13. Common Ground Above Us, Christ In Us

In our culture-epoch, it must be in such a way that we realise: what developed in us by the usual civilisation must be the consciousness-soul. It must be that which since the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth centuries started seizing the human beings as a science, as an external materialistic consciousness that will spread out farther, and is completely developed until the end of the fifth culture-epoch. That, however, which must seize the sixth culture-epoch must be the spirit-self. Then the spirit-self must be developed in the souls like now the consciousness soul is developed. However, this is the characteristic of the spirit-self that it presupposes these three traits of which I have spoken in the human souls as spiritual science says it: brotherly social living together, freedom of thought, and pneumatology. A human community just needs these characteristics within which the spirit-self is developed as the consciousness-soul in our souls of the fifth post-Atlantean culture-epoch by the external culture. Hence, we are allowed to imagine that, because we unite in study groups brotherly, that hovers invisibly over our work. It is like the child of those forces which are the forces of the spirit-self which is cultivated by the beings of the higher hierarchies, so that it can flow down into our souls when they are there again in the sixth culture-epoch. In our brotherly study groups we perform work which flows up to the growing forces preparing the spirit-self.