Thankfulness, Love, and Karma

 

Rudolf Steiner:

We must give the answer to these questions not with the intellect, but with feeling. And feeling answers: I must be thankful to all that has come into my life, because only thereby have I become the being I am and with whom I more or less identify myself. I cannot know whether otherwise I might have been of even less account. I can only be thankful to life, because I have become what I am through its joys and sorrows.

This question must be answered with a feeling of thankfulness to life. And it means a great deal if this thankfulness for earthly existence finds its way into the human soul. If certain deepenings of the soul are achieved and life is judged not out of emotion but out of the soul in its purity, then this thankfulness always arises. Though much of what life has brought us may be deplored, yet in many respects the regret is the expression of a complete error. For if what is regretted had not taken place we should not be what we actually are. The feeling that we can have about life amounts ultimately to this thankfulness. Thankfulness may also be felt even when we are not entirely in agreement with life, when we would like to have had more from our existence. We can also be thankful if we are given a small cake by someone from whom we might have expected the present of a large one. The fact that we had expected a large cake must certainly not weaken our thankfulness. And so it can truly be said that whatever, in our opinion, life has denied us — and this opinion may after all be erroneous — it has at all events brought us something. For what it has brought us we must develop the feeling of thankfulness. But when in all earnestness we develop the feeling of thankfulness — we need only reflect on this and it will be readily understood — there must be thankfulness for something else. Anyone who has developed thankfulness to life will be led, through this thankfulness itself, to recognition of the invisible spiritual Bestowers of life and to the transformation of memory in loving devotion to them.

The most beautiful way for one's personality to be led to the supersensible is when the path leads through thankfulness to life. Thankfulness is also a way into the supersensible and finally it becomes veneration and love for the life-bestowing spirit of man. Thankfulness gives birth to love, and when love is born from thankfulness to life it opens the heart to the spiritual Powers permeating all existence. And as life began with our birth and we cannot possibly begin to be thankful to life merely from our birth — as we then already obviously possessed certain qualities — it is therefore quite certain that thankfulness to life leads out of this life into pre-natal existence. In order to be fully aware of what I am now saying it must in any case be proved in actual life. If thankfulness develops out of unprejudiced observation of life, let us test whether love that quickens insight into the spirit is not actually born from this thankfulness, and we shall find that it is so. The question arising here can indeed only be answered through life itself, but life answers as I have indicated. When, however, through actual experiences we develop thankfulness and love to the life-bestowing spiritual Powers, our feeling is quite different from anything associated with memory. We experience vividly, with intensity; in memory our experiences become pale shadows. Memory owes its existence to our experiences; but we now come to something that is mightier than our ordinary ego.

When we consider the experiences that have come to us we are not concerned merely with our shadowy memories; we are concerned with something mighty, not with the shadow of our ego flowing through time, but with the creator of this earthly ego. Outside on every hand are the events to which we owe our existence, and when we consider these events we must acknowledge them to be powerful creators of our earthly ego. We stand in the middle of them with our momentary, present ego; behind us, if we look into our soul, are shadowy after-images of our experiences; before us, there is weaving destiny, the successive experiences of destiny which have formed and moulded our ego. The transition from thinking to feeling belongs in fact to this vivid feeling of the shaping of destiny, for thankfulness and love can be experienced only in the realm of feeling. It is to this thankfulness and love that there comes a presentiment of an irrevocable destiny. When we have divined the existence of this ruling destiny, having experienced thankfulness and love, we begin to feel the power of the events that have made us what we are.

Source: https://martyrion.blogspot.com/2021/04/thankfulness-love-and-karma-cosmic.html