Love as a Force for Good

Love for someone else is possible only if we become genuinely interested in them. We can be attracted to them by an array of qualities but love itself happens because of our desire to know more about them: what gives them joy, what interests them, what are their hopes and dreams. As we get to know them better, we begin to understand them and gain insight into them. Interest is the ground on which we step that allows love and understanding to bloom. As great as our love for another person becomes, it is but a baby step.

The spiritual hierarchies are interested in us; they love us. We will find that our experience of love here on earth is a mere reflection of the love we experience among the hierarchies in the spiritual world between earth lives. Each cycle of life as we go back and forth between earth and “heaven” is held with interest by the hierarchies, most specifically by our guardian angels. We are never alone and never unloved, but most of us don’t know it. Many of us aren’t interested in knowing it, but nevertheless, between each earth life, we are part of this communion with the hierarchies.

We may recall from previous posts that how we live our lives on earth affects our ability to fully encounter the beings of the hierarchies after we die. It is our own responsibility to work toward our inner development, and if we choose not to do that, not only do we find it difficult to feel love toward each other and all of humanity, to work together toward common goals, we also will have difficulty communing with the hierarchies after death which then hinders our ability to love in our next life. And so on.

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

(Some) people here on Earth are incapable of unfolding love in which there is real strength, incapable of unfolding that all-embracing love which comes to expression in the power to understand other people. We may say with truth: it is among the Gods, in pre-earthly existence, that we acquire the gift for observing other people, to perceive how they think and how they feel, to understand them with inner sympathy. If we were deprived of this association with the Gods, we would never be capable of unfolding here on Earth that insight into other human beings which alone makes earthly life a reality.

When in this connection I speak of love, and especially of all-embracing human love, you must think of love as having this real and concrete meaning: you must think of it as signifying a genuine, intimate understanding of other people. If to the all-embracing love of humanity, this understanding of others is added, we have everything that constitutes human morality. For human morality on Earth—if it is not merely expressed in empty phrases or fine talk or in resolutions not afterwards carried out—depends upon the interest one person takes in another, upon the capability to see into the other person. Those who have the gift of understanding other human beings will receive from this understanding the impulses for a social life imbued with true morality.

So we may also say: everything that constitutes moral life in earthly existence has been acquired by human beings in pre-earthly existence; from our communion with the Gods there has remained in us the urge to unfold, in the soul at any rate, community on Earth as well. And it is the development of a life where the one person together with the other fulfils the tasks and the mission of the Earth—it is this alone that in reality leads to the moral life on Earth. Thus we see that love, and the outcome of love—morality—are in very truth a consequence of what man has experienced spiritually in a pre-earthly existence.

Excerpt from: Man and the World of Stars. Lecture IV: Rhythms of Earthly and Spiritual Life, Love, Memory, the Moral Life, by Rudolf Steiner. Dec. 15, 1922, Dornach, Switzerland.

We can be grateful to those who love us and allow us to love them because we need to know what love means. And we can feel grateful for meaningful work with others—work that accomplishes something in the world—work we could not do if we didn’t have others working alongside us. We can also be grateful for the flame that ignites our interest in others and our will to work in the world. The impetus to be our best selves, to create community in the world, to truly love, comes from the hierarchies in the world we live in before birth and again after death, whether we believe in them or not. But we must purposefully direct our wills to overcome the distractions of our world in order to utilize this gift of the gods, in order to genuinely encounter each other.

All around us in 2024 we can find the results of a lack of capacity to see and understand the other: we have lost our moral compass. We define people by our sympathies and antipathies instead of seeing them as having souls like us. The results of this are horrific. To become complete human beings, we must fight our own lethargy, our own prejudices, to seek insight into each other. Becoming a whole human being, a moral human being, is the hardest thing we can do because no one can do it for us. Yet this is our real work, the work that matters.

A meditative practice, of contemplation in the quiet of our own minds, even for just five minutes every single day, is a start. This is so much harder to do than it sounds. Try it.

Know Thyself

At the beginning of his book, How to Know Higher Worlds: A Modern Path of Initiation, Steiner says, “A person rich in feeling and deep of soul who passes through a beautiful mountain landscape will have a different experience from one whose inner life is poor in feeling. Inner experience is the only key to the beauties of the outer world. It depends upon the inner lives we have developed whether, when we travel across the ocean, only a few inner experiences pass through our souls, or we sense the eternal language of the world spirit and understand the mysterious riddles of creation.”

Most of us would like to sense the world spirit; we would like to understand the mysterious riddles of creation. Point the way, right? Steiner goes on to say, “To develop a meaningful relationship to the outer world we must learn to work with our own feelings and ideas. The world around us is filled everywhere with the glory of God, but we have to experience the divine in our own souls before we can find it in our surroundings.”

In other words, we won’t understand the world without first understanding ourselves and what it means to experience the divine in our own souls. In today’s blog, Steiner offers an argument for getting into details rather than settling for generalities. For example, we can appreciate a beautiful plant out our window for its beauty alone. If we can name it, we will appreciate it more. If we understand how earth, water, air, and light/warmth work on a seed growing into all its component parts, we will appreciate the plant even more. We can go further: what are the components of the earth where the plant is located? Of the water? Of the air? What natural laws are in effect here? Very soon we realize how much there is to know and how little we actually do know. Then, at what altitude, in what season… We can go on and on and on.

Now visualize that the plant and all the components of its life and death have spiritual aspects, too. We can imagine how our appreciation for all of it would grow.

Being human is hard work, and it’s challenging to try to understand it, but try we must. Today we will take another look at a profound spiritual reality. A year ago, we discussed the seven members (subdivisions) of the human being. Rather than explain them again, please refer to this link and read the Steiner excerpt: https://www.whoareyou.blog/seven-members. This time, Steiner explains why it is important to know about them.

These are the seven subdivisions:

1. Physical body

2. Life body

3. Astral body

4. The “I” as the soul’s central core

5. Spirit self as transformed astral body

6. Life spirit as transformed life body

7. Spirit body as transformed physical body

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

It may seem that the subdivisions of the human constitution are based on purely arbitrary distinctions between parts within a monolithic soul life. To counter this objection, it must be emphasized that the significance of (the subdivisions above) is similar to that of the appearance of the seven colors of the rainbow when light passes through a prism. What a physicist contributes to our understanding of light by studying this process and the seven colors that result is analogous to what the spiritual scientist does for our understanding of the makeup of the human soul. The soul’s seven members are not abstract intellectual distinctions any more than are the light’s seven colors.

In both cases, the distinctions rest on the inner nature of the things themselves, the only difference being that the seven constituents of light become visible by means of an external device while the seven components of the soul become perceptible to a method of spiritual observation consistent with the nature of the human soul.

The true nature of the soul cannot be grasped without knowing about this subdivision, because the soul belongs to the transitory world by virtue of three of our constitutional components—physical body, life body and astral body—and has its roots in eternity through the other four constituent parts.

When the soul is seen as a unity, its transitory and eternal aspects are indistinguishably bound up with each other, but unless we are aware of the differentiations within it, we cannot understand its relationship to the world as a whole.

Let me use another comparison. Chemists separate water into hydrogen and oxygen, two substances that cannot be distinguished when they are united in the form of water. However, each of these elements has an identity of its own and can form compounds with other elements. Similarly, at death our three lower constitutional components unite with the makeup of the perishable world, while our four higher members unite with the eternal. Refusing to consider this differentiation within the soul is like being a chemist who refuses to learn about decomposing water into hydrogen and oxygen.

Excerpt from: Theosophy by Rudolf Steiner. 9th edition: 1918.

When our “I” acts on the astral body to purify it, our “I” is building the Spirit Self, our next higher soul level. Obviously, becoming the master of our desires and passions instead of letting them rule us is a good thing; we don’t need to know more than we already do to become a better person. But ponder for a moment what it means to know how our soul works. Through the knowledge we gain by understanding the details of our soul, we begin to see the divine laws working. We begin to “experience the divine in our own souls” as a fact rather than just a feeling. We begin to grasp the components of our own light and see how they interact with the light of the world.

The source for today’s blog, Steiner’s book, Theosophy, is widely available, so is How to Know Higher Worlds: A Modern Path of Initiation.