Lecture V

Having reached this conception, we may now ask, “How can one speak about being confronted with a Luciferic being?” When, in the world of the higher hierarchies, we feel thus influenced to draw away from eternity to a state of independent concentration in the world, then it is that we feel the working of Lucifer. When we have experienced that, then we know how the forces that are Luciferic can be described. They may be described in the way I have just shown, and only then does it become possible to speak with reality of a contrast that even finds an echo in our world of the senses. This contrast simply arises from the realisation that in sensory existence it is quite natural for us to be placed into the temporal, whereas in the spiritual world that lies—to speak from a transitory point of view—above the astral world, it is natural for us no longer to perceive what is temporal, but only what is eternal. This devachanic experience that appears there as a longing for temporal life is echoed in the longing for eternity. The interplay of actually experienced time—time experienced in the passing moment—with the longing for eternity, arises because of the penetration of our world of the senses by the devachanic world, the world of spirit-land. Just as for ordinary sense perception, the spirit-land is hidden behind our physical world, so the eternal is hidden behind the passing moment. Just as there is no point where we can say, “Here ends the world of the senses, and here begins the spiritual world,” but everywhere the spiritual world permeates sensory existence, so each passing moment, in accordance with its quality, is permeated by eternity. We do not experience eternity by coming out of time, but by being able to experience it clairvoyantly in the moment itself. We are guaranteed eternity in the passing moment; in every moment it is there.