The Importance of Love
We live our lives guided by what we like and dislike. Intermingled with this is the activity of the anti-forces, primarily Lucifer and Ahriman. They have their place and they can easily be out of place if we don’t love rightly. Somehow we must work out how to rise above our instinctive liking and disliking so that we can truly love. If we can do this many disagreements will fade away.
“Such luciferic influence is always present whenever, in the sympathies and antipathies of the sensory world, a kind of love is active that is not based upon compassion for the life of another sensory being. If you can love a person for the characteristics that he or she brings forth to meet you, then no luciferic element can mix into that love. Love that is founded upon qualities manifesting in sensory existence keeps its distance from the luciferic element. Love that is not grounded in the beloved in this way, but is instead grounded in the person of the lover, tends toward a luciferic influence. If you love someone because he or she has qualities toward which your nature, as the one who loves, tends, you love that person with that part of the soul that luciferic elements can approach.” On the Nature of the Spiritual Worlds, Aphorism 11, by Rudolf Steiner. Translated by Christopher Bamford
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Another way of looking at this –
Sympathy (like/love) and antipathy (dislike/hate) are biased by personal motives – usually for personal gain. We have to become the ‘interested observer’ as I call it – not distanced and cold but warm and interested.