How the being's "cosmic consciousness" disappears, and it thereby experiences "death"
1547. With its increasing growth or evolution towards the "animal kingdom" on the physical plane, the I of the plant becomes increasingly "involved" or enveloped in physical matter, ultimately becoming a being that in animal matter, that is in flesh and blood, in the form of a "terrestrial human being", thinks and acts only in the interest of selfishness, which is actually the same as the killing principle. It has a permanent hunger for matter, for everything from goods and gold (which it preferably accumulates around itself as security for the future and as a kind of replacement for its lost faith or confidence in Providence and life) to the organisms of its fellow beings, which, with the aid of a butcher, it skins and cuts to pieces so as to turn them into material for its feasts, as well as for its more ordinary, daily nourishment. It even continues with this right up to the stages in evolution where it is no longer vitally necessary to eat flesh and blood, indeed, where swallowing such substances is even downright harmful or unhealthy, thereby promoting illness and ageing. It can be no surprise that an individual with this apparently insatiable or ravenous hunger for matter shows such a dominant and all-overpowering interest in procuring animal food and drink and material wealth that it entirely outdistances its interest in its soul and spirit. And things that individuals are not particularly interested in are given very little or no thought. And the things that they do not think about are forgotten. They degenerate and die in their world of thoughts. And thus the beings' cosmic knowledge of their immortality or eternal existence gradually degenerates or disappears. Indeed, the beings feel that they are so much "at one with matter" or that which is "temporal" that they flatly deny their immortality and eternal I. They believe that everything is "temporal", that everything is perishable, even including their own self or I. They eat matter, they gather up matter around them and bury themselves so much in substance that they can neither see nor sense anything other than substance. They think, therefore, that they themselves are merely chance dust at the mercy of equally chance forces of Nature. They thus do not understand that behind Nature, the universe and the organisms of the living beings there is a soul, a spirit and an I. Could a living being constitute a greater embodiment of "death"? If "death" is really to be experienced awake day-consciously by a being, how could it be manifested more adequately, in more detail and more unshakeably? The spiral cycle's second step on the ladder of evolution is thus existence's "zone of death". Here all beings experience the so-called "wages of sin". Here all beings are in the process of experiencing "death".
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