Let’s start a bit differently by enjoying Andra Day’s cover of the song bearing the title of this month’s post.
When romance appears in our lives, it changes us. The whole world becomes more beautiful, more harmonious, more livable. Our lives have new meaning as we anticipate today, tomorrow and the next day filled with joy. Love is a force that elevates us—that moves us to turn our attention away from ourselves and toward another. We also can see ourselves reflected with glorious light in the eyes of the person who loves us; we ourselves are more beautiful.
It is this aspect, however, that entangles romantic love with a good measure of self-love. As long as the love we give is returned, the glow remains. When love isn’t returned, or it withdraws, we suffer; we may even hope the other will suffer, too. Romantic love can be selfish.
What the world needs now is more unselfish love; love reaching beyond our personal relationships. Love that becomes an actual force in the world. This won’t be easy. In the excerpt below, Dr. Steiner discusses why our subconscious awareness of our own karma makes this kind of love so difficult to give.
In our previous studies of karma and reincarnation, we discovered that everything we think, say and do in this life matters forever. We are born with karmic debt from previous lives that we will work out in this or a future life, and we accrue karmic debt in this life that we will work out in subsequent lives. Deeds of unselfish love, however, do not follow this formula. Deeds of love given freely can only mitigate our past-life debts; they do not benefit us in our own future karma. Yet these free deeds of love are enormously important because they become a world-changing force.
Let’s see what Dr. Steiner has to say:
If we grasp the meaning of the law of reincarnation, we recognize the significance of love in the world, both in a particular and in a general sense. When we speak of karma, we mean that which as cause in the one life has its effect in the next. In terms of cause and effect we cannot, however, speak truly of love; we cannot speak of a deed of love and its eventual compensation. Deeds of love do not look for compensation in the next life…
By everything we do out of love we pay off debts. From an occult point of view, what is done out of love brings no reward but makes amends for profit already expended. The only actions from which we have nothing in the future are those we perform out of true, genuine love. This truth may well be disquieting and men are lucky in that they know nothing of it in their upper consciousness. But in their subconscious all of them know it, and that is why deeds of love are done so unwillingly, why there is so little love in the world. Men feel instinctively that they may expect nothing for their “I” in the future from deeds of love. An advanced stage of development must have been reached before the soul can experience joy in performing deeds of love from which there is nothing to be gained for itself. The impulse for this is not strong in humanity. But spiritual science can be a source of powerful incentives to deeds of love.
Our egoism gains nothing from deeds of love—but the world all the more. Love is for the world what the sun is for external life. No soul could thrive if love departed from the world. Love is the “moral” sun of the world… Our deep concern must be that an impulse for sound, healthy development shall find its way into the affairs of humanity. To disseminate love over the earth in the greatest measure possible, to promote love on the earth—that and that alone is wisdom.
Excerpt from: Love and Its Meaning in the World. Lecture 10 by the same name given in Zurich, December 17, 1912.
The very definition of selfishness is that we keep for ourselves that which we might give to another for their benefit, a sobering thought. But Steiner’s explanation of why “there is so little love in the world” is sobering on a deeper level because so very many of us in modern humanity think that the idea of changing the world with love is one of pure folly, the height of naivety.
Dr. Steiner says the belief that love can change the world is wisdom.
Elsewhere in this same lecture, he says that “when we practice love, cultivate love, creative forces pour into the world.” We see the truth of this when our own world changes because of love. We see the truth of this when we feel inspired by others’ deeds of love in the world; random acts of kindness that creatively work on our own forces of goodwill.
We all have moments when we do something selflessly for those close to us. We all have done things for which we expected no reward just to make someone happy or comfortable or safe. Thus, we are already on the path. This is the beginning of our own impulse toward a “sound, healthy development in the affairs of humanity.” The more we can expand our love to embrace the world of people outside our personal circles, the more we can offer free deeds of love, the more we actually change the world.
Photo “The Heart Nebula” ©Alan Erickson