10. First Study: At the Gates of the Consciousness-Soul: How Michael in the Spiritual World is Preparing for His Earth-Mission through the Conquest of Lucifer

That which urges the soul to receive the Imaginations into its experience is the result not so much of faculties possessed by the soul in ancient times—through a dreamlike clairvoyance—but rather of faculties present in the periods between the eighth and the fourteenth centuries AD. These faculties were already pressing more strongly towards an understanding, in terms of thought, of what was perceived by the senses. Both kinds of faculties were present simultaneously during the transition period. The soul was placed between the old orientation, which penetrates to the spiritual world and sees the physical only as in a mist, and the new orientation, which is centred on physical happenings and in which the spiritual vision fades.