III. Man and the World

Now one might perhaps believe that it is not necessary for a person to occupy himself with this spiritual-soul element within him, because this spiritual-soul element will already find its way in the world. But that is not the case. That which is spiritual and soul in us takes hold of us and is in us, and is to some extent wrapped in our body, in part in our abilities, in part in our destiny. And one could say: It is precisely in the present developmental cycle of humanity, in which humanity has now arrived and in whose sense it will continue to develop towards the future, precisely in the sense of this present and the future, that the human being, as a spiritual principle of his body, as a spiritual principle of his life and his abilities, as a spiritual principle of his destiny, redeems what has become incarnate in him. We cannot escape the spirit. The spirit lives in us. We can leave it out of consideration, but it still lives in us. We can look at the laziest, most comfortable, most casual person who has never made an effort in his life to bring something that lies as a religious or spiritual disposition in his mind to independent development, who has remained quite dull, so to speak. We can look at him: he is not spiritless. To speak of people as spiritless is just an incorrect word. There are no spiritless people; nor is it possible to be spiritless in life. For the spiritual and the soul are our endowment when we enter the physical world from the spiritual worlds; they are allotted to us according to what we have gone through before we descended to this present life on earth. We cannot be without spirit, but we can disregard the spirit within us. We can, as it were, sin against it, we can refuse to want to redeem it. We can want it to merely slip into us, to shroud itself within us: then it is present in us, but we have not liberated it within us, we have not redeemed it.