Living Water
Read John 4:1-15 The woman said to him, "Sir, you have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep; where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well, and drank from it himself, and his sons, and his cattle?"
Jesus said to her, "Every one who drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life." The woman said to him, "Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst, nor come here to draw."John 4:11-15
The sixth aspect of Buddha’s path is Right Effort. Each step on the path must have at its basis Right Effort. Effort, rightly understood, is not about struggle. This passage from John’s Gospel paints a graphic picture. Drawing water from a well can represent our struggle in contrast to receiving the presence of Christ.
Think about how much effort goes into make our lives physically easier? Think of the effort and resources committed to producing modern conveniences to reduce the struggle to sustain our lives. Yet, no matter how many labour-saving devices are invented we still experience life as a struggle.
This struggle is intricately tied to willingness. Christ says that: whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.
Are we willing to surrender our tendency to stand, for instance, on a high moral ground and point the finger at those who don’t measure up? - like judging the woman at the well for having so many men in her life. Or, can we resist the temptation to punish ourselves when we think we don’t measure up? We cannot be good all the time. Rudolf Steiner puts it perfectly when he says that good is too weak. What is good anyway? It is the harmonious existence of two opposites. If we say that the pendulum is swinging from good to bad the operative word is ‘swinging’. The pendulum does not stop on point ‘good’, it experiences the full spectrum.
At this present point in evolution good is seen to be a total reliance on the physical world – this is the water in the well. Acknowledgement of our soul and spirit is the opposite of good – Christ’s water. We can say that everything that makes our physical life easier, more comfortable, in other words, requiring less effort, is represented by the water from the well. If we try to get the water from the well as prescribed and think that it will sustain our life forever we will be disappointed. We need living water to sustain our life, the living water that comes from Christ. He can only pour this living water into us if we surrender our ideas, our limited formulas and trust that Christ will give us this water that will become in us a spring of water welling up to eternal life.
When we work on issues with Right Effort we co-operate with each other. Right Effort requires openness, a willingness to look at opposing views and finding ways of harmonising them. All too often Right Effort becomes a struggle because the basic soul mood of sympathy and antipathy, like and dislike which overpowers reason and awareness. Like and dislike arise from our subjective, usually limited, experiences. If we operate from our I AM, that great light house that can scan 360 degrees, objectivity comes naturally. In this objectivity we continually re-assess our assumptions and we welcome other points of view because they enrich us.
Underpinning Right Effort are the basic principles that come to us as esoteric teaching; ethical principles that we must put into practice in our life. The foremost principle is love, pure love; the new commandment that is Christ’s gift to us (Jn 13:34).
How hard is it to love? This woman at the well loves – she has had five husbands and one lover. We often do not love because we fear, fears like ‘the well running dry’ or ‘falling into the well’? Fear really is hate. The pendulum also swings between love and hate, it doesn’t stop on point ‘hate’. If we love one another as Christ loves us we will experience the full spectrum of emotions between love and hate. We will not deny them. We will recognise our fear and with Right Effort we will conquer it. We will recognise the superficiality of our love, especially in our favouritism and seek to love more purely.
In all our endeavours we will seek to experience the full spectrum of the pendulum with honesty and trust. This means that we can admit our mistakes. This is only possible in an atmosphere of pure love – for mistakes are neutralised by love, this is Right Effort. If we do nothing else we should put all our effort into loving more, trusting more, casting errors into the sea of forgetfulness and drinking the living water that flows the continually from the presence of Christ.
A question
Kristina - I have been fed tenfold by the wisdom in your articles on the Eightfold Path. Thank you.
I am inwardly questioning the way you have conflated fear and hate this week. You wrote: Fear really is hate.
In Earthly life they are bound together with brother doubt. In the soul they feel very different. I experience that underneath fear skulks hatred in some hidden guise or other. At the threshold we meet them side by side.
Could you clarify what you intend to convey in unmasking these 2 tough teachers of the human soul? The other thoughts here are - as usual - full of light. Other conversations on this site this week are hungry for the wisdom you are sharing out.
along with John
Hi John,
I think we can each feel the qualitative differences between them. But it's like shaking a guy's left hand or his right. The differences are very real and potentially significant, but it's the same guy either way.
I see fear, hate and doubt as each depending on the exact same suppositions about vulnerability and sin. Fear, Doubt and Hate can only "exists" if sin, blame and endangerment are made real. In other words, if the Ego is the self, then all three have done their work.
This is why we could use more representations of Christ's Deep Laughter. It's not an angry or mocking laughter. It just gets the cosmic joke about the true nature of doubt, blame and fear, hate (and all the other manifestations the same presumption take).
But in the same way that doubt, fear and hatred are the same, we can see that Christ's Laughter, Christ's Comfort and Christ Justice are the same as well.
By the way, I love seeing that the same insights that Kristinia is wonderfully and generously sharing with us are finding their way into all sorts of different teachings, able to use the vocabulary of esoteric christianity just as easily as it uses secular humanist and atheistic conventions. It's a relief to see that it certainly isn't confined to any set of symbols or practices. You can read Tolle's descriptions of working with the "pain-body" and see how it is expressed via those symbols so effectively. Thanks Kristinia for bringing it the way you do!
Jeff
Fear and hate
These reflections about the way St John's unfolds Buddha's path are a continuum of my study - I try to express each reflection in self sustaining bites. I can understand how this statement would bite the mind. In his lectures published in The Fall of the Spirits of Darkness Steiner says "-hatred being merely another aspect of fear-". Many years ago I was shocked to realise that hate, that word we avoid, was a central soul experience - the opposite of love. I then realised that as often as we avoided confronting the many ways we hate, this often meant that this was how often we denied our fear. Equally, when we experienced dislike or antipathy - really hatred - from others, it meant that they feared us.
When you translate this into experiences of the body, soul and spirit; fear is experienced in our body and hatred is experienced in our soul (as you say) because in our spirit, or through our 'I'/higher self, we are still learning to love (agape). Therefore, as you so rightly say, "At the threshold we meet them side by side." I am sure that we need to learn to experience them both at once - like tasting something sweet and sour at the same time. Thank you for your thoughtful words.
K
Namaste
Inspired contributions from you both - many thanks.
I realise now why the appearance of some degree of hatred in another, which covers a fear within them, sparks off such self-doubt in me. This had not connected up so clearly before.
Jeff's contribution brought about a deep seismic shift in my soul. I had flash of the Dalai Llama's chuckle for a moment. I used to struggle ineffectively with the guilt gremlin until I tried a Toltec practice of diminishing self-importance. This is much more advanced stuff. I want a t-shirt with Wide Open Church of Christ's Deep Laughter printed on it!
Iactually experience a
I actually experience a sense of peace after reading that Kristna. I think you bring to us something that is very special. Thank you again.
Sebastian
Love
Dear friends, thank you very much - all of you. I agree with Sebastian - reading Kristina, I also feel peace and touch of Truth.
I would like to share with you one of my experience or rather thoughts and feelings from my childhood, which can seem to be a little bit naïve. Please forgive me my poor and terrible English.
I remember, when I was 5 years old and observed the world of adults (with big respect, without judge), I was wondering how it is possible that wise and intelligent people are so chaotic and so far from the Truth, which is very simple, very close to them, waiting for them with open hands. This Truth is Love.
And I remember that I suffered not from lack of love to me, but from misunderstanding this simple, and important for everybody, Truth. I felt it that time very intensive as a big Wisdom and promised myself – when I will be an adult ( 20 y.o. :-), I will write a book about it. What is interesting to me, is that later, I remembered the promise about the book, but I completely forgot what I meant and reminded to myself everything only after crossing the age of 28. After this age I also understood my parents and other ‘adults’ better, although still suffered from their too emotional life – a life full of fear.
As a doctor, I can say that this problem is directly connected with our health ( of course); very often people start (in the best case…) to work with their fears and emotions and have life’s reflections after the health’s disorders begin or on one’s deathbed. Why do we have to wait for problems and death to begin being mature? We can say, karma…yes, we have to learn, also through our own mistakes. But, I think, Love is an omnipotent and the biggest healing power. As Kristina wrote: …This is only possible in an atmosphere of pure love – for mistakes are neutralised by love, this is Right Effort.
The one, who understood, shares Love with others and helps to find them the way to pure Love which is hidden in the well of their hearts.
And then “…the streams of living water will flow from within him” (John 7:38)
Love to all
Olga
Olga, this is beautiful.
Olga, this is beautiful. Thank you!
Full Spectrum
Kristina
Thank you for this and all your essays. I'm especially grateful for this part: If we love one another as Christ loves us we will experience the full spectrum of emotions between love and hate. We will not deny them.
Sympathy and antipathy get so much bad press around here, but aren't they lesser forms of love and hate? And quite necessary in a certain sphere of life. If, for instance, you strive to overcome your antipathy to a piece of rotten food and eat it anyway, you will probably get sick, which means your body knows better than you do what to avoid. That's a crass example (sorry). In Marjorie Spock's essays she calls sympathy and antipathy soul motions, toward and away from. I wonder if anybody came to study anthroposophical ideas who didn't feel some kind of sympathy (attraction) toward Steiner's ideas. So it serves a purpose, even if the purpose is to lead us toward the idea of not letting sympathy and antipathy rule our lives.
I suppose that only experiencing the full spectrum of emotions as you describe above will allow us to be able to work with them and transform them.
Wonderful comments
Olga, you touch on a deep esoteric secret kept for us in Matthew's gospel "whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it." 10:15
Lori, thank you for bringing to my attention the excellent way of describing sympathy and antipathy - as soul motions. This is so true. It is through our I AM that we can raise these to a higher expression. By this I mean that we don't get thrown back and forth between them but that we observe them more objectively.
Kristina
sympathy and antipathy as observed by scientific introspection
Dear Friends,
Introspective observation of the soul reveals a number of aspects which can be related to such terms as: feelings, emotions and so forth. Everyone knows these when they are strong in the soul, for they often produce a physiological effect felt as an apparent sensation in the material body: flushing of the skin, tightening of the stomach and so forth.
The life of feeling also influences the life of thought, such that careful observation of thought life over time will teach us about feelings and their influence on thoughts. Primary feelings effecting thought are sympathy and antipathy. What I like or dislike (basic feeling responses to percepts) produces an effect on thoughts.
Since we tend to sleep through these most of the time, we don't notice this. The most obvious way thoughts reveal the underlying unconscious feeling of antipathy is when the thought contains a "antipathetic" judgment. We see someone, and our thoughts will reveal the not liking in the content, such as "this person is an asshole". Obviously this characterization is not in the person themselves, they are just who they are the same as we. But the antipathetic feeling judgment produces the negative mental picture, a fact of existence we very much need for life, but all the same quite subjective.
Christ teaches about this in the Sermon on the Mount in the teaching of the mote and the beam. The mote is the small defect in the other that we react to in a "not liking" fashion (antipathy), but the beam is the judgment that arises in the thought life as the negative mental picture. This judgment does not exist in the other, but only in our own soul as a thought driven by the unconscious or semiconscious antipathy. The stronger the antipathy, the more vicious the thoughts. Politics brings this out a great deal, and so those who "hate" George Bush, for example, are caught up in the antipathy to him and his actions.
We can also have too much sympathy, such as happens in the Anthroposophical Movement and Society where Steiner is raised up into an abnormal condition of such inflated excess that people believe him incapable of error or creating karma.
Now antipathy and sympathy do reflect valid knowledge of the world, but in order to obtain to that valid knowledge we have to learn to set aside the beam - that is to master the thought content produced by the unconscious (see once more the Sermon on the Mount).
Most people don't want to work on this problem (mastering the feelings of antipathy and sympathy so that they no longer give us a mistaken picture of other people), but for students of spiritual science, who want to develop capacities in their soul, such work is at the very foundation of everything else. Most of us are familiar with these problems, for PoF addresses them from several directions.
Again, the I needs to separate itself from its thought product at certain points of scientific-like self observation, in order to perceive in the thoughts just those effects of feelings of antipathy and sympathy on the thought content. The thought content is influenced by much that lies deep in the soul, and the better we learn to observe the arising and becoming of the thought content the more will the secrets of the soul be revealed to us. For details: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/samod.html
joel
Mote and Beam
Joel, what a great explanation of the mote and beam problem! I always just took it to mean that one's own faults are obviously so much worse than the little faults that one sees in others. Which doesn't really make that much sense, since we're all just about equal in the fault department. But now I see that the beam is what happens in my eye when I'm judging the other person's mote. So it blocks my vision of the person.
Thanks!
Mirror
Thank you - Joel and Lori for wonderful words about sympathy and antipathy, especially about the mote and beam.
Joel wrote: Obviously this characterization is not in the person themselves, they are just who they are the same as we.
Yes. Usually we notice in others, as mistakes, reflections of ours. We look in each others like in the mirror. Then the antipathy or sympathy will rise (often unconsciously).
I think, when we noticed in others some negative things or dislike somebody (or like too much) we have to ask ourselves, why? And look for the reasons inside us. This can be a good lesson, through which we develop and know our true selves better.
There is also, in my opinion, a simple solution: just conscious notice, touch by the inner eye, the highest ‘I’ of another human - Christ in him or her (even not only in human but also in other beings). As Kristina wrote: If we operate from our I AM, that great light house that can scan 360 degrees, objectivity comes naturally. In this objectivity we continually re-assess our assumptions and we welcome other points of view because they enrich us.
I consider that work with sympathy and antipathy as a central in anthroposophy.
And what I am absolutely sure of, is that a person who evokes in us more antipathy than we can even expect from ourselves, just needs more Love.
All the Best
Olga
Glad you're back
Glad you're back Olga! :-)
S.
Reversals
Hi Joel,
Now we're getting close to some important material. Thanks for the venture in this direction.
Yes, sympathy and antipathy are fundamental movements (feelings) in the astral body. When they move in one direction, they become thinking; when they move in the other, they become willing.
What you don't mention here is that both of these movements are fundamentally anti-social. They move in the direction of self-concern and self-interest, and away from the social (moral) attitudes of universal concern and neutral disinterest.
The key concept that redeems or should redeem these anti-social movements in the feeling life is the fact described by spiritual science that the action of the astral body is always point for point reversed with respect to action in the etheric body. If a movement is forward in the etheric body, it is backward in the astral body. If it is upward in the etheric body, it is downward in the astral body.
Now we can see the absolute necessity in spiritual science for the thinking exercise and the willing exercise. These exercises reverse the movements of antipathy (thinking) and sympathy (willing), thereby bringing the astral body into register with the etheric (with the physical) body. These are literal physical or hyper-physical movements that need to be practiced and accomplished if we are going to begin to enter the anthroposophical domain.
The scenario that follows, or should follow, upon actually entering such a domain is almost beyond description. In such society, the astral dimensions of each individuality stand as a transparent Sign to all others of the karma that each individual has carried into the present moment, and will continue to carry into future epochs of Earth evolution. These are actual, hyper-physical forms and figures, filled with supernal tone and luminescence, accessible to clairvoyant intuition in the two-petaled organ in the brain. But as in Socrates' dream, they have no logos (no account, no description).
I hope on this basis you will now be able to grant us all without reservation that a culture of Goethean conversation, and only such a culture, can make it feasible to practice scientific introspection with these evolutionary, karmic objectives taken as given. I hope on this basis you will express some sort of a practical commitment to all of us, and not just another long series of judgments about what it's like to be an anthroposophist, or what it's like to be Joel Wendt. I take it as understood by you that science is a consensual, social practice, and not a solitary, solipsistic endeavor, that social practices entail commitments, and that commitments, not judgments, are what have real social value because they are what embody the currency of social life.
Ok, All of my fuss about
Ok,
All of my fuss about why we can’t really describe a “connecting” of percept and concept is totally related to why Carl probably needed to communicate this way to Joel. It’s totally connected to why I’ll get angry at the driver that cuts me off on the road or upset at how Bush justifies his latest decision. There is nothing wrong with anger, ever. But anger is very different when you are actively loving the object of your concern as compared to when you have forgotten that love. When I’m loving Bush I can still be passionate about what I won’t accept from him.
But when we say we aren’t mad or hurt and we talk to somebody as if we are talking about ideas…that’s just bizarre. We all do it. But’s it’s weird. And, I believe, it’s connected to the main point of PoF, which, to me, is all about conscious love or taking full and utter responsibility for our lack of moment to moment love. Not the sentimental love, but the practical love in this moment, the love that is inherently "your" very self-sustaining nature.
Carl you make a direct and personal request to Joel at the end of your post. Also, you are always very actively asking for feedback about the nature of your communication. I want to make a request of you in the spirit of your interest in feedback. Would you be willing to share what was going on when you were motivated to write this post to Joel. I’m not interested in all the fascinating intellectual aspects of your intention or the serious moral motivations…I don’t doubt there are much of each. I’m wondering if there was anything else going on that is directly related to why you wrote in the manner you did? Obviously, I’m biased here. I think there is. But, all I can do is ask for descriptions.
Thanks,
Jeff
oh Carl, you rascal
I must confess Carl that none of what you wrote made any sense to me. I suspect you were trying to trick me, by suggesting that I would be in agreement with even 5% of what you wrote. You overplayed your hand, however, and this was really quite clever and funny. At least I hope you weren't serious. If you were, I apologize for being so amazingly stupid that I barely understood a word. If this was serious and true, you are clearly so far beyond me in anthroposophiical comprehension, that I perhaps should not write any more for this list.
Tom has been suggesting to me that we have to recognize that individual posts represent an "outlook", and that from the writers point of view are correct. If you are correct, I am so wrong that I should probably never get out of bed tomorrow, or at least not until the Divine Mystery has seen fit to enable me to be able to comprehend such a collection of words. If you wrote an outlook, I must have written an inlook. I which case your suggesting that to be scientifically introspective is a solipsistic endeavor must be correct and I have been wasting the last 35 years of my life. I wonder what Steiner would have said if you made such a remark about PoF.
In any event, my hats off to you, Carl, for a really extraordinary string of words and sentences, the like of which I've never seen before.
joel
Thank you, Carl, for your
Thank you, Carl, for your scientific explanation of the topic of antipathy and sympathy, and their social importance. Although for me is easier the heart’s thinking, I respect your point of view and wish myself understand it better in future. :-)
Love
Olga