Awakening to Cosmic Life
The Epiphenomenal Basis of Our World
This is likely the earliest description of the Eighth Sphere, coming almost exactly eleven years before Rudolf Steiner would link the Eighth Sphere with the Occult Movement, and its aims during World War I. Thus, the instrumentality of the so-called, “Eighth Sphere”, is clearly indicative of its functional purpose in which the Earth is to be experienced as a living, breathing realm of visible and interacting appearances. Our Earth is the veritable bridge to higher and more Noumenal formations known as the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Spheres.
“We left human evolution at the point where the human being entered into what we would call the mineral realm. He had now become mineral. A brain had been developing from the middle of the Lemurian age. The mineral world achieved its highest quality when the brain developed, with intellectuality establishing itself within it. This descent of humanity to the mineral world was only possible because earlier stages of evolution had taken the human being through the first, second and third elemental worlds. Before going through the three elemental worlds the human being was pure monad, pure spirit (atman, budhi, manas). He then descended through the three elemental worlds into the fourth. The mineral world is the fourth world. Who was actively involved in this development?
Spirits called 'dhyani of wisdom' were active, putting the body together in its mineral form from the outside. And it was only when the brain was finished that the stream of evolution could continue from inside. If the dhyanic spirits of wisdom had continued to work from outside for themselves at this time, the human being would have grown harder even than the mineral world; he would have had no inwardness, no spirituality to counter the hardening tendencies of matter, and he would have been lost to cosmic life. He would have dropped away like a cinder in the course of evolution, cast out from the successive natural worlds. If a life in mind and spirit had not intervened from inside, a world of completely petrified human concretions would have arisen that would have been incapable of evolving further. Such a petrified world must drop out from the succession of worlds. Occultists call this hypothetical world the 'eighth sphere'.
As they were lagging behind at the time, the dhyani of wisdom would have taken humanity to a dead end. At this point the dhyani that had lagged behind before and were now ascending took hold of humanity. This spiritual principle took humanity, then moving towards hardening, to bring spirituality into human evolution. The dhyani working from inside sought to spiritualize the human being more and more, and in that case there would have been wisdom only. The human being then had two avenues open to him—to fall to the eighth sphere, or to be wholly spiritualized. Either would inevitably have led to something other than humanity is today—humanity would either have vanished into the eighth sphere, or it would have been steadily getting more spiritual. These two streams worked against each other from the middle of the Lemurian age. The situation would have remained like this if the dhyani that had built up the human being from outside and would have taken him onward into the eighth sphere had not taken in budhi or love. (In Marie Steiner-von Sivers’ notes, this sentence reads: ‘It would have remained like this if the dhyanic spirits of love had not incarnated in order to bring love also into matter.’) They thus saved the material aspect of the human being from perdition. They joined the others as a third stream; these were working from the outside.
With the three streams acting together, part of the material, mineral world became this tripartite human being made up of matter, or body, of soul and spirit. Anything that could not be taken along because the streams were not equal did indeed turn into cinders. That is [today’s] moon. It is a piece of the eighth sphere; cinder. In the moon we have a symbol, for the time being, of what the first dhyani might have achieved. The activity of the dhyanic spirits, which had given the human being his form until then is thus symbolized in the moon. In Jewish esoteric language they are collectively called Yahveh or Jehovah, the god of macrocosmic wisdom, of form. H. P. Blavatsky therefore calls him a moon god, the god of form. In [A. P. Sinnet’s] Esoteric Buddhism, the moon is seen as part of the eighth sphere. It is only a part of it, however, a symbol of what the human being would have been in the eighth sphere. Yahveh is the elohim of the fourth round, the lord of wisdom-filled form (the fourth elohim).
From the middle of the fourth round, the lord of love was active—the Christ, the world's love, the second Logos. The lord of form, the fourth elohim, was wisdom, the third Logos. Jehovah is the spirit of the third Logos. In the spirit, the Christ principle, the principle of love, began in the middle of the Lemurian age. Lucifer intervened at the same time. We must get to know the difference between things perishable and imperishable. Greek sculptors, for example, created magnificent, glorious works, but a time will come when they will all have perished. If those works were all, we would have to say that they are perishable. Everything on the physical plane is mortal in this way. But the fact that artists work on the physical plane means something that will remain for the artist's spirit, something that would not exist if he had not been working on the physical plane. Taking in something done on a lower plane is the faculty of the spirit on a higher plane—that is evolution. It is only by incarnating that human beings gain riches in their spirit which they would not otherwise have. That is what the perishable means for the imperishable.
The skeletal system is the most mineral aspect of the human being. It also gives physical human beings at the present time their most perfect form. In future Earth evolution, the digestion, the heart, and so on will be more and more perfect, but not the skeletal system. This will gradually vanish. Standing firm in the physical world with one’s skeletal system is important. Human beings will be able to take with them what they have become through their skeletal system.
The fact that the bones of the Christ must not be broken means that the part of him which belonged to the mineral world must not be destroyed, had to be left intact. The symbols from the mysteries were then for the first time lived out in the world. The Christ becoming a human being was one of the most important cosmic events in the fourth sub-race of the fifth root race. The founders of earlier religions had taught wisdom; the Christ teaches love.”
The sub-races of the fifth root-race
1st sub-race
Indians, The race of spirituality
2nd sub-race
Persians (Zoroastrian religion), The race of flames
3rd sub-race
Chaldaeans, Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, the earliest Greeks, Romans, Celts. Zeus had remained behind from the 2nd sub-race. The heroes Heracles, Theseus and Jason were sun heroes of the third sub-race. The race of stars.
4th sub-race
The later Greek and Latin peoples, The race of personality
5th sub-race
The Germanic, Anglo-Saxon nations, making the personality a free personality that conquers the world; called The race of the world.
6th sub-race
The Slav race
7th sub-race
The American peoples. The race of egotism
https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA089/English/CMP2001/19041019p01.html
I wanted this post to reach out in a way that would allow for a third installment on the subject of the Eighth Sphere. We have it all aligned, and it is contained here in this rather contiguous short lecture-course on the Mission of Archai Michael:
https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/MissMich/MisMic_index.html
For example, here is a text from the first lecture. In reviewing it, I realized I had no further words in order to explain the Eighth Sphere anymore than has previously been explained on the subject.
"Now the significant question arises: If we turn to the beings still higher in rank, to the hierarchy of the so-called Spirits of Form, on what stage do we find them? We must answer: They have already passed beyond the stages which we human beings conceive of as our evolutionary stages of the future. They have already passed beyond the Vulcan evolution. If we consider our own evolution as consisting of seven stages, which suffices for our present considerations, we must say that the Spiritsof Form have reached the eighth stage. We human beings are at the fourth stage of evolution; if we consider the eighth stage we find the Form Spirits.
Now we must not conceive of these successive stages of evolution as existing side by side, but we must conceive of them as interpenetrating one another. Just as the atmosphere surrounds and permeates the earth, so this eighth sphere of evolution to which the Form Spirits belong permeates the sphere in which we human beings live. Let us now carefully consider these two stages of evolution.
Let us repeat: We human beings exist in a sphere which has reached the fourth evolutionary stage. Yet we also exist, if we disregard everything else, in the realm which the Form Spirits, around us and through us, have to regard as theirs. Let us now consider human evolution concretely. We have often distinguished the development of the head from that of the human being. The latter we have again divided into two separate parts, the development of the breast and the development of the limbs. Let us disregard this latter differentiation and consider man as having, on the one hand, that which belongs to the development of the head and, on the other, everything that belongs to the rest of the human being.
Now imagine the following: You have here the surface of the ocean, the human being wading in it, moving forward with only his head rising about the water. In this image—of course it is only an image—you have the position of the present-day human being. Everything in which the head is rooted we would have to consider as belonging to the fourth stage of evolution, and everything in which man moves forward, wading or swimming in it, as it were, we would have to designate as the eighth stage of evolution. For it is a peculiar fact that the human being has, in a certain way, outgrown as far as his head is concerned, the element in which the Spirits of Form unfold their particular being. In regard to his head, man has become emancipated, so to speak, from the sphere which is interpenetrated by the beings of the Spirits of Form.
Only by thoroughly comprehending this can we arrive at a proper conception of the human being; only then can we understand the special position man has in the world; only then will it become clear to us that when the human being senses the Spirits of Form's creative influence upon him, he does not sense this directly through the faculties of his head, but indirectly through the effect of the rest of his body upon the head. You all know that breathing is connected with our blood-circulation, speaking in the sense of external physiology. But the blood is also driven into the head, creating an organic, vital connection of the head with the rest of the organism. The head is nourished and invigorated by the rest of the body.
We must carefully discriminate between two things. The first is the fact that the head is in direct connection with the external world. If you see an object, you perceive it through your eyes; there is a direct connection between the outer world and your head. If you, however, observe the life of your head as it is sustained by the processes of breathing and blood circulation, you will see the blood shooting up from the rest of the organism into the head and you may say there is not a direct, but only an indirect connection between your head and the surrounding world.
Naturally, you must not say, pedantically: well, the breath is inhaled through the mouth, therefore breathing also belongs to the head. I have stated above that we have here only an image. Organically, what is inhaled through the mouth does not actually belong to the head, but to the rest of the organism.
Focus your attention upon these two fundamental concepts which we have just gained; focus your attention upon the idea that we stand within two spheres: the sphere which we entered by passing through the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolution and being now within the Earth evolution which is the fourth evolutionary stage; then consider the fact that we live within a sphere which belongs to the Form Spirits just as our earth belongs to us, but which, as the eighth sphere, permeates our earth and our organism with the exception of our head and all that is sense activity. If we focus our attention upon these facts we have created a basis for what is to follow.
Yet let me first build a still firmer basis through certain other concepts. If we wish to consider our life under such influences, we must take into account the beings we have often mentioned as cooperating in world events: the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings. Let us, at the outset, fix our attention upon the most external aspect of these beings. They dwell in the same spheres in which we human beings live. Considering their most external aspect, we may think of all Luciferic beings as possessing those forces which we feel when there arises in us the tendency to become fantastic, when we yield one-sidedly to fancy and over-enthusiasm, when we—if I may express it pictorially—tend to go out with our being beyond our head. If we tend to go out beyond our head, we employ forces which play a certain role in our human organism but which are the universal forces of the beings we call Luciferic. Think of beings formed entirely of those forces within us which strive to pass beyond our head and you have the Luciferic beings which have a certain relation to our human world.
Conversely, think of all that presses us down upon the earth, all that makes us sober philistines, makes us bourgeois, which leads us to develop materialistic attitudes, think of all that exists in us as dry intellect, and you have the Ahrimanic powers."
Pretty tough stuff to explain to today's modern audience. Yet, this is also what it means to be influenced by the Eighth Sphere within the totally appropriate Fourth Sphere, where human evolution occurs. The Gods were really evidently present on this one.
This article is also intended to be a kind of further dedication to Jeff Barney, who I have been pestering a bit, without ill effect, I hope. Kind regards.