Rudolf Steiner: "...by means which are designed to meet the needs of ordinary daily life on Earth, one cannot really reach one's own true ‘I.’ As it is, only the first rudiments of love live in our earthly ‘I.’ And even so, a glow is shed over life on Earth through the power of love which radiates into this earthly life. But this love must grow stronger. It must gain sufficient strength to enable man to behold the etheric world and the astral world through the power of love and thus to overcome what lives in him as his lower self, as egoism — the opposite of love — to gain mastery over that which, as the antithesis of love, enables him to experience himself in earthly life as an independent ‘I.’ Love must grow so strong that one learns to ignore this earthly ‘I,’ to forget it, to disregard it. Love is the identification of one's own self with the other being. This impulse must be so strong that one ceases to heed one's own ‘I’ as it lives in the earthly body. Here then arises the contradiction, that it is precisely through selflessness, through the highest capacity for love, that one advances towards one's own true ‘I’ beckoning as it radiates through the cycles of time. One has to lose one's earthly ‘I’ to behold one's true ‘I.’ And he who fails to accomplish this act of surrender has simply no means of finding the true ‘I.’ One could say that the true ‘I’ does not want to be sought whenever revelation of its presence is desired. If sought for, it hides. For only in love will it be found, and love is a surrender of self to the other being. For that reason the true Self must be found as if it were another being."
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