The world seems to be conspiring to make us angry. The very earth itself seems angry now. Vicious storms, earthquakes, volcanoes, heatwaves, tidal waves all seem to echo the blistering storms and heat of our political, economic and social lives. The third decade of the third millennium could be seen as a conflagration of the worst of us. Rudolf Steiner has much to say about this particular time of earth and human evolution, but today we are going to once again look at the inner work we might do to manage it all.
We cannot ignore the injustices and tragedies going on around us, but we don’t have to become victims of them either. Bad things can befall us without our believing we are victims. When we fully understand that we have asked for these hardships of life—that we have placed ourselves in the midst of them to gain mastery of ourselves—we come to an inner realization that is a rich source of empowerment allowing us to extract ourselves from the outer feelings of blame or victimhood.
Many of us feel we have every right to be angry by the injustices we perceive. But anger isn’t a solution; it always makes things worse. We may not be active perpetrators to the injustices, fear and hatred we witness, but with deeper insight, we inevitably find our own culpability. We come to see how our own behaviors and beliefs now and in our past lives have contributed to the problems of our time.
What now?
Let’s see what Dr. Steiner has to say:
Whenever I am angry or irritated, I build a wall around myself in the soul world and the forces that should develop the eyes of my soul cannot approach me. If, for example, someone annoys me, he or she sends a soul current into the soul world. But I cannot see this current as long as I am still capable of anger. My anger hides it from me. This is not to say that if I master my anger, I will immediately perceive such soul (or astral) phenomena. For that, I must first develop an inner eye for my soul.
Each of us possesses such an eye in rudimentary form, but it remains ineffective so long as we are still capable of anger. Not that it appears as soon as we have begun to combat the anger in ourselves. Rather, we must continue on, struggling patiently with our anger, until one day we notice that this inner eye in the soul has opened…
In addition to anger and irritation, we must also struggle against other traits, such as fearfulness, superstition, prejudice, vanity, ambition, curiosity, the urge to gossip, and the tendency to discriminate on the basis of such outer characteristics such as social status, gender, race, and so on.
We may have difficulty in understanding that the struggle against such traits has anything to do with increasing our cognitive abilities. Yet every occultist knows that much more depends on these things than on our ability to expand our intelligence and practice artificial exercises.
Misunderstandings can easily arise if, for example, we believe that the injunction to overcome fear means becoming foolhardy; or that to fight against discrimination based on social status or race means becoming blind to the differences among people. The fact is that we learn to recognize these differences for what they are only when we are no longer caught up in prejudice.
Even in ordinary life, fear of a thing prevents us from seeing it properly. In this sense, racial prejudice prevents us from seeing into a human soul. The esoteric student must take such ordinary common sense and perfect it inwardly with great sensitivity and precision.
Excerpt from: How To Know Higher Worlds: A Modern Path of Initiation, Chapter 4: Practical Considerations, by Rudolf Steiner.
Anger, fear and division are the tools being used in our time to dominate us all. When fear and division are our go-to tools, we do not act in anyone’s best interest, especially our own. If each of us would refuse to pick up these tools, all the useless rhetoric from all sides of an argument would disappear. We cannot make anyone drop a tool they want to use, but we are the only ones who can decide to drop it from our own hand. When we do, we gradually gain a clearer perspective, one that allows us to become a healthful force in the universe instead of a source for more anger and hatred and intolerance.
Later in this book, Steiner expands on this idea. In fact, in more than 6000 books, lectures, and articles, Steiner has made it clear over and over that the goal of all humanity is to achieve mastery over ourselves so that we can consciously cross the threshold into the spiritual world and see what the world is really like.
The world looks as it does today because we have not, as a whole, achieved anything close to that. Yet, every single one of us that begins to work in this way changes the world for the better. We need to decide who we shall be—that is the freedom of our time.