The Third-Dimensional plane of reality is undoubtedly a zone of conflict. Every opinion has a counter-opinion, every truth inspires a question concerning the validity of the assumptions that led to that truth. There is no way we can escape the dialectical nature of this world.
Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), the Austrian clairvoyant insisted that all conflicts on the material plane are resolved on the astral plane. From the higher perspective of the soul, he said, the persistent contradictions that drive evolution and history do not present themselves as problems, but rather as complimentary ingredients to a larger reality.
The Fourteenth Card of the Major Arcana, Temperance, invites us to move past the conflicts of the mundane world and embrace a reality that includes a “both-and” response to the “either-or” dichotomies of our day-to-day lives. The Angel depicted on the card—a Guardian Angel—performs the miracle of pouring water from one jug to another, horizontally, without spilling a drop, demonstrating what Valentin Tomberg calls a “cooperating polarity.” There is more to this cooperation, however, than merely the marvel of water defying gravity; it is the presence of the Angel itself. If we allow ourselves to consider the possibility that a Guardian Angel is in a real sense the bearer of the Higher Self, we can come to appreciate our own latent ability to perform the miracle of bringing opposites together.
Thus, we can unburden ourselves of the stress that comes from living in a world of conflict, because it is our enlightened participation in the world that brings the conflicts to a peaceful resolution. This is a reality known to all people who seek greater consciousness, but easily forgotten in the overwhelming stresses that acrimony, argumentation, and polarization bring. We want a world of peace, harmony and cooperation, but we forget that we have to build it ourselves.
The Angel, aside from being a bearer of the higher self, also teaches us the practice of conflict resolution. Stuck as we are in three dimensions, we feel ourselves constrained to the horizontal plane. We move horizontally in space and time and are unable to exploit the vertical regions that allows the higher perspective to unfold. If we keep our Angelic nature in mind, we can ascend even in the Third Dimension by placing ourselves mentally on a plane where both sides of argument can be right, and both views can be seen as valid. The Angelic perspective, which demands placing the ego in suspension, affords us the ability to accept the truth of another without doing violence to ours.
It may be that the Angels have conflicts of their own, but we can confidently strive to embrace the dichotomies of our world by remembering that there are necessarily differences in ideology, custom, religion, and personal histories. Rather than trying to prove that our view is correct, we can accept the truth that on some level, competing views are all correct, and spend our efforts in coming to peaceful acceptance of that reality.