Light on the Path

 

Rudolf Steiner:  "But how is this to be attained? By patience. By approaching more and more to the stage where all personal ambition is killed out. Personal ambition tempts us ever more and more to produce that which is merely personal, without listening to that which is the expression of the Divine. How are we to know that the Divine is speaking in us? We must kill out everything that only comes from ourselves, and first of all we must kill out every tendency to ambition. This generates the right polarity in us and produces real fructifying germs in the soul. Impatience is the worst guide in life. It is that which destroys the world. If we are successful in this, you will see, as I have been explaining to you, that the meaning of life is reached in the way described, through the fructification of what is outward by that which is inward. Then we shall also understand that if our inner nature is not right, we sow wrong fertilizing seed in the world. What is the result of that? The result is that deformities are born into the world. Our present civilization is rich in such deformities. All over the world, books are written today one could almost say by steam-power; while even in the eighteenth century a celebrated author wrote: “A single country today produces five times as many books as the Earth requires for its good.” Today it is much worse. These are things which surround the present civilization with spiritual entities which are not fit for life, which would not and should not come into existence, if man had the requisite patience. That will also come to birth within the human soul as a kind of opposite pole — patience: so that the human soul does not simply scatter around what is merely a product of ambition and egoism! This must not be taken as a kind of moral sermon, but as the representation of a fact. It is a fact that productions springing from ambition and desire for renown give rise in our souls to such seeds as bring deformities to birth in the spiritual world. To suppress these and also gradually to transform them is a fruitful task for the far future. It is the mission of Anthroposophy to accomplish this task, and it is the meaning of life that in doing so the anthroposophical world conception should take its place in the whole meaning of life; that everywhere meaning should flow in on us in life, that everywhere life should be full of meaning."

Source: https://martyrion.blogspot.com/2020/12/on-meaning-of-life-lecture-2-human.html

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