I. Inner Experience of Language I

But these three consecutive periods will encroach upon each other considerably. What comes two expression in the sixth, and even what the seventh expresses, must already be unfolding in the fifth. There will not be so much differentiation in the future as there has been in the past. In the sixth period it will above all be necessary for men to cause the ahrimanic to be fettered, that is to come to terms with reality. How does one come to term with reality? For this it is essential in the first place that the life of rights that has separated from the cultural and economic spheres, that this life of rights in which men must live together democratically must now become as conscious in a higher way as it was unconscious in the Egypto-Chaldaic period. In everything that goes on between man and man, men must learn to experience significant processes on a higher level. Such ideas must become as living as they are presented in my last mystery play, in the Egyptian scene, where Capesius says that what takes place there in little has significance for the whole of world events. When men once more realise that no one can lie without a mighty uproar being made in the spiritual world, then things will be fulfilled as they must be in the sixth post-Atlantean period. And when we arrive once more at the possibility of a wise paganism alongside Christianity then what must come to pass in the seventh period, but is even now particularly essential, will be realised. Humanity has lost its relationship to nature. The gestures of nature no longer speak to man. How many can have any clear idea today when one says: in summer the earth is asleep, in winter awake? It seems a mere abstraction. But it is no abstraction. Such a relation to the whole of nature must be gained so that man can feel once more his identity with all nature.