Lecture IX

Above all other things, it is necessary that man should once more rise above the egoistic habit of living only in his own soul. A word of truth in the Gospels—and how many words that we read in the Gospels are not taken according to their true meaning because they do not please us—a word of truth in the Gospels is, “Where two or three are gathered in My name, there am I in the midst of them.”[^2] The spirit of vain mysticism that says, “The Christ shall be born in my soul,” is not the spirit of Christianity; that spirit declares, “Where two or three are gathered in My name, there am I in the midst of them.” However, in order to explain the entire spirit of this saying in connection with repeated earthly lives, as we wish to do in these reflections, and also in connection with the vocational life of a human being today, I must discuss something especially characteristic of our age. We must learn to rise above the egoistic limitation within our human nature. In a sense applicable to our time, we must rise above this by learning once again to know and think of the cosmos with which the human being is related and from which he is born by learning to think of it in relation to man.