Theos-Talk Archives (January 2011 Message tt00152)

Basically life and form are always evolving and moving forward and this
basic concept no one can have any objection to. I think if we start with
this basic principle, anything can be explained intelligently.

On Wed, Jan 12, 2011 at 2:48 PM, Carol Merritt <carolamerritt@6dby_P-6kCwhE9zapVcexDtlo2keEVJnOh23oHHcRZ5Dy7tYaK0fvwFRlhdCiqWKQ-L0OMRwGVknyXvBSVc_Z0I.yahoo.invalid>wrote:

>
>
> Early in my Theosophical career, a well-spoken, intelligent and apparently
> sincerely spiritual black man regularly attended our meetings.  One day, he
> asked the meaning of Root Races, and he was met with several poor answers.
> Most of the people went silent, hoping someone else would answer.  He never
> came back.
>
> This scenario has repeated several times since, and I have become
> convinced that our early authors have misinterpreted this teaching.  I
> believe in the Root Races, but I don't think it is right to identify
> present-day people with them.  It must refer to ancient peoples whom we
> know only by the fossil record.
>
> The teaching, as I understand it, is that the third Root Race developed
> the physical body; the fourth developed the astral (emotional) body, and
> the fifth is developing the mental body.  There must be many differences
> from one Root Race to the next, but I think I can identify only a few.
> For the fourth, it is pair-bonding, also known as falling in love.  If
> you're going to develop emotions, what better than falling in love?  For
> the fifth, it is a longer lifespan, with a long, protected childhood;
> also a new specialized brain frontal lobe.  This encourages the
> development of mind, as the youth now spends many years learning to fit
> into society.
>
> Please note that all of our current races have these features.  All fall
> in love, and all have the extended childhood.  In fact, aside from
> appearance, I can't think of any major differences between the races.
> Many American Indian religions are clearly fourth Root Race, as they
> stimulate the emotions with dancing, chanting, shouting.  So are many
> Christian groups, with Holy Rollers shouting, running in the aisles.
> Far more supposedly fourth Root Race people embrace Buddhism, which can
> be as intellectual as any Western religion.  All modern peoples have fully
> fifth Root Race bodies, complete with frontal lobes and speech organs.
>
> The physical differences between modern and ancient man are significant,
> but the difference in consciousness must be even greater.  The fossi
> record doesn't help here, but Rudolph Steiner describes Atlantean
> consciousness in "Atlantis and Lemuria":
>   "Their knowledge as well as their technical abilities - in short -
>   their entire civilization was completely different from any thing
>   that can be seen in the present day. . . . Logical reasoning, the
>   power to calculate and combine, faculties which lie at the root of
>   so much that is done in the present day, were quite unknown to the
>   early Atlantean.
>   . . .
>   "It had never occurred to anyone that three times four are twelve,
>   but when any such sum had to be done, the Atlantean remembered -
>   he dipped down, as it were, into his memory, and recalled similar
>   instances and similar results."
>   . . .
>   "When, therefore, the child arrived at a maturer age and took his
>   place in life, his memory was a storehouse of similar acts and
>   events, all of which had been presented to him in his school days.
>   "However, when confronted by an entirely new set of circumstances,
>   the Atlantean was inevitably thrown back on experiment.
>   . . .
>   "There was something rather monotonous about this system of education.
>   It gave a sameness to life; lengthy periods of time were passed in
>   always doing the same thing over and over. . . . You simply went on
>   doing what you had always seen done.  No one thought anything new;
>   people only remembered."
>
> Steiner explains that memory was developed to a high degree, and that
> memory was very important to the development of emotions, because one had
> to
> remember the person or event associated with the emotion.
> I have never met anyone of any race who has that kind of consciousness,
> but maybe we have an example in the movie Rainman, with Dustin Hoffman.
> Maybe this is an example of a throwback to an earlier kind of
> consciousness, which had emotions, excellent memory and observation,
> but no mentality.
>
> Several of our authors have stated that most of the world population are
> of the fourth Root Race.  I can accept this statement by conceding that
> most people function emotionally rather than mentally.  But this isn't
> a racial distinction; it applies to most people everywhere.
>
> Still, there may be a racial connection to Root Races.  According to
> Carlton Coon, in "The Origin of Races", Homo Habilis was Asian in
> appearance. (2.4 to 1.4 million years ago)  In other words, the races
> are older than the species, Homo Sapiens.  Let's assume that the Manu of
> the fifth Root Race selected some Homo Habilis, and began to develop new
> qualities in them.  Occasionally people would leave, or get kicked out,
> and find mates among the general world population.  Thus, the genetic
> makeup of the world would be continually upgraded just a little after
> the new qualities were developed in the Manu's people.  Well, maybe within
> a few thousand years.  Leadbeater says that the offsping of fourth and
> fifth will be fifth Root Race.  In evolutionary terms, if a new quality
> has survival value, that quality will eventually predominate.  Some
> populations may never have gotten the upgrades, and those would have
> gone extinct.
>
> As for sub-races, they are apparently coherent enough that nations
> have particular tendencies.  Here too, there must have been considerable
> blending, so that an individual within that group would not necessarily
> have the sub-race tendencies.
>
> Human evolution is not random; it is driven by the Manus of the Root
> Races.  The changes made at each surge are large, amounting to a change
> of species.  We can speculate what this means about future evolution,
> in the sixth Root Race.  The new focus will be the development of Buddhi.
> Maybe that means a stimulation of chakras, or maybe something I haven't
> imagined.  But it will be a large change, not a simple change of skin
> color.  And eventually, all humans will get the upgrades.
>
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>
>  
>


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