Notes from the Second Lesson in London

For the sake of our esoteric development, a person has to stop feeling cut off from our cosmic environment. Let us ask about the relationship of our day life to our surrounding cosmic world. Around us a person perceives the mineral, plant, and animal world. Yet he feels separate from this world in his body. This isolated existence in body was good for his own development. But today there is a tendency to separate oneself too much from the world, really, not merely in thoughts. Every night we enter the realm of sleep from which only chaotic dreams well up to the surface. Instead of being among animals and plants there, we are surrounded at best by shadow images of them. We are infinitely alone with ourselves there. Our dream life is filled with infinite loneliness and this continues to work on in our daytime consciousness. We continue to dream on in our illusions, and out of this arise all the things that are rooted in our egoism. On our way to the godlike spiritual we have to overcome this egoism. This proper feeling, this attitude of mind must give rise to the beginning of an esoteric path. Whomever is not willing in a certain way to break with all that has formed itself in his ordinary self will not get far along an esoteric path, for we are concerned here with a genuine turning point in development. For the world, much depends on how many human beings will find their way on to a truly esoteric path.