XXII. The Esoteric Life

If we look far back into early humanity with the occult eye, we come to a strange discovery. In ancient Lemuria and also later, in the Atlantean era, as the Akashic Records teach us, man felt the influence of his surroundings much more than he does today. The physical possibility of sleeping depended on the sunrise or sunset. In another way, people were subject to the influences of the moon. Certain bodily functions depended with great precision on the cosmic clock. Certain events occurred at sunrise and sunset. It was physically impossible at that time to turn night into day, as it happens now in our big cities. Mankind lived in harmony with the rhythms of nature. The fact that this harmony was lost in Lemuria was due to the unconscious ego. It was only with the conscious development of this ego that disharmony arose. The ego began to show its self-awareness by deviating from the rhythms of nature. The activities that had previously been connected with the course of the sun and moon were postponed. Until this time, when this took place (in the epoch of the transition to the fifth race), man had possessed a kind of dreamy clairvoyance. Now, in conquering our present form of consciousness, which, as I said, first expressed itself in the deviation from the rhythms of nature, this clairvoyance was temporarily lost. The effectiveness of the self that had awakened to consciousness consisted in the ordering and purifying of the astral body, and this purified and ordered part became Manas. This Manas encompasses all thoughts, all memories, every intellectual function, and we can call it the self of the spirit, the spirit self. And it is the task of the self to make the astral body a manasic body through purification. But how can clairvoyance and clairaudience, which used to be part of the human being, even if only in a dreamlike way, but has been lost through deviation from the rhythm of nature, be acquired again? This can only be done by the influence of the principle of Budhi on the etheric body, which is its shadow in the lower worlds. In this way it can be conquered again, but not in a dream-like state, but with full consciousness.