actions - of ourselves, therefore, and also of the people and the world around us. Consciousness means to experience, feel, think, gain insight and understanding. In this way we can find truth and essence and can learn to act on that basis.

It is a characteristic of the human consciousness soul that it has a twofold nature. On the one hand, because the development of the soul was rounded off with this part, it belongs to our soul world. On the other hand, it also opens the door to the world of spirit, in other words, to our spiritual self, but also to the spiritual beings in the spiritual world - both positive, constructive beings and negative ones.

This brings us into our current time. Since in addition to the sentient soul and the intellectual or mind soul, human beings also live more and more in the consciousness soul, and because therefore in our inner being the door to the world of the spirit opens more and more, we ask ourselves questions. We increasingly look for insight into the deeper backgrounds of life and the reason and essence of our existence. On the other hand, we also run into spiritual forces in ourselves on which we still have little or no grip.

It is no exaggeration to say that in our time human beings are only beginning to face their true earthly task. All that came before, the whole development of the different bodies, the soul, and the I, was just preparation for this. In our time, the earthly housing is complete, and what lives deep within us as our true Self wants to be born and become active. It indicates the important and critical point we human beings are standing on at this stage of evolution.

As was mentioned before, the foregoing was needed to put the events in Paradise in the proper perspective. That will be the subject of the following chapters.

7. Seventh era

2. Hyperborea

6. Sixth era

5. Post-Atlantean era

4. Atlantis

Rudolf Steiner:

Theosophy, GA 9

The Influence of Spiritual Beings upon Man, GA 102

Human Development and Christ-Knowledge, GA 100

See https://rsarchive.org