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evolution of the earth and mankind will have advanced so far that the spiritual powers and beings that
had to sever themselves from the earth during the Lemurian age, in order to make possible the
continued progress of the earth's beings, will be able to unite themselves again with the earth.
The moon will then reunite with the earth. This will occur because at that time a sufficiently large
number of human souls will possess so much inner strength that they will use these moon forces for
the benefit of further evolution. This will occur at a time when, alongside the high level of
development that will have been reached by a certain number of human souls, another development
will occur that has taken the direction toward evil. The laggard souls will have accumulated in their
karma so much error, ugliness, and evil that they will form, for the time being, a special union of evil
and aberrant human beings who violently oppose the community of good men.
The good humanity will through its development acquire the use of the moon forces and thereby so
transform the evil part also that, as a special realm of the earth, it may participate in further evolution.
Through this work of the good humanity, the earth, united with the moon, will be able, after a certain
period of evolution, to reunite also with the sun and with the other planets. Then, after an intermediate
stage, which presents itself as a sojourn in a higher world, the Earth will transform itself into Jupiter.
Within this state, what is now called the mineral kingdom will no longer exist; the forces of this
mineral kingdom will be transformed into plant forces.
The plant kingdom, which in contrast to the present plant kingdom will have an entirely new form,
appears during the Jupiter state as the lowest kingdom. To this a higher kingdom is added, the
transformed animal kingdom; above it there is a human kingdom, which proves to be the progeny of
the evil community that arose on the earth; above all these are to be found the descendants of the good
community of earth men, a human kingdom of a higher order. A great part of the activity of this latter
human kingdom consists in the work of ennobling the fallen souls of the evil community, so that they
may still be able to find their way back into the actual human kingdom.
The Venus evolution will be one in which the plant kingdom also will have disappeared; the lowest
kingdom at that time will be the retransformed animal kingdom; this will be joined on an ascending
scale by three human kingdoms of different degrees of perfection. During the Venus state the earth
remains united with the sun; during the Jupiter state, however, evolution proceeds in such a way that at
a certain point of time the sun departs once more from Jupiter and the latter receives its effects from
the outside. After a time, the union of sun and Jupiter [ Jupiter minus the sun in contradistinction to
Jupiter with the sun. (Tr.)] again occurs and the transformation gradually proceeds over into the Venus
state.
During that state a special cosmic body splits off that contains all the beings who have resisted
evolution, a so to speak "irredeemable moon," which now moves toward an evolution, for the
character of which no expression can be found because it is too dissimilar to anything that man can
experience on earth. The evolved mankind, however, advances in a completely spiritualized existence
to the Vulcan evolution, the description of which does not lie within the scope of this book.
We see that the highest imaginable ideal of human evolution results from the "knowledge of the
Grail": the spiritualization that man acquires through his own efforts. For this spiritualization appears
finally as a result of the harmony that he produces in the fifth and sixth cultural periods of present
evolution between the acquired powers of intellect and feeling and the knowledge of the supersensible
worlds. What he there produces in the inmost depths of his soul is finally itself to become the outer
world.
The human spirit elevates itself to the tremendous impressions of its outer world and first divines and
afterwards recognizes spiritual beings behind these impressions; man's heart feels the boundless
sublimity of the spiritual. The human being can also recognize that his inner experiences of intellect,
feeling, and character are the indications of a nascent world of the spirit.
Whoever believes that human freedom is not compatible with foreknowledge and predestination of the
future condition of things, should consider that free human action in the future depends just as little
upon the character the predestined things will have as this freedom depends upon his resolve to live in
a house a year hence, the plan of which he determines today. He will be as free as it is possible for him
to be according to his inner nature, precisely in the house he has built for himself; and he will be as
free upon Jupiter and Venus as his inner life permits just within the conditions that will arise there.
Freedom will not depend upon what has been predestined by antecedent conditions, but upon what the
soul has made of itself.
* * * * *
Within the Earth evolution is contained what has evolved during the preceding Saturn, Sun, and Moon
evolutions. The earth man finds "wisdom" in the processes that take place in his environment. This
wisdom is present as the result of what had happened previously. The Earth is the descendant of the
ancient Moon which, with all that belonged to it, formed itself into the "cosmos of wisdom." The Earth
is the beginning of an evolution through which a new force is added to this wisdom. It brings the
human being to the point where he feels himself an independent member of the spirit world.
This rests on the fact that his ego is fashioned by the Spirits of Form during the Earth evolution, just as
upon Saturn the Spirits of Will formed his physical body, upon the Sun the Spirits of Wisdom his life-
body, and upon the Moon the Spirits of Motion his astral body. The manifestation of wisdom appears
through the co-operation of the Spirits of Will, Wisdom, and Motion. The Earth beings and Earth
processes can harmonize in wisdom with the other beings of their world through the work of these
three classes of spirits.
From the Spirits of Form the human being receives his independent ego. In the future this ego will
harmonize with the beings of Earth, Jupiter, Venus, and Vulcan through the power that is added to
wisdom by the Earth evolution. This is the power of love. In earth humanity this power of love must
take its beginning, and the "cosmos of wisdom" unfolds itself into a "cosmos of love." Everything that
the ego is able to unfold within itself is to become love. The exalted Sun Being Whom we are able to
characterize in the description of the Christ evolution manifests Himself as the all-encompassing
"archetype of love."
Thus the seed of love is planted into the innermost core of human nature. And from there it is to flow
into the whole of evolution. Just as the previously formed wisdom reveals itself in the forces of the
sensory external world of the earth, in the present-day "nature forces," so in the future love will reveal
itself in all phenomena as a new nature force. It is the mystery of all evolution into the future that
knowledge and all that the human being does through a true understanding of evolution is a sowing of
seed that must ripen as love, and the greater the force of love coming into being, the greater will be the
accomplishments of creative force in the future.
In what will be created from love will lie the strong forces leading to the above described culminating
result of spiritualization. The greater the amount of spiritual cognition that flows into human and earth
evolution, the greater will be the number of fertile seeds for the future. Spiritual knowledge is
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