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Chapter 8
Evolution
Living beings' experience of life sensed as transformation or evolution  266. As mentioned in the previous chapter, every form of the experience of life is conditioned by the basic energies, which again are synonymous with different types of vibration or movement. And as movement can exist only as identical with transformation, then all the living beings' experience of life is in this way the same as transformation. This transformation takes place according to definite eternal laws and thereby attains a certain permanent shape or corresponding eternal character and begins to be recognized by terrestrial mankind as that reality we call "evolution". Evolution or the process of transformation is apprehended and sensed as a condition through which a living being is transformed out of a lesser to a more complete form of existence. One of the factors in this process of transformation which each human being will recognize is that he is neither the least nor the most complete of beings in existence, and that there are people who are more beautiful, more clever and more knowledgeable in life than himself, just as in the same way there are naturally those who, compared with himself, appear as being less clever, less beautiful and more primitive in their way of being. But as living beings are developing from a primitive state to a more perfect form of experience of life, what has been mentioned above will actually indicate that their present way of being or state of manifestation is only a temporary stage in the process of transformation which will be succeeded by further stages still nearer to perfection and so on continuously through all eternity. This means that there are numberless stages in life through which living beings have to pass, but they do not pass through all these stages simultaneously. This is why we see such deviations in perfection between living beings, in that some of them are just entering stages which others will not arrive at until a much later point in time, and in the same way there are also those who have entered such stages long ago in the distant past. When living beings appear as differing from each other in character, thought and behaviour, some with a so-called good character, and others with a bad one, some as so-called "criminals", others as "saints", or if we look at life on a wider scale and thereby see that some beings appear as belonging to the plant kingdom, others to the animal kingdom and others to the human kingdom - so it is all due to the fact that living beings are themselves one behind the other in that eternal process of transformation we have already mentioned. This indicates that the living beings who are today manifested as plants will one day become animals, just as animals, according to this perfecting process, will one day become human beings, and people with a bad character (or those who in their present life are looked upon as "bad") will one day become "good", just as those who are poorly talented at present will some day in coming lives be manifested as highly intellectual.


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