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

What is put into life is intertwined in such a way that different spheres collide. The spiritual submerges into the physical-sensual and experiences itself there quite differently than it could experience itself in the spiritual alone. As a result, the spiritual grows stronger in a way that would not have been possible without this submersion. Indeed, one could say that certain developments could not have occurred in the spiritual world if evil had not existed in the world, just as no germ of a new plant can arise without the withering away of the flower and part of the mother plant. In every painful experience there is a necessary descent, so that the germ of something new, higher and more luminous, can develop in the bosom of a sphere that is initially foreign to it, from which something must be sacrificed for this purpose, that is, for this development; and in this dying away is the necessity for all evil. In the evil and pain of this world lie the seeds for a future development.