Now nobody who strives honestly for self-knowledge today can fail to come to the conclusion that he is incapable of laying hold of that for which he is striving; that his power of comprehension lags behind his striving. He feels the ineffectiveness of his efforts. This is a very real experience. A certain feeling of ineffectiveness is experienced by everyone who in the quest for self-knowledge takes honest counsel with himself. It is a wholesome feeling, for it is nothing else than awareness of the sickness in us, and when we have an illness without being aware of it, then we are all the more ill. In feeling at some point in our life the powerlessness to lift ourselves to the Divine, we become aware of that sickness of which I have spoken, the sickness that has been implanted into us. And in becoming aware of this sickness, we feel that as the body is today, our soul would be condemned to die with it.
Source: Rudolf Steiner – GA 182 – How Do I Find the Christ? – Zürich, October 16th, 1918
Translated by A. P. Shepherd, D.D., and D. S. Osmond
Previously posted on February 16, 2020
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