IX. World-Thoughts in Michael, and World-Thoughts in Ahriman

The age, now beginning to dawn, requires that men's eyes should be turned to a world which lies, as spiritual world, on the very borders of the seemingly physical one, and in which they may find things such as the Michael Being and the Michael Mission, here described. For that world, which Man paints to himself as a picture of the natural world, from the view he has of the seemingly physical one, is not even that world in which he is immediately living, but one that lies as far below the real world of Man, as the Michael-world lies above it. Only Man does not notice that unconsciously, when he sets out to paint his own world, it is really the picture of another which emerges. In the very painting of this picture, he has already begun to eliminate himself, and to fall into spiritual automatism. Man can only save his manhood, when, over against this picture—which he takes for a view of nature, and where he himself is lost—he sets that other one, which shows Michael as he rides on high, Michael leading the way to Christ.