I. The Waking of the Human Soul and the Forming of Destiny

The nature of our link in association with these Beings is of determinative significance when we pass through the portal of death. For it is possible to know through spiritual vision that one is able to draw ever nearer to the Angels, the Archangels, the Beings of the Archai. But it is something which may become extremely bad for future human beings if they surrender themselves wholly to the Ahrimanic elemental Beings, if materialistic thinking, speaking, action become ever more habitual. Thanks to the spiritual world, however, human souls of the present time—at least as to most persons—have such an inheritance of a good mood in thinking, speaking and action that the materialism of the present time cannot degrade everything. Very materialistic persons do not possess out of the contemporary life on earth much that can render possible approach to the hierarchies, yet out of the life of the past there flows forth what brings them there. Yet humanity may very easily meet with a different reward if a spiritual conception of life is not acquired. The idealizing of thinking, speaking and action provides man with the possibility of creating in a certain way new connections with the three classes of divine-spiritual Beings—the Angels, the Archangels, the Archai—and this man needs for the time between death and a new birth. Otherwise, in a far future time, if he has not had a connection in the present time with the Angels, he must be born as a being crippled in thinking; if he has not entered into a union with the Archangels, as a man without language; if he has not had a connection with the Archai, as a being crippled in limbs and in moral impulses. It is within the power of mankind on earth, through materialism in civilization and culture, to drag the whole of earthly humanity down to ruin, or through spiritualizing to lift humanity to a loftier height, such as I described in my Occult Science as the Jupiter existence of the earthly beings.