510. As our readers already know, the living being's physical thinking begins to take place in the spiral's first zone – the "plant kingdom". Through millennia of influence on Nature's part there emerges the first feeble tendency of consciousness – the ability to "sense vaguely". "Sensing" is thus the first embryonic beginning of the ability to "differentiate", which again is the ability to distinguish the difference between contrasts. Through that ceaseless influence by Nature upon the being's manifestation as a mineral, there awakens in the form of "sensing vaguely" its first elementary perception of the major leading contrasts in the physical world, namely "heat" and "cold". And with the acquisition of this ability the being emerges from the "kingdom of bliss" and its existence begins to take shape in the physical world as "plant life". All plant species and everything which belongs to plant life, is thus based on the "ability to sense". Through the being's "C knowledge" or the inherited automatic functions from a former spiral, it has already begun its manifestation as a "cosmic chemist" – although, of course, quite unconsciously. Through this inherited automatic function, it has been able to hold the energies in a certain fixed constellation which manifests itself before us as its physical body. It is such a constellation of energies we call a "plant", a "tree", a "flower" and suchlike. This constellation constitutes the being's incipient creation of an organism. This, as mentioned above, comes about automatically. Its maintenance demands the fulfilment of certain specific conditions. And it is here that the being's automatic functions prove valuable.