Human Knowledge and Its Significance for Man and the Cosmos

Now it is exactly the same with the knowledge we acquire about the things of the outer world, of outer Nature. The knowledge we thus acquire passes over into a different sphere of working. I beg you to take this truth in the deepest earnestness. In our efforts to understand the outer world it is possible for us to deprive ourselves of many of the forces that are necessary to the process of the transformation of our present body into the head of the next incarnation. As we acquire knowledge of the outer world, we deprive our being of a very great deal, and an adjustment must be brought about by providing that this knowledge passes over into another sphere. Just as the grains of wheat receive in a sense a nobler function when they are used as foodstuff for human beings, just as they receive compensation in this way for having been diverted from their original evolution, so too, knowledge of the outer world must be given over to a nobler purpose as compensation for having been deprived of its primary function. All the truth that a human being makes his own, all the knowledge he acquired of the outer world must be given into the hands of the Gods. We ought always to be inwardly conscious that the knowledge thus diverted from the onward stream of evolution must be placed in the service of the Gods, must, as it were, become an act of divine worship. All the knowledge we acquire without making it a holy offering to the evolutionary process of humanity, without consciously offering it to those Higher Spirits who receive their nourishment from it—all the knowledge we receive without thought of giving it over to this higher purpose, is like the grains of wheat which fall into the soil and decay—fulfilling neither their original purpose nor the other purpose of serving as nourishment for human beings.