6. Intuitive Insight in the Happy and Serious Hours of Life

As human beings we are carried by the stream of life. We drift along in this stream of life between our birth and our death, as it were. I would like to start with a comparison that illustrates this drifting along in the stream of life. When we sit in a train and travel along, looking out the window, it seems to us, at least at first, especially if we are not yet accustomed to traveling by train, as if the trees and houses were passing by, moving past us. — This is roughly how a person lives, traveling the journey of life with their worldviews and perceptions of life, in relation to the luck and misfortune, successes and failures of life. For how do luck and misfortune, successes and failures affect human nature? Just as human nature is initially conditioned by what it can draw from the physical world, so do happiness and unhappiness, success and failure, work in such a way that they always carry with them, as it were, our sense of the world, our sense of existence, that the world itself seems to pass before us in our feelings and sensations, depending on whether we experience suffering or pain in it. And just as we must first get used to traveling in the physical world in order to have the right point of view during this journey with regard to what only seemingly moves past us outside, so it is up to the human being to gain the right point of view in order to that he may remain calm in his feeling for the world, in his sense of existence — calm in the spiritual world, when happiness and sorrow, when success or failure seek to show him the sense of the world, the feeling of existence, in motion, in seeming motion.