III. East and West

What did it mean to have this feeling: “I was a sentient-soul in the last incarnation”? It is an impossible feeling for present-day man, but in the early centuries of the fourth post-Atlantean period man could still remember it vividly. In the third epoch, the Egypto-Chaldean, it was the normal thing to experience—and it means that man was unaware that he was a thinking being. To have thoughts meant nothing to him; but he had an unbroken, vital feeling of standing, in connection with the outer world—an outer world entirely steeped in spirit.