Understanding Spiritual Worlds Without Direct Vision

When we survey present-day spiritual life, perhaps what sinks most deeply into the soul is all that may be said about the Guardian of the Threshold. He stands there because the human soul in ordinary existence is not sufficiently mature to live through and experience all that takes place in super-sensible worlds. He stands there for our protection. That is just as true as that the human soul, living on into the future, will have to experience more and more about super-sensible worlds. The reason why the Guardian stands there is because, were the human soul to pass into super-sensible worlds before it was ready, which can never happen on an authentic occult path, this soul would feel that it had fallen into what was infinitely fearful, infinitely terrible. This is because in their pettiness and immaturity, in their love of sensory existence and dependence on it, men could never bear all that is connected with the entrance into super-sensible worlds. Why, one cannot even approach those who want to be progressive, with all that our modern life demands! From the place from which, up to now, we have been allowed to reveal super-sensible truths, we have been obliged to point out how, in the course of the twentieth century, a super-sensible event will come to pass in the human super-sensible body when man, as if through a natural occurrence, will find the risen Christ. So much we were able to point out. But this reappearing Christ will not sail the sea in ships, nor travel in trains, nor airships. He will go into the individual being of man, into what passes from human soul to human soul. There, according to how these souls are constituted, He will be recognised by the means given in the etheric. What thus we are allowed to tell of the manner in which the risen Christ will be revealed seems feeble as compared with what will actually come to the soul of man, straight from the super-sensible world because men would like to see with physical eyes the Mighty Being Who is to come. They would like to picture Him going by airplane or travelling by sea. They would like to be able physically to touch and glorify Him Who should come. The reason is that they dread coming into actual contact, with the super-sensible.