22.5  If we imagine that this materialistic and atheistic son of God is symbolised in symbol no. 22, we see that his consciousness or knowledge will encompass more or less only the physical world. This means the area of the symbol below the two transverse lines. See symbol no. 22A. This area, as we already know, symbolises his own physical body and other physical phenomena, the physical bodies of the living beings, the physical substances, matter and movements and the results of these in weights and measures. He knows nothing whatsoever about his own I and superconsciousness or spiritual structure, indeed, he can even deny the existence of this part of his life and its structure. By denying his own immortal I and the spiritual world, he has only matter or substance to go on. But in its most profound analysis substance is merely kinds of movement. If one is unable to sense or see the unshakable connection of these movements to living, spiritual originators, they are in turn merely dead or lifeless phenomena. It is not so remarkable that the Bible says that death is a consequence of eating of the tree of knowledge. The totally materialistic and atheistic scientist is thus a being for whom the lifeless results of matter are primary in his daily sphere of thought and way of being. He lives in a kind of sphere of death. He sees and observes the mineral kingdom, the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom and the human kingdom but he does not see the real spiritual beings behind these kingdoms. He sees only their bodies or organisms, which, without connection to their spiritual originator, are merely dead or lifeless phenomena that must decompose as corpses that have to be buried or interred, except in those cases where he eats the organisms of animals. In the parable of the prodigal son Christ expresses this as eating with the swine. It is not a vital necessity for the human being to consume the flesh and blood of animals in order to live. Such a state can occur only in the sphere of darkness or the sphere of the prodigal son because of the as-yet all too feeble faculty of humaneness and the lack of knowledge about the animals' right to live.