The Last Shall Be First and the First Shall Be Last

Was there a pattern on the mountain?

When Jesus' disciples asked him whose sin had caused the man to be born blind (Jn 9,1-3), the man or his parents, Jesus answered neither.¹ The debate on evolution that has raged through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and into the twenty-first demands the same answer, excepting only that it be "none of these," for the debate's contentions are essentially threefold, namely, that the human being

1. evolved from the lower kingdoms without divine involvement;

2. evolved from the lower kingdoms with divine involvement;

3. did not evolve but was specially created by God in six days just a few thousand years ago.

The problem is that the question posed by the debate is based upon a false premise, namely, that a human being is something that can be perceived by the senses as we know them. And since our senses perceive only the mineral kingdom, the debate rages over whether or not the human being came into existence (either with or without divine involvement²) by the progression from one mineral state to another.

The true premise must be sought by first answering the question, What is the human being? That was the Psalmist's question.³ And it is the question that must control the debate. To say the human being is made up of nothing but minerals means Darwinism (or neo-Darwinism as the case may be) wins the debate. But the problem with that is no one has ever shown how "nothing but minerals" could produce anything but an aggregation of minerals. Even more, no one has ever shown how minerals came into existence in the first place—the creation of matter. The start is always with existing matter. Even the "big bang" theory, which is only a theory, starts there.⁴

A central thesis of this book, and of the series of which it is a part, is that the human being is neither the result nor the sum total of an aggregation of minerals but is rather a state of consciousness merely clothed for a time, sojourning if you will, in the mineral kingdom.⁵ Consider what differentiates the four kingdoms, mineral, plant, animal and human. The mineral kingdom standing alone is dead, from an earthly standpoint. The plant kingdom rises above the mineral kingdom with the addition of life. The animal kingdom rises above the plant kingdom with the addition of sensate consciousness. The human kingdom rises above the animal kingdom with the addition of self-consciousness or self-awareness, called the "I Am," biblically speaking. The "I AM" is the name that "no one knows except him who receives it" (Rev 2,17; 19,12-13; 3,12), for, as Rudolf Steiner first pointed out, no one can speak that name except the one to whom it is given; this cannot be said of any other name. The depth of its meaning is the subject of the "I AM" essay in The Burning Bush. John identifies the Christ as the "I AM" in his Gospel, and specifically equates that name to him in Rev 3,12 where the Christ reveals it to John as "my own new name." Moreover, the same Christ is clearly the Alpha and Omega, the first and the last in Second Isaiah's prophecy (Is 44,6; 48,12), as is shown in the next essay. But it is equally clear from the above passages in the Apocalypse that the same name is given to the human being when perfected as "a son of man" ( as in the Christ-perfected Jesus of Nazareth, Rev, 1,17; see fn 2 in "The Question" and Christianity as Mystical Fact [CMF], Chap. 8, pp. 128-129). At the very time in human evolution when self-awareness began to emerge out of tribal consciousness, it confronted Moses on Mount Sinai in the form of a burning bush. But it was not a normal bush as we know it. Philo described it as a bush "entirely enveloped . . . by the abundant flame . . . [but] it nevertheless remained whole without being consumed, like some impassible essence, and not as if it were itself the natural fuel for fire, but rather as if it were taking the fire for its own fuel."⁶ Its name was given as "the I Am." It was the Christ speaking to Moses⁷, and it is clear from that and the rest of the Bible that it applies both to the human being and to the Christ, and that the two must be joined together as one. While we, as human beings, say "I am," we still ask who we are, and only when the higher "I AM" of Christ lives fully in us will we attain to the ultimate consciousness of being that constitutes the human as a god, that is, a spiritual being (Jn 10,34; Ps 82,6).

The spiritual reality of the first and the last (the Alpha and Omega) found expression also in Prov 25,6-7 (as also in its larger context Prov 25,1-14), and then in Christ's aphorism that the "first will be last, and the last first" (Mk 10,31; Mt 19,30; 20,26; Lk 13,30). I showed in The Disciple Whom Jesus Loved (as well as in the essay in The Burning Bush from which it was taken, "Peter, James and John") that these synoptic passages are Christ's reference to the relationship between Zebedee John ("the first who became last") and the one who would become the Evangelist John ("the last who became first"). But the principle is not limited by that instance, and can be seen to have dramatic application to the evolution of the four kingdoms. It is the shibboleth to understanding the true nature of human evolution.

A most intriguing illustration of its applicability has come to light in recent scientific research on embryonic stem cells, which exist only early in the embryonic process before they turn into more specialized cells. Ethical issues aside, by preserving these cells in their undifferentiated state, before they specialize in (metamorphose into) a particular human organ, it appears they can be used to replace terminally diseased human organs of all types. This is a most dramatic illustration of the "As Above, So Below" principle-the fractal discussed later in this volume. What holds back until the time is right⁸ replaces phenomena that commit to specialized form at an earlier stage. This is what explains the evolutionary relationship of the human kingdom to the three lower ones. Humanity waited until the times of specialization-the descent of the animal kingdom—were over before descending into mineral form, though vestiges of all animals remain in human nature (which is the meaning of Noah's taking a pair of all animals into the ark, the post-Atlantean human body [see Gen 6,19-7,3]; it is also implicit in the "wild beasts" in Christ's temptation experience [Mk 1,13]⁹).

Nowhere have I found these principles, as they apply to human evolution, more ably expressed than in Hermann Poppelbaum's Man and Animal (MAA), published in 1931. Poppelbaum was already a capable biological scientist when he had a fateful meeting with Rudolf Steiner in 1921 and a whole new world conception opened to him. A portion of his expression of it follows:

During the Azoic era the solid mineral matter of the earth is separated off for the first time. But it can only be taken up by those beings who are most backward in evolution; hastening ahead of the others, they "embody" themselves in the new substantiality. Thus the minerals appear as the first solidified kingdom on the earth. The remaining kingdoms, though already existent in rich variety and even at this stage divided into plant and animal and differentiated into types [he is here elaborating Gen 1,9-25, all of which existed in etheric form before taking on substantiality beginning with Gen 2,4b], still resist solidification. Their archetypes have remained behind hitherto in the more plastic elementary kingdoms; now, as they begin little by little to incorporate the solid elements, they take form as those organisms which belong to the great order of invertebrates. These were previously already differentiated as to their essential being, and their separation into types was an accomplished fact before the mineralization of their bodily form set in ["according to their kind"-Gen 1,11,12,21,24,25]. And here we have the answer to one of the great riddles of paleontology:—the plasticity of the ancestral forms and the lack of true intermediate forms able to relate the chief types in the geological records. The ancestral forms did indeed exist in bodily shape,—but they were of the finer substantiality which Rudolf Steiner has described as belonging to pre-earthly conditions, composed of the elements of warmth, air and water, without as yet having absorbed any solid matter. This supplies the reason for that mutability which has up to now completely baffled research. At the same time, we see why no impressions nor remains of them could be left in the earth's crust. . . . The germs of the future human body are among those forms which resist densification. (pp. 56-57)

Poppelbaum goes on through the various geologic ages describing the evolution of the Earth and its inhabiting kingdoms. But running as a thread through it all is the plasticity that exists in the succeeding stages until those stages take on materiality. Thereupon they become imprisoned in their form, and what takes place in that form thereafter is a higher specialization and imprisonment. The animal is thus far more efficient in its speciality than the human being. But the human being remained plastic until the last, unspecialized, and could thus, at the "right time," take on materiality in a form that would permit it to receive self-awareness, "the I Am."Time and time again," Poppelbaum says, "on the long path of evolution it has been this quality of remaining plastic which has made steady advance possible for man." The human being is the "stem cell" of earthly evolution. It did not evolve from any "specialized cell" (any already-materialized lower kingdom), but had its own independent origin, still reflected in the mystery of embryology, which mirrors the heavenly bodies.