Reconciled opinion

  "Love is higher than opinion. If people love one another, the most varied opinions can be reconciled. Hence it is deeply significant that in Theosophy no religion is attacked and no religion is specially singled out, but all are understood, and so there can be brotherhood because the adherents of the most varied religions understand one another.

   This is one of the most important tasks for mankind today and in the future: that men should learn to live together and understand one another. If this human fellowship is not achieved, all talk of occult development is empty." - Rudolf Steiner

 At the Gates of Spiritual Science

Lecture 11, 1st September, 1906 Stuttgart

 

 

http://888spiritualscience.blogspot.com.au/2014/10/love-is-higher-than-opinion-steiner.html.

   It is a great task today to overcome our intolerance and find the spirit behind the words of another. We are educated to judge everything for ourselves. Which is good but we need to add tolerance to this education if we are not going to back ourselves into a blind alley. We need a judgement that's not focused on the surface. Broad-mindedness is a goal we have to take up for ourselves. There is a growing need to be wary of systems of thought that are linear, not even attempting to see things from more than one perspective.

Giving Thanks for Suffering?

 

   “In the greatest sufferings you should say, “It is for the good.” It is a great thing, when you are in contradictions, to be thankful to God. Your character is being tried then. Why, you are not alone. Thousands and millions of people take part in the difficulties which you are in. Those who want to take up the New teaching should first be content with unfavourable conditions. Thousands of people are suffering around you and you are not paying attention to them. God has allowed you to suffer, so that you do not pay attention to the sufferings of others. Do not be discouraged and do not say, “Nothing will come to me.” When you thank God for the good, it grows. When you give thanks for the suffering, it goes away. When you do not give thanks for the good, it goes away. When you do not give thanks for the suffering, it remains and grows. These are four laws of Nature.” – Beinsa Douno (Harmonizing of the Human Soul, pg 76)

   To give thanks for suffering is a hard ask but may be the very source of solace. We cannot fight suffering. We cannot even struggle with it. It is not something that can be grasped. It cannot to be put aside or forgotten. It has a singular quality of being. Being that is self-existent.

   If the world teaches us anything it is when we suffer we are not alone. There is no life that is without suffering. This is Buddha’s first noble truth.

   Can suffering be transformed? What would it be transformed into?

   “The happiness, enjoyment and contentment life brings one gratefully accepts; but more valuable by far, once it is overcome, is the pain and suffering, for to that people owe what wisdom they possess. Spiritual science recognizes in wisdom something like crystallized pain; pain transformed into its opposite.” (R. Steiner, Supersensible Knowledge, Lecture II, GA 55)

Body, Soul, and Spirit - "Spirit?"

 

   Body we know and with it we have our whole external life. Soul is a little less clear but it is our inner life: our thoughts, emotions, and will impulses. Spirit that is the mystery but it is the essential part that can turn surviving into thriving. If we look at the three functions of the soul: thinking, feeling, and willing, then willing is related to the body, feeling to the soul, and thinking to the spirit. But thoughts are not thinking they are the end product of thinking. It is this movement, essence, gesture of thought before it crystalizes into words that is spirit. Thinking is pre-thought/ pure thought.

   With spirit we find eternal resurrection. Spirit is not just the overcoming of death but it is the life that is found through death, on the other side of death. This is the missing key. We have our life in the outer world and our inner life but still things remain an incomplete picture. It is the spirit that brings back wholeness to life.

   This force of resurrection lies in thinking too. Our thoughts are dead, empty shells. With spirit thought comes into process. What was dead and empty is from this other side, before it is crystalized, full of life.

   Thinking has become the emphasising of a viewpoint in words. What thinking is meant to be is knowing, understanding. We have been taken over by an inner dialogue which was meant to be a lens for understanding the world and ourselves. Our search for meaning is really the want of a thinking that cognizes.

   Spirit is what we are seeking. The search for meaning, depth, being, essence this is the search for spirit. This is the squaring of the circle where the duality of life becomes whole, becomes trinity. If morality is who a person is at heart then morality is spirit.