Steiner's THEOSOPHY

What has just been said already suggests one of the first qualities that must be cultivated by people who want to achieve independent perception of higher realities. It is unreserved and unbiased devotion to what human life or the world outside has to reveal. If we approach any phenomenon with a preconceived notion derived from our life as it has been until now, we shut ourselves off from the quiet yet pervasive influence this phenomenon can have on us. While learning, we must be able at any moment to make ourselves into a totally empty vessel into which the world we do not know can flow.
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Complete inner selflessness is part of this devotion to what the unknown world can reveal, and we will probably make some astonishing discoveries about ourselves when we test the extent of our own devotion. If we want to set out on the path to higher knowledge, we must practice until we are able to obliterate ourselves and all our prejudices at any moment so that something else can flow into us.
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We must eliminate any standards of attractiveness and unattractiveness, stupidity and cleverness, that we apply as a matter of habit. We must try to understand people purely out of themselves.
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The pleasure we experience because of a particular thing immediately makes us dependent on that thing; we lose ourselves in it.
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Seekers of knowledge must have the same goals for their actions as they have for their thinking—that is, their actions must not be disrupted by their personality, but must be able to obey the laws of eternal beauty and truth, accepting the direction these laws provide.
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Seekers of knowledge cannot consider only what will yield fruit or lead to success for themselves; they must also consider what they have recognized as good.
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We cannot question whether it does any good to resolve to obey only the laws of truth when in fact we may be mistaken about what is true.
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As long as our relationship to the world is a personal one, things show us only what connects them to our own personality. This, however, is merely their transient aspect. If we pull back from what is transient in ourselves and dwell with our “I” and our feeling of identity in what is lasting in us, our transient features are transformed and begin to convey the eternal aspects of things to us.
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We must not imagine that if we turn our mind to the eternal like this, it will estrange us from immediate reality and destroy our ordinary capacity for observation and our feeling for everyday affairs.
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This is the will to freedom, because freedom means acting from within, and only those who draw their motivation from the eternal can work from within.


Theosophy by Rudolf Steiner.