Patience : Keep Calm and Become Worthy

"The good effects that confidence can bring are driven away by impatience; the enlightenment that comes through confidence is darkened by impatience. Nothing is worse than letting impatience conjure up a mist before the soul."  — Rudolf Steiner

 

Rudolf Steiner:

If we wish to say something that is true, not something which has merely occurred to us, it must always be said out of the depths of spiritual secrets. That is extremely important. Therefore you must not think that words which are used in occult works, be it in the form of prose or poetry, arise in the same way as do words in other works. Such spiritual or occult works which really spring from truth, truth about the world and its mysteries, come into existence when the soul really allows world-thoughts to speak through it, really lets world-feelings — not its own personal feelings — inflame it, and has really created these feelings and thoughts from beings of cosmic or universal will.

It is part of the mission of the Anthroposophical movement that man should learn to discriminate between what is sounding forth out of the cosmic mysteries and that which his own arbitrary imagination has invented. Ever more and more the development of civilization will rise to the point where, in the place of arbitrary invention, there will appear that which lives in the human soul in such a way that it is the other pole of the corresponding spirituality. Things created in this way are in their turn life-giving seed which unite with the spirit. They have a purpose in the world process. It gives us quite a different feeling of responsibility as regards what we do ourselves when we know that what we bring about are living germs — not sterile ones which simply perish. Then we must allow these germs too to spring up from the depths of the World-Soul.

Now, it may be asked: 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. What Spiritual Science desires to teach men is this: that we are in the midst of this meaning, and can express it truly thus:

“Within thy thinking cosmic thought doth live,

Within thy feeling cosmic forces play,

Within thy will do cosmic beings work;

Abandon thou thyself to cosmic thought,

Experience thyself through cosmic force,

Create thyself anew from cosmic will.

End not at last in cosmic distances

By fantasies of dreamy thought beguiled.

Do thou begin in farthest spirit-realms

And end in the recesses of thy soul,

The plan Divine then shalt thou recognize

When thou hast realized thy Self in thee.”

That, my dear anthroposophical friends, is the meaning of life, as man must understand it at present. This is what I wished to consider with you. If we understand it fully and make it entirely our own, the souls which have become Divine will make it effective in your souls.

Anthroposophia, The Spirit of Love

Source of second Steiner extract: May 24, 1912

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https://martyrion.blogspot.com/2019/12/spiritual-invincibility-what-archangel.html
http://martyrion.blogspot.com/2016/01/let-us-run-with-patience-race-that-is.html

https://martyrion.blogspot.com/2020/12/light-on-path.html