Opinions

Listening

How willing are we to try to understand each other? How willing are we to listen to a person who holds an opinion about God or politics or society that differs from our own? How do we move towards peace and love – the ideals celebrated at Christmastime?

conversation

For the past three years, we have discussed our souls and spirits. We see that the smallest aspect of ourselves is our current physical body. We realize that we existed before birth and will continue to exist after death. We know that we accrue and pay off karma in every lifetime. These are basic truths of spiritual science and knowing them helps us practice a love and peace that can hold all of humanity.

If we decide to begin on the path toward initiation knowledge (see April 2020 post: Primary Source) in earnest, we must accept that it will require dedication and will and courage. We will need to clean up our acts. Toward the middle of his book, How to Know Higher Worlds: A Modern Path of Initiation, Rudolf Steiner gives seven requirements for spiritual training. They are sobering, to say the least, requiring an honesty with oneself that initially seems impossible. The seventh one tells us something about loving each other. (If you want to know about all of them, please get the book.)

Let’s see what Dr. Steiner has to say:

… To believe in and love humanity is the basis of all striving for the truth. Our striving must be built upon trust and love for humanity—although it does not begin there. Rather, it must flow out of the soul’s own forces. And this love for humanity must gradually expand into love for all beings, and indeed for all existence…

Simply listening to what others say with reverence and devotion, rather than immediately opposing it with our own opinions, need not lead to our becoming slavishly dependent on them. Those who have achieved something on the path to knowledge know that they owe everything to patient listening and assimilation, not to their own obstinate personal opinions. We must always remember that where we have already formed a conclusion, we cannot learn anything. If we desire only to judge, therefore, we can learn nothing… our willingness to learn should be unconditional. It is far better to withhold our judgment on something we do not understand than to condemn it. We can leave understanding until later.

How to Know Higher Worlds, Chapter 5, by Rudolf Steiner.

Learning to listen requires the trust that we will not lose ourselves in the other’s opinion. We may have observed that this seems particularly difficult with the onslaught of today’s media blitz on every aspect of our lives. But how we listen is a vital key to peace and love. Steiner addressed this in a lecture he gave around the same time he wrote the book quoted above:

It is our duty to enter into what another person says; we need only make it clear to him that we value him at that stage of truth where he now stands. Everyone must learn for himself, and knowing this, we shall become tolerant towards every form of truth. We come to a better understanding of things; we do not battle against people but seek to live with them...

Love is higher than opinion. If people love one another, the most varied opinions can be reconciled. Hence it is deeply significant that in Anthroposophy 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 we should learn to live together and understand one another. If this human fellowship is not achieved, all talk of spiritual development is empty.

At the Gates of Spiritual Science, Lecture 11, September 1, 1906, by Rudolf Steiner.

Christmas occurs near the winter solstice, a time celebrated for thousands of years. The return from the shortest day of the year; a return to the light. Let us connect the idea of light with love. Let us see that light is related to knowledge and understanding. Love and understanding will lead us to peace… starting within ourselves.

Nothing But the Truth

Seeking to find the humanity in the other may feel like an effort we just cannot make right now—the stakes are too high; there is too much to lose. How did we get here?

A scary factor of the 21st century so far is that many of the most successful companies are information/entertainment providers, and while some are not yet monopolies, their dominance is unquestionable. All over the world, whether we are progressive or conservative, we are likely to be influenced by the empires that feed us the media we consume. Our media choices lend support to our beliefs, but why did we choose those particular sources? Do we instantly base the worth and accuracy of new information on what we already believe? How much resistance do we feel when our beliefs are challenged?

When people allow their opinions to become their truths, we can watch them becoming unsociable in varying degrees. We all know people who hold strong opinions that cloud their ability to see any flaws in their thinking. We all see friends and family that used to avoid contentious topics amongst each other now finding they can’t be together at all. Are we ourselves like these people?

Even if we conscientiously fact check the accuracy of what we are reading or watching before we believe it or pass it along, perhaps we could dig deeper. If we explored the origins of our own beliefs, despite the discomfort that might arise, we might begin to understand how those with whom we disagree believe what they do. What, then, is gained by understanding the other?

Let’s see what Dr. Steiner* has to say:

Inasmuch as we devote ourselves inwardly to truth, our true self gains in strength and will enable us to cast off self-interest. Anger weakens us; truth strengthens us… Love of truth is the only love that sets the Ego (our “I”) free. And directly man gives priority to anything else, he falls inevitably into self-seeking. Herein lies the great and most serious importance of truth for the education of the human soul. Truth conforms to no man, and only by devotion to truth can truth be found. Directly man prefers himself and his own opinions to the truth, he becomes antisocial and alienates himself from the human community. Look at people who make no attempt to love truth for its own sake but parade their own opinions as the truth: they care for nothing but the content of their own souls and are the most intolerant. Those who love truth in terms of their own views and opinions will not suffer anyone to reach truth along quite a different path. They put every obstacle in the way of anyone with different abilities who comes to opinions unlike their own. Hence the conflicts that so often arise in life. An honest striving for truth leads to human understanding, but the love of truth for the sake of one’s own personality leads to intolerance and the destruction of other people’s freedom.

… [Truth] can be sought for and attained through personal effort only by beings capable of thought. Inasmuch as truth is acquired by thinking, we must realize very clearly that there are two kinds of truth. First we have the truth that comes from observing the world of Nature around us and investigating it bit by bit in order to discover its truths, laws and wisdom. When we contemplate the whole range of our experience in this way, we come to the kind of truth that can be called the truth derived from “reflective” thinking—we first observe the world and then think about our findings.

There are also other truths. These cannot be gained by reflective thought, but only by going beyond everything that can be learned from the outer world… [One is] derived from reflective thought and the other from “creative” thought.

Excerpt from: Metamorphoses of the Soul: Paths of Experience, Lecture 3: The Mission of Truth, 22/10/1909, Berlin by Rudolf Steiner

We may, occasionally, need to look away from the incessant news of the day and all of the opinions masquerading as truths that create such enormous inner turmoil. We can seek to understand others without justifying their ideas or actions. The path to eternal truth is not a straight line; it’s not even a single path—as many people as we are so are the number of paths to be taken. The error we see in the way others are going may not be an error for them; it may be exactly the way they need to go to get to the truth—the same truth toward which our own path leads us.

If we would seek ideas that are larger than the mundane world, we would have to accept that eternal truths are real and possible to know. If we resolve to learn these truths, we will do so by thinking creatively. If we don’t, humanity seems doomed to suffer the endless conflicts between people of differing ideologies, faiths, and cultures. Steiner points to ways we might pursue these truths.


Links:

Mistakes Were Made, (but not by me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson
http://a.co/d/3bsZ6c8

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXfkmGkI83g