The Rudolf Steiner Archive

2. Spiritual Science as Preparation for the New Etheric Vision

[ 1 ] We would make little progress in our branch lectures if we did not occasionally speak about the more intimate processes of humanity’s spiritual life. What we are to acquire in our branches is, after all, a preparation for grasping higher spiritual truths, and in this preparation we must not think merely of learning theories or ideas; rather, what we call preparation for the higher truths should actually consist more in a certain emotional and spiritual disposition of our soul. Through life in the branch, by gathering, so to speak, week after week in our branches, our soul is to gradually mature to the point of gaining a receptivity even for those parts of spiritual science that descend—or, if we will, we can also say, ascend—from the general truths that we can already proclaim today to a wider audience in the exoteric lectures, to the concrete facts of life.

[ 2 ] Therefore, let this evening in particular be one that counts on such a preparation of our soul—a preparation of our soul’s emotions. Certain things are to come before our souls today, which we will, admittedly, only learn to understand slowly and gradually, but which we can sense and intuit if we acquire the maturity to be attained through the life of the soul. It is assumed that such truths will be received with the appropriate sensitivity, received in such a way that we regard them as a precious treasure of our soul, not as something we believe we can simply carry out into the open before an unprepared audience. From the known, we will gradually ascend to the unknown.

[ 3 ] This is a question that naturally arises for anyone who becomes acquainted even with the basic principles of the anthroposophical worldview. The question is: Is there any meaning or purpose to the human soul appearing here on Earth in a succession of successive incarnations or embodied lives? One can grasp the abstract truth of reincarnation, but such abstract truths are, in essence, of little use in life. Truths only gain significance for life when they are capable of being transformed within our soul into the warmth of feeling, into the light that shines within us so brightly that it guides us forward along life’s paths. That is why the abstract truth of reincarnation only becomes meaningful to us when we, so to speak, know something more precise and intimate about the meaning and significance of the successive incarnations of the human being. That is to be the one question that will occupy us today.

[ 4 ] The other question is this: What significance does it have that, in our present incarnation, we are specifically in a position to introduce anthroposophy into our souls and to connect anthroposophical truths with our innermost lives? — We shall see that these two things will come together harmoniously for us today.

[ 5 ] You have often heard that two successive incarnations of a human being do not follow one another in any arbitrary manner, but that when a person has passed out of an earthly life through death, they return to a new earthly life only when they have the opportunity in that new life to learn new things on our Earth and to connect them with their soul. However, this can only be understood by those who view the development of our Earth not merely in terms of how it unfolds, so to speak, over a few centuries or millennia; only those who turn their gaze to the overall development of the Earth can truly grasp this. Even with regard to external physical conditions, if we limit ourselves to external sources, we will come to see how the face of the Earth changes over relatively short periods of time. Just read up on what the regions where we are here looked like around the time Christ walked the earth, and you will find how the entire face of this region has changed in relatively few centuries. And then ask yourself how the moral and other cultural conditions might have changed over the course of these few centuries. Try to picture in your mind, for example, what a child learned around the time our calendar began, and what a child learns today. Make all this clear to yourself, and then recall from the anthroposophical teachings that we can look back into the distant past, when the face of the Earth looked quite different, when, for the most part, the continents that exist today were not yet there, but instead there was a vast, expansive continent in the place now occupied by the Atlantic Ocean. And think of all that must have taken place over the course of long, long periods of time to shape the face of the Earth in the way it is today. When you let all this come before your soul, you must say to yourself: There is the possibility that souls always experience something new, always take in new fruits of our Earth’s existence, and then unite these fruits with their own lives, in order to then pass through a spiritual life between death and new birth. And when conditions have changed once more so that new things can be learned and it is worthwhile to descend once again to our Earth, then the souls truly return to incarnation.

[ 6 ] It is not merely a game played by the beings and forces at work behind appearances that repeatedly brings human beings down into new incarnations; rather, each incarnation adds a new strength and ability as a new link in the divine plan, which is represented by the entirety of a person’s life. Only when we view life in this way does the law of repeated earthly lives take on real meaning. But then we must also ask ourselves: Might we not actually be missing out on something? Does not something depend on our using an incarnation, an embodiment, in the right way? If we were simply to have a repetition of our present life in a subsequent incarnation, then some might say, “I have plenty of time; I will live many more times.”

[ 7 ] But when one looks at the most important facts of life and realizes that what the Earth can offer us during a specific period cannot be experienced at any other time, then one will surely tell oneself that one can also miss out on something, that one can take on an inner obligation and responsibility to make the most of every incarnation, every embodiment, in the appropriate and correct way. And we gain an even clearer understanding of how we can make use of these incarnations when we now take a brief look back based on spiritual research. I will now speak in part about something already familiar to us, but then I will have to expand on something that will still be unknown to most of those sitting here. What is known to you is that our own souls possessed entirely different abilities in earlier incarnations. The abilities through which humanity lives and acts today were not always present. If we ask ourselves through what the human soul acts in a particularly distinctive way today, we must say to ourselves it acts by precisely taking in the external facts of the world through the senses, that the human being has a self-conscious intellect, a self-conscious power of judgment, which he can apply to sensory perceptions and through which he can combine these perceptions to form a picture of the world through his cognition. We then know that when a person develops their soul further and further through the methods described in my book *How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds*, they can have yet another, spiritual environment around them. We know that there is an opened spiritual eye, an awakening of supersensory higher abilities that lie dormant in the average person today; we know that there was a time when the spiritual world was perceptible to all people, but also that there will be a time when the spiritual world can once again flood into our souls—just as light and color flood into the soul of a person born blind who has undergone surgery; these were present in his surroundings before, but could not flood in because he lacked the open faculties to receive them.

[ 8 ] Thus, today we have a humanity that can only glimpse into the spiritual world through abnormal development and very special methods. The normal state of modern human beings is, after all, that they perceive the things of the world through their external senses and combine these perceptions with their intellect, which is bound to the physical brain.

[ 9 ] Humanity is not always as it is today. If we look back to the early stages of human development and open our clairvoyant eye to the records we call the Akashic Records, we find that entirely different spiritual abilities were, so to speak, the norm for human beings. In ancient times, all people possessed a kind of clairvoyance. Not the kind acquired today through the methods mentioned, but a clairvoyance of a different nature—one we must describe as a dim, dull, dreamlike clairvoyance. But it was there; it was present especially under certain abnormal conditions. It simply arose of its own accord and did not require special training. Admittedly, we would have to go back a long way to find a humanity with constant clairvoyance, but in fact, a certain degree of clairvoyance was always inherent in humanity during certain intermediate states between sleeping and waking. We find this clairvoyance more and more the further back we go. You will recall that as we go back through various cultural periods, we pass through different epochs of human civilization. We now live in a cultural period that was preceded by another. We refer to this other cultural period as the Greco-Latin one. This was in turn preceded by another, which we designate, after the leading peoples, as the Egyptian-Chaldean-Babylonian-Assyrian epoch. This was in turn preceded by another, which we designate as the Proto-Persian, and even earlier we come to what we designate as the Proto-Indian. That was a culture to which only the clairvoyant eye can look back, for that culture which produced the Vedas arose in much later times as a faint echo of that high wisdom which the seven holy Rishis themselves bestowed upon the world in the original ancient Indian culture. And if we go back beyond that period, we find the great Atlantean catastrophe, which, through powerful water and air forces, so altered the face of our Earth that, little by little, the Atlantean continent disappeared and was replaced by what is today, on the one hand, Africa and Europe, and on the other, America.

[ 10 ] And we could go back even further, and the records of the Akashic Records would show us how the people of the ancient continent of Atlantis possessed entirely different spiritual abilities—abilities that would seem almost unbelievable to people today, because they lie far beyond anything known to modern humanity.

[ 11 ] During all these periods, our souls already existed—in other bodies—but always possessed different abilities. And if we could go back, we would find that our souls were then endowed with a high degree of clairvoyant receptivity; especially in certain intermediate states between sleeping and waking, they were witnesses to a spiritual world and could look into it. If you could go back, you would find that you yourselves saw the facts and the beings of the spiritual worlds. Back then, there was no temptation for human souls, not even the possibility, to deny the spiritual world, for they had seen it; for they were turned toward the physical world only for a few hours of the day. The objects of the outer physical world were not yet arranged as they were in later times. Therefore, when people entered this intermediate state between sleeping and waking, they were surrounded by a world they had to perceive as spiritual, a world that had to give them the conviction: Humanity originates from this world. It has descended from it to acquire something in the physical world that it could not have acquired in the spiritual world alone. What, then, could he have acquired in this outer world that he could not have had in the spiritual world as well? What the spiritual world lacked was the possibility of developing self-consciousness, the possibility of saying “I” to oneself. Humanity did not have that. It was, so to speak, as if the human being were outside of himself precisely at the most crucial moments of his life, as if in a state of detachment, where he did not even know that he was an independent inner individuality. He was devoted to the spiritual world. To perceive himself as an “I”—this the human being could only learn here in this physical world; true self-consciousness he could only receive here. And inseparably linked to this self-consciousness is what we call the power of judgment, our present-day thinking, and our capacity for perception. Thus, humanity had to relinquish its former connection to the spiritual world, its old, twilight-like clairvoyance, in order to acquire the ability to distinguish itself as an “I” from its surroundings and thereby to arrive at the “I,” at self-consciousness at all.

[ 12 ] In the future, human beings will once again reclaim this gift—the ability to look into the spiritual world through clairvoyance—as part of their self-awareness. The gateway to the spiritual world has, as it were, been closed to them so that human beings might become self-aware, inner spiritual beings, so that they might ascend to self-awareness, and then, as independent beings, re-enter the spiritual world.

[ 13 ] There were, in other words, ancient times when humans looked out upon an environment that was, so to speak, quite different from today’s. When we look out at our physical surroundings today, what do we see? We see the world of minerals, plants, animals, and our fellow human beings with physical senses. This is what surrounds us and to which we initially belong, rather than to the world that opens up to us between birth and death.

[ 14 ] We can only penetrate the world from which this originates, and which lies beyond it, through clairvoyant gifts which, as I said, are not the normal abilities of modern human beings today, but were available to all people in certain states in those ancient times. There he immersed himself in the spiritual world; there he perceived those spiritual beings and spiritual realities of which we hear in spiritual science—realities that exist and cannot be dismissed as nonexistent simply because modern, ordinary perception cannot see them; realities that exist just as light and color exist around a blind person, even though he cannot perceive them. These spiritual beings were, at that time, the companions of human beings, and a person could say to themselves: I belong to a spiritual world; as a spiritual-soul being, I belong to a world in which, just as my own spiritual-soul nature, there are such beings as I have around me in such states. - In those times of the distant past, human beings were companions of spiritual-soul beings. Those insights into the world and those realizations that have looked into these conditions have always been able to distinguish precisely—and can still distinguish today—the various stages that human beings have passed through in different eras. First, there was the stage when he was still completely immersed in this spiritual world, where he scarcely descended with consciousness into the sensory-physical world, but felt himself to belong entirely to the spiritual world, so that he drew all his powers from this spiritual world. This stage distinguished spiritual knowledge from the subsequent ones, in which this power gradually waned, and in which the perception of sharply defined objects of the external world increasingly came to the fore, along with the processing of these impressions through logical thinking and judgment, simultaneously with the development of the “I,” of self-consciousness.

[ 15 ] In Eastern philosophy, which was still able to gain insight into these conditions because it retained remnants of the ancient sacred teachings of the Rishis, there were still terms for these various stages of human development. For the most ancient times, for the periods of clairvoyant human development in which this clairvoyance reached, so to speak, into the highest regions of the spiritual world, up to those beings whom we must imagine as the highest connected to our world, the term Krita Yuga was used, which was later called the Golden Age. Then came another era in which people saw much less of the spiritual world, in which the effects of the spiritual world were no longer quite so vivid within people. This era was called the Treta Yuga, later the Silver Age. In a different way, the people living between birth and death gained a certainty about the spiritual world. Although they now had only very vague, immediate experiences of the spiritual world, they remembered the times before their birth when they had also lived with spiritual beings. Thus, this was a time when human beings still knew the spiritual world with such certainty that, just as an old person today cannot deny having had a youth, they could not deny the existence of the spiritual world. In those circles where such knowledge is held, this age was referred to as the Treta Yuga, for which the somewhat vague term “Silver Age” was later used. All these ancient terms, however, have a profound meaning, and it is downright childish of modern science to treat these terms as it does, because it has no inkling of the realities from which these designations sprang.

[ 16 ] This Silver Age was followed, however, by an age in which clear knowledge—a kind of genuine insight into the spiritual world—still existed, but in such a way that humanity had already descended so far into the physical-sensory world that it could, so to speak, choose between the two worlds in terms of its convictions. In this third, Iron Age, Dvapara Yuga, the old clairvoyance grew darker and darker, yet it still existed to a certain degree in a twilight-like manner, and human beings could, out of their own inner conviction, connect more or less with the spiritual world. For them, this spiritual world had once been an experience; they still knew this in this age.

[ 17 ] Then, little by little, the age we refer to by the Eastern term Kali Yuga—the Dark Age—began to dawn. This is the age in which the gateway to the spiritual world slowly and gradually closed completely for the human soul’s faculties. And as people became increasingly dependent on perceiving only within the physical-sensory world, they were also able to develop their sense of self, their sense of “I,” and their self-consciousness more and more within this world. This age began at a relatively late time, around the year 3100 B.C., and has continued up to our own time.

[ 18 ] We are considering this today in the sense that we must learn to distinguish between these ages so that we can understand the most important tasks of our own current incarnations.

[ 19 ] We would actually be returning to the Atlantean era if we traced the Krita Yuga back to its very beginning. In contrast, the Treta Yuga still falls within the time of the holy Rishis, that is, within Indian culture, but also, in part, within the ancient Persian culture. The Dvapara Yuga, on the other hand, coincides with the later cultural epochs, the Chaldean-Babylonian-Assyrian-Egyptian times. A certain degree of ancient, twilight-like clairvoyance was still present then. And the point in time when the complete closure of the gate to the spiritual world slowly and gradually begins, becoming ever more thorough, so to speak, confining humanity to the physical plane—the beginning of this age falls in the year 3101 B.C., that is, before Christ Jesus walked the earth. So, a little over 3,000 years before the Christ event, we see the dawn of an age that has gradually made us what we are today. When we realize that the most significant event in the entire history of the Earth—the deed of Christ—falls within this age, we can truly appreciate the full significance of that deed. What were human beings like in that age, the Kali Yuga, when Christ descended to Earth? They had already been in a state of development for more than 3,000 years that confined them to the physical world, limiting them, between birth and death, to taking in only what was offered to them in this physical world, what presented itself to them in this physical world. Had this development continued in this way, human self-consciousness would indeed have grown stronger and stronger, but only in an egoistic direction. Humanity would have become nothing more than a hedonist, a creature of desire, coldly enclosing everything within its ego. They would have completely lost the awareness that a spiritual world exists, had nothing else intervened. What did intervene? The full significance of what intervened becomes clear to us once we understand that there truly are transitional periods in Earth’s development. Some people who merely speculate, who merely engage in abstract philosophy or cultivate some other ideology, often call every age a transitional period, and one can find almost every era—as far back as one can go in time since the invention of the printing press, since so much has been printed—referred to as a transitional age. Those who stand on the ground of spiritual science will not be so generous with this term, for transitional periods are only those times in which something truly more essential and decisive happens than in other eras.

[ 20 ] There is a common saying in science that is taken for granted—anthroposophists should learn that it is nonsense: Nature does not make leaps. - It sounds very objective, and yet it is nonsense, for nature makes nothing but leaps. Observe how a plant develops, how a leap occurs every time something new works its way into the course of development, how a leap occurs from the regular formation of leaves to flowering, from the calyx to the petal, from the petals to the stamens, and so on. Nature makes nothing but leaps after proceeding gradually for a time, and all existence makes leaps. This is precisely the essence of development—that crises and leaps occur—and the statement “Nature does not make leaps” belongs, so to speak, to the platitudes of the most terrible conveniences of human thought—for it really does make many leaps.

[ 21 ] But spiritual life, in particular, proceeds in leaps and bounds. In the course of spiritual development, great and significant leaps occur. Then life continues on a gradual path, and then significant spiritual leaps occur again. Such a tremendous leap for the life of humanity—not only for those who were around the Christ—occurred precisely during the time when the Christ walked the earth. And in this sense, we may call the era in which the Christ lived and taught in Palestine a transitional era. Do not say that all people must easily notice such a leap, such a transition. Oh, the most essential thing that happens in an age can be completely hidden from the eyes of contemporaries; it can pass them by without their noticing a thing. After all, we know that such an event once passed by millions upon millions without a trace. After all, we know that Tacitus, that eminent Roman writer, writes in one passage of his work about the Christians as if they were a hidden sect; that, for example, nearly a hundred years after Christianity had already spread throughout the southern regions of Europe, quite strange things were being told in Rome about Christianity. So there were social circles in Rome at that time who knew nothing else about Christianity except that there was a sect disturbing them, that there was a sect in a remote back alley, led by a certain Jesus, and that he was inciting them to all sorts of misdeeds. This is a story that—already a century after Christianity had existed—was circulating in Rome. Thus, the most significant event not only of that time but of the entire development of humanity passed by a large number of people without a trace. We must be able to imagine that, in fact, while people notice nothing, absolutely nothing, the most important, most significant things can happen. Therefore, when people say that we live in a time when nothing essential or important is happening, that is no proof that these people are really right.

[ 22 ] In fact, we are once again living in a transitional age in which the most important spiritual realities are unfolding—realities of which many of our contemporaries are unaware, yet which are very much present. This is what we must make clear to ourselves on the one hand: that we can truly speak of times of transition, but that we should not be too quick to use this term. What, then, was the essence of the time of transition in which Christ Jesus appeared? The essence of this time of transition for all humanity is expressed in a meaningful phrase that one must only understand correctly. It is expressed in the proclamation of John the Baptist, which Christ then took up again and which reads: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” A whole world lies in this statement—precisely that world which is intimately connected with the most important event that took place at that time for the development of all humanity.

[ 23 ] Through natural development in the Kali Yuga, human beings had gradually reached a point where they had attained the power of judgment and self-awareness, yet they had become incapable of reestablishing a connection with the spiritual world from within this self-awareness through their own efforts. The Baptist said: The time has now come when your ego must educate itself in such a way that this ego can become so deeply rooted in itself spiritually that it finds within itself the link to the heavenly realms, for outside of itself, in clairvoyant states, human beings can normally no longer ascend into a spiritual world. The realms of heaven had to descend down into the physical world. They must reveal themselves in such a way that the ego can recognize them through ordinary self-consciousness, through the sense of truth of ordinary self-consciousness. Change your mindset, change your old state of mind, so that you may believe that your inner life can, within itself, within the I, become so warmed that through observing all that is happening around you, you may comprehend: There is a spiritual world! You must learn to comprehend the spiritual worlds within your I, through your I. They have come down close to us. They must not now be sought in a world of raptures! — That is why Christ had to descend and appear in a human, physical body, for the human state of mind was attuned to a perception of the physical plane. God had to come to humanity on the physical plane because, through the development of their ego and the closing of the gates to the spiritual world, people were no longer able to approach the gods in the old way. This is the great event that took place at that time: on the one hand, through the natural development of human faculties, the old connection with the spiritual worlds was lost and an ego-consciousness was attained; but on the other hand, this made it possible to attain an awareness of these spiritual worlds within the physical world. Thus, Christ was the mediator to the spiritual worlds for those people who had reached such a stage of development that they could now, through an “I” living on the physical plane, establish a connection with the spiritual world. Change your state of mind; no longer believe that through rapture a person can normally ascend into the spiritual world, but believe that through the unfolding of the possibilities lying within your own ego, with the help of Christ, the path to the spiritual worlds can be found. For only in this way will humanity be able to find the Spirit at first.

[ 24 ] We are living in a similar age once again today, for the Kali Yuga, the dark age, came to an end in 1899, and new states of mind and new spiritual capacities are now slowly emerging in a similar way. It is quite possible that our contemporaries, the people of our time, will miss this. Little by little, we will come to understand what will happen to all people in our age, which has now begun following the end of the Kali Yuga. Our task today is precisely to ensure that this event—this transitional event—does not pass us by unnoticed and without impact on the progress of humanity.

[ 25 ] The Kali Yuga has come to an end; it was just a few years ago. 1899 is the approximate date when it ended. We are now moving toward a time when certain clairvoyant abilities will naturally develop alongside our growing self-awareness. People will experience the peculiar and strange phenomenon that they will actually not know what is happening to them! People will begin to have premonitions that will come true, to foresee events that will affect them. People will gradually begin to see, albeit in a shadowy way and in its earliest stages, what we call the human etheric body. Today, people see only the physical body. The perception of the etheric body will gradually emerge as something about which people will either have learned that it is a reality, or which they will think is an illusion, that it does not exist at all. It will go so far that some, when experiencing such things, will ask themselves: Am I crazy?

[ 26 ] Even if, at first, only a small number of people will develop these abilities over the coming decades, spiritual science is something that must be disseminated because we feel a responsibility toward what is happening in reality—what must happen according to the natural course of events. Why do we teach spiritual science? Because phenomena will arise that can only be understood through spiritual science, and that will remain incomprehensible if one does not have spiritual science... [gap].

[ 27 ] These abilities will develop relatively quickly in a small number of people. It is certainly true, however, that through esoteric training, human beings can already today rise far above what is being prepared in its early stages for all humanity. But what human beings can now artificially rise to through appropriate training is being prepared, at least in its early stages, for all of humanity as something that will have to be discussed—whether people understand it or not—in the years 1930 to 1940. Only a few decades separate us from the time when such phenomena will begin to occur more frequently.

[ 28 ] But then something else will come to pass for those people who have attained these abilities. These people will find proof of one of the greatest statements in the New Testament, which has a profound effect on their souls. For in these souls the statement arises: “I am with you always, even to the end of the world,” that is, if we translate it correctly: “until the end of the eons of the earth.” This saying tells us that Christianity is not merely what was once written in books, what was learned in certain times; it tells us that Christianity is not merely what is today summarized under this or that dogma, but something living, which contains within itself the seeing and experiencing of revelations, which will unfold ever more and more strongly. Today we are only at the beginning of the impact of Christianity, and whoever has truly united themselves with Christ knows that ever new revelations will come forth from this Christianity. They know: Christianity is not in decline; Christianity is growing, becoming; Christianity is something living, not something dead.

[ 29 ] Anyone undergoing spiritual development today can already begin to experience the truth of the saying: “I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” Thus, he is with us, surrounding the Earth in spiritual form. Before the event at Golgotha, clairvoyants could not find the Christ in the Earth’s atmosphere. Only after the event at Golgotha does the Christ become visible in the Earth’s atmosphere, because he has been there since that time. One who was trained in clairvoyance in pre-Christian times knew that a time would come when the following would occur. He knew: At present, one does not yet find in the astral realm of our Earth what is called the Christ, but a time will come when the clairvoyant eye will be open and will see the Christ in the realm of the Earth! He knew that a great change would one day occur with regard to earthly clairvoyance. He was not yet convinced by the events in Palestine that these events had already taken place. No physical events could convince him that the Christ had already descended to Earth. Only one thing could convince him: when he saw the Christ clairvoyantly in the Earth’s atmosphere. Then he was convinced that the descent of the Christ to Earth, as anticipated by the Mysteries, had truly taken place. What Paul had experienced—the presence of the Christ in the Earth’s atmosphere—is what a clairvoyant person trained through esoteric schooling can experience artificially today; it is also what individual people will be able to experience through clairvoyance that has become natural, as has been described, beginning in the years 1930 to 1940, and then over longer periods of time as something that has become entirely natural. The event at Damascus will then be repeated for many, and we can call this event a Second Coming of the Christ, a Second Coming in the Spirit. Christ will be there for those who can ascend to the point of seeing the etheric body. For Christ descended into the flesh only once: back then in Palestine. But in the etheric body, he is always present in the etheric atmosphere of the Earth. And because people will develop the ability to see the etheric, they will behold him. Thus the Second Coming of the Christ arises from the fact that human beings ascend to the ability to behold the Christ in the etheric. This is what we are to expect in our transitional period. And what spiritual science has to accomplish is now also to prepare the souls so that they may receive the Christ who descends to them.

[ 30 ] Now we have, so to speak, already addressed the second of the questions we posed. On the one hand, we have seen how it makes good sense to make good use of one’s incarnations, but we have also seen how we can best make use of our own present incarnation by preparing ourselves for that insight which will be ours for the future of Christ. And we must understand this Second Coming in the right sense; then we will also understand the great dangers associated with it. That is what I must now tell you.

[ 31 ] The greatest thing that lies ahead for humanity in the coming times is the described return of Christ in the Spirit. But the materialism of our time will be so strong that even such a truth will be interpreted materialistically. And these materialistic interpretations will become reality. This truth will be reinterpreted as a return in the flesh. False Christs will walk the earth in the not-too-distant future—false messiahs, people who will pass themselves off as the Christ who has descended once more. Anthroposophists, however, should be those who cannot fall into the materialism of believing that Christ will descend again in the flesh to the earth, for they know that the dark age has come to an end in which human beings needed life in the physical-material realm, without insight into the spiritual worlds, for the development of their ego-consciousness. Humanity must now develop upward again into the spiritual spheres, where it will be able to behold the Christ as a living and present being in the etheric realm.

[ 32 ] Humanity will be given a period of about 2,500 years to acquire these abilities. It will have 2,500 years to develop etheric vision as a natural, universal human gift, until humanity must then ascend to another ability during a subsequent transitional period. During these 2,500 years, more and more human souls will be able to develop these abilities. And it will make no difference whether people live during this period here between birth and death, or remain in the spiritual world after death. The time of human life between death and new birth will also be spent differently once the souls have experienced the Second Coming of Christ. That, too, will be transformed by this experience. Therefore, it will be of such great importance for the souls who are now incarnated to be well-prepared for the Christ event that is coming in this century, both while they are still here in the physical body, and it will also be important for those who have already passed through the gate of death and are between death and new birth when this new Christ event takes place. It is important for all present souls to be prepared for this event and thereby to be equipped to face the dangers as well.

[ 33 ] When we speak in this way, we sense what anthroposophy is meant to be and can be for us, and how it is meant to prepare us so that we can fulfill what will ensure that a momentous event does not pass humanity by without leaving a mark. For if it were to pass humanity by without a trace, humanity would lose an important opportunity for development, and it would sink into darkness, into withering away. It can only bring light if people awaken to the new perception and thus also open themselves to the new Christ event. This will be said again and again in the future. But it will also be said again and again that the false prophets could prevent the good, the great, if they succeeded in spreading the belief that the Christ would appear in the flesh. If the anthroposophists were not to understand this, they could fall into the error that would make it possible for false messiahs to appear. They will appear because they count on the weak, on souls weakened by materialism, who can only imagine that when the Christ returns, he must appear in material flesh. This misinterpretation of the proclamation is a grave one; it will come about as a grave temptation for humanity. Anthroposophy has the task of protecting people from this temptation. This cannot be emphasized strongly enough for all who are willing to hear it. But in this you also see that anthroposophy has something important to say, that we do not pursue anthroposophy merely because we are curious about all manner of truths, but because we know that these truths are needed for the salvation of humanity, for the continual perfection of humanity.

[ 34 ] Christ will continue to approach humanity in many forms. He chose the form he took during the events in Palestine because people at that time needed the ability to develop their consciousness on the physical plane and to master it. However, humanity is called upon to develop ever higher and higher abilities so that evolution can then take another leap forward.

[ 35 ] Christ will be there so that He may also be experienced at these higher levels of knowledge. In this respect, too, Christianity is not at the end but at the beginning of its effectiveness, and humanity will ascend from stage to stage, and from stage to stage Christianity will be there to satisfy the deepest needs of the human soul throughout the future of the earth.