Originally posted in German on 1st January 2025
By Heinz Grill
Most people see their worldly happiness in the opportunities they find within a relationship, within a family, or perhaps, in the broadest sense, even within a group of people.
Generally relationships will be very difficult and will offer few harmonious hours. Agreement as to how a couple solve an equation – for example 20 x 20 = 400 – will be reached in increasingly rare moments. The feelings will constantly disturb, irritate and give rise to increasing conflicts. Quite particularly, however, health conditions will impair relationships and sometimes the last form of relationship is even that people only communicate with each other because they have to help each other due to illness.
Fundamentally, however, the sphere of relationship should not necessarily have only a bad prognosis. Humanity is coming closer and closer to a limit with its existing, natural dispositions for relationship and the natural, hidden driving forces for affinity and togetherness. As is generally known, love through affinity quickly also turns into antipathy and it is difficult for people to find sufficient common ground and aims.
What can a consciously shaped relationship look like?
A helpful starting point is a spiritual maxim that I have been voicing for many years and which has been confirmed in practice hundreds of times: A relationship needs soul and therefore – and this is now a purely spiritual perception – it needs the favour and affinity of the deceased. Someone who learns how to search for a soul in the afterlife, where and how it is assimilating into the cosmic, free space cleansed of all earthly heaviness, notices that its light seeks connections to those they have left behind, and the more someone carried out good work in their lifetime, the greater is their light. The souls of the dead wish for connections and encourage human togetherness, but they want this togetherness on the basis of value and quality. An emotionally bound relationship based purely on feelings is for them like a shadow, heavy, painful, isolating and inappropriate.
In life today people are no longer conscious at all that in every human relationship the souls of the deceased, with their different qualities of light, their joys and also their suffering, are in constant connection. For this reason, here the sphere of relationship is not only at people’s disposal as a psychological, tactical commodity, it is seen in terms of its potential and necessity for the future.
The better people set themselves aims which are rational and at least to some extent fulfil an ideal of existence, the more easily the deceased with their sphere of light come towards the living. This experience can, for example, be found by artists when they decide to work together, draw up an aim and perhaps even bring this aim towards a greater world-whole. However different the individuals are from each other, they enter into an uncomplicated exchange and get to know each other through the process of doing, and through completing a work. They connect without strain, overzealousness or authoritative orders.
Just as light leads people into connection with the objects of the world, to the same extent the flexibility to decide to follow an aim, and to work at this aim impartially and yet animatedly, draws people together. The constant, light-filled movement of not placing the old so very much at the centre, developing new experiences in the process of doing, and ultimately coming closer to people in this way, gives rise to relationship experiences of an elevated kind.
Relationships, however, will require an extraordinary amount of courage from people, because, for example, when people are in spiritual training like the one advocated here, they must put new life into all their previous conditions of relationship and take responsibility for them. The difference between “having a relationship” and being responsible for another person and entering into relationship in this way is as great as darkness is to light. Neither using others nor behaving submissively are to be tolerated in the togetherness of relationship. For example, spiritual students must determine their standpoint in such a way that they make their decisions with the best responsibility for others, for themselves and for a greater whole. They cannot simply fall into a relationship, or separate from a relationship according to the feelings that seem comfortable to them at any one moment. Although there are no definitive rules fit for all, nevertheless the condition of relationships must be guided and shaped and this applies not only to one person, but to all to the appropriate degree.
What are the effects of the courage to live and develop relationship-ideals?
In Eastern schools of yoga, if they are organised in a well-founded and strict way, there are no man-woman relationships. Traditional knowledge still carries within it the wisdom that the sensual connection between the sexes is not a love at first sight but a love that is laden with karmic fate in an all-embracing way. However, in a culture like the Western one, greater aims have to be developed so that the primary attractions that arise through sexuality recede and the responsibility becomes greater. Achieving these aims, and real movements of the soul to a togetherness, needs time, perseverance, self-conquest and above all a courageous consciousness. For example, if one person only has an expectation from another in order not to be alone, the first person feeds the other person’s tendency to withdraw and so will feel cast out into isolation.
A lived ideal does not only lead to a beautiful relationship with other people. It is the spirit that leads people to the joy of relationship and it is the souls in the afterworld that make their light available for this. Rudolf Steiner’s statement is very apt:
“To find oneself in the spirit (or content) is to unite human beings.”
Without putting the spirit at the centre and following the spiritual aims that are an existing necessity for the whole of humanity today, relationships cannot really flourish as they will again and again be subject to the divisive weight of karma.
An ideal, which individuals create, develop, live and even manifest, both in close personal interaction with other individuals and then also with further colleagues and friends, leads to the dissolution of the wide-spread totalitarian behaviour or, to use a general term, of being determined by fundamentalism.
As a general rule, fundamentalism is not necessarily always negative. In relation to religion it usually means a one-sided way of thinking and acting, fixed to tradition and commonly even characterised by violence. The word integralism is also not insignificant in this context as it shows how a religion is allegedly lived right into the deepest structures of life, but usually not really in a transformative but rather in a dogmatic, forcefully determined form. Religions must not determine people for the future and if they monopolise too much they usually create constraints that distance individuals from the spirit more than leading them towards it.
Good relationship conditions loosen, or even tear the roots of these bound states of will deep out of their entangled structures, and the ground is stripped away from the general forcefulness of determination.
A look at Eastern countries, in which women who do not wear veils are punished, shows how little the culture and form of relationships have actually developed in a progressive and yet sensible way. The forms of relationship in which men are possessive of women are like a kind of sexual preservation and they very easily lead people away from anything that is spiritual. On the other side, however, there are many very liberal forms of approach between men and women, which only remind us of the awful degeneration of the entire condition of relationships. They too create all kinds of entanglements and karma. Ultimately, individuals within these very non-committal relationships resort to a total giving up of themselves and they lose any healthy, creative substance. Usually the thinking structures then even become obsessively liberal, and that is a contradiction that is very common.
The conditions surrounding relationship should result in beauty, beauty in interaction, in outer appearance and in the way in which aims and meetings take shape. Without a content, a relationship cannot exist. Both partners, man and woman, strive towards spiritual ideals, mutually compare these and then, through repeatedly new experiences opened up by the meditation and study, they find a constant opportunity to transform. An ideal like this can strip the ground away from the long-since redundant fundamentalism in Middle-Eastern countries, so that the roots no longer embed themselves fruitfully.
Where have these relationship ideals been found previously?
In many anthroposophical circles, and also even in alternative groups, pleasant relationship conditions arise, which are usually very relaxed and communicative. The tendency to exclude people who think differently has reduced in recent years, however, it will increase again in the coming year.
Many groups involved with anthroposophical content will encounter their limit because their hidden karmic dispositions will prevent them from actually realising the content they ought to realise. Human meeting points are, however, a first departure for general encounters. Nevertheless, they do not yet have the fullness of light and the transforming power that would be necessary for really lasting and good relationship conditions. The forming of real relationships happens through accomplishments with a boundary-breaking character, and these are carried out into the world with light. The successfully created light-force, which arises though content and reconciles people with each other, is ultimately furthered by the archangel to become a peace plan in the world.
The year 2025 will lead many people into burdened relationship conditions and yet there is the hidden power that can arise from a spiritual training that is really lived and this power can ultimately lead people back to a greater connectedness.
The mantra lokah samastah sukhino bhavantu, mentioned in part 1 of the outlook for the year, describes the happy uniting of souls in the afterlife. Successful human activities lead to the skill of peace. However, it will only be realised by a few people.
The dissolution of very bound traditions, particularly traditions in Middle-Eastern regions, will not happen through demonstrations or persuasive talks, but rather through relationship ideals lived by individual people who have made clear decisions.
A lived wisdom, in whatever context it stands, can also take away the craving for the dissolute scenes that tend to come from the West.
