Free will in light of the Fall of Man

The story of the Fall of Man from Paradise is relevant to humanity's complicated existence today. Over the course of millions of years of human evolution, from the time of ancient Lemuria, man became independent of the divine spiritual powers that once guided him, symbolized by Lucifer's temptation of Adam and Eve to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

See: Fall and redemption - original sin and grace

We see that human consciousness posits a fall of man at the beginning of the historical development of mankind on earth. He would have been incapable of falling into sin if he had remained in his old state, in a state of instinctive guidance by divine spiritual powers. 

...Whereas he would then have remained sinless, incapable of sinning, like a mere creature of nature, he now became capable of sinning through this independence from the divine spiritual powers.  

Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden

This was a necessary part of the Divine Plan. If we had always remained perfectly wise and moral, we would have never become free. We would always know how to act, and there would never be a deliberation of choice between two options. 

If we did not have this possibility of choosing, we would still be unconscious in Paradise, among "little angels with pink gowns playing lyres, what a boredom!"...Thus, Evil was a necessity!

As Mephistopheles answers to Faust, when asked who he was: "I am a part of that force who always craves for evil but always ends up doing good".  

Building with the atom: the new masonry. The frontier of spiritual knowledge in the modern age. Collected quotes by Steiner.

What is the atom? 

The atom of physics is nothing else but frozen electricity...It stands in the same relationship to electricity as ice does to water out of which it has been frozen. The physical atom is condensed electricity.

The developments in electricity in recent centuries heralds a new era in which human knowledge of the atom will be used for spiritual purposes. 

New electrical theory...is something of enormous importance...[it] hints at the critical turning point in the development of man's thinking...Before the end of the fifth epoch of culture, science will have reached the stage where man will be able to penetrate into the atom itself. 

It is true that only now...human thinking has turned to tracing natural forces as far as the atom, and indeed, he who would understand this precisely must follow the latest phase of the various developments in electricity.  

Thinking...must be carried right into the atom. When man has learned to think right into the mineral atom, when he has an understanding of how to make use of what lives in the atom and place it in the service of the whole.