39. The Origin of Evil

Let us look at the beaver and his dam, building it with marvellous art—if one measures the angles then one will find they are quite exactly measured. So we could observe bit by bit everything that surrounds us. Could we now extract this wisdom from out the world unless it were there within it? The materialistic mood denies that the wisdom which man draws out is in the phenomena. But a natural thinking would tell you that something which man extracts from nature must be contained in it. As little as one can drink water from a glass if none is in it, just as little can one extract wisdom from the world if none is in it. But this wisdom is there and spiritual science knows that this wisdom was in all things at the beginning of earth evolution. Thus in a plant seed for example was a beech; as a proof of this we see a beech tree grows from it and not an oak. The earth carried the wisdom which meets us today already when the things around us were still in germ. Just as truly as the seed comes not from the earth but from the plant, so truly the seed from which our earth was born arose from what the earth was previously. That was the cosmos of wisdom. That which you see today in each leaf, in each organ in man's form, in everything spread out around you, slowly and gradually arose, formed itself member by member and only appeared after wisdom had struggled with wisdom. We had an embodiment on the previous stage of our earth where the wisdom of things was worked out in which, so to say, the things in their wisdom were worked over. What has our earth, to which this Wisdom has come over, for a task? It has its special mission. Just as its predecessor developed the wisdom which surrounds us today bit by bit, similarly our earth today develops bit by hit another cosmic force, and this force is love. Therefore in spiritual investigation we call the earth the Cosmos of Love. The evolution of the earth so runs its course that love appears as a force becoming more and more dominant, and when the earth will have reached its goal then everything will be penetrated by the force of love. Hence we call the earth the cosmos of love. Just as on the previous cosmos the beginning was made with un-wisdom and only gradually was the form of wisdom worked out, so this earth runs its course so that gradually love is worked out. Then when the earth has reached its goal love will be spread out everywhere, everything will be permeated with love, and the earth will have beings on it who will find love just as we find wisdom in everything that surrounds us. Those who will be on the new embodiment of the earth will stand wonderingly before love, just as we stand in wonderment before wisdom. Our earth has the holy mission of letting flow the impulse of love into things. The impulse is here to fulfil this mission, to make it deed. Thus we have to think of the structure of our earth as the cultivation of love going through the entire earth evolution of man. If we see this then we have a handle for understanding today's question, only we must be clear that man is not the only being around us. You know the spiritual investigator does not speak of the spiritual worlds as of something far off in the clouds, but he speaks of them in a natural and self understood way. A person born blind who has his eyes opened suddenly sees everything flooded with light and radiance. He sees a new world around him which was existing before just as light and colours existed before his eyes were opened. In this world which only an unlogical thinking can deny, other beings are existing with other forms of spirituality than man has. We can form an idea of these spiritual beings by bringing to mind that man is in a continual evolution. He must ascend ever higher and higher. In each incarnat-ion he experiences something, he becomes an ever more perfect being.