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Rudolf Steiner e.Lib
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Occult Science - An Outline
Rudolf Steiner e.Lib Document
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Occult Science - An Outline
Present and Future Evolution of the World and of Mankind
In spiritual science, it is impossible to know the future evolution of
the world and man without first coming to an understanding of the
past. For when the scientist of the spirit observes the hidden facts
of the past, what he perceives also contains, latent within it, all
that is knowable to him of the present and the future. We have
described Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth evolutions. To understand the
Earth itself in the light of spiritual science, we had to study the
preceding stages. What man encounters in this Earth-world here and now
may indeed be said to contain within it the facts of Moon, Sun, and
Saturn evolutions. To understand the Earth itself in the light of
spiritual science, we had to study the preceding stages. What man
encounters in this Earth-world here and now may indeed be said to
contain within it the facts of Moon, Sun, and Saturn evolution. The
Beings and entities that partook in Moon evolution underwent further
development, and from them all that constitutes our present Earth came
into being. Physical consciousness cannot however fully perceive all
that evolved from Moon to Earth. Part of it remains invisible to the
outer senses; it is seen only at a certain stage of supersensible
awareness. When this stage has been reached, our earthly world is seen
to be united with a world supersensible, containing within it the
portion of Old Moon-existence which has not condensed to physical
perceptibility. It contains it however as it is at present, not
as it was during Old Moon evolution. Yet in the course of
supersensible research a picture of that earlier condition can be
reached. For upon further contemplation the perception of the present
state gradually divides of its own accord into two distinct pictures.
The one picture manifests the form the Earth was actually in during
Old Moon evolution, while in the other we soon recognize that it
contains a form still in its germinal beginnings one which will
only in the cosmic future become real in the way the Earth is real
today. And as we persevere in spiritual observation, we see that
something is perpetually streaming into this future form, wherein we
recognize the outcome of what is happening on Earth. We are therefore
beholding what our Earth is destined to become. The effects of
Earth-existence will unite with what is taking place in the
supersensible world to which we here refer, and from their union there
will arise the new cosmic entity into which Earth will be
metamorphosed, even as Old Moon was metamorphosed into Earth.
This future evolutionary form may be named the Jupiter
condition. One who is able supersensibly to observe it will see quite
clearly that in the cosmic future certain things are bound to happen.
For in the supersensible part of the Earth-world deriving from Old
Moon, beings and entities are present which will assume certain
predestined forms when the appropriate events have taken place upon
the physical, sense-perceptible Earth. Jupiter therefore will contain
what is already predetermined by Old Moon evolution, and in addition
something new, making its entry into the evolutionary process only in
consequence of what has meanwhile been enacted upon Earth.
Supersensible consciousness can thus attain some knowledge of the
events and processes of Jupiter evolution. Yet the beings and events
seen in this field are not of a kind to be perceived by outer senses;
they cannot even be described as thin and unsubstantial forms of air,
such as might still give rise to anything like sense-perceptible
effects. All we receive from them are the impressions of purely
spiritual sound, spiritual light and spiritual warmth. They do not
find expression in material embodiment. Only the supersensible
consciousness can apprehend them. And yet these beings can be said to
have a kind of body. Within their soul-nature the soul which
manifests their present being they bear a store of
concentrated memories. This is their body. For we
are able to distinguish in these things what they are undergoing in
the present and what they lived through in the cosmic past and can
remember. This cosmic memory they bear within them as a kind of body.
They experience it in the same way as man on Earth his body.
To a stage of seership higher than is needed for gaining knowledge of
Old Moon and of the future Jupiter, beings and entities become
perceptible which are the further-developed forms of what was present
during Old Sun evolution. They are now at such a lofty level of
existence as to elude a power of perception whose range is limited to
the Old Moon and to the forms deriving from it. Also the spiritual
picture of this higher world divides on further contemplation into
two. The one part leads to a knowledge of the past Sun evolution; the
other manifests a future cosmic form of the Earth, namely the form
into which it will have changed when the results of all that has taken
place on Earth and on Jupiter have flowed into the forms of yonder
world the forms deriving from the past Sun-condition. In the
language of spiritual science, the future universe a higher stage is
consciousness is thus enabled to perceive may be designated as the
Venus state. Lastly a supersensible consciousness even more highly
developed perceives an evolutionary state of the more distant future
to which the name of Vulcan may be given. Vulcan is in like relation
to Saturn evolution as Venus to Sun and Jupiter to Moon. Thus in
considering the past, the present and the future of Earth evolution we
have to name its successive stages: Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter,
Venus and Vulcan.
Now even as these vast evolutionary stages of the Earth become
accessible to spiritual consciousness, so do the facts of a less
distant future. But at this point we have to utter an essential
warning one which cannot be over-emphasized. To grain true
knowledge of these things, one must completely rid oneself of the idea
that ordinary philosophical reflection, trained as it is to begin with
in contemplation of sense-perceptible realities, can be of any help at
all. These things cannot be n or are they meant to be
discovered by dint of reasoning and reflection. If anyone imagines
that having learned from spiritual science of Old Moon, he can by dint
of thought setting to work, let us say, to combine the known
facts of the present Earth with those of the Old Moon make out
for himself what Jupiter will look like, he will soon become involved
in illusion. These things are only meant to be discovered by the
developed consciousness reaching up to their direct perception. Only
when thus discovered and properly communicated, then alone and
then indeed can they be understood even without supersensible
consciousness of one's own.
The scientist of the spirit is however in a different situation when
communicating future things than when telling of the past. For to
begin with it is impossible for man to contemplate future events with
the same candor and detachment as those that have already taken place.
What is about to happen in the future cannot but stir up his feeling
and his will; the past is bearable in quite another way. Everyone who
has observed the life of man will know how true this is even in
day-to-day existence. But to have any notion of the immensely
heightened degree to which it applies when dealing with occult facts,
or of the many subtle ways in which it shows itself, one needs to have
some knowledge of supersensible worlds and of their latent
difficulties. The branch of spiritual science is hence confined within
determined limits, which have to be respected.
Even as we can trace the great sequences of cosmic evolution from
Saturn to Vulcan, so too we can the shorter periods the
periods, for example, of Earth evolution proper. Since the tremendous
upheaval that brought the life of old Atlantis to an end, there have
been the successive stages in man's development described in this book
as the ancient Indian, the ancient Persian, the Egypto-Chaldean and
the Graeco-Latin epochs. The fifth is the present the epoch man
is going through today. In preparation ever since the fourth or fifth
century A.D., it began gradually about the twelfth, thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries, to emerge fully in the fifteenth. The preceding
epoch the Graeco-Latin began about the eighth century
B.C., the Christ-Event taking place when the first third of it was
over. With the transition from the Egypto-Chaldean into the
Graeco-Latin epoch, the whole mode and disposition of man's soul and
all his faculties had undergone an essential change. The kind of
logical thinking and intellectual comprehension of the world with
which we are now familiar did not exist in Egypto-Chaldean times.
Knowledge, which man today acquired by the deliberate exercise of his
intelligence, he then received directly; it was given to him as an
intuitive and inner in some respects, supersensible
knowledge. Such was the form of cognition proper to that age. Man saw
the objects around him, and in the very act of looking at them, the
concept the picture of them his soul needed arose of its
own accord within him. Now when cognition is of this nature, pictures
not only of the sense-perceptible world make their appearance in man's
soul, but from the depths of the inner life there dawns a knowledge,
howsoever limited, of facts and beings imperceptible to the outer
senses. This was a remnant of the dim and pristine supersensible
awareness, once the common property of all mankind.
In the Graeco-Latin epoch an ever growing number of people were born
in whom such faculties were lacking. Men now began to think about
things with purely intellectual reflection. They drifted farther and
farther away form the direct though dreamlike perception of the world
of soul and spirit. Instead, they had to form an intellectual picture
of it for themselves intellectual, though aided by the life of
feeling. Broadly speaking, man may be said to have been in this
condition throughout the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. Those alone, who
as an heirloom from the past retained the earlier
faculties of soul, were able still to receive the spiritual world into
their consciousness directly. But they were the belated remnants of a
bygone age; their manner of cognition was no longer suited to the
time. For by the very laws of evolution, an older faculty of soul
loses its full significance when new faculties develop. The life of
man becomes adapted to the new and has no further use for the old.
There were however individuals who began to supplement the newly
acquired faculties of intellect and feeling with the fully conscious
development of higher powers of cognition, whereby they could
penetrate once more into the world of soul and spirit. They had to set
about it in a different way from the disciples of the old Initiates,
who had not yet had to reckon with the new faculties of mind and soul
due to the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. Thus the fourth epoch
witnessed the first beginnings of the modern form of spiritual
training, described in the present work. But this was in its infancy;
it could only come to full development in the fifth epoch (from the
twelfth and thirteenth and more especially the fifteenth century
onward.) Those who contrived to reach up into the supersensible worlds
in this new way were able by their own Imagination, Inspiration and
Intuition to gain knowledge of the higher regions of existence. Those
on the other hand who did not get beyond the recently developed powers
of intelligence and feeling, could only learn of what the old
clairvoyance had still known from the traditions which were handed
down through the generations, whether by word of mouth or in writing.
This was also true of the Christ-Event. If they themselves could not
reach up into the supersensible worlds, men who were born after its
time could only learn of the real essence and mystery of this Event
from tradition. It should be added however that there were some
Initiates of another kind Initiates who still retained natural
faculties of supersensible perception, by the development of which
they could ascend into higher worlds, even while disregarding the new
powers of intellect and feeling. They helped in the transition from
the old way of Initiation to the new. Also throughout the later
centuries individuals of this kind were still living. Yet the
distinguishing mark of the fourth epoch was the shutting-off of the
human soul from direct intercourse with worlds of soul and spirit, for
by this very fact the human faculties of understanding and good
feeling became deepened and enhanced. Souls who in their incarnations
in the fourth epoch evolved these faculties to a high degree would
bring the fruits of this development into their incarnations in the
fifth. Shut out though they were in those days and left to their own
resources, to compensate for this there were the sublime traditions of
the ancient wisdom and above all of the Christ-Event, which by the
very power of their content gave them the confident assurance of a
higher world.
Yet all the time, as we said before, there were also those who in
addition to the faculties of intellect and feeling developed higher
powers of cognition. It fell to them to experience the facts of the
higher worlds and more especially the mystery of the Christ-Event by
direct supersensible cognition. From them there always flowed into the
souls of other men as much as they could understand and beneficially
receive.
The spread of Christianity began therefore at the very time when
faculties of supersensible cognition were undeveloped in a large
proportion of mankind. This was intended. It was in harmony with the
whole trend of mankind's evolution upon Earth, and it accounts for the
overwhelming influence of tradition at that time. The strongest
influence was needed to give men faith and trust in the supersensible
world when they themselves had not the faculty of spiritual sight.
With the exception of a brief interval in the thirteenth century,
there were however
Nearly always present upon Earth some individuals, able to lift
themselves into the higher worlds by Imagination, Inspiration and
Intuition. These were the true successors in the Christian era of the
Initiates who in pre-Christian times had guided and partaken in the
old Mystery-wisdom. It was their task to regain by their own human
faculties the knowledge reached and entertained in bygone ages by the
methods of the ancient Mysteries. To this they had to add the
knowledge of the Christ-Event and of its deeper meaning.
Thus there arose among the new Initiates a power of cognition which
could reach out to all that had been the theme and content of the old
Initiation, while in the focus of it radiated the higher knowledge of
the Mysteries of the Christ Event. Only to a very small extent could
this Initiate-knowledge find its way into the wider life of mankind
during the fourth epoch, the task of which was still to strengthen and
make firm in human souls the faculties of reasoned thought and
feeling. Throughout this epoch it was accordingly a very hidden
knowledge. Then came the dawning of the present epoch, known as
the fifth, the character of which may be described as follows. In the
first place the powers of man's intellect go on developing and will
continue doing so to an unprecedented extent both now and in the
future. After the gradual preparation for this, beginning slowly in
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries A.D., from the sixteenth century
onward the pace has been and still is rapidly accelerating. Thus the
fifth epoch has become a period of human evolution ever more given up
to the cultivation of intellectual powers, while the traditional
knowledge from the past the knowledge entertained in simple
trust and faith loses its hold upon the human soul. But there
has also been a steadily increasing inflow of the higher knowledge,
arrived at by the modern forms of supersensible consciousness and
cognition. Imperceptibly at first, the hidden knowledge
has been seeping into men's thought and ways of thought. That
intellect as such should hitherto have tended and still be tending to
reject this knowledge, is natural enough and was to be expected. But
though it be rejected for a time, what is predestined will be
fulfilled.
The hidden knowledge which is gradually taking hold of mankind, and
will increasingly be doing so, may in the language of a well-known
symbol be called the Knowledge of the Grail. We read of the Holy Grail
in old-time narratives and legends, and as we learn to understand its
deeper meaning we discover that it most significantly pictures the
heart and essence of the new Initiation-knowledge, centering in the
Mystery of Christ. The Initiates of the new age may therefore be
described as the Initiates of the Grail. The pathway into
spiritual worlds, the first stages of which were set forth in the
preceding chapter, culminates in the Science of the Grail.
It is a characteristic of this new Initiation-knowledge that while its
facts can only be investigated with higher faculties of cognition (the
methods of attaining which have been described,) once investigated and
discovered they are well able to be comprehended precisely by the
faculties of mind and soul which the fifth epoch has developed. These
faculties will more and more find satisfaction and fulfillment in the
higher knowledge. It will be evident increasingly as time goes on. We
are now living at a time when the higher knowledge needs to be far
more widely received into the general consciousness of mankind than
hitherto; it is with this in view that the present work has been
written. And as the cultural evolution of mankind absorbs the
knowledge of the Grail, in the same measure will the spiritual impulse
of the Christ-Event become effective; its true significance will be
revealed and it will grow from strength to strength. The more external
development of Christianity as hitherto will increasingly be
supplemented by the inner, esoteric aspect. What man can come to know
by dint of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition of the higher worlds
in unison with the Mystery of Christ, will permeate men's thinking,
their feeling and their willing ever increasingly as time goes
on. The hidden knowledge of the Grail will become manifest
and grow to be a power in man's life, entering ever more fully into
all the ways and walks of man.
Throughout the fifth epoch the knowledge of supersensible worlds will
thus continue to flow into the consciousness of men, and by the time
the sixth begins it will be possible for mankind to have regained on a
higher level the knowledge they possessed in pristine ages by virtue
of the dim and dreamlike supersensible vision of those ancient days.
But the renewed possession will be of quite another form than the old.
What the soul knew of higher worlds in olden time was not yet
permeated with her own human powers of intelligence and feeling. It
came of its own accord was given as a kind of
spiritual inspiration. In future, man will not only be receiving
inspirations of this kind, but will understand them
through and through, feeling them as his very own, the true expression
of his inmost being. When spiritual knowledge comes to him concerning
beings or events, his own intelligence will find it true and sound and
thus confirm the knowledge. Or if in spiritual knowledge some moral
precept or principle of human conduct dawns upon him, he will say to
himself: My feeling about it is only vindicated if I put into practice
the implications of this knowledge. By the sixth epoch this mood and
disposition of the soul should be achieved in a sufficiently large
number of human beings.
The fifth epoch brings a kind of repetition of what the third
the Egypto-Chaldean contributed to mankind's evolution. In the
third epoch the human soul was still able to perceive some at least of
the realities of supersensible worlds, though the perception was
dwindling. The intellectual faculties which were to shut man off from
higher worlds for a time, although not yet developed, were impending.
In the fifth epoch the supersensible facts, seen in the third in a dim
state of consciousness, will become manifest once more, but taken hold
of now by man's own intelligence, realized with individual feeling,
and permeated too with what the soul has gained by knowledge of the
Mystery of Christ. Hence in the fifth epoch they take on an altogether
different form. When man received impressions from supersensible
worlds in olden time, they felt like forces influencing and impelling
him from an external spiritual world a world in which he
himself was not. Evolution, leading on into the new era, will have
wrought a change. Man will now feel these impressions as emanating
from a world into which he himself is growing a world in which
he too will have his place, ever more as time goes on. We have not to
picture the repetition as though the human soul were simply to
re-absorb what lived in the Egyptian and Chaldean culture and has been
handed down traditionally. The Christ Impulse, truly understood and
received into the soul of man, enables him to feel himself a member of
a spiritual world, outside of which he was till now. Not only does he
feel it thus; he knows it in full consciousness and bears himself
accordingly.
Even as the third epoch comes to life again in the fifth, permeated in
the souls of men with the new gifts and values acquired in the fourth,
so will the sixth epoch be related to the second, and the seventh to
the first the ancient Indian. Thus in the seventh epoch the
possibility will be given for all the marvelous wisdom proclaimed by
the great Teachers of ancient India to be living once again in human
souls. And it will now be their very own the truth they live
by.
The things and creatures of the Earth apart from man are also
undergoing change changes related to the evolution of mankind.
When the seventh epoch has run its course, another great convulsion
will overwhelm the Earth, comparable to the catastrophe between the
end of Atlantean and the beginning of post-Atlantean time. Under the
altered conditions following upon this event the life of man will once
again evolve through a succession of seven epochs. The souls who will
then be incarnated will experience in an enhanced degree the community
with spiritual worlds enjoyed by the Atlanteans on a lower level. But
among human beings not everyone will without more ado prove equal to
the new conditions then prevailing. It will only be those in whom
souls are incarnated who have duly benefited by the influences of the
Graeco-Latin and the succeeding fifth, sixth and seventh
post-Atlantean epochs. Their inner life will be in harmony with what
the Earth will have become. They others will perforce remain behind,
while formerly they had been free to choose whether they were making
themselves fit to go forward with the world's progressive evolution or
were neglecting to do so. For the conditions that will prevail after
the coming cataclysm, those above all will be well fitted who, in
their incarnations between the fifth post-Atlantean epoch and the
sixth, succeed in integrating the supersensible wisdom and their own
human powers of intelligence and feeling. The fifth and sixth are the
decisive epochs. In the seventh, the souls who have reached the
evolutionary goal of the sixth will go on evolving. For those who have
not, even the surrounding worlds will be too greatly altered; they
will find little opportunity to recover their lost ground, and must
await a more distant future when the conditions will again be
favorable.
Thus evolution moves on from epoch to epoch. The future changes
recognized by supersensible cognition involve however not the Earth
alone, but the surrounding heavenly bodies in their relation to the
Earth. Thus there will come a time when the Beings and forces who
during old Lemuria were obliged to leave the Earth will be able to be
reunited with her. In the Lemurian epoch they had to be detached to
enable the inhabitants of Earth to go on evolving. Now the progressive
evolution of the Earth and of mankind will have made it possible for
them to join again. The Moon will reunite with the earth, for by that
time a sufficient number of human souls will have strength enough to
make a fruitful use of the reintegrated Lunar forces for their further
evolution. Yet that will also be a cosmic time when, side by side with
human souls who have attained this high level of development, others
will be living who have turned into a path leading towards evil. These
backward souls will have burdened their Karma with so much of error,
ugliness and ill-doing as to constitute a special group on their own,
subject to aberration and evil and bitterly opposed to the progressive
community among mankind.
By virtue of their spiritual development the good humanity will then
be able to make use of the Moon forces and with their help transmute
the bad, enabling them too to partake in the further evolution of the
Earth, albeit as a distinct kingdom. An through this labor of the good
humanity, the Earth united now with the Moon will in due
evolutionary time also become able to reunite with the Sun, and with
the other planets.
After a cosmic interval a sojourn in a higher world the
Earth will then be transmuted into the Jupiter condition. In Jupiter
what we now call the mineral kingdom will exist no longer; the forces
of this kingdom will have been changed into plant-like forces. Thus
upon Jupiter the vegetable kingdom, though in a very different form,
will be the lowest. Above it will be the animal kingdom, likewise
considerably altered, and then a human kingdom, recognizable as the
spiritual descendants of the bad humanity originating upon Earth.
Lastly, the descendants of the good humanity will constitute a human
kingdom on a higher level. This is the human kingdom proper, and a
great part of its work will be to influence and ennoble the souls who
have fallen into the other group, so that they may yet gain entrance
to it.
In the Venus stage of evolution the plant kingdom too will have
disappeared. The lowest will then be the animal kingdom, metamorphosed
a second time. Above it will be three human kingdoms, differing in
degrees of perfection. During the Venus stage the Earth will remain
united with the Sun. In Jupiter evolution, on the other hand, there
will come a time when the Sun will separate again and Jupiter will be
receiving the Solar influences from without. Then, after Sun and
Jupiter have again become united, the transition to the Venus state
will gradually be accomplished. From Venus, at a certain stage, a
separate celestial body becomes detached. This as it were, an
irreclaimable Moon includes all the beings who have
persisted in withstanding the true course of evolution. It enters now
upon a line of development such as no words can portray, so utterly
unlike is it to anything within the range of man's experience on
Earth. The evolved humanity on the other hand, in a form of existence
utterly spiritualized, goes forward into Vulcan evolution, any
description of which would be beyond the compass of this book.
We see then that the Knowledge of the Grail culminates in
the highest imaginable ideal of human evolution the ideal of
spiritualization, brought about by man's own efforts. This is the
ultimate outcome of the harmony achieved in the fifth and sixth epochs
of the present age the harmony between the powers of
intelligence and feeling man has by now acquired, and the true
knowledge of the spiritual worlds. What man is thus achieving in his
own inner life is destined ultimately to become an outer world. Great
and sublime are the impressions he receives from his surrounding
world, and in the aspiration of his mind and spirit, as he goes out to
meet them, he at first divines and at last clearly recognizes
spiritual Beings of whom these impressions are the outer garment. His
heart responds to the infinite majesty and sublimity of it all.
Moreover he beings to know that the experiences and achievements of
his own inner life in intellect, in feeling, in character, and
strength of purpose are seeds of a future spiritual world, a
world in process of becoming.
It may be asked if human freedom is not incompatible with all this
foreknowledge, this predetermination of the cosmic future. But a man's
freedom of action in the Earth's future will not depend on the
predestined cosmic plan any more than will his freedom in a year's
time be impaired by his present resolve that he will then be moving
into the house, the plan of which he is now deciding. Living
incidentally in the house he has had built, he will be as free as his
character allows. So too on Jupiter and Venus once more, within
the conditions there prevailing man will be free according to
the scope and measure of his own inner being. Freedom will depend, not
on what is pre-determined by the cosmic past, but on what the soul has
become by her own efforts.
Earth evolution bears within it the outcome of Saturn, Sun and Moon
evolutions. In all the processes of Nature going on around him, man
upon Earth finds Wisdom. Wisdom is in them as the fruit of what was
done in the preceding epochs. Earth is the cosmic descendant of Old
Moon, which as related in a former chapter evolved with
all its creatures into a Cosmos of Wisdom. With Earth
herself an evolution is beginning whereby a new virtue, a new force,
is being added to instilled into this Wisdom. As a
result of Earthly evolution man comes to feel himself an independent
member of a spiritual world. He owes it to the fact that upon Earth
the I or Ego is engendered in him by the Spirits of Form, even
as was his physical body by the Spirits of Will on Saturn, his
life-body by the Spirits of Wisdom on the Sun, his astral body by the
Spirits of Movement on Old Moon. All that now manifests as Wisdom has
come into being by the working-together of the Spirits of Will, Wisdom
and Movement. That the beings and processes of Earth can harmonize in
Wisdom with the other beings of their surrounding world, is due to the
work of these three Hierarchies of Spirits. Now, from the Spirits of
Form, man receives his independent I, his Ego. And in the
future the I of man will harmonize with the beings of Earth,
Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan by virtue of the new force which Earthly
evolution is implanting in the pristine Wisdom. It is the power of
Love. In man on Earth it has to have its beginning.
The Cosmos of Wisdom is thus evolving into a Cosmos of Love. All the
I of man brings to development within him will grow into Love.
It is the sublime Sun Being, of whom we had to tell when describing
the evolution of the Christ-Event, who at His revelation stands forth
as the all-embracing prototype of Love. Into the innermost depth of
man's being the seed of Love is thereby planted. Thence it shall grow
and spread until it fills the whole of cosmic evolution. Even as the
pristine Wisdom now reveals its presence in all the forces of Nature,
in all the sense-perceptible outer world upon Earth, so in the future
will Love be revealed Love as a new force of Nature, living in
all the phenomena which man will have around him. This is the secret
of all future evolution. The knowledge man acquires, and also every
deed man does with true understanding, is like the sowing of the seed
that will eventually ripen into Love. Only inasmuch as Love arises in
mankind, is true creative work being done for the cosmic future. For
it is Love itself which will grow into the potent forces leading
mankind on towards the final goal the goal of spiritualization.
To the extent that spiritual knowledge flows into the evolution of
mankind and of the Earth, there will be viable and fertile seeds for
the cosmic future. For it is of the very nature of true spiritual
knowledge to be transmuted into Love. The whole course of history we
have been tracing from the Graeco-Latin through the present time and
on into the future, shows how this transmutation is to come about and
reveals the future evolutionary trend of which this is the beginning.
The Wisdom that was prepared all through the Saturn, Sun and Moon
evolutions lives in the physical etheric, and astral bodies of man. It
manifests as Wisdom of the World. Then, in the I of man, it is
turned inward. From Earth evolution onward, the Wisdom of the outer
world becomes inner Wisdom Wisdom in man himself. And when thus
resurrected in the inner life, in the I of man, it grows into
the seed of Love. Wisdom is the premises, the forerunner of Love; Love
is the outcome of Wisdom re-born in the I of man.
Should anyone be prone to think that this account of cosmic evolution
implied a fatalistic picture, he will have misunderstood it. To think
that by this evolution a fated number of human beings will be
condemned to belong to the bad humanity argues a mistaken
notion of how the two realms the external and
sense-perceptible, and that of soul and spirit are related.
They represent, within certain limits, two distinct evolutionary
streams. It is from forces inherent in the former stream in the
external, material and sense-perceptible that the forms of the
bad humanity arise. A human soul a human individual
will only be under necessity of incarnating in such a form if
he himself has given rise to the conditions for it. When the time
comes it might even happen that among human souls who have been
through the earlier evolutionary times there were none left to ensoul
these forms. They might, without exception, be too good for the bodies
of that kind. In that event, the forms would have to be ensouled out
of the Universe in some other way than by human souls who had lived
through the preceding epochs. They will only be ensouled by human
souls if the latter have themselves incurred this kind of incarnation.
Supersensible cognition can only tell what it sees. It sees that in
the cosmic future there will be two human kingdoms
good and bad. It has not to start reasoning
and to conclude, from the condition of human souls today, what their
condition will have to be in the cosmic future, as though by some
necessity or law of Nature. The evolution of human forms and the
evolution of the destinies of human souls have to be looked for along
two distinct paths of spiritual research. A tendency to confuse the
two would be an unavowed survival of materialism, impairing the clear
outlook of supersensible science.
Last Modified: 02-Nov-2024
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