Are We Fighting Reality, or Learning to Work With It?

The world contains suffering, catastrophe, injustice, illness, conflict, and circumstances that no individual human being has chosen.

The existence of such realities does not disprove human agency. It makes the question of human agency more urgent:
Given the world as it is, what can we actually do?

There is an important distinction between accepting reality and submitting passively to it.

To work with reality does not mean drifting downstream with every prevailing social tendency. Nor does it mean becoming opportunistic, accommodating ourselves to whatever happens to be powerful at the moment.

Sometimes the stream itself is going in the wrong direction.
But neither does freedom consist in perpetually swimming upstream simply because we have decided beforehand where the river ought to go.

The first requirement is perception.

How Much of Our Difficulty Do We Continually Recreate?

If we observe biographies, families, institutions, businesses, political movements, and even entire cultures over sufficient periods of time, an uncomfortable phenomenon becomes visible.

Human beings can become remarkably persistent in reproducing the very conditions from which they suffer.

An assumption produces a certain response. The response creates resistance in another person. That resistance confirms the original assumption. The assumption consequently becomes stronger.

Soon an entire self-confirming reality has been constructed.

The same can happen economically.

We fail to perceive an opportunity because it does not fit our expectations. We continue applying an old solution to a changed situation. When it fails, instead of questioning the underlying assumption, we apply the same solution with greater force.

What appears to us as an increasingly hostile world may sometimes be reality attempting, again and again, to tell us:
The key you are using does not fit this lock.

Reality Contains Locked Possibilities

There is another way to approach the world.

A situation is rarely exhausted by what it presently appears to be.

Within human relationships, economic circumstances, education, agriculture, medicine, technology, and social organization there may exist possibilities that have not yet become visible because the necessary form of perception has not yet developed.

This is where Einstellung (attitude) becomes important.

A different inner orientation does not magically manufacture a different universe. It may, however, allow us to discover something in the existing world to which we were previously blind.

There are possibilities that require the right keys.
* Interest can be such a key.
* Trust can be a key.
* The ability to suspend judgment can be a key.
* Imagination can be a key.
* The capacity to observe a phenomenon without immediately forcing it into an existing theory can be a key.
* And knowledge of the deeper developmental principles at work in the human being, nature, and society may provide further keys.

The Difference Between Principle and Dogma

This also raises an uncomfortable question for spiritual life itself.

What happens when a spiritual worldview becomes something we use to defend ourselves against reality?
We may possess elaborate concepts of cosmic hierarchies, spiritual beings, historical necessities, good and evil, evolution, destiny, or the future. But reality still has the right to correct us.

A spiritual concept that cannot be modified by deeper perception can become as rigid as the materialism it opposes. Then we are no longer using spiritual knowledge to enter reality more deeply. We are asking reality to obey our spiritual picture of it.

There is a profound difference between discovering lawfulness and imposing a system. True laws do not imprison reality. They allow us to work creatively within it. A sailor does not overcome the laws of wind and water by denying them. Understanding them gives the sailor greater freedom of movement.

Perhaps something similar applies to life itself.

Spiritual Science as a Practical Social Capacity

This may be one of the largely unexplored possibilities of spiritual science.
* What if its task is not merely to provide a description of invisible worlds?
* What if knowledge of the human being and of evolution could become a practical capacity for meeting situations differently?

Imagine places devoted to such work: Centers for Social Development in which people do not merely study ideas, but investigate how consciousness actually enters life.
* Observation exercises.
* Exercises in changing Einstellung.
* Learning to recognize projection.
* Practicing genuine interest in another human being.
* Studying how groups create invisible assumptions and then unconsciously force individuals to inhabit them.
* Learning how an economic initiative can arise from the perception of real human needs rather than abstract theories of growth.
* Developing the ability to recognize a situation in which the old response no longer works — and having enough inner mobility not to repeat it.

Such work would not promise to remove tragedy from the world. It would ask a more modest, and perhaps more powerful, question:
How much unnecessary suffering could cease if human beings stopped continually recreating conditions that no longer need to exist?

And beyond that:
How many possibilities presently remain unrealized simply because we have not developed the organs capable of perceiving them?

We Need Mobility, Not Relativism

Being inwardly flexible does not mean believing that everything is equally true. Quite the contrary. If there is an objective lawfulness within reality, then we need extraordinary flexibility precisely because our present understanding of that lawfulness may be incomplete.

• We must be capable of being corrected.
• We must be capable of discovering that another person is different from the picture we formed of them.
• We must be capable of noticing that circumstances have changed. We must be capable of abandoning a cherished explanation when the phenomenon itself no longer supports it.
• And we must become capable of distinguishing between swimming against a destructive current and merely fighting reality because reality refuses to conform to us.

This requires something more difficult than conviction. It requires inner mobility. Perhaps one of the central spiritual questions of our time is therefore not:
* What do I believe about reality?
But:
* Can I become sufficiently awake, interested, and inwardly mobile that reality can show me something I did not already know?

From there, something new can emerge. Not because we control the story. But because we have finally learned how to participate consciously in writing the part that actually belongs to us.