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Transforming Grief Into Gratitude

SPIRITUAL SCIENCE 110

As perspective of a landscape can best be gained at a distance, so appraisal of an experience may be more accurately made at a distance of time. At the time of an event, one is too much involved to look at the situation objectively, free from likes and dislikes, sympathies and antipathies, love and hatred. That holds true for our ordinary consciousness. However, spiritual research reveals that in the supraconsciousness (the higher self of which we are not yet conscious) it is otherwise. The higher self does not hold instinctive, automatic, sympathy or antipathy. It has an open feeling, a cognitive feeling, receptive to all impressions and experiences - even a feeling of gratitude - toward every impression, regardless of the nature of the experience.

Someone may insult us openly, yet the higher self would still register a feeling of gratitude. The reason for this attitude is that every experience enriches our life, raises the soul, including all the hurtful and unpleasant experiences as well as the happy and harmonious ones. Every disappointment and failure is received as an enriching gift and calls forth a fine feeling of thankfulness. The attitude that welcomes and is grateful for all experiences as registered in the supraconsciousness, must be drawn into our consciousness in this age of light and of the development of the consciousness soul, so that we no longer hold grudges, nurse resentments, feel bitter, or are hurt by harmful acts of speech of others or by blows of destiny. Then we have gratitude for every event and for the gift of life itself, given by the entire universe. Feelings of unity with all beings and things, and the constant upwelling of gratitude in the soul, create an atmosphere that connects the so-called living with the so-called dead. Whether we are aware or unaware of the fact, we are always connected with the spiritual world and with discarnate souls who were related to us by the forces of destiny. But the discarnate cannot relate to us if we wish they were still in the flesh. To mourn because we have them no more is an ungrateful feeling. We should rather be thankful we did have them with us, and be grateful that they enriched our life. To entertain a feeling that we have lost them weighs them down.

In lectures on "Earthly Death and Cosmic Life," Rudolf Steiner makes clear: "If we have lost someone we love, we must be able to raise ourselves to a feeling of thankfulness that we have had them with us; we must be able to think selflessly of what they were to us until their death, and not upon what we feel, now they are no longer with us. The better we feel what they were to us during life, the sooner will it be possible for them "to speak" to us, to speak to us by means of the common air of gratitude." There is rejoicing in all worlds when souls on earth change their attitude from grief to gratitude.
John and Beredene Jocelyn
Thanksgiving, 1948

This course is based on the book, "Staying Connected - How to Continue Your Relationships with Those Who have Died"; Selected Talks and Meditations by Rudolf Steiner.

We also offer a counseling service through email that includes the book, Staying Connected - How to Continue Your Relationships with Those Who have Died - Selected Talks and Meditations by Rudolf Steiner. For only $50 you will receive this book plus one month's unlimited email counseling by Andrew Flaxman, Director. Further counseling is available after the first month at a mutually negotiated arrangement.

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