420. We have thus been present at a "macrocosmic forming of an embryo". We have seen the "macrocosmic seed" (starry nebulae) turning into more and more complicated systems and indeed even into such perfection that at least one of them (this terrestrial globe) has become an organism amongst whose micro-beings are people, that is to say, beings with a greatly advanced ability to think and research, beings with the beginning of a high intellectuality, beings who can begin to investigate and thus experience their own macrocosmic nature and their own identity as immortal in an everlasting existence as sons of God. We have seen, then, a process of development which actually took the form of a conflagration which became extinguished. Naturally, this has to a very high degree contributed to the difficulty mankind has in grasping the correct and complete picture of the world. As terrestrial man from time immemorial could not avoid feeling the sun as a source of light and warmth – if not, indeed, as the source of all physical life, in that from the physical viewpoint it always became dark and cold wherever its power was absent – then this same source of life to a very great extent has been worshipped by prehistoric man as identical with the Godhead itself.
      Yes, it is no exaggeration to say that even certain of the modern pioneers in research have regarded the sun, or suns, as worlds of a far higher nature than the cold and dark physical worlds, and they regarded these heavenly bodies as the habitation of beings of a much more advanced intellectual standing than those which the cold physical globes were destined to harbour. And does not modern research teach us today that those cold globes are "dying" or "dead" worlds? It is certainly quite natural that science should come to this conclusion as long as it still relies on purely outer terrestrial physical phenomena and does not know of the invisible cosmic world of causes behind everything, that is to say, of life in the higher physical worlds. So science has become a victim of that same illusion about which people have been induced to shed the most tears, namely, the illusion of "death". But nothing is more incorrect than the above mentioned conclusion. For just as a living being is not dead just because he is no longer in his physical body, neither is a globe dead simply because it is no longer a physical sun. On the contrary, we are now about to meet cases where it far surpasses the sun in its manifestation as an expression of life. It is, of course, correct that it is the nature of the living being's physical body to dissolve when it is left behind by the I, and that also cold, physical globes in the same way move towards dissolution when they are abandoned by the I's which have existed within them. That which we call "moons" constitute as a rule just such "globe-corpses". But here it must be pointed out that a globe's I has not left the globe just because the latter no longer exists as a sun but appears as a "cooled-down" globe. On the contrary such a "cooled-down" globe becomes in fact the most important tool of that globe's I with which it can develop "intellectuality" on the physical plane.
      If, for example, we observe our own globe, the physical Earth, it is certainly obvious that within this physical terrestrial body, there is revealed an immense ocean of forces which in reality existed only in an embryonic state in the Earth body's former state of fire, and in the same way today corresponding forces are to be found only in an embryonic state on the present-day sun. Our physical Earth is thus, in its own spiral, a far more advanced body than the solar system is in its spiral. The only major difference between these two heavenly bodies is that the solar system belongs to a higher spiral. Yet it is actually a "younger" being in that spiral than this terrestrial globe is in its own spiral.