The Rudolf Steiner Archive

11. About the group Egos of Animals, Plants, and Minerals

[ 1 ] It must be emphasized again and again that theosophy must become life in the sense that through theosophy, human beings do not merely learn this or that, but learn to think, feel, and perceive differently in relation to their entire environment. This happens to people when they take in theosophical ideas in the right way. They have to learn to feel for and live with all beings. This has to be most true for other people, though. But we learn best to feel for people when we first learn to feel for the rest of the world.

[ 2 ] Human beings gradually get to know the whole world around them. They gradually learn that they are surrounded everywhere by spiritual beings, that they pass through spiritual beings everywhere. They learn to understand this in terms of feeling and sensation. They learn to recognize what is around us in the three realms of nature. They learn to recognize the beings in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms. They walk through meadows and forests, across fields and meadows differently than people who have not undergone theosophical training.

[ 3 ] When we look at other beings, we might initially believe that animal beings do not have a soul like humans. However, the human ego, the human soul, differs from the animal ego. The human ego lives on the physical plane. If we consider the animal as such, the individual animal has a physical body, an etheric body, and an astral body. In addition to these three members, we humans also have the ego. Thus, when we are awake, our ego is contained within us. However, animals do not have the ego on the physical plane. Here we must penetrate a little deeper into the so-called astral world. There we find, just as here on the physical plane, a population of human beings, and on the astral plane a population of animal egos. Just as human beings encounter other human beings here, so the seer on the astral plane can encounter equally self-contained personalities; these are the animal egos.

[ 4 ] Imagine the following: Imagine the ten fingers of a human being sticking through a wall. They are moving. We see the ten fingers moving, but not the human being himself. He is hidden behind the wall. We cannot explain how the ten fingers come through the wall by themselves and move. We must assume that some kind of being is involved. It is the same with animals in the physical world. All animals of the same kind have a group ego. Here in the physical world, we see animals walking around. What we see there has a physical body, an etheric body, and an astral body. If we see lions here in the physical world, for example, these lions are organs produced by the lion ego living in the astral world. The lion ego, the group ego of physical lions, is just as much a complete being on the astral plane as we are complete beings here. Thus, every animal group has an ego on the astral plane; a lion ego, a tiger ego, a vulture ego exist on the astral plane. The individual animals are here in the physical world, just as fingers are when they are stretched through a wall.

[ 5 ] When we look at the individual animals here, many of them appear to us to be extraordinarily intelligent. These animals are organized by the astral plane. There are the animal egos, the group egos. This population of the astral plane is much more intelligent than humans. The animal group egos on the astral plane are very wise beings. Let us observe the flight of birds, how they migrate through different regions, how their flight is organized, how they migrate to warmer regions in autumn and gather again in spring. If we look deeply into these wise institutions, we must ask: Who is hidden behind the wall, organizing all this? — It is the group I's. When we see beavers building, we observe that they build more wisely than the greatest engineers. People have observed how bees' intelligence works by throwing sugar instead of honey to them. Then they were observed. They cannot take the sugar with them. They fetch other bees, fly first to a source of water, and each little bee brings back a drop of water and soaks the sugar with it, transforming it into a kind of syrup. They then carry this into the beehive. The spirit of the beehive is behind the work of the bees. The individual bees belong to a single bee personality, just as our limbs belong to us. Only that the individual bees are more separate, and our individual limbs are closer together, more compact. We walk, invisible to ourselves, everywhere, even through beings, through the animal group egos that elude physical observation.

[ 6 ] Just as we begin to feel beings of which humans have no inkling, so too can we feel the souls of plants. Plant egos live in a world even higher than that of animal egos. Plant egos, those closed group egos to which a series of plants belong, are on the so-called Devachan plane. We can also specify the place where all these plant egos actually are. All plant egos are at the center of the Earth. The animal group egos circle around the Earth like the trade winds. Thus, the plant egos are at the center of the Earth. They are beings that all interpenetrate each other. In the spiritual world, the law of continuity prevails. One being passes through another. We see the animal group Iches traveling over the Earth like the trade winds and see how they carry out what we perceive in the actions of animals from their wisdom. When we look at plants, we see the head of the plant, the root, pointing toward the center of the Earth, because their group Iche is at the center of the Earth.

[ 7 ] The earth itself is the expression of soul-spiritual beings. From a spiritual point of view, plants appear to us like the nails on our fingers. Plants belong to the earth. When we look at individual plants, we never see them completely. Each plant belongs to the sum of beings that form the plant egos. We can thus empathize with the sensations and feelings of the plants themselves. What grows out of the earth from the plant, what strives from the interior of the earth toward the surface, has a different nature than what grows beneath the earth. Cutting off the flower, stem, and leaves of a plant is different from pulling out the root. When you cut them off, it is a kind of pleasant feeling, like a delight for the plant's soul. This pleasure is similar to that felt by a cow when her young calf suckles at her udder. What grows out of the earth from the plant is really something similar to the milk of animals. When we walk through the fields in autumn and the stalks fall under the reaper's scythe, when the scythe sweeps through the sheaves, feelings of well-being, of pleasure, flow and breathe through the fields. It is something immensely significant when we see not only with our physical eyes the sheaves falling, but when we see how these feelings of well-being sweep across the earth as the reaper goes through the fields with his scythe. But when the roots of plants are pulled out, it is a painful sensation for the soul of the plant. In the higher worlds, the same laws do not apply as in the physical world. We arrive at different ideas when we ascend into the spiritual worlds. Here in the physical world, too, the principle of beauty sometimes contradicts the principle of pain or pleasure. It may be that, driven by a sense of beauty, someone pulls out their white hair, but it still hurts. It is the same with plants. If you pull them out by the roots, it may look neater, it may be more beautiful, but it still causes pain to the plant.

[ 8 ] Stones are also lifeless only in the physical world. In the higher worlds, they too have their group egos. In the higher parts of the Devachan plane, the group egos of minerals are present. They too experience joy or pain. We cannot learn about this through speculation, but only through spiritual science.

[ 9 ] When we see a worker breaking stone after stone in a quarry, we might think that this causes pain to the soul of the stone. But this is not the case. Precisely when the stone is broken, feelings of well-being spring forth from the stone in all directions. From the quarry where the rocks are blasted out, strong feelings of well-being flow out in all directions. If we have a glass of water and add salt to it, and the salt dissolves, the water is filled with a feeling of pleasure, of delight. Joy flows through the water when we view the dissolution of the salt from a spiritual point of view. But when we allow the dissolved salt to solidify again, this happens with a feeling of pain. The same would happen with a feeling of pain in the soul of the stone if we could bake the shattered rocks back together again.

[ 10 ] The seers have always told people about these secrets in their secret writings, their religious documents. But people have forgotten how to understand these secret writings. Let us think back to distant, past periods of our Earth's development. We see the stone masses of the mountains, which are composed of different clay masses, basaltic rocks, and so on. Going further back, we find that things on Earth are becoming softer and softer. Then we come back to a time when the Earth was filled with powerful masses of heat, when iron, all metals, and all minerals were dissolved into spiritual substance. At that time, human beings were also spiritual beings. If human beings were to develop further and retain their present forms, this soft mass had to solidify. The mountains arose, the mineral masses separated from the soft substance, and the Earth became the dwelling place of present-day human beings. The lifeless rock mass crystallized out of the fiery liquid Earth like salt from a salt solution. Everything was formed in such a way that the solid masses emerged from the liquid state. This did not happen without pain. The entire process of solidification of the globe was connected with the pain of the stone soul.

[ 11 ] In the future, the earth will become spiritual again. The whole earth will split apart again, as radium already shows today. The process of dissolution of the earth will begin, a spiritualization, a deification, an adoption as a child. Let us now hear what the Apostle Paul says: “The whole earth, all beings groan in pain, waiting to be adopted as children.”

[ 12 ] Here we have a description of what is happening on Earth, where the stone soul suffers in pain until the state is reached on Earth where it is adopted as a child. It could hurt one's soul when those who proclaim religious documents to people dream all kinds of things into them because they do not want to make the effort to penetrate the depths of these religious documents. For those who guide people, it is downright a dereliction of duty if they do not want to penetrate their religious documents.

[ 13 ] The Apostle Paul knew what the events on earth meant. Theosophy should lead people in our new age into the depths of religious documents. It is sad when the appointed representatives of the same do not even try to penetrate them, but they have no will to understand them. All the arrogance of the present, which says, “How wonderfully far we have come!” must disappear. How many believe that our ancestors knew nothing! People come and interpret the writings of Paul, the religious documents, as they please, filled with arrogance, feeling that they know more than our ancestors. But how do the words affect us: “All beings sigh in pain, waiting to be accepted as children” — when we allow ourselves to be affected by the knowledge of the sentient stone soul, how it waits in pain, waiting to be accepted as a child? People with a materialistic mindset believe that they walk outside merely through air, wind, and fog, through oxygen and nitrogen. But the person who has spiritual knowledge knows that he passes through everything, that with every breath he inhales spiritual beings and becomes one with them.

[ 14 ] Thus we have seen how the animal egos circle around the earth like the trade winds, how the plant egos are gathered at the center of the earth, how the earth itself feels something when we pull up plants, and how the earth itself lives and is animated and feels something. Everything outside is animated and alive.

[ 15 ] Just as the physical body is born out of physical substances and forces, so our spiritual limbs are born out of the great universe. We begin to see within ourselves a small world that rests within the great world. This causes a blissful feeling within us. Only when we learn to empathize with minerals, plants, and animals do we also learn to feel how our ego rests in the entire universe.

[ 16 ] Thus we see how theosophy leads us to the spiritual foundations of existence. It is something that transforms our attitude toward life, our life impulses, so that we become different people. Theosophical ideas are seeds, impulses of will for real experience.