The experiences that lead to an understanding of human guilt, need, care, and death can be encountered only in the physical body. Only in the physical body can we awaken the force of courage and the humility needed to go through the ‘needle’s eye’ of initiation.

Only those who are conscious of the range of human guilt and the human need arising from it can develop the necessary humility in the presence of the spiritual world – a necessary condition of acceptance by that world and security against rejection by the spiritual world as a moral alien.

Moreover, individuals cannot achieve the courage to enter the kind of gloomy nothingness in which the spiritual world shows itself at the  decisive hour, unless they have seen, unparalysed, not only common day but also cosmic day in the colourless light of care, not flinching from the sight of all that is dying in the cosmos, in humankind, and in themselves.

Only in the school of the physical body can we learn the humility and courage needed by free human beings, or initiates, to conclude and realise a free alliance with the spiritual world.

Christ and Sophia, Valentin Tomberg