Love starts when we push aside our Ego and make room for someone else.-Attributed to Rudolf Steiner
The exact quoted words don't appear in Rudolf Steiner's corpus. Following are some quotes on the theme:
“Love is an experience of the other in one’s soul. To experience love, however, a sort of veil must be drawn in the soul over the self-feeling or ‘I’ experience present in its depths. Then because its own powers are muted the joys and sorrows of the other arise in the soul. In this way, love, which is the source of the most genuine moral impulse in human life, germinates. Love if for us the most important fruit of human experience in the sensory world. If you penetrate the nature of love, or compassion, you will discover how the spiritual expresses its truth in the sensory world” (……) “An excessive ‘I’ feeling in the physical world works against morality.” (…….) “To develop a genuine moral attitude in our souls, we must mute the ‘I’ feeling with tendencies to compassion and love. “ (Threshold of the Spiritual Worlds Part 1)
http://wn.rsarchive.org/.../English/GPP1922/GA017_c09.html
“We can only begin to speak of true love when we refrain from all that which pertains to ourselves and allow the being of the other to live in us. In this regard our own egoism always stands in the way. This gives rise to numerous sources of self-deception.In Love the soul orients itself to another, in contrast to Egoism which is self-centered. On the other hand Egoism is the expression of a soul-force without which we would be incapable of bestowing Love: It is the feeling of self that mediates the experience of selfhood. Only an autonomous, independent “I” who can freely choose to make another “I” an object of their attention is capable of Love. Therefore a developed feeling of self is a necessary
prerequisite for the unfolding of Love. However if thrust into the foreground Egoism gains the upper hand. Then one’s own Experience becomes more important than that of the other, until in the Extreme ultimately becomes incapable of extending love beyond one’s self. If on the other hand the feeling of self remains undeveloped the danger of losing oneself arises.” (Frank Linde Die Liebe ist die Sonne der
Welt, Flensburger Hefte 1/99 # 54 Trans. By Florian)
“What is essential for love? What is essential in order that one person loves another” It is this: that he be in possession of his full self-consciousness, that he be wholly independent. No one can love
another in the full sense of the word if this love is not a free gift of one
person to the other….only one who is independent, one who is not bound to the other person, can love him. To this end the human being had to become an ego being. The ego had to be implanted in the threefold human body, so the earth might, through mankind, fulfill its mission of love. Therefore, you will understand esoteric Christianity when it streamed down from divine beings…now love streams into the earth and the bearer of love can only be the independent ego, which develops by degrees in the course of the evolution of the earth.” (The Gospel of John 05/20/1908)
Thanks to Florian Sydow
