ndred degrees, and imagine also
everything changing there! If you expand this thought to all the other
natural conditions, it shows you that the human being is in truth completely
dependent on the constellation and configuration of the forces within
which he lives. He becomes another being if he is in another interrelation.
One made scientific attempts
recently: one made butterflies hatch at temperatures at which they do
not live, otherwise. One found that they change their colours and colour
shadings. At higher temperatures even bigger changes are to be observed.
Today the natural sciences are already a kind of elementary theosophy.
Concerning theosophy there is no contradiction between the natural sciences
Thus the developmental levels
of humankind also depended on the quite different developmental levels
on our earth. Already the physicist says to you namely as a hypothesis
that the farther we go back in the earth development, we come to higher
and higher temperatures. The theosophist or the practical mystic sees
really back to these primeval times, and he sees these conditions in
the Akasha Chronicle as truth, like the average person sees table and
chairs as truth before him. We come to a condition in which all substances
on our earth are in quite different relations to each other than today.
You know that the substances
if they are warmed up change their state. Solid substances become liquid,
liquid ones become vaporous et etcetera Now we come back to much higher
temperatures than we know on earth today. There the whole material world
of our earth was different. Only someone who is set on the materialistic
view and on the immediate view of our earth can get to the view that
this is impossible. Who emancipates himself from our reality today also
realises that life was possible in these higher temperatures of the
earth .The human being really lived in these higher temperatures, indeed,
in another way. He lived in the state of the “fire mist.”
The bodies were a vaporous, soft mass which cannot really be compared
with anything we know today. Thus we come back to quite different circumstances.
One can still follow up this if one wants to get to know the origin
of the earth. This origin is intimately connected with the whole development
of the human being. If we go back, we find the human being in company
of much lower animals which belong to the lower classes of our present-day
animal realm which had, however, other figures in those days, were different
from their present-day descendants. Because the earth became more solid
and denser, they took on other shapes and characteristics. We have,
if we observe what takes place in us with the bare rational eye, no
idea how it looked at that time. An animal world, nevertheless, lived
round the human being. As the human being takes up food from the physical
world today, he also took up it in those days in similar way.
We have now to realise that
what I tell now is something quite fantastic and strange for those who
are not used to such ideas. The time has come to pronounce it once again.
We stand on the point of evolution where again an idealistic world view
will replace the purely materialistic one. Going back to these times,
the whole materiality of our earth becomes different. At that time,
the mass of the earth I ask you to not be too much astonished about
what I say was still in connection with other heavenly bodies than it
is the case today. Already somebody who thinks the present physical
ideas without clairvoyance to an end understands that what I say is
not completely inconsistent.
You need only to go back
according to the Kant-Laplace theory to the time when the single planets
do not yet circle the sun, have not yet developed from the primal nebula,
and then you have a valiant, but correct hypothesis. We can also come
back from the standpoint of the physicist to a time when the earthly
materiality still was in contact with the materiality of the whole solar
system. At that time, the human being was much more related with everything
than he is today. In the Akasha Chroni