The profound need for profound tolerance

Rudolf Steiner

Rudolf Steiner: 

"One must educate oneself to listen with profound inner calm even to things one cannot in the least agree with, listen not in a spirit of supercilious endurance, but with the most positive inner tolerance as one would to well-founded utterances on the other person's part.

In the higher worlds there is little sense in making objections to anything. A person with experience in that realm knows that the most opposite views about the same fact can be expressed there by, let us say, oneself and someone else. When he has made himself capable of listening to the other's opposite view with exactly the same tolerance he feels toward his own — and please notice this! — then and then only does he have the social attitude required for experiencing what was formerly merely theoretical knowledge of the higher worlds."