In this history of human consciousness, Steiner explains how humanity’s spiritual conception of the world ended in the fourth century A.D., when it became impossible to find the spirit in outer nature. Since then, we have been living in an increasingly spiritual inner world, yet on a disintegrating, dying Earth. Although people have been asleep to the spiritual reality that surrounds us, Steiner shows a way out of today’s blind materialism that takes us toward a new spiritual perception and knowledge, which is the only way that we will find the enlivening presence of Christ, and thereby of our very existence, in our time.

In these lectures, Steiner also talks about the inner nature of numbers, the Mystery of the Grail, and the development of materialism, emphasizing how need to overcome materialism as a world view now that it has fulfilled its task of making us citizens of the physical-sensory Earth. Through a contemplative study of spiritual science, we can, now with our modern form of intellectual consciousness, gradually become again citizens of the spiritual world.