641. If we look at the mentality of the terrestrial human being we can see that
what is culminating or has culminated in its consciousness is the "killing principle", in other words everything that comes under the concept of discord, pain, suffering, "hell" or "darkness".
If we observe animals, we note that
these beings have not yet brought "hell" to culmination or "satiation" in their consciousness, but on the contrary are merely on their way towards such a culmination.
As for beings in the plant kingdom, "hell" or the "killing principle" is still for the most part only a detail far out on the horizon.
But it can, however, be ascertained that the hunger or longing for forms of manifestation of the "killing principle" is dominant, since we can see that the plant is actually evolving towards taking the "killing principle" into its service.
Indeed, we can even observe transitional forms in which the plant is just as much an animal as a plant.
We can thus see that in the mentality and life of plant and animal beings the only satisfaction of mental hunger that one can speak of in the zone of these beings is the hunger to experience the domain of the "killing principle".
But, as already mentioned, a cycle can exist only as a culmination of two contrasts.
Therefore, that part of the cycle in which the opposite of the "killing principle" culminates is lacking here.
But among the present type of beings that we know as terrestrial human beings we also see that there is an increasing number whose ideals, wishes, desires or longings are no longer for the "killing principle".
Thousands of beings can no longer be warriors, hunters, butchers or executioners, just as their main, authorised religions are all more or less based on the development of humaneness and love for one's neighbour.
This humaneness and love for one's neighbour is nothing less than precisely the beginning of the cycle's or spiral's contrast to the "killing principle".
Humaneness or love for one's neighbour is thus the new object of the advanced terrestrial human being's cosmic desire.
It has passed the culmination of the zone of the "killing principle".
Its ideals can be only contrasts to all darkness.
It is on its way into the spiral's regions of light, that is to say, the spiral's sphere of the intellect.
What is light for the soul is actually "intellectuality", just as its darkness is the same as "primitiveness".
While the primitive sphere of the spiral cycle constitutes, as mentioned here, the physical, visible kingdoms or zones, that is, the plant kingdom and the animal kingdom (to which the terrestrial human being belongs), the intellectual sphere, as the readers already know, constitutes the zones of the human kingdom, the kingdom of wisdom, the divine world and the kingdom of bliss, and it is from the latter kingdom that rays and energies overshadow the physical world and bring about the phenomenon we call the "mineral kingdom".
Symbol no. 10
The Principle of the Cycle
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