Greater Love

  

Rudolf Steiner:

"Then a new element made its appearance in human life with the awakening and development of the consciousness soul. This calls for a second kind of awakening, one for which the human race will feel a growing need: an awakening at hand of the souls and spirits of other human beings. In ordinary waking life one awakens only in meeting another's natural aspects. But a person who has become an independent, distinct individual in the age of consciousness wants to wake up in the encounter with the soul and spirit of his fellowman. He wants to awaken to his soul and spirit, to approach him in a way that startles his own soul awake in the same sense that light and sound and other such environmental elements startle one out of dreaming.

This has been felt as an absolutely basic need since the beginning of the twentieth century, and it will grow increasingly urgent. It is a need that will be apparent throughout the twentieth century, despite the time's chaotic, tumultuous nature, which will affect every phase of life and civilization. Human beings will feel this need — the need to be brought to wake up more fully in the encounter with the other person than one can wake up in regard to the merely natural surroundings. Dream life wakes up into wakeful day consciousness in the encounter with the natural environment. Wakeful day consciousness wakes up to a higher consciousness in the encounter with the soul and spirit of our fellowman. Man must become more to his fellowman than he used to be: he must become his awakener. People must come closer to one another than they used to do, each becoming an awakener of everyone he meets. Modern human beings entering life today have stored up far too much karma not to feel a destined connection with every individual they encounter. In earlier ages, souls were younger and had not formed so many karmic ties. Now it has become necessary to be awakened not just by nature but by the human beings with whom we are karmically connected and whom we want to seek.

So, in addition to the need to recall one's super-sensible home, which the cultus meets, we have the further need to be awakened to the soul-spiritual element by other human beings, and the feeling impulse that can bring this about is that of the newer idealism. When the ideal ceases to be a mere abstraction and becomes livingly reunited with man's soul and spirit, it can be expressed in the words, “I want to wake up in the encounter with my fellowman.”

This is the feeling that, vague though it is, is developing in youth today, “I want to be awakened by my fellowman,” and this is the particular form in which community can be nurtured in the Anthroposophical Society. It is the most natural development imaginable for when people come together for a communal experience of what anthroposophy can reveal of the super-sensible, the experience is quite a different one from any that the individual could have alone. The fact that one wakes up in the encounter with the soul of the other during the time spent in his company creates an atmosphere that, while it may not lead one into the super-sensible world in exactly the way described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, furthers one's understanding of the ideas that anthroposophical spiritual science brings us from super-sensible realms.

There is a different understanding of things among people who share a common idealistic life based on mutual communication of an anthroposophical content, whether by reading aloud or in some other way. Through experiencing the super-sensible together, one human soul is awakened most intensively in the encounter with another human soul. It wakes the soul to higher insight, and this frame of mind creates a situation that causes a real communal being to descend in a group of people gathered for the purpose of mutually communicating and experiencing anthroposophical ideas. Just as the genius of a language lives in that language and spreads its wings over those who speak it, so do those who experience anthroposophical ideas together in the right, idealistic frame of mind live in the shelter of the wings of a higher being.

Now what takes place as a result?

If this line (Dr. Steiner draws on the blackboard) represents the demarcation between the super-sensible and the sense world, we have, here above it, the processes and beings of the higher world experienced in the cultus; they are projected by the words and ritualistic acts of the cultus into the physical world here below the line. In the case of an anthroposophical group, experience on the physical plane is lifted by the strength of its genuine, spiritualized idealism into the spiritual world. The cultus brings the super-sensible down into the physical world with its words and actions. The anthroposophical group raises the thoughts and feelings of the assembled individuals into the super-sensible, and when an anthroposophical content is experienced in the right frame of mind by a group of human beings whose souls wake up in the encounter with each other, the soul is lifted in reality into a spirit community. It is only a question of this awareness really being present. Where it exists and groups of this kind make their appearance in the Anthroposophical Society, there we have in this reversed cultus, as I shall call it, in this polar opposite of the cultus, a most potent community building element. If I were to speak pictorially, I would put it thus: the community of the cultus seeks to draw the angels of heaven down to the place where the cultus is being celebrated, so that they may be present in the congregation, whereas the anthroposophical community seeks to lift human souls into super-sensible realms so that they may enter the company of angels. In both cases that is what creates community.

But if anthroposophy is to serve man as a real means of entering the spiritual world, it may not be mere theory and abstraction. We must do more than just talk about spiritual beings; we must look for the opportunities nearest at hand to enter their company. The work of an anthroposophical group does not consist in a number of people merely discussing anthroposophical ideas. Its members should feel so linked with one another that human soul wakes up in the encounter with human soul and all are lifted into the spiritual world, into the company of spiritual beings, though it need not be a question of beholding them. We do not have to see them to have this experience."

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We are the Trinity

You—Love—and I—We are One-Two-Three

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Two—Yes—and One—Yes—and also Three:

One Dual Trinity

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Ultimate Mystery

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Source: The Rudolf Steiner Archive March 3, 1923. GA 257