VI. Present and Future Evolution of the World and of Mankind

The fifth epoch brings a kind of repetition of what the third—the Egypto-Chaldean—contributed to mankind's evolution. In the third epoch the human soul was still able to perceive some at least of the realities of supersensible worlds, though the perception was dwindling. The intellectual faculties which were to shut man off from higher worlds for a time, although not yet developed, were impending. In the fifth epoch the supersensible facts, seen in the third in a dim state of consciousness, will become manifest once more, but taken hold of now by man's own intelligence, realized with individual feeling, and permeated too with what the soul has gained by knowledge of the Mystery of Christ. Hence in the fifth epoch they take on an altogether different form. When man received impressions from supersensible worlds in olden time, they felt like forces influencing and impelling him from an external spiritual world—a world in which he himself was not. Evolution, leading on into the new era, will have wrought a change. Man will now feel these impressions as emanating from a world into which he himself is growing—a world in which he too will have his place, ever more as time goes on. We have not to picture the repetition as though the human soul were simply to re-absorb what lived in the Egyptian and Chaldean culture and has been handed down traditionally. The Christ Impulse, truly understood and received into the soul of man, enables him to feel himself a member of a spiritual world, outside of which he was till now. Not only does he feel it thus; he knows it in full consciousness and bears himself accordingly.