*The Challenge of the Times*


Chaos is necessary for the total course of events, and he must often take up his position in the midst of the chaotic, as well as in what has been harmonized.
Especially is our fifth post-Atlantean epoch such a time as causes man to pass through much that is chaotic.
But this is connected with the entire characteristic, the whole nature, of this epoch.

We are living at a time in which man must pass through those impelling forces in the course of evolution that set him upon his own feet and permeate him with individual consciousness.
We are living in the epoch of the consciousness soul.

We must ask ourselves what is the most profound characteristic of the evolution of the consciousness soul in our epoch.
The profoundest characteristic of this epoch is that man must become acquainted in the most profound and the most intense way with all those forces that oppose the harmonizing of humanity as a whole.
For this reason a conscious knowledge of those ahrimanic and luciferic powers working against man must gradually spread.
If he should not pass through these evolutionary impulses in which the luciferic and ahrimanic forces are participating, he would not arrive at the complete use of his consciousness, and thus at the development of his consciousness soul.

This integration of the consciousness soul into human nature has to be recognized as a strongly antisocial impulse.
Thus we have in our epoch the peculiar fact that the manifestation of social ideals appears as a reaction against what is striving to emerge out of the innermost nature of man, a reaction against the evolution of individual consciousness.
What I mean to say is that the reason we have such an outcry about the need of socializing is that the innermost nature of man, precisely in our age, is most violently opposed to this socializing.
For this reason it is necessary that we should obtain a view of everything in the cosmos, in the universe, that sustains a certain relationship to man, in order that we may become aware of the relationship existing between the antisocial impulses streaming today out of the depths of human souls and the clamor for social harmonizing, working like a reaction to what streams forth from the inner nature of the human soul.
It is simply necessary that we should come to see clearly that man represents in his life a state of balance between conflicting powers.

Every conception characterized by the idea of mere duality — a good and an evil principle — will always fail to illuminate life.
Life can be illuminated only when we represent it from the point of view of a trinity, in which one element represents a state of balance and the two others represent the opposite poles, between which the state of balance tends to move continually like a pendulum. This is the reason for the Trinity we undertake to represent in our Group.
The Representative of Man balancing Ahriman and Lucifer, which is to constitute the middle point of this building.
This consciousness of a state of balance for which one strives, but that is always in danger of swinging toward the one or the other side, must become the essential element in the world conception of this fifth post-Atlantean epoch.

Thus you see things are not so simple as people suppose in thinking that it is necessary only to think out one thing or another in order to propose ideals to men.
We must be able to look into reality.
We must be able to say what really governs and develops its powers amid these realities.
Man is faced, in fact, with the prospect of not being able any longer to base his life upon the merely unconscious or of finding it necessary to base his life upon the conscious element within life between birth and death.
The unconscious depends upon the breathing process and thus inevitably upon what is connected with the breathing process, upon the blood circulation, that is, upon the line of descent, upon connections by blood, upon heredity.
The culture that must come into existence cannot base the social order upon mere blood connections because these blood connections yield only one-seventh of what must be established in the culture of humanity.
The other six-sevenths must be added through the Christ impulse: In the fifth epoch, one; in the sixth epoch, the second; in the seventh epoch, the third.
The rest stretch out into the following periods of time. For this reason there must gradually develop in humanity what is connected with the true Christ impulse, and what is related to the mere Jehovah impulse must be superseded.


RUDOLF STEINER
7 December 1918, Dornach
https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA186/English/AP1941/19181207p01.html


Rudolf Steiner The Representative of Man balancing Ahriman and Lucifer