The Rudolf Steiner Archive

12. Faith, Love, Hope: Three Stages of Human Life II

My dear Theosophical friends!

[ 1 ] Yesterday we sought to gain an understanding of how profoundly what we might call the supersensible revelation of our time intervenes in the whole of human life. We pointed out that in the last cycle of human history, this revelation can be described as the third; indeed, in a certain sense, we must place it in a line with the revelation on Mount Sinai and with the revelation during the time when the Mystery of Golgotha took place.

[ 2 ] Now, we must not take this characteristic of our time to mean that we should, so to speak, adopt merely theoretical or scientific notions; rather, as theosophists, we must increasingly rise to the realization that humanity is missing something essential in its development if it were to turn away from our present and future proclamation. It is true, of course, that at first all external life would, in a certain sense, pass away, even if this proclamation were simply dismissed as a figment of the imagination; it is also true that, in a certain respect, many people would not initially notice the adverse consequences arising from their disregard of what is at stake here, but Theosophists should realize that the souls living in human bodies today, regardless of what they now take in, are heading toward a very specific future. And what I am about to say concerns all souls, for this is something that is part of the upheaval of our times that is taking place.

[ 3 ] The souls who are incarnated today have, in essence, only very recently passed through that stage in which human beings advance toward a kind of true sense of self. This consciousness, however, has been developing since the ancient Atlantean era. But for the people of earlier times—for those living up until the era when the Mystery of Golgotha heralded the great turning point—this sense of self was daily superseded by a kind of consciousness that modern humans no longer truly recognize. Modern humans generally distinguish only between the ordinary waking state—between waking and falling asleep—and the state of sleep, in which consciousness has completely faded away. In between, however, modern people still recognize that intermediate state we call the dream state. Yet modern people know that dreams are something we must indeed regard as a kind of exceptional state. Certain processes from the depths of the soul life do indeed rise up into consciousness through the dream images, but they emerge in a highly unclear manner in ordinary dream life, so that people will hardly ever be able to interpret correctly what in their dream life does indeed point to deep, supersensory processes of their life, of their soul life.

[ 4 ] To more easily arrive at a characterization of that intermediate state I have spoken of—one that older humanity still knows—let us take the common case of a dream, a dream that has actually caused quite a headache for a recent scholar of dream science, since he could explain it only in an external, one might say materialistic, way. A highly significant dream! It is, then, a dream I have taken from the science of dreams, which, as I pointed out in my response to the question, exists today just as much as physics and chemistry, even if it is understood and appreciated by very few. The following dream is recorded there. It can be mentioned here because it is a characteristic dream. I could easily mention similar dreams here that are not taken from literature, but I would like to discuss this one in particular because it has caused certain difficulties in contemporary literature, which cannot address such matters. This case is as follows.

[ 5 ] A couple deeply loves their son. The son grows up to the joy of his parents. One day, the son falls ill. Within a few hours, his condition deteriorates dramatically, and after a day, the son passes through the gates of death. Thus, quite suddenly—so to speak, from the perspective of the couple’s external experiences—this son is snatched away from them. The son himself is torn from a life full of hope. The parents, of course, mourn their son. In the months following his death, both the man and the woman have dreams in which many things remind them of their son. But after a long time, after many, many months had passed, one night both the mother and the father have the same dream, exactly the same dream: the dream that their deceased son appears to them and that this deceased son tells them he was buried alive, that in truth he was only seemingly dead, and that they should just look they would be able to see for themselves that he had been buried alive.

[ 6 ] The two parents share with each other what they dreamed that same night. They are the kind of people who would naturally think to ask the authorities to have their son’s body exhumed. But as is the way of life today—the authorities are not open to such things these days—the request was denied. The parents had to continue mourning. But the dream researcher in question, who is now recording this dream himself and can only think of it in materialistic terms, is now facing great difficulties. At first, isn’t it very easy to say: Well, that’s quite understandable. These parents have been thinking about their child constantly; why shouldn’t one of them dream about the son one time, and the other dream about the son another time? That goes without saying. — But one thing gave him particular trouble: the fact that the two people had the same dream on the same night. So he comes up with a highly peculiar explanation, and anyone who reads it will sense the sheer contrivance of this explanation. He says: One cannot help but assume that only one of them actually dreamed the thing; he woke up, and the other, who did not dream, believes that he, too, had dreamed it all. - Well, this explanation is quite plausible at first glance for our present-day consciousness, but it is not very profound. I explicitly mentioned that for those well-versed in the realm of dream experience, it is not uncommon for the same dream to be dreamed by several people at the same time.

[ 7 ] Now let us try to understand this dream experience from the perspective of spiritual science. We know, of course, from the findings of spiritual science that when a person has passed through the gate of death, they continue to live on as an individual in the supersensible world, furthermore, that all things and beings in the world are connected in a certain way, and furthermore, that a bond with departed human beings is formed, so to speak, when those who have remained here on the physical plane direct their intense, loving thoughts toward the deceased. For it is not a matter of those who have remained on the physical plane having no connection with those who have passed on and are in the supersensible world —they have it constantly, as long as they direct their thoughts toward them in any way, and even in the moments when they do not direct their thoughts toward them, as long as they direct their thoughts toward them even once, the relationship remains—but rather, the point is that, given the current organization of humanity, those living on the physical plane cannot bring their knowledge of these bonds into their waking consciousness. But just because one does not know something, one must not conclude that the thing in question does not exist. That would be a very superficial conclusion. Otherwise, those who are now sitting here in this room and cannot see Nuremberg could easily prove that Nuremberg does not exist. We must therefore be clear that, although due to the organization of modern humanity, people know nothing of the connection with the dead, this connection does exist. But what takes place in the depths of the soul can sometimes conjure up an abnormal awareness, even into consciousness, and this is precisely what happens in dreams.

[ 8 ] That is the one thing we must bring to bear when we approach these dream experiences. The other is that we also know that passing through the gate of death is not that leap from one thing into something entirely different that people who know nothing of these matters usually dream of, but rather a gradual transition. What has filled a soul here on earth does not vanish in an instant when a person passes through the gate of death. What a person has loved on Earth, they continue to love even after death, except that they have no way of satisfying those things that require a physical body for their fulfillment. But what the soul experienced as desires, longings, joy, and sorrow, as certain inclinations during an incarnation in the physical body, naturally continues even after a person has passed through the gate of death. And so we will understand that that young man, who, completely unprepared for death, passed away suddenly, had a vivid feeling that he actually still wanted to be on Earth, that he had a living urge to be surrounded by a physical body. This urge continued throughout the Kamaloka period, for a long, long time. This is a force that works within the soul.

[ 9 ] Now vividly imagine the parents, having fallen asleep while thinking of their beloved deceased son. The bonds between them remain, even though they are asleep. But the son, let us say, at the very moment when the dream begins for the two of them—for father and mother—feels a particularly vivid urge arising from the development of his soul, which we might express something like this: “Oh, if only I were still on earth now, surrounded by my physical body”—if we may translate this into such words. This thought of the deceased found expression in the depths of both parents’ souls. But the parents, of course, had no special understanding of the particular nature of the events in the dream just mentioned. So they translate what is pressing into their soul life into images that are closer to them, and while, if they could clearly perceive what the son is actually pouring into their soul life, they would feel it in such a way that they would say: “Now our son longs to be surrounded by a physical body,” the image presented by the dream takes on a form they can understand, and this spreads as the image that he has been buried alive, covering the true event beneath it.

[ 10 ] We must not, therefore, seek in such a dream image a reflection of what actually exists in the supersensible worlds; rather, we must look for a kind of veiling of the actual, objective process in what is dreamed, depending on the understanding of the dreamers in question. This is the peculiarity of the present dream world: unless we can penetrate deeper into things, we can no longer view the images as they appear—as direct, real reflections of what lies behind them—but must say: Although there is always something that lives its way into our soul behind the dream image, we must regard the dream image only as a kind of even greater Maya than the external world around us is Maya, which we face in the waking state.

[ 11 ] However, the fact that dreams are like this has only become apparent in our time; in essence, it has only become clear to people since the events in Palestine took place, since the sense of self has taken on the form it has assumed since that time. In the past, the images that entered people’s minds in a third state—one they experienced apart from waking and sleeping—were more akin to what actually took place in the supersensible worlds. And people also lived much more closely together with the dead in spirit than they can now. We need not go very far back into the centuries preceding the Christian era to find there still numerous, indeed countless, people who could say to themselves: Yes, the dead are not dead; they live in the supersensible world; I can see what they feel, see what they actually are now. - And just as this applies to the dead, it also applies to the other beings of the supersensible world, whom we recognize, for example, in the realms of the hierarchies.

[ 12 ] Thus, in certain transitional states between waking and sleeping, there existed for human beings something of which only a final remnant—now in the process of fading away—remains in dreams. That is why it was so significant for people at that time to feel that something they once had was slipping away from them. Indeed, in that transitional epoch of human development, when the events in Palestine were unfolding, there were many reasons to say: Change the state of your souls, for entirely different times are approaching humanity. - One of these reasons was that in the past, people looked into the spiritual worlds and knew from direct experience what the situation was like with the dead and with the supersensible beings. That was lost. And while a living proof of life with the dead in ancient times can be found in history in the form of religious worship that appears everywhere, ancestor worship, which is based on effectively conceiving of the dead as a true reality, while in ancient times ancestor worship was more or less universal, people in the transitional period find that they must tell themselves—even if they do not express it clearly in words: In the past, our souls reached up into the world we call the spiritual world. In the past, we were able to live together with the higher beings, with the dead; but now our dead depart in a very different sense; now they depart from our consciousness; we no longer have that living connection.

[ 13 ] This brings us to a matter about which we must say that the intellect will find it extremely difficult to grasp, but the understanding mind is capable of grasping it. This is what made the very nature of the early Christians’ worship so infinitely significant, so infinitely sacred and profound—that the early Christians were the ones who felt most keenly how they had lost their direct psychic connection with the dead. But they replaced what they had lost in this way with those sacred feelings that they allowed to flow through their souls during their acts of worship, when they offered their sacrifices over the graves of the dead, celebrated their Masses—in short, performed their acts of worship. And fundamentally, it is this transition that has brought about the very fact that, in the era when one feels the awareness of the dead fading away, altars take on the form of a coffin—that is, that one performed the reverent worship or spiritual service for the remains precisely in this form—unlike with the ancient Egyptians. As I said, this is something the intellect will not be able to fully grasp. But one need only look at the form of an altar and vividly feel that transition in the entire human perspective over the course of time, as it has been characterized, then one can also gain a sense, an understanding of this transformation in the human soul’s perspective, of everything that followed in its wake.

[ 14 ] Thus we see that the state in which the human soul finds itself today has been brought about slowly and gradually. And from yesterday’s hints, we can gather that this state, which has now been brought about, is gradually being replaced by another, and that we are now faced with the fact that the capacities for this other state are awakening within human beings.

[ 15 ] What I cited yesterday as an example—that a person will see, as in a kind of dream image, something real that is intended to serve as karmic compensation for an action—will be the reemergence of abilities that, in turn, will carry the soul up into the supersensory worlds. It was, relatively speaking, only a brief intermediate state in the entire development of the Earth, in which the human soul was cut off from the supersensible world—a state that had to occur so that, in this intermediate state, human beings could acquire the strongest forces for their freedom. Now, however, there is something connected with the entire progress in the development of humanity of which I have just spoken to you; it is connected with the fact that human beings could only have arrived at their self-contained sense of self, at their true self-consciousness, in this way. This self-consciousness will become more and more firmly established within the human being as humanity moves toward the future; it will become ever more significant. In other words: The strength and integrity of human individuality will increase more and more; people will be increasingly compelled to have a firm foundation of their being within themselves.

[ 16 ] Thus we see that the actual sense of self that human beings possess today does not extend over as many incarnations as is commonly believed. We need only go back a few incarnations, and we would not have this sense of self in the way that is characteristic of human beings today. Therefore, since the sense of self is intimately connected with memory, we need not be surprised that what might be called a recollection of past incarnations has not yet occurred for many people today. After all, people do not remember what happened to them in their earliest childhood years because their sense of self was not yet developed at that time. Is it not entirely understandable, then, that people today cannot yet recall their past incarnations, precisely because their sense of self was not yet developed? But now we stand at the threshold where humanity has developed its sense of self and where the forces are emerging that will make it necessary, in future incarnations, to remember past incarnations. The times are approaching when people will have no choice but to say to themselves: We look back with wonder on times when we were already on Earth in other life forms; we look back in such a way that we must say to ourselves, we were indeed already here on Earth. - And among the abilities that will increasingly emerge will be one that will point people to the realization: I cannot help but look back on my past incarnations.

[ 17 ] Now just imagine: For the next incarnations that the human souls currently incarnated will undergo, an inner power, so to speak, will arise that enables them to look back and recognize themselves in retrospect. But for those who have not familiarized themselves with the idea of repeated earthly lives, this recollection will be a terrible torment. So that, in fact, ignorance of the mysteries of repeated earthly lives will be agonizing for those in whom the forces seek to rise up, seeking to tell them something regarding earlier times, but cannot rise up because these people have failed to familiarize themselves with the great mystery truths of repeated earthly lives. Failing to familiarize oneself with these truths of the Mysteries, as they are now proclaimed by spiritual science, does not merely mean neglecting theories, but rather making the life of subsequent incarnations a torment. Therefore, something is particularly at stake for these times of transition in which we live. You can also glean the slow preparation for this from our second Mystery Drama, “The Trial of the Soul,” where reference is made, so to speak, to earlier incarnations of the characters there, which lie only a few centuries in the past. That is already being prepared. But now the situation is such that, through the wise guidance of the world, people are being given the opportunity, in a certain way, to become acquainted with the truths of the Mysteries. There are relatively few people who find their way to Theosophy at present. Is it not true that the number of Theosophists is small everywhere in comparison to that of other people, so that we can say: People are not yet interested in theosophy to any great extent. But the law of reincarnation for our time is such that, in fact, for those people who now go through the world in a dull manner and do not allow their experiences to tell them that one must investigate the mysteries of existence, a new life will begin relatively soon, that they will incarnate again soon, and that they will thus find ample opportunity to familiarize themselves with theosophical truths. That is the case. So that if we now see people in our midst who are dear to us but who want nothing to do with Theosophy, who are even bitterly opposed to it, we need not let this weigh too heavily on our hearts just yet. It is certainly true, and the Theosophist should realize this: disregard for spiritual science or Theosophy means the beginning of a life of torment for future earthly incarnations. That is true, and we must not take the matter lightly. On the other hand, however, those who have dear friends and acquaintances who want nothing to do with Theosophy can say to themselves: Well, if I am a good theosophist myself, I will find a way to be of service to these human souls through the powers that remain with me after I have passed through the gate of death—since the living bonds we have spoken of still exist. And these souls themselves will have the opportunity—since the time of the intermediate life between death and a new birth is now shortened—to absorb the truths of the Mysteries that people must absorb if their coming incarnations are not to become a torment. All is not yet lost.

[ 18 ] Thus, we must view Theosophy as a real power; on the other hand, however, we must not view the matter too gloomily or too pessimistically. It would be wrong to be optimistic in the sense of saying: Well, if that is the case, then I can wait until my next incarnation to take in these theosophical truths. For if everyone were to say that, then little by little people would pass over into their next incarnations, and there would be too few opportunities in the next incarnations to truly help humanity. For even if, for the time being, those who wish to come to Theosophy can be introduced to its truths through a few people, for the countless multitudes who will approach Theosophy after a relatively short time, countless people will be needed—either here on the physical plane or, if they are not incarnated, from higher planes—to introduce people to Theosophy.

[ 19 ] That is the one thing we must tell ourselves in light of the entire nature of the great upheaval that is now taking place. The other thing, however, is that the ego has gone through all of this precisely in order to rely more and more on itself, to become more and more independent. This reliance on oneself on the part of the ego is, in turn, something that will occur, something that will come to pass for all souls; yet it will also spell ruin for those souls who do not acquaint themselves with spiritual wisdom. For these souls will perceive this growing individuality as a form of isolation. Those, on the other hand, who will become acquainted with the great mysteries of the spiritual worlds will thereby find the opportunity to form more and more bonds in the spiritual realm, from soul to soul. The old bonds will dissolve more and more, and new ones will have to be formed. This will now take place gradually in the coming times.

[ 20 ] We are now living in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch; this will be followed by the sixth, then the seventh, until a catastrophe such as the one that occurred between the Atlantean and post-Atlantean eras takes place once again. This catastrophe, in its similarities and differences from the ancient Atlantean one, was characterized right here in Nuremberg during the cycle of lectures on the Apocalypse at that time. As for the particular character of our era, we can describe it—when we observe life around us—by saying: In our time, what is particularly active in human beings is what we might call intellectualism, the intellectual conception of the world. We are indeed living in an age of intellectualism, in an age of the intellectual conception of the world. This age of the intellectual conception of the world has now been brought about by a very special circumstance. We will come to understand this circumstance when we recall the era that preceded our present fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch. It was preceded by the period we call the Greco-Latin era, that remarkable cultural epoch in which human beings were not yet, one might say, as separated as they are now from nature and from the knowledge of the world as it presents itself externally. But it is also the period in which the ego, so to speak, broke in upon humanity. That is why the Christ event had to take place during this period, because the ego broke in in a special way. In our time, what do we experience? It is not merely the breaking in of the ego, but we experience that one of the human shells casts a kind of reflection or mirror image upon the soul. The sheath that we described yesterday as the faith sheath now casts a reflection or a mirror image onto human souls in our fifth epoch. So that in our epoch we have the peculiarity that there is something present in the human soul as if the character of faith of the astral body were reflected in the soul. In the sixth post-Atlantean epoch, the character of love of the etheric body will be reflected within the human being, and in the seventh, before the great catastrophe, the character of hope of the physical body.

[ 21 ] For those who have heard lectures like the ones just given here and there, I would like to note that I have presented these gradual processes differently from a different perspective, both in Munich and in Stuttgart. But it is essentially the same thing. It is simply that what is now to be presented—in connection with the three great human forces of faith, love, and hope—was presented there through a direct relationship to the elements of human soul life. But it is quite the same, and I do this intentionally so that theosophists may accustom themselves not to cling to words, but to approach the matter itself. When we see that things can be characterized from the most diverse perspectives, then we will no longer swear by the words, but will strive to approach the matter and take it in such a way that we know the words that characterize things from the most diverse perspectives are meant to signify nothing other than approximations of the matter itself. We come closer to the matter not by swearing by words once spoken, but only by bringing into harmony what is said in successive times, just as we come to know a tree only by observing it not from one side alone, but from the most diverse angles.

[ 22 ] So, essentially, it is now the power of faith of the astral body that shines into the soul and defines the character of our time. Strange, some might say; now you’re telling us that the power of faith is the most essential force of our time. Yes, perhaps we could acknowledge this from those people who have preserved the old faith, but then there are so many today who look down on faith because they have moved beyond it, who regard it as a childish stage of human development. — Those people who call themselves monists may believe that they do not believe, but they are more faithful than the others whom they label as believers. For everything that has been brought to light in the various monistic creeds is the blindest faith; it is just that people are not aware of it: they believe it is knowledge. We cannot at all characterize what is being done unless we continually speak of faith. If we set aside the faith of those who believe they do not believe, we find that, fundamentally, an infinite amount of what is most significant in our time rests upon that impulse which the astral body casts into the soul, thereby imparting to the soul a character of faith that is downright fervent. One need only recall the life paths of the greatest figures of our time—take Richard Wagner, for example—how his life as an artist itself is an ascent toward a certain fervor of faith, and how this is the most captivating aspect when considering this very personality. Wherever we look in our time, the light and dark sides of it can be understood from what we might call the reflection of faith in the ego or the ego-soul of the human being.

[ 23 ] And our age will be succeeded by one in which the need for love will shine forth. In a completely different sense, what might also be called Christian love will come to fruition in this sixth cultural epoch. We are slowly drawing ever closer to this sixth epoch, and precisely by introducing people in the Theosophical Movement to the mysteries of the universe—to the nature of the various individualities of the physical plane or the higher planes—we seek to kindle within them a love for every form of existence. Not so much by speaking of this love as by feeling what can kindle this love in the soul, the sixth epoch is being prepared through Theosophy. Through this, however, the forces of love are particularly laid bare in the whole soul of the human being, and what humanity needs to gradually arrive at a true understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha is being prepared. For although this Mystery of Golgotha has indeed taken place, and although the Gospel has brought forth what was described yesterday as comparable to the language of a child, this deepest teaching of the mission of love for the earth—as it is linked to the Mystery of Golgotha—has not yet been comprehended. This can only be fully understood in the sixth post-Atlantean cultural epoch, when human beings will increasingly rise to the point of finding the basis, the foundation, completely within themselves in reality, and doing what must be done from the innermost being—that is, from love; when humanity’s dependence on commandments will be completely overcome, when the state will have come about: “Duty, where one loves what one commands of oneself,” as Goethe says. When the forces awaken in our soul such that we can do nothing else but accomplish out of love what we are meant to do, then we have discovered within ourselves something that must become increasingly widespread in the sixth cultural epoch. With this, however, very special forces of the etheric body are also revealed to human natures.

[ 24 ] If we want to understand what is increasingly coming to pass, we must consider it from two perspectives. One aspect is that something is coming which, though it can only be dreamed of today by the finest minds, is not yet here—namely, a very specific relationship to morality, ethics, and rationality, to intellectuality. Today, a person can still be a relatively great scoundrel and at the same time a relatively clever, intelligent person. He may even use his very cleverness and intelligence to commit as much villainy as possible. It is not yet a necessity today that a measure of cleverness be united in the soul with the same measure of morality. All the things that have been described as impending for the future will now also be linked to the fact that, as we live into this future, these two things in the human soul will no longer be able to be separated, will no longer be able to exist in different degrees, but rather that the human being who, through his previous incarnation, has acquired something in his life account that would make him a particularly intelligent person—if he were not moral—will, through his life account, as he lives into his incarnation, have his intelligence paralysed, so that to the same extent that one could be more intelligent than moral, for the next incarnations, as one grows into these incarnations, is made stupid by general world laws, so that stupidity and immorality must increasingly occur together. For immorality will have an extinguishing, paralyzing effect on intelligence. In other words: We are approaching the age where morality and what has now been characterized for the sixth post-Atlantean epoch as the shining-in of the love forces of the etheric body into the ego-soul essentially signifies such forces as have to do with this harmonization of the forces of intelligence and the forces of morality.

[ 25 ] That is one aspect we must take into account. The other is that only through such harmony between morality, ethics, and wisdom can the Mystery of Golgotha be fully comprehended in all its depth. And this will come about because the teacher who had already prepared people for this Mystery of Golgotha before Christ Jesus came to Earth will, in his successive incarnations, increasingly develop into the great teacher of the greatest earthly event. The individuality whom we call the successor of Gautama Buddha in relation to the Bodhisattva dignity was incarnated in that personality who lived about a hundred years before our era and whom we there call Jeshu ben Pandira. That Jeshu ben Pandira had a number of disciples, among them one who, even then, had in a certain sense prophetically written down the Gospel of Matthew. It then only needed to be renewed once the Mystery of Golgotha had taken place. And time and again this individuality has been incarnated, and time and again it has appeared, and it will continue to appear time and again until it ascends from the Bodhisattva dignity to the Buddha dignity. This will be about five thousand years after our era. By then, a sufficiently large number of people will be endowed with the abilities we have spoken of, and in the course of a remarkable incarnation that the individuality who was once Jeshu ben Pandira will undergo, this great teacher of humanity, this Bodhisattva, will have come to be able to work in a completely different way as an interpreter of the Mystery of Golgotha than is possible today. Today, the clairvoyant can indeed gain insights in the supersensible worlds into what will occur five thousand years after our era, but the outer physical human constitution does not yet enable any physical body to do what that Teacher will be able to do some three thousand years from our present time. No human language would yet be capable of conveying that magical manner of working through communication and teaching, as that Teacher of humanity will then work. His words will pour directly into human hearts and souls like balm, and every word will not merely be theory; rather, to an extent far greater than the human mind can currently conceive, the teaching will simultaneously possess a magical moral power capable of deeply and intimately convincing hearts and souls of the primal, profound brotherhood of intellect and morality.

[ 26 ] The great Teacher who, when humanity is ready, will be able to teach most profoundly the essence of the Mystery of Golgotha will fulfill what the Eastern prophecies have always said: that he who will be the true successor of the Buddha will be the greatest Teacher of Goodness, the Teacher of Goodness for all humanity. That is why the Eastern tradition calls him the Maitreya Buddha. His task will be precisely to explain the Mystery of Golgotha to humanity, and he will be able to find the deepest and most meaningful ideas and words through the fact that his words, spoken in the special language that will be used—a language of which no human language today can even form a conception—will imprint the nature of the Mystery of Golgotha directly and magically into the human soul. In this respect, too, we are approaching what we might call the future moral age of humanity. In a certain sense, we could even describe it as the approaching Golden Age.

[ 27 ] But we, speaking today on theosophical ground, are fully aware of what is to come; we are hinting at how the Christ will gradually reveal Himself to ever higher and higher powers within humanity; we are hinting at how the teachers, who previously taught only for individual peoples and individuals, will become the interpreters, the explainers of the great Christ event for all people who wish to hear it . We can indicate how, with the dawn of the Age of Love, the very conditions for this Age of Morality are now in place.

[ 28 ] And then comes the final great period in which a reflection will be cast into the human ego-soul of what we call hope. But then, strengthened by the power emanating from the Mystery of Golgotha and from the moral age, people will take within themselves the forces of hope: the most essential thing they need to overcome the catastrophe, to begin a new life on the other side of it, in a manner similar to how the post-Atlantean era brought a new life.

[ 29 ] For while in the last post-Atlantean epoch external culture—purely combinatorial culture—reached its zenith, people will keenly feel the unsatisfactory nature of this culture; when people find themselves in such a position vis-à-vis this culture that, had they not developed the spiritual within themselves, they would face this culture with true desolation—it is here that hope will be planted, a hope that will be fulfilled in the next phase of human development. If what spirituality can bring to human souls—and what the Theosophical Movement seeks—could not take root in them, then external culture might perhaps continue for a while, but people would eventually come to the point where they would say to themselves: Yes, we have now attained all of this! Wireless devices carry our thoughts—devices our ancestors could never have dreamed of—across the entire globe. But what do we gain from it? We send the most trivial, barren thoughts from one place to another; we have had to strain human intellectual power to the utmost so that we can now finally, with all manner of perfect tools, convey from one distant part of the earth to another what we are now eating, and we have strained our intellectual powers to span the globe quickly, very quickly, but we have nothing in our minds that we can in any way carry from one point to another. For the thoughts we can carry are desolate, and truly, they have become even more desolate since we carry them in our modern vehicles, compared to those we carried in the old, snail-like vehicles.

[ 30 ] In short, desolation and barrenness would be spread across the globe by material civilization. But in the final cultural epoch, the soul will have grown rich, as it were, upon the ruins of material civilization, having embraced the spiritual life. And that you have not embraced this spiritual life in vain will be guaranteed by the powerful forces of hope that will live within you—the hope that after a great catastrophe, a new age of humanity will dawn, in which what has been prepared spiritually within the souls will also emerge in outer life through a new formation of humanity.

[ 31 ] Thus, in the coming period, as we move from our age of faith through the age of love and hope, we will consciously—as we become imbued with theosophy—head toward what we see as an ever-increasing approach to the highest, truest, and most beautiful goals of humanity.