39. The Origin of Evil

It was the view of the great Egyptian priestly magi that the ‘I’ was veiled but that the coverings must fall away. No other can solve the nature of the ‘I’ than the ‘I’ itself when it becomes conscious of its true nature by descending into its own depths where it grasps itself in its own immortality; then it knows what is concealed behind the veil. Of course only the very few today are inclined to gaze into the nature of the ‘I’, the utterance of Fichte still holds good: Most people would sooner regard themselves as a piece of lava in the moon than as an ‘I’. Since Fichte we have seen the coarse materialism flow into the culture of the 19th century. People today are very satisfied when they can partially know something physical and demonstrate it materialistically. They regard themselves as being more like a piece of lava in the moon than an ‘I’. It would be nonsensical to speak of the higher members of man's nature if in the sense of spiritual investigation one were to speak of the fourth member as a mere phenomenon of the physical body. Naturally spiritual investigation must have something in this sphere which must appear very stupid to a person who so often thinks today that everything must rest on the basis of scientific facts. That which occurs in the etheric body, the astral body and the ‘I’ is not the effect of the physical body but the reverse. What transpires in the physical and etheric bodies is the work of the astral body. Only when one gradually raises oneself to this view is one able to answer this question.