Twelfth Lecture

We know more, if I may express it paradoxically, than we are allowed to keep to ourselves, and our needs intersect in this respect. Whoever shares something with another should in turn receive something from another. It can't be any other way. So we shower each other with spiritual life, we pour out our riches on each other. That too is a peculiarity of this spiritual life. We have too much. We bring with us too much for this material world, because the spiritual life that we bring with us as thinking beings is at the same time destined for the supersensible. Because the supersensible lives itself out in it, it floods this physical world, as it were, like a flood. It is quite different when we turn our attention to economic life. There it is not the case that we so easily communicate our thoughts to others. First of all, we often do not want to do so. If we wanted to communicate thoughts of economic life to others as easily as we do with thoughts of pure teaching life, no one would patent anything, no one would keep a trade secret. The desire to communicate is not as great as in the field of spiritual culture. And you only have to imagine what the situation is in economic life to immediately see that there is no such flood of ideas passing from one person to another, but that things are quite different there.