6. The Sermon on the Mount

This Dark Age was preceded by an age in which man was not dependent only upon his outer senses and intellect, but he still retained a memory, more or less, of the ancient dreamlike condition in which he was able to feel a connection with the spiritual world. It is of these ancient human times that we wish to create a picture. Not only could man see the mineral, plant, and animal realms, as well as himself within the physical, human realm, but he could also, in a condition between waking and sleeping, see a divine world. He saw himself as the lowest member of the lowest realm in the hierarchical order, above which were the angels, archangels, and so forth. He knew this through his own experience, so that it would have been absurd for him to deny the existence of this spiritual world, just as it would be absurd today to deny the existence of the mineral, plant, and animal realms. Not only did he possess a knowledge of what streamed toward him as wisdom from spiritual realms, but he had the capacity to become completely permeated with the forces of this domain. He was then in a state of ecstasy; his sense of I was submerged, but the spiritual world with its forms really flowed into him. He thus not only had a knowledge, an experience of the spiritual world, but he could, if he were ill, for instance, derive healing and refreshment by means of this ecstasy.