292. But life does not intend this for the individual. It has a far greater plan ahead for living beings. Everybody grows out of the phase of childhood, mentally as well as physically. This growth gives access to a direct contact with life, access to genuine experience in areas of both suffering and pleasure and thereby creates in the individual's mentality a corresponding knowledge of the pleasant and the unpleasant and of what constitutes the absolute realities of existence itself.
      The truth of this is demonstrated clearly in everyday life. Accidents and injuries, sorrows and illness, war and poverty, chaos and confusion are such dominating factors that they are proof enough of how mankind, to a great extent, finds itself at a stage where there are no longer protective phenomena behind which to hide from life's drastic bitterness, and that it is set in direct contact with all the various adversities of fate.
      As these adversities are in reality just as much reactions between mental energies as between physical ones, while their particularly unpleasant nature is due to the individual's incorrect use of these energies and this misuse is rooted solely in terrestrial man's ignorance, then it becomes obvious how necessary it will be for those sufficiently mature human beings to be informed about the special characteristics and reactive abilities of physically invisible matter or substances with which they have to work each day in the form of their whole mental life, mental development and ways of thinking, upon which the entire formation of their fate is based. This information about the reaction-faculty of spiritual or cosmic substances – in other words "cosmic chemistry" – is thus nothing less than the "science of fate". And this, in turn, will form a basis for developing the ability to understand later explanations in "Livets Bog" about the formation of fate itself.