|
This Classic work is now copyright expired and therefore in the public domain. An Outline of Occult Science by Rudolf SteinerVI. THE PRESENT AND FUTURE EVOLUTION OF THE WORLD AND OF HUMANITY
page 7 of 8 | page 1 | An Outline of Occult Science - home
After an intermediate state, which will be a sojourn in a higher world, the earth will be transformed into the Jupiter condition. That which we now call the mineral kingdom will not exist on Jupiter; the forces of this mineral kingdom will be transformed into plant forces and the plant kingdom, which will have quite a new form compared with its present one, will appear in the Jupiter state as the lowest of the kingdoms, while above it, we find the animal kingdom, likewise transformed. Next comes a human kingdom--the descendants of the evil earth humanity. And then will appear the descendants of the good earth humanity, as a human kingdom on a higher level. A great part of the work of this last human kingdom consists in ennobling the souls which have sunk into the evil community, so that they may still gain admittance into the true human kingdom.
The Venus condition will be of such a nature that the plant kingdom will have disappeared also; the lowest kingdom will be the animal kingdom once more transformed, and above that there will be three successive human kingdoms of different degrees of perfection. The earth will remain united with the sun during the Venus period; while during that of Jupiter it will have happened that, at a certain point, the sun separates from Jupiter, the latter receiving its influence from outside. Then there is again a union between the sun and Jupiter, the transformation gradually passing into the Venus state. During that state another planet detaches itself from Venus, containing all kinds of beings which have opposed evolution, an "irredeemable moon," as it were, following a path of evolution which is of a character impossible to describe, because it is too unlike anything which man can experience on earth. But evolved humanity will pass on in a fully spiritualized state of existence to the Vulcan evolution, a description of which lies beyond the scope of this work.
We see that from the fruits of the "Wisdom of the Grail" springs the highest ideal of human evolution conceivable for man: spiritualization attained by him through his own efforts. For in the end this spiritualization appears as a product of the harmony which he wrought out in the fifth and sixth periods of the present evolution, between the faculties of reason and emotion which he had then attained and cognition of supersensible worlds. That which he thus achieves within his soul will finally become in itself the outer world. The human spirit rises to the mighty impressions of its outer world and at first divines, later recognizes spiritual beings behind these impressions; the human heart senses the unspeakable exaltedness of the Spirit. Man can, however, also recognize that his inner experiences of intellect, feeling and character are but the germs of a nascent spirit world.
He who thinks that human liberty is not compatible with a foreknowledge and predestination of future conditions, ought to consider that man's freedom of action in the future depends just as little on the arrangement of predestined things as does his liberty of action with regard to inhabiting a house a year hence, on the plans for which he is now settling. He will be as free as his innermost being will permit, within the house he has built; and he will be as free on Jupiter and on Venus as his inner life permits, even under the conditions which will arise there. Freedom will not depend on what has been predetermined by antecedent conditions, but on what the soul has made out of itself.
-------------------------------------
Next |
