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An Outline of Occult Science by Rudolf Steiner

VI. THE PRESENT AND FUTURE EVOLUTION OF THE WORLD AND OF HUMANITY

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This explains, also, why the information in this book concerning the present and the future is given in the merest outline as compared with the more detailed descriptions of the evolution of the world and of humanity in the past. What is said here is not intended to appeal to the love of sensation in the smallest degree; not even to awaken it. We shall only state where the answer can be found to vital questions which naturally present themselves to one who holds a certain definite attitude of mind.

Just as the great cosmic evolution can be portrayed in the successive states, from the Saturn to the Vulcan period, so also is this possible for shorter periods of time; for example, for those of the evolution of the earth. Since that mighty upheaval which terminated the ancient Atlantean life, successive periods of human evolution have followed one another which have been called in this work the ancient Indian, the ancient Persian, the Egypto-Chaldean, and the Greco-Roman. The fifth period is that in which humanity finds itself to-day,--it is the present time. This period gradually took its rise in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteen centuries A.D., after a period of preparation commencing in the fourth and fifth centuries. The Greco-Roman period preceding it began about the eighth century B.C. When one-third of this period had elapsed, the Christ-event took place.

During the transition from the Egypto-Chaldean to the Greco-Roman period, the attitude of the human mind and, indeed, all human faculties, underwent a change. In the first of these two periods what we now know as logical thinking, as a mere intellectual concept of the world, was still wanting. The knowledge which a man now acquires through his intelligence, he then gained in a manner suited to that time,--directly through an inner, in a certain sense, clairvoyant cognition. He perceived the things around him, and while perceiving them there arose within his soul the percept, the image that was needed. Whenever knowledge is gained in this way, not only pictures of the physical sense-world come to light, but from the depths of consciousness a certain knowledge of facts and beings arises which are not of the physical world. This was a remnant of the ancient dim clairvoyance, once the common property of the whole of humanity.

During the Greco-Roman period an ever-increasing number of individuals appeared without these capacities. Intelligent reflection concerning things took their place. Mankind was more and more shut off from the immediate perception of the psycho-spiritual world, and was more and more restricted to forming a picture of it through intelligence and feeling. This condition lasted more or less during the whole of the fourth division of the post-Atlantean period. Only those individuals who had preserved the old mental state as an inheritance could still become directly conscious of the spiritual world. But these were stragglers from an earlier time. Their manner of gaining knowledge was no longer suitable for later conditions. For, as a consequence of the laws of evolution, old faculties of the soul lose something of their former significance when new faculties appear. Human life then adapts itself to these new faculties, and can no longer use the old ones properly.

There were individuals, however, who began in full consciousness to add to the powers of intelligence and feeling already gained, the development of other and higher powers, which made it possible for them once more to penetrate into the psycho-spiritual world. To this end they were obliged to set to work in a different way from that in which the pupils of the old Initiates had been trained. The latter had not been obliged to take into account those faculties of the soul which were developed only in the fourth period. The method of occult training which has been described in this work as that of the present age, began in its first rudiments in the fourth period. But it was then only in its beginning, it could not attain real maturity until the fifth period (from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries onward). Those who sought to rise into supersensible worlds in this manner could learn something of the higher regions of existence through the exercise of their own imagination, inspiration, and intuition. Those who went no further than the development of the faculties of reason and feeling could learn only through tradition what had been known to ancient clairvoyance. This was handed on, either by word of mouth or in writing, from generation to generation.

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