Star Symbol in Menu


Read and Search The Third Testament
   Sect.:  
(1-288) 
 
Advanced search
   

 

Chapter 6
From Animal to Man
Terrestrial man as a being in transition from animal to human. The killing principle. The motivating factor in the evolution of the animal kingdom  171. We have now come so far in Livets Bog that we have gained a general view of the facts and conditions to which terrestrial mankind is subjected. With regard to the particular nature and character of these facts we have learned that mankind is found at a stage of evolution which can be expressed as the transition from animal to human. Terrestrial mankind thus represents the last great part of evolution before the zone of the real human kingdom begins. Since mankind consists of transition beings between animal and human, in addition to their animal tendencies, they will show in their manifestations expressions of more or less human tendencies. And it is the latter tendencies which have given the still unfinished creature the title of "human being". By "animal tendencies" we understand such manifestations as are released on the basis of an individual's specially developed organs or faculties for susceptibility to "gravity energy" (see section 168). Because of the latter's overall explosive nature, when it dominates the other basic cosmic energies permeating the individual, it releases itself as the "killing principle" - in other words, that principle from which all forms of suffering arise. In the animal kingdom proper, this principle is of such prominence that the living beings there mainly have to kill in order to live. Indeed, this principle forms such a prominent condition of life among beasts of prey that in order to maintain their daily existence they are forced to tear to pieces and devour the organisms or bodies of living beings at the same stage of development as themselves; this "cannibalism" even reaches right up into the zones where the animals are beginning to appear as human creatures and where, at certain stages of development, there are examples of them even being driven to devour the organisms of human beings belonging to their own species or race. As it is fundamental in the animal kingdom that daily food or nourishment is the flesh and blood or organisms of other beings in the same kingdom, then in those animal beings the concentration of consciousness must necessarily be the growth of "might". Since the organism determines the living being's experience of life, the problem has been to protect that organism and preserve it from persecution by fellow beings while at the same time being able to seize upon and overcome the others for the maintenance of necessary nourishment from their flesh and blood. But in order to obtain the latter power and supremacy are required and so, in the form of the instinct of self-preservation, the acquiring of these two realities became the evolutionary stimulus in the animal kingdom. As we see in the fourth chapter, mankind has not yet quite grown away from this stimulus.


Comments can be sent to The Martinus Institute.
Information about errors and shortcomings as well as technical problems can be sent to webmaster.