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

What is joined together in the human being in terms of his or her essential parts takes on a different composition in terms of the finer relationships in happiness and in suffering. When we experience happiness, when the soul plunges into this happiness, or even when it submerges into its successes, what then happens to human nature? Then, as it were, what is otherwise dormant in human nature tears itself out of the inner being, pursuing what penetrates into us from the outside in the form of happiness and success; the human being becomes estranged from his inner self, he ceases to be merely in himself. The human being enters into a foreign place. This becoming alien to oneself, this coming out of oneself, is what presents itself to us, as it were, as the one pendulum swing of human inner experience in happiness. When a person experiences pain, when he has failures, then the soul-spiritual, fleeing the pain, the failures, withdraws deeper into the inner being than it would have to ; it is then as if the soul contracts, so that the person does not lose themselves in the outer world, as they would in happiness and success, but withdraws into themselves. And since man is so constituted that he can only find peace and satisfaction in harmonious connection with the world, his contracted inner being brings him just as much out of harmony with life as he is estranged from his nature by being absorbed in happiness and success. This is the other pendulum swing of the human inner life in relation to a life of happiness and success: the desire to live entirely within oneself, to flee from the world because it wants to pour failure and pain over us. However, it is necessary for the overall human experience that the person has these two pendulum swings; it is only a matter of how he experiences them. If he does not experience them, then he even seeks them out. And I want to show, in the context of this reflection, how he can seek out this alienation, which we experience in the natural course of happiness, where man is no longer within himself, where he wants to merge into an element that is alienated from his actual self.