18. The Origin of Evil and the Evil in the Light of Spiritual Science

Just to clarify, it should be emphasized that the facts of spiritual science show that human life cannot be imagined as something simple, but must be understood as an interplay of different spheres of the world, whose forces can be beneficial in one world and harmful in another. The human organism as a whole must develop different forces in one particular sphere of life than in another. Thus, a locomotive can easily run over a person who, in despair, throws himself in front of its wheels and thus comes into conflict with the forces that could have been beneficial to him if he had used the train as a passenger. We thus become aware of how, on the one hand, forces must be developed that become evil on the other, and it is precisely these that can lead human beings up into the spiritual worlds; for in these forces, which have an evil effect in the physical world, higher forces prevail in a good, beneficial sense in the sphere that suits them. Thus, evil becomes transparent in its meaning as a product of the transformation of forces in human life, so that we finally arrive at the fact that this evil is the reversal of a higher good in a sphere of activity that is not appropriate for it.