This except is taken from R. Steiner's 11th lecture "The Post-Atlantean Cultural Epochs" in the cycle of lectures: 'At the Gates of Spiritual Science'.
"The Atlantean did not raise himself to his God through concepts and ideas. He discerned something holy in nature as a keynote of the Divine; it was as though he breathed in and breathed out his God. If he wished to express what he heard in this way, he would embody it in a sound similar to the Chinese T-A-O. For the Atlantean this was the sound which pervaded the whole of nature. When he touched a leaf, or saw a flash of lightning, he was aware that part of the Godhead was displayed before him; it was as if he were touching the garment of the Divine. Just as we make contact with some element in a man's soul when we shake hands with him, so the Atlantean, when he took hold of a form in nature, felt that he was touching the body of the Godhead. He lived in a religious feeling quite different from our own. The Atlantean, too, was still clairvoyant and was thus in direct communication with the world of spirits.
But then the type of thinking associated with logic and mathematical calculation began to develop, and the more it did so, the more did clairvoyance fade away. People began to concern themselves more with what the senses could perceive externally, and so nature was increasingly divested of divinity. People acquired a new gift at the cost of an old one. In proportion as they achieved the gift of exact sense-observation, they ceased to understand nature as the body of the Godhead. Gradually they came to see before them only the body of the world, and not its soul. But as the result of this a yearning for the Divine arose once more in man. In his heart it was written: Behind nature there must be God. And he came to realise that he must seek for God with his spirit. That is in fact the meaning of the word ‘religion’: to try to re-establish a connection with the Godhead; religere means to re-unite."
commentary....Steiner's exacting research was grounded in what today is called Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. This form of research, a dawning capability of the consciousness is directed to the intuitive dimensions of the human spirit which is itself only beginning to evolve in humanity and will further develop in the future. Steiner's fully developed conscious and direct reading of the Akasha (Sanskrit for World or Cosmic Memory), a possibility well known and practiced in the ancient Mysteries, is now new since the beginning of the 20th century, with Steiner's pioneering work. The difference, now from all ancient practices which were more or less mystically induced, creates a distinct possibility of penetrating into the spiritual world through ever higher stages of cognition, forever dismissing any and every limitation of the boundaries of human knowledge. Spiritual Science is a free-will, intensely evolved state of one's higher faculty of clear and active thinking. In this view, gradually possible little-by-little, and for more of humanity of the future, human thought (and through it a new ethical will-practice of life) becomes filled with warm and deeper power of conscience; will be able to fully discern the great spiritual laws of reincarnation and karma; will have an ever greater power to lovingly co-create in community.
The accompanying state of clear clairvoyance will reveal itself most effectively through cultivating what can be called a 'Grail Mood' which always begins with reverence for all existence and for Truth and Knowledge. and will become a spiritual possession of the humanity achieved through each individuals strength of heart-will.
In it's fullest expression then, the highest stage of human evolution will have helped to build the...
Royal Temple of Love gained through True Freedom...The human self which began as an invividually endowed 'dew drop of the spirit' will have fulfilled the mission of conscious and full re-unification with the Spirit of the Cosmos.....the Tao will have become fulfilled..
it seems appropriate to here again post this quote:
"The TAO expresses -- for the greater part of humanity as it has already expressed for millennia-- the highest to which humanity could aspire, and of which humanity thought that the world, the whole of humanity, will one day aspire. It is the highest that the human being carries as a seed, which one day will blossom fully out of innermost human nature. TAO signifies both a deep, hidden fundament of the soul and an exalted future."
Rudolf Steiner, November 16, 1905 (whole lecture as yet untranslated)
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