The way we care for people follows certain tendencies. I think these tendencies can be categorized in 3 ways.

1.) We often care for other people's physical body out of a sense of prudence.

2.) We often care for other people's emotions out of a sense of empathy.

3.) We only care for other people's spiritual well being out of a true, free and independent, spiritual morality.

With #1 their is constraint. You almost can't help but care for people in this way. Just as, for example, when backing your car up in a parking lot one is careful not to bang into someone else's car out of a sense of prudence (Fear that I will be caught and have to pay the bill) so we often times care for a person's physical body in the same way. (We are also careful not to back over other people in the parking lot for similar reasons).

I know this sounds harsh, and there are many people who have moral standards much higher than this (for example, one is careful when backing up simply because they have recognized this as the right thing to do - regardless of the law or whether or not they will be held accountable), but - sadly - many times this is still the case.

I had a patient once who was an Air Marshall, and so he knew all about the airline industry. He actually knew several people in high administrative positions in the airline industry. He told me once, "One thing is for sure, they care nothing about you. You are just a number to them when you fly on their planes. If the plane goes down, they know that they are covered." In saying this he was referring to the fact that the airlines have insurance to protect them from lawsuits of surviving families, and thus they are not really concerned about the individuals who may perish in a crash, because 'they are covered'. This is the morality of prudence.

With #2 their is also constraint. Again - the average person can not help but feel a little bit of empathy for someone who is having a hard time or is in some type of pain. Have you ever seen someone fall hard on the ground. Likely you would have made a sound, like "Oh!" (And if you were in a group of witnesses there likely would have been a collective "Oh!") When you see someone take a hard fall, you (in a small sense) experience the other person's pain yourself, as a shock to your emotions (What we anthroposophists have learned to call the astral body). And this shock, in many ways, causes us to want to help the other person, so that we can put our own feelings at ease. One could even, I think, call this the Mothering Instinct. For this is the basic process that goes on when mother's take care of their children.

This is not to say that mothering, or caring for people out of empathy is immoral. And it would be easy to think this - for on one level it seems that, in taking care of someone out of empathy, we are really, essentially, just taking care of our own emotions.

I don't think this is correct for one simple reason. Opening oneself up to the emotions of others is in itself moral. It is an act of the healthy person to do so. Just imagine what our society would look like if we did not open ourselves up, make ourselves vulnerable to, the emotions of others. It would indeed be a dark, cold, and uncaring society that I don't think anyone would want to live in.

With #3 however, true spiritual freedom in caring for another person enters the picture. For what you are caring for is not yourself at all (in the sense of emotions or prudence) but purely the other person. To begin with, this is really quite rare. How many of us (and how often) have had the experience that someone was trying to help us in a purely selfless way? For the benefit of our own spiritual individuality, with no trace of self seeking whatsoever?
Unfortunately, the last (and I mean dead last) place to look for this is within the family structure. For when you exist within a family, everything you do reflects on the family, and this creates strong (mostly unconscious) urges to want a person to do one thing or the other, simply out of concern for how the family will appear (and by proxy, how you will appear) to the outside world.

This is related to Christ's teaching in the Gospels that he came to turn the family against itself.

I recently heard a story about the famous actor Peter O'Toole on NPR. He was in the British Navy in the 40's (or around there) and his commander noticed something about him (Peter). The commander asked Peter, "What is it that you really want to do with your life?" - Peter thought about it and said, "I want to be an actor". The commander said, "Well then, by God, be an actor." Shortly after Peter O'Toole started taking acting classes and the rest, as they say, is history.

This is a beautiful and poignant example of spiritual morality - taking care of another's spirit purely for the sake of the spirit. How many of us have had experiences like this? Unfortunately, I think the answer is far too few.

But just think, for a moment, what the world would (actually, will) look like when the third motive becomes just as common as the second motive.

That, my friends, would essentially be Heaven on Earth.