But disappointments, sorrows and suffering will certainly bring about in the beings the urge or desire to find the cause of the misery. Terrestrial human beings therefore gradually profit from their experiences. While sufferings in the being give rise to the faculty to know the difference between genuine pleasantness and unpleasantness, which in turn means to develop its feeling both mentally and physically, the struggle for existence gives rise in the being's consciousness to the faculty of intelligence. And with the development of these two great faculties there can be no avoiding culture being formed in the being's consciousness. Well-developed feeling reveals itself as the faculty to feel compassion and enables the being to feel the urge to help other living beings in need, whereas the faculty of intelligence enables the being to regulate this urge to feel compassion so that it is logical. Such a harmoniously regulated sympathy with other living beings is the same as what we call "love". And the development of this "love" for all living beings will be the provisional result of everyday terrestrial life.
      But also developing at the same time as this "love" is the being's liberation from matter. To love one's neighbour is really the same as to love life. For the living being there actually exist only two outer factors: matter and its neighbour, and these in turn are respectively the same as death and life. To love matter is the same as to think about matter. And whatever one thinks about, one becomes, that is to say, it develops in one's consciousness. Because matter, as already mentioned, is the same as death, one will develop death in one's consciousness if one loves matter above all things. And was it not also precisely this that Adam and Eve were told would be a consequence of "eating of the tree of knowledge"? And what is "eating of the tree of knowledge" other than precisely an excessive revelling in material phenomena and material goods, as well as a corresponding excessive struggle against equally material evils? That such a being only has thoughts for matter, matter and yet more matter in its consciousness is quite obvious. In fact such a being becomes so buried in matter that thoughts about life can neither thrive nor develop. And as a result it has only the faculty to sense matter. That such a being is therefore bound to believe that everything is matter and can therefore constitute nothing other than time and space – this even applies to itself – and is thereby subject to an absolute beginning and conclusion, proves only how incomprehensible its own high identity as an eternal or immortal being really is to itself. As it thus cannot observe actual life itself, seeing only matter wherever it looks, we can see how fundamental this being's cosmic or spiritual death is. It believes itself to constitute nothing more than a collection of various types of matter and it believes the same about its "neighbour", that is to say, all other living beings. It sees life as exclusively a series of results based on weights and measures. It can therefore say about the living being that it is evil, good, sick, healthy, talented, untalented, intelligent, charming and so on; the list is endless. But all these expressions of the living being are only temporal phenomena. They have a beginning and a conclusion and are thus only temporary outer appearances. But it is impossible for temporary, outer appearances to be a complete analysis of eternal things. The absolutely only thing they can be are analyses of local phenomena or of something purely temporary in the sphere of these eternal things. And this brings us face to face with the ordinary terrestrial human being's view of life or perception of the world. He sees only local details in the universe and takes them to be the whole. These false impressions of the whole create the world of illusions that forms the basis of all disharmony and the resultant state of sorrow and suffering that today makes up the general condition of terrestrial mankind. It is not surprising that people in this sphere of dark and sad conditions begin to dream of a sphere in which in quite a different way there are light, happy circumstances, harmony or true peace. Living beings cannot go on living and still believe that life does not exist. Of course, they certainly sense something that they call "living beings", but they do not sense the actual life in these beings. They see only the combination of matter that such beings are made up of and that constitute their organisms, but because this is subject to having a beginning and a conclusion, because it is transient, they believe these living beings to be nothing more than created things, thereby proving their own ignorance regarding actual life. But an area that these beings do not recognise or do not know exist can represent only "death" in those beings' consciousness. And so it is that terrestrial human beings, who represent death instead of life, are the Adam and Eve who were put to death as a result of their "eating of the tree of knowledge".