43. The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Humanity III

This connection was most powerful with those teachers whom we call the sacred rishis of the Indians, the sacred teachers of the first post-Atlantean culture, that first Indian culture which spread throughout a certain area of Asia. When the Atlantean catastrophe had passed, the physiognomy of the earth had changed and the new organization of Asia, Europe and Africa had developed in the eastern hemisphere, the culture of the ancient great teachers of India was at work - even before the time to which we have now alluded from the legends of the Egyptians themselves. People today will generally have a rather false mental image of these great teachers of India. For if, for example, a scholar of today - a person who is called a “scholar” today - were to meet one of the great teachers of ancient India, he would make strange eyes and perhaps say: “This is supposed to be a ”sage"? I have never imagined a sage like that! - Because in the sense of what is wise or clever in today's scholars, the ancient holy teachers of India had nothing clever to say. They were all simple-minded people in the modern sense; people who answered in the simplest possible way even to questions of everyday life. And there were many, many times when you couldn't get much out of them other than this or that word, which would seem quite simple to a scholar today. But again, there were certain times for the holy teachers of India when they presented themselves as something other than mere plain men. At these times they had to be together in the number seven, because what each one of them could feel had to sound together harmoniously as in an octave of seven notes, so that each one had the possibility of feeling this or that according to his particular instrument and his particular development. And out of the harmony of what each individual felt, there then arose that which sounds out as the primordial wisdom, if we understand how to decipher the real occult documents, those documents which are not the Vedas or the Vedanta - however much we admire Vedas or Vedanta; but what the holy Rishis taught is much earlier still, and only a faint echo of it is what we have before us in the Vedas.