17.18  After thus having experienced the universe's very highest, divine form of life experience in the summer epoch of the spiral cycle, the I's of the beings of bliss continue their incarnation into physical matter, which thereby becomes transformed into vegetable organisms that in turn evolve further to greater perfection and become animal organisms, which enable the I's to appear as the beings that we call "animals". In the plant organisms the I's of bliss can "vaguely sense" the physical world. They can thus "vaguely sense" pleasantness and unpleasantness. They can "vaguely sense" heat and cold. The fact that vegetable matter can "vaguely sense" on the physical plane is the reason why it is regarded as "living". Through a mineral organism it cannot experience anything whatsoever on the physical plane. That is why this matter is regarded as "dead" or lifeless. But the evolution of the vegetable organisms into animal organisms results in the being that has undergone this evolution acquiring a set of physical senses. With this it can, in an awake day-conscious way, experience the physical world. The plant beings thus constitute a plane of existence where the experience of life consists merely of vague sensing. But this ability to "sense vaguely" is, nevertheless, sensory perception, and is thus an expression of consciousness. We know this being's plane of existence as the "plant kingdom". As the animals are beings or I's that have evolved, not merely to be able to sense vaguely, but to have a complete set of senses by means of which they can experience the physical world around them as fact, they constitute likewise a plane of consciousness or of life experience, namely what we know as the "animal kingdom". In the symbol we see that the plant kingdom and the first half of the animal kingdom constitute the spiral cycle's epoch of autumn (indicated by the diagonal red stripes). They are designated the autumn of the cycle because they constitute the transitional zone between the cycle's waning epoch of summer and its growing epoch of winter. And from here the beings' experiencing of life continues into a new cycle's epoch of winter, and so on continuously for all eternity, although in such a way that each new cycle occurs in a new and higher variation.