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.

Of protests and protesters

    "And then I shall naturally come to think of myself as a link in the whole of humanity and a sharer in the responsibility for everything that occurs. This insight should not, of course, be immediately translated into political agitation in the world. It should be calmly cultivated in the soul. By this means it will gradually come to expression in my outer actions. Indeed, in such matters, we can begin only by reforming ourselves. To make general demands for social and political reform on the basis of such insights is fruitless. It is easy to say how other people should be, but students of esoteric knowledge must work in the depths and not on the surface. It would therefore be quite wrong to connect the demands of esoteric schooling with any external demand for reform or even political change. The education of the spirit has nothing to do with such things. Political activists generally know what to ask of other people, but they hardly ever talk about asking anything of themselves."
   - R. Steiner, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment. pg 120-1

   Politics and esotericism conventionally don't mix. Politics means to foster what the greatest number of people want or to authoritivly preside over people. Esotericism is entirely based on freedom but in politics either there is no freedom or no freedom for least number of people. Spirit is of an essence that is not yet resolved into a fixed form. The spirit can not be taken hold of except with freedom. Spirit has to been seen anew from many viewpoints.

   The onus of spirit is on the individual. The obligation of politics is on the community. The community has to be formed by free individuals and then it can truly convey spirit. A spiritual community strives to attain for each member the freedom to transform. A political community can have nothing to do with esotericism unless it wants to use occult knowledge to manipulate large sways of people and there a dark, left hand, path unfolds.

   Protests and activism negate the need for spiritual insights to be "calmly cultivated in the soul." Spirit is of an evolving order, whereby what it appears as first may not be its crucial aspect. Spirit reveals itself over time whereas political activism erupts in the moment or is bound to a particular moment.

   The gradual cultivation of spiritual insight leads to the holy grail. This ongoing stepwise evolution provides the framework by which the spiritual sun, the etheric christ, can exist in the world.

An endless variety of books

   Eternal wisdom is right here in front of us. In so many different books and different kinds of books. We can deeply read (truly understand by reading between the lines) just about anything. Human beings are the only worldly creatures who are self-aware and can, therefore, think for themselves. We are here to understand the world around us, other human beings, and ourselves. In a sense then, the world around us, other human beings, and ourselves can be seen/ understood/ metaphorically interpreted as books. So some of the books I like are paintings, photos, people, actual books, movies, shows, conversations, the inner life, cosmic evolution, 'the book of life' (nature), and the human being as a cosmic archetype.
   The variety and number of books is endless. All that is needed is an open eye to read - not to skim over stuff (although sometimes you just don't have the time and are forced to) but to wrestle, dance with what is on the page, don't just stand back objectively. You the reader play, now (once something is there to be read), the greatest role.
   Develop understanding through practice; that is the only way. Things may come to you out of the blue but to receive the right things at the right time takes practice and dauntless patience. This, reader's eye, can only be developed in ourselves, by ourselves. It is already in us as a seed and just awaits the right conditions. This seed can and will grow (because things evolve regardless) and ultimately flower, bringing forth future seeds within us; which will in their turn will undergo an analogous (comparable) processes. "The kingdom of heaven is within you."
   "... Giants seek to tell tales fully. We [giants] desire to scant no portion of the rich complication of loves and hearts. Joy is in the ears that hear, not in the mouth that speaks." ( - Against All Things Ending, Stephen Donaldson)

   The original idea for this blog came from 2 separate sources at a similar time: One said, "you should write a book," and I immediately rejoined: "Yeah, titled: 101 ways to know what you don't know." The other wrote after an inspiring passage in an email, "send me a weekly inspirational paragraph." I bet they are both, if they have gotten this far through the blog thinking: "Why, Oh why, didn't I take the blue pill!"

   Understanding is king, because in life we have to read between the lines otherwise, we will never know when someone is giving us the finger or trying to pull the wool over our eyes. No, understanding is king because it is what is essentially human. We, humans, are that part of the world that is awake to itself; all the rest of nature sleeps in this sense. To be aware is, for us, to understand that we are aware.

Some Steiner quotes

Some Rudolf Steiner quotes with {my own 2 cents worth}:
   "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."

{ love reconciles differences and leads to community }

   "When we grasp the true meaning of human freedom, we can have no wish that a sin should be so forgiven us that we would no longer need to pay it off in our Karma.”

{ freedom is a process that arrives through karma }

   "More and more will souls be imbued with the consciousness that a man ought not to say merely what he “thinks”, but must prove the objective truth of what he says."

{ thinking must become spirit vision and speech become initiation }

   "There is no absolute truth — each truth has its particular mission at a certain time. We talk of Theosophy today, but we know that when we come to be reborn in the future we shall hear something very different and stand in quite a different relationship to one another."

{ living thinking = freedom = transformation of the future }

   "Two things must be completely avoided during occult training. We should never harm anyone through deeds, thoughts or words intentionally or not.   Secondly, the feeling of hate must disappear in us, otherwise it reappears as a feeling of fear; for fear is suppressed hate. We must transform the hate into a feeling of love, the love of wisdom."

 
   Here is one not by Steiner but by B. Hive (https://888spiritualscience.blogspot.com):

  "There is recreation and then there is solemn encounter. The light hearted may tell you a circus is fine; but participation is not desired. Who cares to step inside the ring? Who cares to put their head in the mouth of a wildcat, or frolic with the clowns?"

{ deeds of love leave only little traces and mostly go unnoticed }

What is humour?

   I'm not sure. So in a humours mood I offer up the following video link, which my daughter showed me. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kDso5ElFRg 

   One of the things that this video pointed out to me was the danger of spiritual development becoming reactionary. Reactionary impulses are bound to be destructive because we are primarily reacting to something that is in ourselves, denying it, and projecting it on to the other. It is very hard to avoid this when it is mild.
   This may or may not contribute to a questioning  of humour: a nonhumorous joke:
   Have you heard the one about the Imam, the Rabbi, the priest, the yogi, the monk, and the Aboriginal.  ... Ok, so a true-Muslim, a true-Hebrew, a true-Christian, a true-Hindu, a true-Buddhist, and a true-Shaman meet up together due to fortuitous circumstances. And because they were all good esotericists they deeply knew where the others were coming from. They decided to work together and they accomplished great things for the world.
  I had further fun deciding what a true-politician is, a true-garbage man is, a true-doctor, a true-photographer, a true-solider, a true-policeman, a true-criminal, a true-terrorist, and finally a true-mental patient would be. I even found a living example of a true-solider. Well, he is dead now: Daskalos, Dr. Stylianos Atteshlis, also known as Spyrous Sathi. He did a lot of good in the war on Cyprus for people on both sides and never intended to killed anyone and actually didn't kill anyone.
   So humour can be an opportunity to see things in a new light and find enjoyment in what can be a sorrowful world.