7. The Creation Of Man

“God created man in his own image and breathed into him his own breath!” These are two occurrences: the creating and the animating!

Both processes, like everything else, were strictly subject to the existing Divine Laws. Nothing can step outside the framework of these Laws. Divine Will can never contradict these immutable Laws which bear the Divine Will Itself. Every revelation and promise is also made with regard to these Laws and must be fulfilled in them, not otherwise!

So also the incarnation of humans on earth, which was a progressive step in the mighty Creation, the transition of the gross material into a completely new, elevated stage of development.

To speak of the incarnation requires knowledge of the Ethereal World; for the human being in flesh and blood is inserted as a supporting link between the ethereal part and the gross material part of Creation, while his root remains in the Pure Spiritual.

“God created man in His own image!” This creating or being created was a long chain of development that took place strictly within the Laws woven into Creation by God Himself. Instituted by the Most High, these Laws work ironclad, incessantly at the fulfilment of His Will, self-acting as a Part of Him towards perfection.

So also with the making of man as the crowning glory of the whole work, in whom all species that lay in Creation were to unite. Accordingly, in the Gross Material World, the earthly visible matter, the vessel was gradually formed in further development into which a spark from the Pure Spiritual, which was immortal, could be lowered. Through the constant striving to form, overtime, there came into being the most highly developed animal which, being able to think, already made use of various aids to sustain life and to defend itself. Even today we can observe lower species of the animal kingdom that make use of various aids to obtain and store their necessities of life, and which often show astonishing cunning in defence.

The highly developed animals mentioned earlier, which became extinct with the earth upheavals that took place, are today called “prehistoric men”. But to call them human ancestors is a great mistake! With the same right one could call the cows “partial mothers” of humans, since the largest number of children in the first months of their lives need the milk of the cows directly to build up their bodies, thus remaining viable and growing through their help. The noble and thinking animal “primitive man” has not much more to do with the real human being, for the gross material body of the human being is nothing more than the indispensable aid that he needs in order to be able to work in every direction in the gross material earthly world and to make himself understood.

The assertion that man is descended from apes is literally “throwing the baby out with the bathwater!” This is going far beyond the goal. A partial process has been elevated to the status of the purely factual. The main thing is missing!

It would be true if the human body were really “The Human Being”. But in this way the gross material body is only his clothing which he takes off as soon as he returns to the Ethereal World of Matter.

How did the first incarnation take place?

After the climax in the Gross Material World with the most perfect animal, a change had to come for further development, if a standstill was not to occur, which could become a decline with its dangers. And this change was foreseen and came: When the spirit-sparks had gone forth, drawn through the Ethereal World, renewing and lifting all things, there stood at its boundary, at the moment when the gross material-earthly vessel had reached the climax of its development, the ethereal-spiritual man also, ready and willing to unite with the gross material in order to promote and lift it.

While the vessel had been prepared in the World of Coarse Matter, the soul had developed so far in world of Ethereal Matter that it possessed sufficient strength to retain its independence on entering the vessel of coarse matter.

The connection of these two parts now meant a more intimate union of the Gross Material World with the Ethereal Material World up into the Spiritual.

Only this process was the birth of the human being!

Even today, procreation itself is a purely animal act. Higher or baser feelings have nothing to do with the act itself, but they release spiritual impulses, the effects of which become of great importance in the attraction of essential homogeneity.

The development of the body up to the middle of pregnancy is also purely animal. Purely animal is actually not the right term, but I want to describe it as purely gross.

It is only in the middle of pregnancy, at a certain maturity of the expectant body, that the spirit intended for birth is incarnated, which until then spends much time in the vicinity of the expectant mother. The entry of the spirit triggers the first twitches of the tiny developing gross material body, i.e. the first movements of the child. Here also arises the peculiarly blissful feeling of the pregnant woman, in whom, from this moment on, completely different sensations occur: the consciousness of the nearness of the second spirit in her, the feeling of it. And depending on the nature of the new, second spirit in her, so also will be her own sensations.

This is the process of every incarnation. But now back to the first incarnation.

So the great stage in the development of Creation had come: On the one side in the Gross Material World stood the most highly developed animal, which was to supply the gross material body as a vessel for the coming human being; on the other side in the Ethereal World stood the developed human soul, which was waiting for the connection with the gross material vessel, in order thereby to give all the gross material a further upswing towards spiritualization.

When an act of procreation took place between the noblest pair of these highly developed animals, at the hour of incarnation it was not an animal soul that was incarnated as before, but in its place the human soul ready for it and which carried the immortal spirit spark within itself. The ethereal human souls with predominantly positively developed abilities incarnated into male animal bodies according to their kind, those with predominantly negative, more delicate abilities into female bodies.

This process gives no support to the assertion that man, who has his real origin in the Spiritual, descends from the animal “prehistoric man”, who could only provide the coarse material transitional vessel for it. Even today it would not occur to the strongest materialists to regard themselves as directly related to an animal. Yet now, as then, there is a close bodily relationship, i.e. a gross similarity, whereas the real “living” human being, i.e. the actual spiritual “ego” of the human being, is not in any kindred or derivation to the animal.

After the birth of the first human being on earth, he was in reality alone, parentless, because he could not recognize the animals as parents despite their high development and was unable to have any community with them.

Now through her more valuable spiritual qualities woman should and could in reality be more perfect than man, if only she had endeavoured to clarify the intuitive perceptions given to her more and more harmoniously, whereby she would have become a power which must have a revolutionary and highly promoting effect in the whole of gross material Creation. Unfortunately, however, it was precisely she who failed in the first place, since she gave herself up to be the plaything of the strong powers of intuition allotted to her, which she furthermore clouded and defiled through feeling and imagination.

What a deep meaning lies in the biblical story of nibbling from the tree of knowledge! How the woman, prompted by the serpent, handed the apple to the man. The process in materiality could not have been expressed better.

The reaching for the apple, starting from the woman, was the woman becoming aware of her charms to the man and the deliberate use of them. The taking and eating of the man, however, was his entering into it with the awakening urge to draw the attention of the woman only to himself by beginning to make himself desirable through the accumulation of treasures and the appropriation of various values.

This was the beginning of the cultivation of the intellect, with its by-products of greed, lies and oppression, to which people finally submitted completely and thus voluntarily made themselves slaves of their tool. With the intellect as ruler, they inevitably chained themselves firmly to space and time according to its own nature, and thus lost the ability to grasp or experience something that is above space and time, like everything spiritual, ethereal. This was the complete separation from the actual Paradise and from the Ethereal World, which they brought upon themselves; for it was now inevitable that they could no longer “understand” everything spiritual and ethereal, which knows neither space nor time, with their circle of vision of their conceptual faculty, which was firmly bound to space and time by their intellect and thus narrowly limited. Thus, for the intellectuals, the experiences and the vision of the Essential Beings, as well as the misunderstood traditions, became “fairy tales”. The materialists, i.e. the people who are only capable of recognizing the gross matter bound to space and time, laughed derisively at the idealists, to whom the path to the Ethereal World was not yet completely closed due to their much larger and expanded inner life, and called them dreamers, if not fools or even deceivers.

But, today, we are finally close to the hour when the next great stage in Creation will come, which is unconditional upswing and brings what the first stage with the Incarnation should already bring: The birth of the spiritualized complete human being!

This is the human being who has a promoting and ennobling effect on the whole of Gross Material Creation, as is the actual purpose of human beings on earth. Then there will be no more room for the materialist who is chained to time and space. He will be a stranger in all lands, homeless. He will wither and perish like the chaff that separates from the wheat. Take care that you are not found too easy in this separation!
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