The great arc · GA 13
Before the human being could stand on the Earth as an “I”, the whole cosmos passed through a sequence of great embodiments, planetary conditions, each preparing one member of the human constitution. This is the widest frame the spiritual science offers: the evolutionary arc within which every biography, every chart, is a single heartbeat.
The first great planetary condition, a cosmos of pure warmth. The Thrones poured out their own substance to lay down the first germ of the physical body, the seed of the human head-organisation.
Warmth condensed to air and light; the etheric body was added, and with it the beginnings of life. The forces of this stage are metamorphosed today into the cosmic, spherical quality of the head.
The watery cosmos in which the astral body was received. The old Moon heritage crystallises, on the descent toward birth, into the peripheral, cosmically-formed head.
The sequence and its correspondences are drawn from the first chapter of the outline of an occult science (GA 13). The four past-and-present conditions are stated there directly; the three future conditions are the same source’s projection of the arc, marked as synthesis. See the references.
The present condition, where the I was implanted by the Spirits of Form. The rhythmic trunk-man mediates perpetually between the cosmic head-pole and the earthly limb-pole, the real human being of the present.
The next planetary condition, prepared by what the limb-system takes up now from the earthly, telluric forces. The astral body will be transformed into Spirit-Self.
A yet later condition in which the etheric body is transformed into Life-Spirit. The forces streaming along the radius of the limb-man are its starting point.
The final planetary condition of this evolutionary cycle, in which the physical body is transformed into Spirit-Man, the far goal toward which the whole arc of the limbs is directed.