Image consciousness

Man had the image consciousness, of which the astral body is the carrier, on the Old Moon. It was similar to today's dream consciousness. In contrast to this, however, the images that man experienced at that time represented realities, whereas today's dream consciousness is largely exhausted in jumbled reminiscences of waking daily life and pictorial impressions of organ activity, which the etheric body imagines in the astral body. Today, those lower animals still have the lunar image-consciousness that cannot express their suffering and lust through sound from within.

Image consciousness was based on the fact that the sense organs, before they had opened outwards through the Luciferic temptation, produced symbolic images from within which represented reality. Accordingly, an inside and an outside were not yet distinguished at that time. Since one could not distinguish oneself from the world, consequently no self-consciousness was yet possible for man on the Old Moon.

The object consciousness did not exist at that time. Rather, image consciousness expressed itself in freely flowing colours and forms that proclaimed something of the inner quality of beings and things. In contrast, our dream consciousness today is much more objective.

Before the I-consciousness developed in the ursemitic sub-race on ancient Atlantis during the evolution of the Earth, the Atlantians still had this image consciousness.

If it is possible for us today, through memory, to call images of what we once experienced before our consciousness, then this is the earthly metamorphosis of the old moon consciousness.

Literature

• Rudolf Steiner: Die Geheimnisse der biblischen Schöpfungsgeschichte, GA 122 (1984) English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org

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