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

And if we immerse ourselves in pain? Truly, spiritual science is not meant to be a sentimental consolation for the pains of life; spiritual science cannot make a person a shallow person. Whatever causes us pain must cause us pain, that is salutary; for pain hardens us for life, pain hardens our strength. Thus spiritual science does not seek to gloss over pain. On the contrary, one will penetrate even deeper into it, one will have to savor its essence to the full, especially when one has become spiritually enlightened. But just as we can gain strength of will and mind from happiness, so from pain there will come a strengthening of knowledge, the certainty of knowledge, and the strengthening and certainty of another part of the mind, more than can be gained from happiness. Just as the man who dies a martyr's death to the sorrows of life shows us, in a wonderfully moving way, the victory of the light over the darkness of life, so man, by bringing his spirit-conscious self into pain, perceives how the spiritually aware self rises above the pain, but, in rising above it, becomes ever more radiant and radiant and is filled with that light that is a beacon in the storm of life and in the struggle for existence.