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Know the reality
There follows a summary of how Rudolf Steiner might have described man’s position in our epoch. There is only one path open to a description of this type and this is highly metaphorical. However, the descriptive force of the message wrapped in metaphors depends on the reader first knowing the reality of the world.
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Overtime it has happened that man has descended, through different degrees of consciousness, to physical thought. He had to carry out an inner activity in which the divine-spiritual beings no longer acted. In ancient times he acted with the imagination and intuition that were given to him by the invisible Masters, the Gods, but later he had to lose this help, in order to win his freedom. Having lost his true inner dimension, he is currently in such a condition that no matter how much he can grasp the whole outside world with his thought of his, he cannot grasp the depth of inner reality. The superficiality of his intellectual level does not allow him to find the Gods, but he finds a being who gives him the answers, gives him the possibility to organise the world, knowledge, the economy, the future, everything that can be understood and organised through fallen thought. The being he finds is the one that Rudolf Steiner defines as the most dazzling intelligence on Earth: Ahriman. At that same level, that of fallen thought, however, man can also encounter Christ. It can be said that at that level man encounters the presence of Christ and the presence of Ahriman on the same level. Of course not because Christ and Ahriman are on the same level, but they are for the man who thinks with the thought of one fallen. Man has the possibility, through Christ, of rediscovering the I as he was originally. However, on the level of reflected thought he finds more easily a force that gives him everything organised: knowledge, physical,mathematical, philosophical knowledge, ethics, logic, administrative capacity, and also politics, the judiciary, medicine, even art, religion, metaphysics and meditation. It is all in the kingdom of Ahriman! Man is put in a position to know this dazzling power, but he also has the ability to perform an act of freedom and reject the easy path of Ahriman, to find the more difficult one of Christ. But he can't find Christ if he first doesn't know the reality of the world.
© John Dunn.
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