Life is an open book — read it and weep for joy

Rudolf Steiner:

‎"The human being must gradually become the guide and leader of his own development. If we understand laughter and tears, we can see them as revelations of the spirit, for a human being becomes transparent, as it were, if we know how in laughter he seeks an outward expression of inner liberation, while in tears he experiences an inner strengthening after the ego has suffered a loss in the external world.
 
To the question as to what laughter fundamentally is, we can reply: It is a spiritual expression of man's striving for liberation, in order that he may not be entangled in things unworthy of him but with a smile may rise above things to which he should never be enslaved. Similarly, tears are an expression of the fact that when the thread linking him to someone in the outer world has been broken, he still seeks for such a link in the midst of his tears. When he strengthens his ego through weeping, he is in effect saying to himself: I belong to the world and the world to me, for I cannot endure being torn away from it."


Source: Rudolf Steiner, Metamorphoses of the Soul, Paths of Experience Vol. 2, Lecture 2, Laughing and Weeping


Thanks to my Facebook friend "Rudolf Steiner"