42. The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Humanity II

There again we feel something of the spiritual guidance of humanity: nothing can be placed in the world without preparation. Why did Paul find the best followers in Greece? Because the ground was prepared there through Socratism by the mood that we have now characterized. In other words, what is happening now takes us back to events that had an effect there in the past and made people ready to accept what would come later. Do we not feel how far the impulse reaches that goes through human evolution and places the right people at the right moment where they are needed for evolution, but which also lifts us beyond ourselves in some moments of life, where we come to a true self-knowledge, where we try to make an effort to go beyond the ordinary person to see higher worlds, to come to powers that the ordinary person does not have. In ordinary life we often make ourselves ill and so on. Within us are the forces that make us foolish and ill and unwise; within us are the forces that lead us beyond ourselves in the world. Such are the forces that are at work in historical development, that are at work in the individual. So in the workings of the whole of humanity - so in the single individuality. Let us learn to feel this. Let us feel what goes through people as a force and impulse from epoch to epoch, but also from age to age.