10. The God of the Alpha and the God of the Omega

We have been viewing with our souls post-Atlantean humanity and have traced its cultural epochs from the ancient Indian down to our own fifth post-Atlantean epoch. We have seen that during this time human beings lost their consciousness of the spiritual world bit by bit. In the first epoch, the ancient Indian, human beings still had a profound yearning for the spiritual world. The world of the senses was considered maya, illusion. Then came the ages that issued a call to human beings to do external, physical labor. Human beings had to learn to love the world of the senses because only then were they able to cultivate it. At this time, human beings no longer said that the external world was nothing but maya. On the contrary, human beings now had to immerse themselves into the world and work on it with their faculties and wisdom. That, however, resulted in human beings' gradually losing the consciousness of the spiritual world so that Zarathustra, the initiator of the Persian culture, felt compelled to tell his disciples: “All living beings are called into existence by the force that streams from the sun as physical force. But this physical force is not the only thing. In the sun lives Ahura Mazdao—the spiritual Sun Being.” It was necessary to demonstrate to people how the material world is but the physical expression of the spiritual world.