Morality / Interest / Compassion
On August 2, 2023 By Ridzerd
Spiritual schooling is closely connected with the increase of moral strength, and therefore any properly communicated spiritual schooling will above all work on the strengthening and establishment of moral strength. Therefore, wherever you find the description of the methods by which one penetrates into higher worlds, for example in my book How to know higher worlds (GA 9), you can at the same time find the indications of the necessity of strengthening moral strength. For moral strength must not only remain as it is in ordinary life in the physical world, but it must be increased and made firm.
We are particularly confronted with what is necessary in this respect when we come to the intuition by which the soul of the spirit-searcher is able to move directly into the inner being of another spiritual being or fact. Then we will see that it becomes after spiritual schooling almost an impossibility to really empathize with other beings, if one has not already taken care here in the physical world to strengthen what can be called open interest in everything, which surrounds us, free, open interest.
All narrow-minded closed-mindedness, all the hiding of the soul within itself, all that will not lead the attentiveness of the soul towards compassion and sympathy of fellow creatures and of all that surrounds us in the sensory world, all this keeps the soul from, when it has ascended into the spiritual world, coming to true intuition, to true insights into higher beings.
Source (German): Rudolf Steiner – GA 62 – Ergebnisse der Geistesforschung – Berlin, 3 April 1913 (page 431-432)
Translated bij DeepL and me
On August 2, 2023 By Ridzerd
Spiritual schooling is closely connected with the increase of moral strength, and therefore any properly communicated spiritual schooling will above all work on the strengthening and establishment of moral strength. Therefore, wherever you find the description of the methods by which one penetrates into higher worlds, for example in my book How to know higher worlds (GA 9), you can at the same time find the indications of the necessity of strengthening moral strength. For moral strength must not only remain as it is in ordinary life in the physical world, but it must be increased and made firm.
We are particularly confronted with what is necessary in this respect when we come to the intuition by which the soul of the spirit-searcher is able to move directly into the inner being of another spiritual being or fact. Then we will see that it becomes after spiritual schooling almost an impossibility to really empathize with other beings, if one has not already taken care here in the physical world to strengthen what can be called open interest in everything, which surrounds us, free, open interest.
All narrow-minded closed-mindedness, all the hiding of the soul within itself, all that will not lead the attentiveness of the soul towards compassion and sympathy of fellow creatures and of all that surrounds us in the sensory world, all this keeps the soul from, when it has ascended into the spiritual world, coming to true intuition, to true insights into higher beings.
Source (German): Rudolf Steiner – GA 62 – Ergebnisse der Geistesforschung – Berlin, 3 April 1913 (page 431-432)
Translated bij DeepL and me
Ahriman – Art of Nesta Carsten-Krüger
THANKS TO: https://rudolfsteinerquotes.wordpress.com/2023/08/02/morality-interest-compassion/