Reference to a god who was said to be half-man, half-fish suggests, once again, an amphibious intelligence. Later, we may recall a great teacher of righteousness, a "fisher of men," who taught the Way and whose followers identified themselves to one another by making the sign of a fish.

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Australian Sir John Eccles (1903-1997), winner of the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1963, was the complete scientist, philosopher, metaphysician. As the neurophysiologist who demonstrated the transmission of electrical impulses in the brain, he declared that his research led him to conclude that evolution alone cannot explain man's awareness of himself. Sir John became increasingly convinced that there must have been the intervention of some transcendental agency in the infusion into humankind of Soul. Simply stated, he maintained that the brain and the mind are separate entities which interact, but it is only the brain that is the product of genetic evolution.

Sir John explained that he was an evolutionist, of course, but he did not believe that evolution was the final story As he stated once in an interview in the Washington Post [April, 1981], "The genetic code and natural selection explain quite a lot, but evolution doesn't explain how I came to exist. It doesn't explain even the origin of consciousness .... If you look at the most modern texts on evolution, you find nothing about mind and consciousness. They assume that it just comes automatically with the development of the brain. But that's not an answer. If my uniqueness of self is tied to the genetic uniqueness of self that built my brain, the odds against myself existing are 10 to the 10-thousandth against.

"It is just too improbable to wait around to get the right constructed brain for you. The brain is a computer, you see. Each of us has a computer, and we are the programmers of this computer. [We were] born ... with what this wonderful structure of evolution and genetic coding have wrought.... But the soul is this unique creation that is ours for life. It is us. We are experiencing, remembering, creating, suffering, imagining. All of this is processed here with the soul central to it."

The great metaphysician Rudolf Steiner theorized that the people of our prehistory had been largely guided and directed by a higher order of beings who interacted and communicated with certain humans--the smartest, the strongest, the most intellectually flexible. Eventually these select humans produced what might be called demigods, divine human beings, who, in turn, could relay instructions from higher intelligences.

In effect, Steiner may have given us another definition of the semi- divine progeny that the ancient Hebrews named Nephilim," which does, in fact, mean demigod, men of "great renown."

Steiner went on to speculate that within the larger evolving human race were the descendents of those divine-human hybrid beings, men and women who are animated by higher ideals, who regard themselves as children of a divine, universal power. It need not be overemphasized that the larger body of humankind is devoted to the service of egotism, materialism, and selfish, personal interests.

Steiner believed that within what he termed the emerging "Sixth Post-Atlantean Race" would be children of the divine universal power who would be able to initiate those men and women who have developed their faculty of thought so that they might better unite themselves with the divine. The children of the divine universal power, those who have the "seed" within them, will be able to initiate the more advanced members of humankind. People so initiated will be able to receive revelations and perform what others will consider miracles. The initiates will go on to become the mediators between humankind and the higher intelligences.

The whole point of the efforts of these higher intelligences is to enable humankind to become more independent, more able to stand on its own feet without having to rely on the higher order of beings that directed us in ancient times.

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