Beginning of the Present Earth — Extrusion
of the Sun
WE SHALL now follow the Akasha Chronicle back into
that remote past in which our present earth had its beginning. By
“earth” is to be understood that condition of our planet
by virtue of which it can support minerals, plants, animals, and men
in their form of today. For this condition was preceded by others in
which the natural realms just mentioned existed in considerably
different forms. That which one now calls earth went through many
changes before it could become the carrier of our present mineral,
plant, animal, and human worlds. Minerals for instance also existed
under the preceding conditions, but they looked quite different from
those of today. These past conditions will be discussed further
below. Now we shall only call attention to the manner in which the
immediately preceding condition changed into the present one.
One can conceive of such a transformation to some
extent by comparing it to the passage of a plant through the seed
stage. Imagine a plant with root, stalk, leaves, blossom, and fruit.
It takes in substances from its environment and secretes others. But
everything in it which is substance, form, and process disappears,
except for the small seed. Life develops by passing through it, and
in the new year it rises again in the same form. Thus everything
which existed on our earth in its preceding condition has
disappeared, only to arise again in its present condition. What for
the preceding condition one might call mineral, plant, animal has
passed away, as in the plant, root, stalk, and so forth, pass away.
There as well as here, a germinal stage has remained, from which the
old form develops anew. The forces which will cause the new form to
emerge lie hidden in the seed.
At the period discussed here we are dealing with a
kind of earth germ. This contained within itself the forces which led
to the earth of today. These forces were acquired through earlier
conditions. This earth germ however must not be imagined as a
densely material one, like that of a plant. It was rather of a soul
character. It consisted of that delicate, malleable, mobile substance
which is called “astral” in occult literature.
In this astral germ of earth there are only
human rudiments at first. These are the rudiments of the later human
souls. Everything in preceding conditions which was already present
as a mineral; plant, or animal nature has been drawn into these human
rudiments and become fused with them. Before man enters upon the
earth he is a soul, an astral entity. As such he appears on earth.
The latter exists in a state of the most highly-refined
substantiality, which in occult literature is called the most
refined ether. Whence this etheric earth originated will be
described in the next essays.
The astral human beings combine with this ether.
They impress their nature upon this ether, in order that it can
become a likeness of the astral human entity. In this initial
condition we are dealing with an ether earth which really consists
only of these ether men, which is only a conglomerate of them.
Actually the astral body or the soul of man is for the most part
still outside the ether body and organizes it from without. To
the scientist of the spirit, the earth appears approximately as
follows. It is a sphere which in turn is composed of innumerable
small ether spheres — the ether men — and is surrounded
by an astral envelope just as the present earth is surrounded by an
envelope of air. It is in this astral envelope (atmosphere) that the
astral men live and whence they act upon their ether likenesses. The
astral human souls create organs in their ether likenesses and
produce a human ether life in them. Within the whole earth there
exists only one condition of matter, the refined living ether. In
theosophical books this first humanity is called the first (the
Polarean) root race.
The further development of earth takes place in
such that from the one condition of matter there develop
two. A denser substantiality is secreted, so to speak, and
leaves a thinner one behind. The denser substantiality resembles our
present air; the thinner one is that which causes chemical elements
to develop from previously undifferentiated substance. Along with
these, a remainder of the previous substantiality, the living ether,
continues to exist. Only a part of it is transformed into the
so-called material conditions. We now are dealing with three
substances within the physical earth. While the astral human beings
in the envelope of earth previously acted only upon one kind of
substantiality, they must now act upon three. They act upon them in
the following way: That which has become airlike at first resists
their activity. It does not accept everything which is rudimentarily
present in the complete astral men. As a consequence, astral humanity
must divide itself into two groups. One group works on the air-like
substantiality and creates in it a likeness of itself. The other
group can do more. It can work on the two other substantialities; it
can create a likeness of itself which consists of the living ether
and of the other kind of ether which brings the elementary
chemical substances into being. This ether will here be called the
chemical ether. This second group of astral men has acquired its
higher capacity, however, only by separating from itself a part of
the astral nature — the first group — and condemning it
to a lower kind of labor. Had it retained within itself the forces
which accomplish this lower labor, it could not have risen higher
itself. here we are dealing with a process which consists in the
development of the higher at the expense of something else, which is
separated from it.
Within the physical earth the following picture
now presents itself. Two kinds of entities have come into being
First, entities which have an airlike body on which the astral being
belonging to it is working from the outside. These beings are
animal-like. They form a first animal realm on earth. These animals
have shapes which, were they to be described here, would strike
mankind of today as very peculiar. Their shape — one must keep
in mind that this shape is based only on an airlike substance —
does not resemble any of the animal forms existing now. At most they
have a remote similarity to the shells of certain snails and mussels
which exist today. Beside these animal forms the development of
physical man progresses. The astral man, who has now ascended higher,
produces a physical likeness of himself which consists of the two
kinds of matter, of the life ether and of the chemical ether. One
thus deals with a man who consists of the astral body and is working
himself into an ether body which in turn consists of two kinds of
ether: life ether and chemical ether. Through the life ether this
physical likeness of man is endowed with the capacity to reproduce
itself, to cause beings of its own kind to emerge from it. Through
the chemical ether it develops certain forces which are similar to
the present forces of chemical attraction and repulsion. Thereby this
likeness of man is in a position to attract certain substances from
the environment and to combine them with itself, secreting them again
later by means of the repelling forces. These substances, of course,
can only be taken from the animal realm described above, and from the
realm of man. This constitutes a beginning of nutrition. Thus these
first likenesses of man were eaters of animals and of men.
Besides these beings, the descendants of the
earlier beings, composed merely of life ether, continue to exist, but
they become atrophied, since they have to adapt to the new
terrestrial conditions. After they have undergone many
transformations, the unicellular animal beings develop from them, and
also the cells which later make up the more complicated living
organisms.
The following process then takes place. The
airlike substantiality divides itself into two, of which one becomes
denser, watery, while the other one remains airlike. The chemical
ether also divides itself into two conditions of matter; one of them
becomes denser and forms that which we shall here call the light
ether. It endows the entities which possess it with the gilt of
luminosity. On the other hand, a portion of the chemical ether
continues to exist as such.
We are now dealing with a physical earth which is
composed of the following kinds of matter: water, air, light ether,
chemical ether. and life ether. In order that the astral entities can
act on these kinds of matter, another process takes place by which
the higher develops at the expense of the lower, which becomes
separated from it. Thereby physical entities of the following kind
are produced. First, those whose physical body consists of water and
air. Now coarse astral entities which have been split off, act on
these. Thus a new group of animals of coarser materiality than the
earlier ones is produced.
Another new group of physical entities has a body
which consists of air and light ether mixed with water. These are
plantlike entities, which however are very different in form from the
plants of today. Finally, the third new group represents man of that
period. His physical body consists of three kinds of ether: the light
ether, the chemical ether, and the life ether. If one considers that
descendants of the old groups also continue to exist, one can judge
what a variety of living beings there already were at that stage of
terrestrial existence.
There now follows an important cosmic event. The
sun is extruded. Thereby certain forces simply leave the earth. These
forces are composed of a part of what hitherto had existed on earth
in the life ether and in the chemical and light ether. These forces,
so to speak, were withdrawn from the earth. A radical change thereby
took place among groups of terrestrial beings which previously had
contained these forces within themselves. They all suffered a
transformation. Those which have been called plant beings above,
first suffered such a transformation. A part of their light ether
forces was taken from them. They could then develop as organisms only
when the force of light, which had been withdrawn from them, acted
upon them from the outside. Thus the plants came under the influence
of the sunlight.
Something similar happened with human bodies. From
then onward, their light ether also had to act together with the
light ether of the sun in order to be capable of life. But not only
those beings themselves which lost the light ether were affected; the
others were affected too. For in the world everything interacts.
Those animal forms, too, which did not contain light ether themselves
had previously been irradiated by their fellow beings on earth and
had developed under this irradiation. Now they also came under the
immediate influence of the external sun.
The human body in particular developed organs
receptive to the sunlight, that is, the first rudiments of human
eyes.
The consequence of the extrusion of the sun was a
further material densification of the earth. Solid matter developed
from fluid; likewise the light ether separated into another kind of
light ether, and into an ether which gives bodies the capacity to
increase temperature. With this, the earth became an entity which
developed heat within itself. All its beings came under the influence
of heat. In the astral element a process similar to the previous ones
again had to take place; some beings developed to a higher level at
the expense of others. A group of beings split off which were well
suited to work on coarse solid substantiality. With this there had
developed the firm skeleton of the mineral realm of earth. At
first the higher natural realms did not act upon this rigid mineral
skeleton. Thus, on the earth there exist a mineral realm which is
solid, and a plant realm which has water and air as its densest
substantiality. In the latter realm, through the events we have
described, the air body had become condensed to a water body. There
also existed animals of the most varied forms, some with water and
some with air bodies. The human body itself had become subject to a
process of densification. It had condensed its most compact
corporeality to the point of wateriness. The newly-developed heat
ether coursed through this water body. This gave to his body a
substantiality which could perhaps be called gas-like. This material
condition of the human body is described in works on mystery science
as that of the fire mist. Man was embodied in this body of
fire mist.
With this, the examination of the Akasha Chronicle
has reached a point shortly before the cosmic catastrophe caused by
the extrusion of the moon from the earth.
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