182. In order that subconscious bodies can become day-conscious they have to be strong enough to bear day-consciousness; in other words to sustain fully the conscious, or awake, experience of existence. There has been a time when the physical body was still not developed enough to be able to bear physical consciousness. Consequently that living being could not experience any physical reality whatsoever in an awake state. The whole of its physical life was, therefore, an unconscious experience in a form of what is known as "sleep". The physical body and its effects were "subconscious". A living being of that kind appears for us under the term "plant". But this should not lead us to think that the whole of a plant's consciousness is a dormant existence; on the contrary, the plant - whether it appears as a tiny bacterium or a giant fir tree - has a kind of day-consciousness through which it does experience an awake or conscious existence. But of course this awake state of consciousness is not sustained by the plant's physical body and so it remains of a spiritual nature. The plant's physical existence is therefore its "night experience" or its "sleep", while its spiritual experience is awake and day-conscious. However, it should be understood here that the plant's day-consciousness represents only a surmounting of the first plane of existence in that enormous plane of evolution which we have touched on earlier in the book under the name "evolutionary spiral", in which living beings go through a stage of development from culminating light to culminating darkness and from there again to an even stronger culminating light. Such a phase of evolution consists, as mentioned before, of six planes of existence. The plants have thus surmounted only the first one, while animals are actually approaching the stage of having overcome both the first and the second. Because the spiral's development of darkness culminates in the animal kingdom, or the physical world, then the plant being is not yet so forward into the darkness, or the physical state, as the animal is, and therefore, as mentioned above, it is of a more spiritual nature than the latter. As a basis for this spiritual nature there lies the cosmic basic energy which here in Livets Bog has the name "instinct energy", because that energy is the foundation for everything which comes under the concept of "instinct". Hence the mainstay, or highest factor, in the consciousness of the plant is "instinct". The plant kingdom will therefore rightly be expressed as the "kingdom of instinct". The plant has prevailed over the body for that particular energy to the extent that it can be carried by its day-consciousness. But since the plant does not control any of the other basic energies to any great extent, that will mean that its awake, or conscious, existence can only consist of instinctive experiences. Instinctive experiences are what we might call a "vague sensing", so the plant's day-consciousness, or awareness of existence, consists only of a vague sensing. Therefore a plant cannot experience any realistic facts; everything is a vague sensing. Naturally it is here that one has to understand clearly that the kind of vague sensing which a plant can experience is of quite a primitive nature and cannot be so detailed, analysed or formulated as that of an animal, or in this case of a human being where other basic energies are in the process of becoming important factors within that vague sensing. Of course all the other basic energies are also present in the plant kingdom, just as on each of all the other planes of existence, but they appear as more or less latent compared with instinct energy which is here dominating and culminating. An exact plan of these basic energies will be given later in Livets Bog in special chapters and symbols.