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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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For he who learns to understand this symbol in its deeper meaning, as it is told in story and legend, will find that it symbolizes the nature of what has been called above, the knowledge of the new Initiation, with the Christ Mystery as its central point. Modern Initiates may therefore be called "the Initiates of the Grail." The preliminary stages of the path to the supersensible worlds described in this book, leads to the "Wisdom of the Grail." It is a peculiarity of this wisdom that its facts can be investigated only when the necessary means, as described in this book, have been acquired. Once investigated, however, these facts can be understood by means of those very soul-forces which are the result of the evolution of the fifth period. Indeed, it will become more and more evident that to an ever increasing extent those forces find satisfaction through this knowledge. We are now living at a time in which this knowledge must be absorbed by human consciousness in general to a much fuller extent than was formerly the case. And it is from this point of view that the teachings contained in this Christ-event will grow ever more powerful in proportion as human evolution assimilates the Wisdom of the Grail. The inner side of the development of Christianity will more and more keep pace with the exoteric side. That which may be learned through imagination, inspiration and intuition, concerning the higher worlds, in connection with the Christ Mystery, will penetrate ever more and more human thinking, feeling, and willing. The "hidden wisdom of the Grail" will be revealed, and as an inner force will more and more permeate the manifestations of human life.

Through the whole of the fifth period, knowledge concerning the supersensible world will flow into human consciousness; and when the sixth period begins, humanity will be able to regain on a higher level that clairvoyance which it possessed at an earlier epoch in a dim and indistinct manner. Yet the new acquisition will take a form quite different from the old. What the soul knew of higher worlds in ancient times, was not permeated by its own forces of intellect and feeling. Its knowledge was instinctive. In the future it will not only have instincts, but it will _understand_ them, and feel them to be the essence of its own nature. When the soul learns a fact concerning some other being or thing, its intellect will find this fact verified through its own nature. Or when some fact regarding an ethical law or human conduct presents itself, the soul will say to itself: "My feeling is only justified when I carry out what is implied in this knowledge." Such a condition of soul will have to be developed by a large part of humanity in the sixth period.

In a certain manner, that which human evolution accomplished during the third period--the Egypto-Chaldean--is repeated in the fifth. At that time the soul could still perceive certain facts of the supersensible worlds, but this perception was disappearing. For the intellectual faculties were at that time beginning to develop and it was their mission to at first exclude man from the higher worlds. In the fifth period supersensible facts which in the third period were perceived in hazy clairvoyance, are again becoming manifest; but they are now interpenetrated by the intellectual and emotional life of the individual man. They are also imbued with what may be imparted to the soul by a knowledge of the Christ Mystery; therefore they assume a form totally different from that which they had previously.

Whereas in ancient times impressions from the higher worlds were felt as forces acting from out a spiritual world to which man did not properly belong, through development in later times these impressions are felt as those of a world into which man is growing, of which he more and more forms a part. Let no one suppose that a repetition of the Egypto-Chaldean civilization can take place in such a way that the soul would merely regain what then existed, and which has been handed on from that time. The Christ-impulse, rightly understood, impels the human soul which has experienced it, to feel and conduct itself as a member of a spiritual world, now recognizing it as a world to which it belongs, outside of which it previously existed.