I. Spiritual Science and the Future of Humanity

The spiritual-scientific investigation of the human soul and the conclusions, which you can draw from it, show that. Since at ancient times the human consciousness lagged far behind, it was different from that of today so that we can speak of times of the human development at which the human soul lived even in a kind of clairvoyant state of consciousness. However, it was not in such a way, as it is with the today's trained spiritual researcher. The clairvoyant state of the today's trained spiritual researcher takes place with full consciousness that he also has in the normal life. That was not the case with the old clairvoyant. He had a more dreamy clairvoyance, a dreamlike consciousness. It was in such a way that we can say, what the human being experiences today in his dreams is an atavistic rest of the ancient state of consciousness. While today dream images mostly mean nothing particular for the reality of the outside world, those old states of consciousness were images that you can compare, indeed, to our dream images, nevertheless, they were different from them. The images that were often symbolic were the contents of an old clairvoyant consciousness, which was not penetrated with modern intellectuality. In the soul of the prehistoric human beings, these images surged up and down. The prehistoric human beings possibly did not always have such pictorial consciousness. Wake states and sleeping states also alternated, but while these merge into each other with us and a mostly meaningless dream state is between them, the third state of consciousness existed in ancient times, the state of such a pictorial consciousness, in which our sensory images did not surge up and down in the soul but symbols as art has them at most in weakened form.