Lecture III

Now in connection with these two boundaries there is something quite definite to be said about this very life of the man of soul. If we go back in human evolution, go back perhaps farther than the eighth pre-Christian century (you remember that the year 747 begins the fourth post-Atlantean epoch), if we go back beyond this point of time into the earlier post-Atlantean epochs, then whet lies beyond this boundary was to a certain degree accessible to the human consciousness into which it worked. The atavistic clairvoyance still existing at that time rested indeed upon this. Certain impulses from the cosmos came through in those days and made themselves felt as atavistic powers of vision. We could therefore say that what is here outside us first became increasingly impenetrable—I mean intellectually impenetrable—after the eighth century before Christ. We are living now in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, and it is still impenetrable. And people are knocking at the boundary today, quite extraordinarily while continuing to maintain that no one is able to penetrate to the thing—call it how you will—lying beyond this boundary.