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Esoteric Evolution - 25What is Life?Someday in the far distant future, when our spiritual capacities will have become much stronger, we humans will not only reach higher grades of consciousness, but we will also work creatively at a high level. It will go so far that in the distant future we will create living beings, living beings like plants and animals and eventually even human beings. That will be because, with our increased spiritual capacities, the power of the divine life spirit, the Sun Logos, will then work so strongly in us that we can cause life to come into being at ever higher levels. That will be at a time when, thanks to the lessons from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, we will have developed to the point that we possess the creative forces of the Tree of Life. Our human futureAs human beings, we are on the way to a lofty future. It is for that reason of great importance to form a clear picture of the way we as humanity are going, and to be conscious of what "life" is and what it means to "create life." We should therefore not only understand the high goal the divine beings have had in mind for humanity from the beginning, but we also have to realize that, in a time like ours when, as a result of increasing technology and the concomitant deceptions and errors in our thinking, this high image of the human being will be more and more undermined. Because of this, there will arise more and more confusion about the fundamental question: Who is the human being? And: What is life? The question of what the difference is between technology and machines on the one hand and, on the other, the human being and living reality, will be increasingly fundamental and urgent. Therefore, there is every reason to direct our attention to what esoteric Christianity, Anthroposophy, has to say about human development through what Rudolf Steiner has given us in this regard. This makes it possible to form ever again a truthful picture of the significance and living reality of the existence of humanity and the earth, and of the unimaginably lofty creative spiritual beings that are at work there. Creator in the mineral realmIt is interesting to realize - Rudolf Steiner pointed this out - that we humans are already creators, in our time, not in the realm of life but in that of the mineral-material.1) Besides the realms of living plants, animals, and human beings, the mineral realm forms part of the earthly world and consists of inorganic, material, dead materiality. What picture can we make for ourselves of "creating in the realm of mineral materiality"? We create works of art, we build skyscrapers, and construct extremely complicated machines like smartphones, robots, satellites, etc. We do that by combining substances from the mineral realm, such as metals, minerals, sand, and plastics, and make them into products. This form of creation is possible, says spiritual science, because today's human beings, living on the earth, have in our time become masters over the mineral realm. It means that they are able to control the forces and means of the mineral realm and do things with them. The only things that limit them are the laws that rule the physical-material world. They set their limits. In the other three realms - the living plant, animal, and human kingdoms - human beings cannot create. Not yet. For instance, they cannot make a living plant or a living cell appear out of their own thinking, just as they can now create a sculpture or a machine in their thinking. According to spiritual science, creating something alive will only be possible when human beings have developed their spiritual core, the spiritual self. That will be the case in a future situation of the Earth, when the mineral realm has disappeared, the plant-like, etheric predominates, and everything that exists has only living, plant-like forms. 2) Experiments with lifeThe foregoing does not mean that current science in our time limits itself to the world of the mineral. Today already, scientists want to create life. For that purpose, they study the secrets that underlie the living. For example, they try to manufacture artificial cells that have the same basic functions as living cells in nature. That way they hope to get insight into the secrets of life. They opt for the cell because they consider the cell the basic unit of life. One of the scientists who is working with this issue is Cees Dekker, Professor of Nanobiology at the Technical University, in Delft, Holland. Besides being a scientist, Dekker is a devout Christian and active member of a church. As such, he views life as a gift from God. Just like other scientists, he also hopes to build a working, artificial cell in his laboratory by copying a living cell, and thus to find the secret of life.
At the same time, he is fully conscious of the fact that there is no scientist in the world who really knows what life is. This means, he says, that current science cannot answer questions such as: What is life? How does life work? What causes the difference between a living cell and lifeless molecules? "We can make a list of the properties of life at the level of the cell, but the essence of life is what we don't understand.3) Yet, he is convinced that sometime in the coming years, through synthetic biology, it will become possible to get insight into what the essence of life is. We find the same kind of optimism with Lee Cronin, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. He too is looking for new forms of life. As an adherent of Darwin's theory of evolution, he thinks that life on earth came about by itself, by accident, and that it therefore can be copied. "That may be easier than we think," he says. He has developed special machines for it and assumes that these will someday discover something that is useful.4) Current science gone astrayWhat we are seeing here is that current science is trying to cajole the problem of life out of the dead substance of the mineral realm in order then, through machines or dead molecules, to create new life. The question is: Are they going to succeed in that? If we submitted this question to Rudolf Steiner, he would firmly deny it. It is completely impossible, he said, to understand life based on dead materiality and to create new life from it. Whoever thinks that way has no idea of what life is. The living did not come forth from the dead, but the dead from the living. That life would come forth from the dead is an absurd supposition.5) The evidence that everything we have around us, including mineral materiality, has come forth from the living is something we have seen again and again in the previous chapters of this series. The Earth has been from its very beginning, and continues to be, a living organism. For if it weren't, no life would be possible on earth. The realm of dead materiality, the mineral realm, arose on earth only as a result of separation processes out of the living, followed by ever-progressing densification and hardening of those separated elements. We see these elements in the form of sand, stone, rocks, mountains, metals, minerals, salts, lime, etc., and also in the form of bones and skeletons in animals and humans. All of these are results, or physical-mineral expressions, of what in earlier ages of the Earth were living cosmic processes. Etheric forces or life forcesWhen is matter or a cell alive? Matter and cells are alive, says spiritual science, when they are permeated by living spiritual forces that work in them. The spiritual forces that bring life are called "etheric forces" or "life forces" in esotericism. Everything that is alive on earth - humans, animals, plants, cells, yes all of living nature - is permeated by these etheric or life forces. Hence, they possess besides a physical-material body, also an etheric body. The etheric body gives life to their physical element and maintains it. Etheric forces are the carrying forces of all physiological and biochemical processes, and thus of all life on Earth.6) The foregoing shows that what we call "life" cannot be understood with conventional scientific thinking. That is because this thinking is based solely on the physical-material and denies the spiritual element.7) For us this brings up the question: If what is "life" did not come forth from earthly materiality, from what did it come? The etheric world and the actual spiritual worldThe answer is that all life on Earth originates from two non-earthly, non-material worlds that are closely connected with each other, namely the etheric world and the actual higher, spiritual world. They permeate each other as well as earthly reality with their living, spiritual forces that are life-creating and life-maintaining. How can we picture that?
Let's start with the etheric world. The world of the etheric with all its etheric forces or life forces is spiritual in its nature, and as such it does not belong to the physical-material world of earth. However, it intensively connected with it. On the one hand, the etheric permeates the Earth from outside as a spiritual, supersensory, cosmic atmosphere and creates life and gives form to everything on Earth. On the other hand, its forces reach far into the cosmos as world-etheric forces and penetrate as "world ether" into the higher realms of the spiritual world. In this way, the world of the etheric, as carrying spiritual substance, forms the bridge between the actual higher spiritual world and earthly material reality.8) In subsequent chapters we will see why that is so and how it works. Space-emptying suction forces
Rudolf Steiner describes the etheric forces as "space-emptying suction forces" that work against the force of gravity of the earth. While they permeate the earthly with their life forces out of the cosmos, they spiritually pull at earthly matter and make it live and grow. Because of this even the tallest trees receive water and sap up into their tops. Another example of how an etheric force works out of the cosmos is light. We can observe the power of light when, for instance, a seed sprouts and a plant grows from it that unfolds ever more. The plant breaks through the earth and grows upward, away from the earth to the light, to the cosmos. Light, an etheric force, gives the plant the capacity to grow upward against gravity, to live, to bloom, and eventually form its own seed. Etheric forces are the carriers of life. However, they are not the cause of life.9) We have to look for the origin of what we call life in higher spiritual worlds, there where the source of streaming life is. That is the subject of the next chapter. Sources
For English translations of Rudolf Steiner's works see www.rsarchive.org. Translated by Philip Mees © Margarete van den Brink 2007-2025 - www.margaretevandenbrink.nl
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Man and matter
Rudolf Steiner beschrijft de etherkrachten als 'ruimte-legende zuigkrachten' die tegengesteld werken aan de zwaartekracht van de aarde. Terwijl zij het aardse vanuit de kosmos doordringen met hun levenskrachten trekken zij geestelijk aan de aardse stof en laten het leven en groeien. Daardoor krijgen zelfs de hoogste bomen water en sappen tot in hun kruin.
