“Something is lacking in us, and we have an inner hunger that drives us on, an urge to come closer to other people, to overcome our inner emptiness, and to find our place in the scheme of things.
It is only when we stop trying to use the world to fill this hunger that things can begin to come right for us. Then we can begin to feel how great a contradiction there is between the state in which we are and what is destined for us.
We cannot come to this by thought. We have to feel how big a task there is in front of man if only he can take it on. It is almost impossible to arrive at what man truly is by thinking. But when our feelings are open to something deeper and the ordinary emotional uproar is abated in us, then it is possible to feel what this human nature is, feel that it has been present on the earth for many thousand years, and feel the greatness of the destiny that belongs to it.
This is how it is when our feeling nature becomes open to the working of the higher energies. So essential is the right working of our feelings that we can say that the transformation of man is the same as the transformation of his feeling nature. Until this has begun, transformation has not begun at all in any way.”