hese etheric forces not only the
continuation of the etheric forces of the sun? Or their force of attraction?
Does it not belong to the sun? There we see that if we understand the
existence in an unrestricted way, we can realise that such an arbitrary
limitation does not take place if we speak of a heavenly body like the
sun. The effects which come from the sun were in the former times still
quite different on the earth than they were later, and than they are
today. They were in such a way that, if anybody could sit down on a
chair and could have looked at the whole world edifice basically the
physicist imagines this in such a way if he illustrates it to the children
, he would not have perceived the sun and the earth as separate bodies,
but he would have over-viewed the whole filled with perceptible contents;
he would have seen that the earth is crystallised from the whole sun
ball in later times.
If we go back to the times
of the most distant earth past, we come to a point where that what has
deposited in the lunar matter today was still connected with the earthly
matter where the forces, which are pulled out today, were still efficient
on the matter. These had effects on our physical bodies. They formed
it in such a way that it reacted in quite different way to the forces
and that in quite different way the effects on the bodily expressed
themselves. In even earlier times the solar effect on the earth was
there in an even more different way than today, also concerning growth.
When the lunar body and the earth body were still united, we have all
earth beings in a state which we only find with the animals which have
the temperature of their surroundings approximately. The warm blood
starts to develop to the same extent as the lunar matter withdraws from
If we go back farther to
the times in which the solar body was still connected with the earth,
we find within the human ancestors the effects which are preserved today
in quite decadent forms of the lowest animals. The human being reproduced
in those days by a kind of separation process. The human being existed
in delicate matter, even more delicate than the fire mist. At that time,
the reproduction happened as a kind of detachment. The daughter being
had the same size as the mother being. The solar forces were in those
days vital forces. They overpowered the material. They imprinted forms
to the material. Thus we look, if we go back to the origin of our earth,
at a time in which the human being was surrounded by subtler and subtler
In the end, we get to a
state which only the clairvoyant can envision where the most delicate
etheric corporeality merges into astral being; as a pure soul-being
the human being was placed in the earthly scene. The human beings who
were formed like the physical aura were placed into the earthly scene.
In the soul forces worked that imprinted forms into the matter soaking
up the matter into themselves and forming it so that they became external
seal impressions, a kind of shades of that what the souls were in the
pure soul land. Now we have come back to the stage of our earth where
the human being did not yet have the physical materiality where the
human being only came in as an astral being into this physical world
which was in those days of extremely delicate nature. Now we could go
back to still much older states in which the human being did not yet
have this astral existence. We could go back to purely spiritual states.
Now, however, this should not interest us; for we do not want to pursue
the human being, but the origin of the earth.
A few words more about the
course backward. We meet the human being there, so to speak, still without
material earth. He is not yet embodied in physical corporeality. There
we would have to go back long periods if we wanted to find the human
being at the former developmental stadia. The human being who was placed
as a soul-being on the earth has the ability to draw the substance to
himself in a particular way. If one were able to investigate the etheric
man, one would perceive that his soul was already organ