IX. Moses, His Teaching and His Mission

The further back we go, the more we come to another form of human consciousness. Although what we call our present waking and sleeping consciousness has already been prepared in the millennia we are talking about today, in those ancient times, which still reach into the oldest times of Egyptian culture and of which external history does not know much to report, there was a kind of old clairvoyant consciousness, a kind of pictorial consciousness. It was this consciousness that asserted itself as a third state of consciousness, like an intermediate state between waking and sleeping. The waking consciousness, as it is today and on which our present-day view of the world is based, was preparing itself in its beginnings, and our “sleeping unconsciousness” was also essentially already present. But people still had a third form of consciousness that was not permeated by those thoughts, concepts and ideas through which we today enlighten ourselves about our environment. It was filled with images, of which the symbols of today's dream are an atavism. But in these images, which undulated up and down, nothing was arbitrary, but these images could be clearly related to supersensible facts and entities that stand behind our sensual world, so that in this state, man actually of an ancient clairvoyance, he reached into the spiritual, into the supersensible world and, from direct experience, from the ancient, dream-like consciousness of clairvoyance, had knowledge of what takes place in the spiritual world.