I. The Transforming of Instinctive into Conscious Impulses

And the third thing, my dear friends, is this: Man must learn to recognize the full power of the impulse of self-seeking, the impulse of egoism. Our age is destined to make it fully clear to man to what an extent, if he lets himself go, he is a selfish being. To overcome egoism, we must first have probed and realized all the sources of egoism that are there in human nature. Love only arises as the counterpart to self-love. We must cross the abyss of selfishness if we would learn to know that social warmth which has to penetrate the social structure of the present and the future; if we would learn to know it, above all, not only in theory but in full practice. And to approach this feeling—which the Initiate sees with fully conscious clarity, when face-to-face with the Guardian of the Threshold as he enters into the sense-world—this again fills man with fear. But there is no other way of entering into the age which must necessarily bring forth a social structure, than by a Love which is not self-love, which is a true Love for other men and interest in other men. Men feel this as a burning fire, as something that would consume them and take their own being from them, inasmuch as it deprives them of self-love, or the right to self-love. Even as they flee the super-sensible, of which they are afraid because it is to them an unknown region, so do they flee from Love, because it is to them a burning fire. And even as they bind their eyes and shut their ears to the truth of the super-sensible, when in the Marxism and in the misguided proletarian thinking of today they keep repeating that all things must be based on the tangible and the material—even as in this domain they go after the very opposite of that which lies in the real tendency of human evolution—so do they also in the realm of Love. Even in the catch-words and slogans this finds expression. They set up idealism, the very opposite of what really lies in the evolution of mankind and must be striven after.