III. The Relation of the Human Being to Nature

In this way, we also learn to find the soul in a plant, in an animal, in a mineral. We learn to know the soul of a whole people. An entire people has a common soul and what one calls the Folk-soul is not a dead term; it is something real. When a people arise, let’s say the Goths, and perish again, this is like the birth and death of a single human being. But in the whole people lives some soul essence and the individual beings are the limbs of this Folk-soul, embedded into the Folk-soul’s substance, which in turn has its fates, sufferings and joys. First, we gain an idea, then increasingly more knowledge of how the world around us is suffused everywhere with pleasure and pain, old and young—as it is within ourselves. This is what through the theosophical teachings turns us into different human beings. This means acquiring theosophical understanding, implementing theosophy intimately in your life, as if the theosophical concept was a seed, which we plant into suitable Earth. Then it starts to sprout and becomes blossom and fruit when it becomes an emotion and a feeling and when we immerse ourselves through our emotions and feelings deeply, deeply into our environment. When through theosophy plants and stones become not only objects of observation, but our friends and fellow beings, who warm up to us through theosophical observation, whom we learn to love, like we love human beings, then by and by we will gain understanding, a perspective will open up about the enormous educational value of theosophy for the whole future. Imagine human beings in two, three, four, five centuries who will not only have concepts about karma and reincarnation but will walk through the world with such emotions as we have indicated here. All of human life and all education will be different when the human being will be able to perceive everywhere the pulse of other beings. If he places his hand on a tree and feels the pulse of the Earth, if he smashes a stone and shares the emotions of bliss that the stone soul experiences, and if he becomes conscious that the Earth had to suffer pain, then the human being will walk across this Earth differently. Life then will be different, and the right empathy, through the human beings themselves, will prevail and be alive.