Intellectual Animal

The current state of humanity: animals with intellect.

When the intelligent principle, the Monad, sends its spark of consciousness into Nature, that spark, the anima, enters into manifestation as a simple mineral. Gradually, over millions of years, the anima gathers experience and evolves up the chain of life until it perfects itself in the level of the mineral kingdom. It then graduates into the plant kingdom, and subsequently into the animal kingdom. With each ascension the spark receives new capacities and higher grades of complexity. In the animal kingdom it learns procreation by ejaculation. When that animal intelligence enters into the human kingdom, it receives a new capacity: reasoning, the intellect; it is now an anima with intellect: an intellectual animal. That spark must then perfect itself in the human kingdom in order to become a complete and perfect human being, an entity that has conquered and transcended everything that belongs to the lower kingdoms. Unfortunately, very few intellectual animals perfect themselves; most remain enslaved by their animal nature, and thus are reabsorbed by Nature, a process belonging to the devolving side of life and called by all the great religions "Hell" or the Second Death.

"The present manlike being is not yet human; he is merely an intellectual animal. It is a very grave error to call the legion of the “I” the “soul.” In fact, what the manlike being has is the psychic material, the material for the soul within his Essence, but indeed, he does not have a Soul yet." —Samael Aun Weor, The Revolution of the Dialectic

"Whosoever possesses the physical, astral, mental, and causal bodies receives the animistic and spiritual principles, and becomes a true human being. Before having them, one is an intellectual animal falsely called a human being. Regarding the face and shape of the physical body of any intellectual animal, they look like the physical characteristics of a human being, however, if their psychological processes are observed and compared with the psychological processes of a human being, then we find that they are completely different, totally distinct." —Samael Aun Weor, Kabbalah of the Mayan Mysteries

"I died as a mineral and became a plant,
I died as plant and rose to animal,
I died as animal and I was Man.
Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?
Yet once more I shall die as Man, to soar
With angels blest; but even from angelhood
I must pass on: all except God doth perish.
When I have sacrificed my angel-soul,
I shall become what no mind e'er conceived.
Oh, let me not exist! for Non-existence
Proclaims in organ tones, To Him we shall return." - Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi (1207 – 1273) founder of the Mevlevi order of Sufism