When the strife and cataclysms of the fifth Great Epoch are finally behind us, the small band of surviving good humans will lay a new basis for further human evolution.
“Those few individuals who survived on earth the War of All Against All, together with the many spiritually minded individuals who had lifted themselves above it, provide the foundation for a new start.” [1]
Combat and racial cleansing will produce a much needed form of segregation:
“Progressive people [will] have radiant, good features and noble benevolent expressions; those who were lukewarm or turned away, preserving backward forces and retarding evolution, [will] reveal their evil passions and impulses hostile to the spirit in ugly, unintelligent, evil-looking countenances ... Mankind is [i.e., will be] thus divided into two great streams, the good and the evil [emphasis by Seddon].” [2]
As we've seen, such segregation — on a large scale or small — is deeply woven into our evolutionary pattern, according to Steiner. Always, there has been, is, and will be a sorting out, with the evil races falling and evil individuals falling. Individuals may descend to lower races, and they may even descend further, becoming beings that are inhuman, subhuman.
Steiner includes a general tendency of the good humans to help the evil. This, too, can be seen far in our future and stretching far back into our past. “Souls whose development has been delayed will have accumulated so much error, ugliness, and evil in their karma that they temporarily form a distinct union of evil and aberrant human beings who vehemently oppose the community of good human beings.” [3]
The good humans use some surprising techniques to rescue the evil ones. “In the course of its development, the good portion of humankind will learn to use the Moon forces to transform the evil part [of mankind] so that it can participate in further evolution as a distinct earthly kingdom.” [4] But don't get too excited. By "distinct," Steiner meant separate. The good will save the bad, but the bad will still be far below, separated from the good. They will be so far behind in evolution, they will be able to advance only on their own, separate, more retarded track.
And some people will be beyond help. Steiner taught that some people are not really human at all — they are demons in disguise or other sorts of subhumans: "they are filled with beings that do not belong to the human class ... they are not reincarnated, but are human forms filled with a sort of natural demon.” [5] And some wicked people, human to being with, may eventually drop out of our evolution, becoming subhuman. "Beings that stay behind at such stages appear in a later epoch as subordinate nature spirits." [6] Nature spirits are beings such as goblins that have no real spiritual identities.
So.
Anyway.
The strife and cataclysms of the fifth Great Epoch will give way to the more peaceful time of the the sixth Epoch, which will be the time of the seals.
The seals are not, as you may have thought, sea lions. Rather, they are the holy seals that will be opened to reveal marvelous new truths: “Therefore it was to these earthquakes [don't ask] that the writer was referring in the opening of the seals and the sounding of the trumpets.” [7] “The writer” is St. John, the presumed author of the Book of Revelation. But modern scholarship debunks this presumption — a point that Steiner, who was so good at describing the future, failed to foresee. [8]
As the seals are opened and — in the seventh Great Epoch, yet to come — the trumpets are sounded, Christ will become more and more infused into the souls of the good and into the very essence of human reality. He will have come again, but only in the etheric realm. Physical reality will subside, and good humans will grow ever more spiritual, while the bad humans... “Rather than feeling oneself the ruler of nature, one [i.e., a good human] here [i.e., then] feels [i.e., will feel] oneself as a child of the [spiritual] Hierarchies and a companion of the deceased [!]. [paragraph break] A third of those who began evolution have at this stage attained the goal, a third will only do so later, and a third are falling away." [9] Falling...
The Moon reunited with the Earth back in the seventh Age of the fifth Great epoch (I forgot to mention this), which naturally has had various startling effects. The good souls who are giving humanity a new start in the sixth Great Epoch will find their “inner life, consisting of all they have done, good and bad, which we call 'I,' is now inside the whole sphere of the moon envelope." [10]
The Moon will loom large. “The first task for this age must be to master the initial interaction between the moon and the earth, and especially to control the spiderlike network of intellectual automata." [11] You see, when the Moon reunited with the Earth, there sprang forth "a terrible brood of beings, automata lying between the mineral and plant kingdoms, possessed of an overwhelming power of intellect." [12] Intellect is dangerous, demonic, according to Steiner (for obvious reasons — anyone who thinks about his doctrines intelligently is likely to burst into laughter and find better things to do).
So.
Anyway.
The good humans will do good stuff, they will evolve, and things will get better and better.
To be continued.
