Me Me Me

Without question, our current materialistic culture reinforces our egoism. For some of us, it makes no sense to do things for others without getting something back. Even if we forgo accolades or quid pro quo, we give ourselves a little pat on the back for doing good. It is no surprise that altruism is a distant goal for most of us because egoism is the reverse of altruism. Imagine the soul development necessary to act in freedom for the common good.

Egoism is supported by the absence of two major soul qualities, reverence and humility, qualities that are often ridiculed and ignored these days. Instead, we take great pride in our personal accomplishments with no awareness of the spiritual beings helping us and with no credit given to all the people who have helped us become who we are.

Egoism should be the least of our problems, but it isn’t. In fact, nothing else even comes close.

In the excerpt below, Dr. Steiner shows that we can be egoistic even when we acquire some spiritual knowledge and try to better ourselves. How?

Let’s see what Dr. Steiner has to say:

A strong altruistic impulse can only come from a spiritual worldview. Only when we know ourselves to be a part of the world of spirit do we cease to be so terribly interesting to ourselves as to make ourselves the very center of the whole universe. At that point, egoistic impulses cease and altruistic ones begin. Our era has little inclination to develop this great interest for the world of spirit, but this is what must increase if we are really to feel ourselves part of the spiritual world.

And then the impulses of reincarnation and karma have, as it were, come raining into our civilization out of the blue. Yet how have they been taken up? Even those who embraced them have done so in a very egoistic fashion. It has been said, for example, that a person earns his destiny in each life.

Even otherwise intelligent people can be heard to say that ideas of reincarnation and karma are an answer to the question of why human suffering exists, and the social question is therefore irrelevant. Otherwise intelligent people have said that poverty is the deserved outcome of a former incarnation, that if someone is poor, they must simply expiate something they brought about in their past life. So even ideas of reincarnation and karma are not capable of working into our civilization as an impulse for altruistic feeling.

What matters is how we introduce ideas of reincarnation and karma into our era. If they only become an impetus for egoism, they do not raise our culture to a higher level but push it still further downwards. Reincarnation and karma actually become unethical or anti-ethical ideas if many people think they must become good so that their next incarnation is a good one. This drive to become good in order to have as pleasant an experience as possible in our next life is a kind of double egoism, a step beyond even straightforward egoism.

And this is precisely what ideas of reincarnation and karma have come to mean for many. Our society today has so little real altruism… that it cannot even comprehend ideas such as reincarnation and karma in a way that would make them an impulse for altruistic and not egoistic actions and feelings.

Excerpt from: Understanding Society through Spiritual-Scientific Knowledge, Lecture 4. Dornach, October 10, 1919.

Yes, we are at the center of our own karma, but our work in the world is to prepare ourselves so that we have the insight and the moral qualities to lift other people from their suffering. Spiritual growth is so that we acquire the capacities necessary to build a healthy society. The ideas that are truly capable of benefiting humankind are born in the spiritual world.

If we recognize no thoughts coming from that realm, if we aren’t working very, very hard on ourselves, we will remain ill-equipped to answer life’s challenges. We won’t know enough to recognize the truth when we hear it. We won’t be in the right place to see what needs to be done, and we will continue to create band-aids rather than cures. We will still be acting out of egoism instead of working with all the spiritual powers available to us. That’s why we are on this arduous path toward enlightenment.

The way to find lasting solutions to the problems stated above are spiritual ones, altruistic ones. Sure, we have a long way to go, but we can’t wait for perfection to offer our services to the good. We can begin by examining our motives, objectively, precisely, to find the place within ourselves to make them clean.

Steiner states that the evolution of all beings is toward giving more than they receive. All beings. Altruism is the goal of humanity, not egoism. Gratitude and humility are the appropriate tools for this work. Even saying this is controversial in today’s world. So, no, it won’t be easy. But what a great goal, right?

Love as a Force for Good

Love for someone else is possible only if we become genuinely interested in them. We can be attracted to them by an array of qualities but love itself happens because of our desire to know more about them: what gives them joy, what interests them, what are their hopes and dreams. As we get to know them better, we begin to understand them and gain insight into them. Interest is the ground on which we step that allows love and understanding to bloom. As great as our love for another person becomes, it is but a baby step.

The spiritual hierarchies are interested in us; they love us. We will find that our experience of love here on earth is a mere reflection of the love we experience among the hierarchies in the spiritual world between earth lives. Each cycle of life as we go back and forth between earth and “heaven” is held with interest by the hierarchies, most specifically by our guardian angels. We are never alone and never unloved, but most of us don’t know it. Many of us aren’t interested in knowing it, but nevertheless, between each earth life, we are part of this communion with the hierarchies.

We may recall from previous posts that how we live our lives on earth affects our ability to fully encounter the beings of the hierarchies after we die. It is our own responsibility to work toward our inner development, and if we choose not to do that, not only do we find it difficult to feel love toward each other and all of humanity, to work together toward common goals, we also will have difficulty communing with the hierarchies after death which then hinders our ability to love in our next life. And so on.

Let’s see what Dr. Steiner has to say:

(Some) people here on Earth are incapable of unfolding love in which there is real strength, incapable of unfolding that all-embracing love which comes to expression in the power to understand other people. We may say with truth: it is among the Gods, in pre-earthly existence, that we acquire the gift for observing other people, to perceive how they think and how they feel, to understand them with inner sympathy. If we were deprived of this association with the Gods, we would never be capable of unfolding here on Earth that insight into other human beings which alone makes earthly life a reality.

When in this connection I speak of love, and especially of all-embracing human love, you must think of love as having this real and concrete meaning: you must think of it as signifying a genuine, intimate understanding of other people. If to the all-embracing love of humanity, this understanding of others is added, we have everything that constitutes human morality. For human morality on Earth—if it is not merely expressed in empty phrases or fine talk or in resolutions not afterwards carried out—depends upon the interest one person takes in another, upon the capability to see into the other person. Those who have the gift of understanding other human beings will receive from this understanding the impulses for a social life imbued with true morality.

So we may also say: everything that constitutes moral life in earthly existence has been acquired by human beings in pre-earthly existence; from our communion with the Gods there has remained in us the urge to unfold, in the soul at any rate, community on Earth as well. And it is the development of a life where the one person together with the other fulfils the tasks and the mission of the Earth—it is this alone that in reality leads to the moral life on Earth. Thus we see that love, and the outcome of love—morality—are in very truth a consequence of what man has experienced spiritually in a pre-earthly existence.

Excerpt from: Man and the World of Stars. Lecture IV: Rhythms of Earthly and Spiritual Life, Love, Memory, the Moral Life, by Rudolf Steiner. Dec. 15, 1922, Dornach, Switzerland.

We can be grateful to those who love us and allow us to love them because we need to know what love means. And we can feel grateful for meaningful work with others—work that accomplishes something in the world—work we could not do if we didn’t have others working alongside us. We can also be grateful for the flame that ignites our interest in others and our will to work in the world. The impetus to be our best selves, to create community in the world, to truly love, comes from the hierarchies in the world we live in before birth and again after death, whether we believe in them or not. But we must purposefully direct our wills to overcome the distractions of our world in order to utilize this gift of the gods, in order to genuinely encounter each other.

All around us in 2024 we can find the results of a lack of capacity to see and understand the other: we have lost our moral compass. We define people by our sympathies and antipathies instead of seeing them as having souls like us. The results of this are horrific. To become complete human beings, we must fight our own lethargy, our own prejudices, to seek insight into each other. Becoming a whole human being, a moral human being, is the hardest thing we can do because no one can do it for us. Yet this is our real work, the work that matters.

A meditative practice, of contemplation in the quiet of our own minds, even for just five minutes every single day, is a start. This is so much harder to do than it sounds. Try it.