1-11 And the more idealistic these mental pictures are, just so much the more blessed is our love.

Mother Teresa could be seen as an example of 1-11, the way to the heart is the head. Her love for people was based upon her seeing those she helped as being Christ. She formed an idealistic mental picture of others.



Mother Teresa: "Because we cannot see Christ, we cannot express our love to him, but our neighbors we can always see, and we can do to them what if we saw him we would like to do to Christ . . . in the slums, in the broken body, in the children, we see Christ and we touch him."

On the other hand we have the example of the witch hunts. The witch hunters looked at a maiden and pictured a witch. Both of these seem somewhat disconnected with the person, but it does point to the fact that we give meaning to things. Two people can witness the same event and give it two different meanings.

By adding the next part, 1-12, One has love while others do not because one made a mental picture of the good qualities, here the mental picture of another is the result of noticing the good qualities of a person. This seems more grounded in the person. Holding onto a mental picture of the good qualities of a person will result in more love.

We can do a review of the images that come to mind when a name of someone is mentioned. These images that come to mind could then be compared to how we feel about the person. Any connection?

C.S. Lewis 1898-1963
The Witch

Starry wonders she has seen
Brooding in the wildwood green
With holiness. For who can say
In what strange crew she loved to play,
What demons or what gods of old
Deep mysteries unto her have told
At dead of night in worship bent
At ruined shrines magnificent,
Or how the quivering will she sent
Alone into the great alone
Where all is loved and all is known,
Who now lifts up her maiden eyes
And looks around with soft surprise
Upon the noisy, crowded square,
The city oafs that nod and stare,
The bishop?s court that gathers there,
The faggots and the blackened stake
Where sinners die for justice' sake?
Now she is set upon the pile,
The mob grows still a little while,
Till lo! before the eager folk
Up curls a thin, blue line of smoke.
"Alas!" the full-fed burghers cry,
"That evil loveliness must die!"

Rudolf Steiner says you can find the basic principles of Anthroposophy in The Philosophy of Freedom. Here is an example in his well known writing on Faithfulness. In 1-12, recalling the mental picture of another's good qualities results in love. This is rephrased in a more inspiring way in his popular "Faithfulness."

Thanks so much for including this quotation, Tom. I love Steiner's definition of faithfulness as wrestling for the image you once saw in the other person! And then the experience of those fleeting moments of light will be seen for the grace they really are.

My heart and soul-mood need motives to work on, and these have to be supplied by thinking.

That the way to the heart is through the head nobody can doubt who has ever had a crush on anyone. What brings such an uncomfortable condition on? You wake up one day and that person is in your thoughts. Suddenly there's the mental picture of his or her face accompanying you throughout the day, like the uninvited guest who refuses to leave.

The first time I read the part about "the more idealistic the mental pictures, the more blessed the love," I almost had to laugh. How many people marry young, only to discover to their dismay that the Prince or Princess Charming they thought they were marrying doesn't really exist? Where's the blessedness in that? This not uncommon situation may be an exception to the correlation Steiner is proposing here, but in the wide world of love in all its forms, over-idealistic romantic love naturally pops into mind in the context of this passage, particularly since he just mentioned sex.

So setting aside this apparent platitude about the blessedness of idealistic love, I'll concentrate on how my mental pictures arouse my emotions. The crush is one all-too-familiar example. What about pity or, as I prefer it, compassion (the German word "Mitleid" seems to stand for both)? It arises in my heart, Steiner says, when a mental picture of a person who arouses compassion appears in my consciousness. Hmm. Something arises when something else arouses it. Does this really explain anything?

My heart is just resting there unoccupied, perhaps happy as I pet my cat, when along comes a mental picture of a friend whose cat died after a lingering illness and multiple operations. The friend is really broken up about it, and her sadness arouses my compassion, even though I have no patience with modern save-that-life-at-any-cost veterinary technology.

The mental picture of my mourning friend arouses my compassion. But how could it unless the compassion was already there to be aroused? Is my compassion like a plant seed in the ground, that's only called into life by a mental picture? As if we could cause a seed to grow by waving, over the ground where we planted it, a picture of the flower it will become? ( And does something like that actually happen on some high spiritual level when flowers grow? Do the sun, moon and stars rain pictures down on them so they can grow into what they're meant to be?)

Where do compassion and love live when we aren't feeling them at the moment, when there's no mental picture in us to arouse them? The way to the heart may be through the head, but is something always waiting in the heart when the mental picture comes around?

I guess it's safe to assume that most people's hearts are full of the seeds of a whole vast range of emotions, which only need the right mental pictures to make them sprout and grow. Love depends on mental pictures; mental pictures cause love to sprout and grow, even though the love already has to be there as a potential.

Returning to the idea of immature, idealized love that turns out badly, I think about what Steiner may have meant by "idealistic." The German word is "idealistisch" which translates directly, and like its English counterpart can mean a range of things, from "quixotic" to "spiritualized." I guess I've been thinking about the "quixotic" version of love, and not the "spiritualized" version. Maybe if we always took the high road we wouldn't get into such trouble!

Lori, it's pretty amazing that you just wrote this post this morning! Last night I got caught up in PoF in a big way and spent quite some time studying how Steiner describes the relationship between a motive and a
driving force . Last night I realized that he actually developes a much more dynamic relationship between them than I originally thought. In the past, I basically thought he was setting up a one-way relationship, especially in reading his "head to heart" comments in chapter one. However, last night I went back and forth between his description in Chapter 1 and his comments in Chapter 9.

In chapter 9, Steiner breaks the driving forces into 4 levels and places "feelings" on level two. He makes it clear that our feelings (he uses "pity", "love"...)can act as driving forces before the next level of 'mental pictures/concepts" kicks in. More than that, he also also makes it very clear that the only way a motive can actually function as a motive is IF it is accepted by the Characterlogical disposition, which is composed of...drum role.....feelings, mental pictures, memories....

He created a full circle! This totally blows away what was left of my former understanding. Sure, the head might be the father of the heart, but only if the heart wants it to be. It's not up to the head because it's a relationship in which each is mutually implied in the other. As you know, I read PoF from the point of view that everything is intrinsicly together, so this was a wonderful discovery for me.

Lori, you write:

"The mental picture of my mourning friend arouses my compassion. But how could it unless the compassion was already there to be aroused?"

Exactly. We miss the point if we believe that the mental picture is a cause in the cause/effect sense. In fact, in Chapter 9 Steiner uses the word "accompany" at least two times when talking about the relationship, implying to me that he wasn't willing to set up a simple cause/effect relationship. And we can look at the other side of your question as well.
How could your compassion be aroused if it wasn't already united with the world. We don't need to see them as separated at all. They aren't.
But my favorite Lori question so far is:

"Where do compassion and love live when we aren't feeling them at the moment, when there's no mental picture in us to arouse them?"

This is the kind of question that I cherish when it arises. I love just sitting in it, smelling and feeling its shape, long before I even care what kind of a response might emerge from such tender loving care. Here's what I'm thinking: compassion isn't a feeling, it is a knowing. It will always have a felt dimension in however it manifests, but the quality of that experience is dependent how the nature of the situation: compassion can be strong like a sword or soft as a cloud, compassion can be light heartest and deeply passionate. There is only one truth/compassion and it will freely show up in each situation with whatever flavor it brings.

So when you ask, "where do compassion and love live when we aren't feeling them at the moment?" I think that they live in the same spot: the truth. Or: You. The subjective ego goes away and does other things in split land. It pays taxes, blames presidents, idealizes spiritual paths, streangthens its will and gets annoyed. But love and compassion are right where they always are, ready to flow towards anything that is open to them. Freedom then becomes not about the specific content of your action, but about how receptive your action is to the Truth- that is, how open you are to what you really are right now.

The subjective ego NEEDS love and compassion to be a feeling, to be something that it can have . Mine does. And it seems SO obvious that they are feelings, but that is only because the subjective ego has already decided, in advance, that it will only recognize them as feelings. The Split Ego will only recognize forms, therefore, it demands a form for the Truth and a Forth for compassion. We are all still involved intimately in the split and, therefore, indentified with the subjective ego, it will certainly appear as if Love and Compassion can go away or be unconscious or whatever. But I think that the "field of experience"- that Steiner says is the only point of PoF reveals that- proves that compassion is always there, that we just have to surrender to it. The "me" does not want to surrender because that means death to it.

If we want to let "pity" and compassion" be distinguished, I would say that "pity" can only happen within the split ( 2-0{3}, 4-2{8}, 5-5{16}, 7-10{30} ), whereas "compassion" is the result of the split no longer being maintained, even if this result flickers into awareness so quickly that the split captures it afterwords and claims it as its own. This happens to me all the time. Ego tries to take credit for what happens when it's gone and Self is there. Ego is a petty tyrant, indeed.

I am very interested in how Steiner argues that the mental picture and the driving force are already within each other from the beginning. I did not see this at first, especially because I did not read Chapter 1's comments about the head being the road to the heart in the light of how he describes the actual dynamic between motives and characterological dispositions in Chapter 9. I need to journal on this to see what I'm actually learning here.

Lori, I'm so glad you used a crush as your starting example because it has all the components necessary to do some very rich, and often embarrassing, research!

Jeff

Love blinds us to the beloved's failings, but opens our eyes to his or her good qualities.

Here's where percepts come into their own. What causes love to sprout and grow? A mental picture. Where does the mental picture come from? We make it. How do we make it? We perceive something, rather than pass by without noticing it. Why do we perceive it when others haven't? Because love has opened our eyes. (And what has caused this eye-opening love to sprout and grow?....)

We have to perceive something before we can make a mental picture out of it that inspires love. But in order to perceive it, we have to have our eyes opened by love. Does love do this before it wakes up? Is it really love that brings about the mental picture that awakens love?

I love the quotation from Steiner that Tom has given us as a comment on this section of PoF: "What is usually called faithfulness may easily fade, but we can create a new kind of faithfulness: In the other person you will experience fleeting moments when they will appear to you as if imbued with, or lit up by, their essential being. There will also be other, long periods when this image becomes clouded; people appear darkened."

The love-awakening mental picture of the beloved was there in the past, but has been succeeded by many other mental pictures, not all of them so full of light and love. Sometimes the light-filled one does come back, as if of its own accord. But we can also call it back, Steiner says, with love. We can make it our spiritual practice to see our beloved as we originally did. "At such times we can learn to say: 'The spirit makes me strong. I think of the image which I once saw. No illusion, no outer appearance can take it away from me.'

"Wrestle for the image you once saw. This wrestling is faithfulness. By striving in this way, human beings will be nearer to each other with angel-like powers of protection."

Is that original mental picture, where we saw so much pure beauty and promise in the beloved, really the image of the beloved's true self, or at least one possible self? What is this thing that hundreds failed to see, but that I have seen in my beloved? Does it still exist, but unperceived by me unless I steadfastly hold it up before my mind's eye, not that old snapshot from the time when we were all of us young and pretty, but a living portrait of his true essential (or possible) self? Will holding it steadfastly up before my own mind's eye somehow protect him? Will it, by bearing witness, help him to find that true essential (or possible) self whenever he feels that he has lost it? And will the failure, or the unwillingness, to hold it up mean that, for lack of it, love is not mine?

"No illusion, no outer appearance can take it away from me," the meditation says. Willful blindness to the warts and pimples of reality, or steadfast inner vision of Reality? (Or of a possible Reality?)

Why all this talk of love at the end of this chapter that's supposed to be about freedom? And why does Steiner still insist that all this talk of love leads us to the question of the origin of thinking?

"I think of the image which I once saw," the meditation says. In the determination of love I turn my thoughts to it. Love brings about the mental image. Love causes thinking! Is that it?

Most people are not interested in abstract philosophy so I am always looking to find ways to view The Philosophy of Freedom in a more practical way.

One way I have found useful is to view the first 7 Chapters as a discussion of 7 different types of thinking. These thinking types can be observed in ourselves and others. Understanding them helps to understand people. I have identified these on the Study Course Topic Table which will be found under "Study Tools" on the Home page in the future.

Chapter 1 Compelled Thinking
Is thinking compelled by natural law?

Chapter 2 Speculative Thinking
Neither of these two points of view (dualism-monism) can satisfy us, for they do not do justice to the facts.

Chapter 3 Reflective Thinking
The purpose of my reflection is to form concepts of the occurrence.

Chapter 4 Reactive Thinking
When someone sees a tree, his thinking reacts to his observation, an ideal element is added to the object.

Chapter 5 Critical Thinking
Critical idealist

Chapter 6 Independent Thinking
He thinks the general concepts in his own special way.

Chapter 7 Cognitive Thinking
Cognition overcomes this duality by fusing the two elements of reality into the complete thing.

This is offered as an example of what Rudolf Steiner is referring to in his description of love at the end of Chapter 1 of PoF - it is taken from Viktor E. Frankl's book "Man's Search for Meaning", Part 1, pages 56-57 (Pocket Books, 1985).  Frankl is describing his own experiences at Auschwitz:

"We stumbled on in the darkness, over big stones and through large puddles, along the one road leading from the camp.  The accompanying guards kept shouting at us and driving us with the butts of their rifles.  Anyone with very sore feet supported himself on his neighbor's arm.  Hardly a word was spoken; the icy wind did not encourage talk.  Hiding his mouth behind his upturned collar, the man marching next to me whispered suddenly: "If our wives could see us now!  I do hope they are better off in their camps and don't know what is happening to us."

"That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind.  And as we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another up and onward, nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking of his wife.  Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds.  But my mind clung to my wife's image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness.  I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look.  Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final truth by so many thinkers.  The truth - that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.  Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: the salvation of man is through love and in love.  I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved.  In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way - an honorable way - in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment.  For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, "The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory."

Thanks, Tim, for giving us this wonderful story about Frankl! It's also a perfect counterpoint to what I imagined Steiner meant by saying that faithfulness gives humans the protective power of angels. Instead of the mental image you hold protecting the beloved, the beloved is protecting you through the image!

I'd been wanting to ask you what you thought of Frankl in your investigations of the various psychology giants, but felt like a dolt because I've forgotten everything I read about him in Psychology 101, lo these many years ago. Probably even that very book you mention! The only thing that came to mind (until you posted this story) was what I read more recently about how in the hell of the concentration camp he realized that the only thing his captors couldn't take away was his innermost spiritual core, and how he was able to go on developing that in such a way as to help him and others live through that hell, even some of his guards. That's the same kind of thing, in a way, as the story about the night march, in that it has to do with the mental image and being able to hold it in the mind.

So anyway, he's obviously fresh in your mind: is there anything you can say about his point of view? Is it phenomenalistic because the mental image is such a vivid, life-changing phenomena? I'm always trying to understand phenomenalism; it doesn't make much sense to me as a separate category. The Researcher is one of the archetypes Tom came up with, because researchers just stick with the facts. But it seems to me that all scientists have to do that! In PoF Chapter One, the phenomenalist of section 1.11 may be saying, "Just the facts, Ma'am: the mental image that causes pity appears, and pity arises in the heart. I'm not saying there's a cause and an effect, only that the two phenomena appear one right after another."