The Road to Paradise
Chapter 16
Why the living being must go through physical rebirths as a plant, an animal and a human being
When the living being, according to
Livets Bog, has passed through a cosmic spiral cycle and, in this cycle, has passed through the culmination of the experience of life, and when its sensory faculties, because of its resulting satiation with the outer experience of life, have degenerated so that it can primarily now experience only by means of its memory, its experience of life will take the form solely of the experience of its memories from the whole of the spiral it has accomplished.
Thus it lives here in its inner world and is only very latently connected with the outer world.
It is this state of life experience that is called the "kingdom of bliss".
In this state of life experience there again arises in the being the desire to sense and create in the outer world.
And this longing or inner attraction towards the outer world causes it to enter once again a great, new, cosmic, spiral cycle.
It begins to incarnate rather feebly in physical matter.
Since its sensory faculties from its previous spiral have degenerated, it temporarily cannot sense or create on the material, physical plane.
It must therefore gradually develop its physical sensory structure, which reaches its culmination in the human organism.
We see here how this development begins as impulses of energy in the mineral kingdom.
Thereafter, by virtue of the same impulses, mineral matter turns into vegetable manifestations.
In the plants we see the incipient development of the physical body.
Evolution continues and transforms matter into animal substances, and the animal comes into existence.
But the being's inner hunger for the experience of life leads it still further and further on in evolution.
The animal organism is gradually transformed into a human organism, which, at its culmination, constitutes the absolutely highest instrument for the experience and manifestation of life on the physical plane of existence.