Esoteric Evolution - 6 

The Development of the Earth

Introduction

The previous chapters described how the Earth was preceded by three earlier incarnations: Old Saturn, Old Sun, and Old Moon. What happened when after the Old Moon state, the Earth appeared out of the darkness of pralaya?

If we could have observed it with our current eyes, we would have seen that out of that pralaya period an unimaginably large heavenly body took shape that bore in itself the later Sun and all the later planets, including the Earth, in as yet undifferentiated forms.

This gigantic mother body extended over an area that in our time covers the orbit of the planet Saturn. Out of this primeval body, in the course of an evolution of billions of years the condition was born that we know today, namely the Sun as a star in the center of our solar system, and the planets, including the Earth, orbiting around the Sun.

How did that process take place?

It happened because high creative spiritual beings gradually split parts off from this mother body and made them autonomous. First came Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars. Then the Sun came out together with the planets Venus and Mercury. In their turn, these two also separated from the Sun.

In this new situation, the Earth together with the Moon was still completely part of the heavenly body that is called Sun. But this also changed when the process of separation continued and the Sun split off from the Earth, which at that time still had the Moon in it. But this latter connection also came to an end when the Moon at a certain time split off from the Earth and began its own orbit around the Earth.

All these separation processes took place in the course of unimaginably long periods of time early in the Earth period that are called Polaris, Hyperborea, and Lemuria. During Hyperborea when, after the earlier planets had separated out, the Sun still had the Earth and the Moon in itself, the Sun itself seceded. Thus, what was left was the Earth that still had the Moon in it. The Moon then left the Earth during Lemuria and gradually, as mentioned before, began to orbit the Earth.

If we want to make a picture for ourselves of all those processes, we have to realize that the primeval bodies in those early times were still mostly fluid and soft. The same is true for the Earth during Lemuria. It was a becoming planet on which hardly any mineral ground had yet formed itself. The process of hardening, mineralizing did not really begin until the Moon had split off.

To give you an idea of the different stages the Earth has gone through in its development in the past, continues to go through in our time, and will go through in the future, a schematic overview follows below of the seven great eras that are characteristic for the development of the Earth. We see that after the era of Lemuria, the era of Atlantis comes, followed by the post-Atlantean era. Then come the Sixth and Seventh eras, which have not yet received names.

After the Seventh era the Earth will again go into a pralaya condition in the spiritual world and reappear as a new heavenly body, called New Jupiter. Circumstances and forms, and therefore also human life, will again be totally different from those on the Earth.

Earth development and its principal eras

1. Polaris						7. Seventh era
	2. Hyperborea				6. Sixth era
		3. Lemuria		5. Post-Atlantean era
			4. Atlantis

In our time we are living in the 5th great era of the Earth, the Post-Atlantean era. In the chapters that follow, I will go extensively into the developments of the different great eras and the splitting off of especially the Sun and the Moon. We will then see the enormous influence these events had on the development of the human being, the Earth itself, and the kingdoms of nature, the plants, animals, and the mineral realm, rocks and stones.

To lift just a tip of the veil, with the separation of the Moon during Lemuria, the separation of the sexes took place on Earth. As a result, the feminine and masculine elements came into being. Until that time, the becoming human being was an androgenous being that united both feminine and masculine in itself. At the same time, birth and death started, and the laws of karma started to work. It was an extremely important period, therefore, in which gigantic changes took place.

Lemuria also includes the time when the story of Adam and Eve in Paradise was enacted, the events that are described in the Book of Genesis in the Bible.

Conventional science and esoteric evolution

The foregoing indicates that the insights of regular science, namely that the Earth and the Moon probably used to form one whole, do not contradict the teachings of esoteric evolution. On the contrary they confirm each other. Rudolf Steiner's spiritual-scientific research never contradicts the facts accepted by conventional science. After all, they investigate the same Earth. When there are differences, they are caused by the manner in which facts and phenomena are interpreted as they occur.

Thus a picture like the one below can be interpreted in two different ways.

You can say, like conventional science does, that human beings descend from apes and are therefore essentially animals. On the other hand, you can just as well say that in their physical development, they went through an animal-like phase, in which their figure had a form that looked in a certain phase more or less like that of the later apes.

Esoteric evolution adds to this that in the course of time, as human corporeality was becoming, the plant-like and animal-like elements were gradually split off, including the ape-like aspect. Today's human form and figure thus arose step by step. Out of the astral substance that was split off during that process of becoming, high creative spiritual beings built the various species in the animal realm, the last one being the apes. Later I will return extensively to this development.

Initially two separate paths

In order to gain a profound understanding of the development process of the becoming human being and to distinguish humans from the apes, it is important always to realize that until Lemuria human development went by two separate paths. The one path is that of the human spirit that descends to the Earth. The other is that of the rising, developing corporeality in which an earthly vehicle was formed. The descending human spirit encompasses the higher aspects of the human being as a spiritual being, spirit man (atma), life spirit (buddhi), and spirit self (manas).

The rising corporeality includes the development of the physical body, etheric body, and astral body. On this path of physical development, human beings go in their corporeality through a plant-like and an animal-like stage.

What we have to keep in mind is that the starting point of the high creative spiritual beings has always been, even long before the beginning of the creation, to build a physical dwelling place for each human being, in which they could go through a path of development on Earth as spiritual beings.

As was indicated before, out of this original human corporeality, the ground of which was laid on Old Saturn already, the kingdoms of nature—the animals, the plants, and the minerals—arose in later times on Earth through separation processes, as described.

The connection between spirit and corporeality

Only during Lemuria do both paths - that of the descending spirit and that of rising corporeality - come together. That is actually the moment when we can speak for the first time of the birth of the human being as he was intended. Everything that preceded it was part of the preparation phase. Hence the term becoming human being.

The connection between spirit and corporeality was achieved when the high creative spiritual beings in Lemurian times bestowed on human beings their I, the later center of their personality. This I made it possible that the spirit descending from the spiritual world and the corporeality developing on the Earth could connect with each other in the human being in a way that never before could have happened. As a result, the spirit could become active in the I and in the corporeality.

Schematically we can show it as follows:

Atma
	Buddi
		Manas
			­ I
		Astral body
	Etheric body
Physical body

This meant that human development received a totally new character. The working of the spirit in the I of human beings caused them to really become human on the Earth. The result was that they began to distinguish themselves ever more clearly from the animals. Animals do not possess their own I and therefore don't have their own personal- or self-consciousness which, by the way, does not mean that they do not have their own form of consciousness.

The foregoing indicates that if you want to know the deeper significance of life on Earth, you must learn to observe, as Wolfgang Goethe said, "at the same time with the eyes of the body and the eyes of the spirit." Conventional science only looks with the eyes of the body and therefore limits itself to the reality of the outer physical world. The reality of the spirit - which contains the meaning of the why and in what way forms in the outer world come to expression - has no place in that way of thinking.

People such as Goethe and Rudolf Steiner, however, looked as scientists and initiates not only into the outer world, but also into the world of the spirit, and they connected the two with each other. By working in this way with both their physical and their spiritual eyes, they could view and interpret phenomena that occur in the cosmos and on earth in very different ways than outer science does.

Fortunately, in our time there are more scientists who are able to observe both sides of reality - supersensible, spiritual, and physically observable earthly things - and can connect these with each other.

One of those is Dankmar Bosse, a German paleontologist, researcher of fossils. In the thirty-five years when he was connected with the Geological Institute in Berlin, he wrote a monumental book of more than 500 pages (see Literature). In it he describes that the geological connections he researched in the details of a rock formation, a fossil, or a landscape, "showed themselves to be astonishingly faithful images of the supersensible, spiritual development of the human being, as Rudolf Steiner described this." Earth and human beings are on a mutual path of development.

Studies such as this will, together with the increasing number of people who are waking up in our time - in other words, whose spiritual eyes are opening - have the result that the spiritual basis of all outer existence will become ever more obvious.

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Literature

Dankmar Bosse, The Mutual Evolution of Earth and Humanity: Sketch of a Geology and Paleontology of the Living Earth, SteinerBooks, Inc.