posted January 21, 2011 06:30 PM            

Karmic Relationships:
Esoteric Studies - Volume I

I

I now wish to begin to speak to you of the laws and conditions of human destiny, which, as you know, it has become customary to describe as karma. Karma, however, cannot be seen clearly unless we are prepared to learn to know the different kinds of universal law and universal activity. Therefore let me begin by speaking to you in a rather more abstract way of the different kinds of universal law and working, and later crystallise out, as it were, that special kind of working which can be called human destiny or karma.

Both when we try to comprehend the World's phenomena and when we wish to understand the phenomena of human life, we are wont to speak of “causes and effects.” Especially in science nowadays, people are accustomed to speak quite generally of “causes and effects.” Yet it is precisely this habit which leads into the greatest difficulties, in face of the true reality. For if we speak in this way, we are leaving out of account the variety of forms in which “cause and effect” actually occur in the universe.

To begin with we may observe the so-called lifeless Nature, which confronts us most clearly of all in the mineral kingdom. There are the marvellous forms which often meet us in the rocks and stones of the earth. There too is all that appears as though it were ground down to powder and compressed again into amorphous stone.

Let us consider, to begin with, all that thus appears to us as the lifeless in the world. When we consider the lifeless purely as such, we find invariably that we can seek within the lifeless itself whatever causes are at work in the lifeless realm. Wherever there is anything lifeless as an effect, there too — within the realm of the lifeless — we may look for the causes. And indeed, we only proceed according to true science if we do this — if we seek within the lifeless kingdom the causes of all lifeless processes.

However beautifully formed the crystal which you have before you, you must investigate its forms within the lifeless realm. This means that the lifeless kingdom is really self-contained. We may not be able to say, to begin with, where we shall find its bounds. They may be very far away in cosmic distances. Nevertheless, whatever lifeless process or effect confronts us, if we are looking for its causes, we must seek them — once again — within the realm of the lifeless.

Therewith, however, we are already placing the lifeless side by side with something else, and at once a certain perspective is opened out to us. Consider man himself — how he passes through the gate of death. All that was working and living in him before he went through the gate of death, has vanished from the tangible and visible form which remains behind when the soul passes on. Indeed, we say of this human shape which is left behind, that it is lifeless. Just as we speak of the lifeless when we look out over the rocks and mountains with their crystal forms, so must we speak of the lifeless when we behold the corpse of man, bereft of soul and spirit. And it is only from this moment that we can apply to the human body what applies to the rest of lifeless Nature from the outset.

For those effects which happened in and about the human form during life — before the soul had passed through the gate of death — we could not seek the causes within the lifeless realm. Not only that when a human being lifts his arm we shall look in vain within the lifeless-physical principles of the human form for the causes of the lifting of the arm. Moreover, in the physical-chemical laws which are present in the human form, we shall look equally in vain for the causes — let us say — of the heart-beat, the circulation of the blood, or any other, even involuntary process.

The moment this human form has become a corpse however, the moment the soul has passed through the gate of death, we also observe an effect in the human body. The colour changes in the skin, the limbs become inert — in short, all the effects appear that we are accustomed to witness in the corpse. Where shall we seek the cause? Within the corpse itself — in the chemical and physical, lifeless laws of the corpse.

Think to the end, in all directions, what I am indicating (for I am doing no more than indicate it), and you will say to yourself: As to his corpse, man, when his soul has passed through the gate of death, has become equal to lifeless Nature. Henceforth we must seek the causes of the effects in the same realm in which the effects themselves are.

This is very important, but precisely when we envisage this characteristic of the human corpse, we find another very significant fact. At death, the human being, so to speak, lays aside his body. Observe with the necessary spiritual faculties what the real man — the man of soul and spirit — has now become, and you will say: The corpse has now been laid aside. For the real man of soul and spirit, having arrived beyond the gate of death, this corpse has no longer significance. It has been cast aside.

For outer lifeless Nature it is quite different. Observe even superficially, and you perceive the difference. Look at a human corpse. You can observe it best where it is buried — so to speak — in the air. Certain communities used to use underground caverns as burial-places, and we there find human corpses simply suspended in the air. They dry until they are completely rotten; you only need to touch them slightly, and they fall asunder into dust.

The “lifeless” which we thus obtain is different from what we find as lifeless Nature all around us. The latter contains a formative, configurative process, giving rise to crystal shapes. Moreover it is in constant change. Apart from the earthy element as such, if we observe the water and the air — which are also lifeless — we find it all in mobility and metamorphosis and transformation.

Nevertheless, let this be placed before our souls at the outset: the equivalence of the human body as to its lifeless nature, after the soul has laid it aside, with the lifeless world of Nature outside of man.

And now we may go farther. Study the plant kingdom. Here we come into the sphere of living things. Study the plant in a real way, and we shall find that we are never able to account for the effects merely from causes which lie within the plant kingdom — in the same kingdom where the effects occur. No doubt, there is a science nowadays which tries to do so, but it is in a blind-alley! It is at last obliged to say: “We can investigate the physical and also the chemical forces and laws at work in the plant. Something is then left over ...” And at this point they diverge, so to speak, into two parties. On the one hand are those who say: “What is left over is a mere synthesis — a kind of form. The physical and chemical laws are the sole effective principle.” “No,” say the others, “there is something more, which science has not yet discovered, but it will do so no doubt in time.” — They will go on speaking like this for a long while yet. For it is not so. If you wish to make research into the plant kingdom you cannot understand it without summoning the whole universe to your aid. You must perceive that the forces for the plant-activity lie in the wide universe. All that takes place in the plant is an effect of the great universe. Before any effects can take place in plant-life, the sun must come into a certain position in the universe. And other forces too must work from the wide universe, to give the plant its form, its inner forces of growth and so on.

Now, if we were able — not in a Jules Verne — fashion, but in reality — to travel say to the moon or to the sun, there too we should not be much wiser in our quest of causes than we are on earth, if we acquired no other faculties of knowledge than those we now possess. We should not reach our goal merely by saying, “Well and good: the causes of effects occurring in the plant kingdom of the earth are not to be found in this kingdom on the earth itself. Let us therefore go to the sun; there we shall find the causes.” No, not at all, there too we shall not find them with the ordinary faculties of knowledge. We find them however when we work our way up to Imaginative Cognition — i.e. when we possess quite a new faculty of knowledge. But then we do not need to travel to the sun; we find them in the earth-domain itself. Only we have to pass from “one world” into another; from the everyday physical into the etheric, the ether-world. In the wide universal spaces on every hand, the cosmic ether with its forces is working. It works inward from the wide spaces. The ether is working in on every hand, from the wide spaces.

Thus, if we wish to find the causes of the effects in the plant in this kingdom, we must actually pass into a second realm of the universe.

Now man also partakes in what the plant partakes in. The forces working into the plants out of the ether-world, work also into man. Man carries in himself the etheric forces, and we describe the sum-total of these etheric forces which he carries within him, as the human ether-body. I have already told you how the ether-body goes on expanding for a few days after man's death, and how at last it loses itself, so that the human being remains over only in his astral body and his Ego-being.

That which man carried with him etherically, becomes ever larger and larger and loses itself in world-wide distances.

And now once more: compare what we can see of man after his passage through the gate of death, with that which we see in the plant kingdom. Of the plant kingdom we must say: its causative forces come in to the earth from the widths of space. Of the human ether-body we must say: its forces go outward into the widths of space. That is, they go whence the forces of plant-growth come — as soon as man has passed through the gate of death.

Here it already becomes clearer. When we observe only the physical corpse, though we recognise that it becomes lifeless, we do not find it easy to relate it to the rest of lifeless Nature. When on the other hand we consider the living kingdom of plants, when we become aware how the causes, the forces for the plant-kingdom come inward from the ether of cosmic space, then — as we enter with spiritual imagination into the human being — we perceive that with man's passage through the gate of death the human ether-body goes thither, whence come the forces, the ether-forces, for the plant kingdom.

Now there is another characteristic. The causative forces that affect the plants, work comparatively quickly. The day before yesterday's sun has little influence upon the plant as it springs from the soil or receives blossom and fruit. The day before yesterday's sun can have little effect today with all its causes. To take effect today, it must shine today. This point is important; mark it well. You will presently see how important it is.

The plants with their etheric causes have, it is true, their actual fundamental forces within the earthly realm, but they have them in the universe simultaneously with the earth.

And when man as a soul-and-spirit being has passed through the gate of death, when the human ether-body dissolves, this again lasts but a short time — only a few days. Here again you have simultaneity. For the duration of the world-process, the few days are a mere trifle. Thus, when the human ether-body returns to where the forces for plant growth — the ether-forces — come from we, can say: As soon as man is living in the ether, his etheric activity is not restricted to the earth (for on the contrary, it leaves the earth), nevertheless, it develops simultaneously. Hence I may write you this scheme:

Mineral Kingdom; Simultaneity of causes and effects within the physical.

Yes, you will say, but surely the causes of some things that take place in the physical are antecedent in time. No, it is not so in reality. For any effects to arise in the physical, the causes must continue working. As soon as the causes cease working, no more effects will occur. Thus we can truly write:

Mineral Kingdom; Simultaneity of causes, within the physical.

And when we come into the plant kingdom (and the same will apply to the plant-nature which we can trace in man himself), there we have simultaneity in the physical and in the superphysical, so we may write:

Plant Kingdom; Simultaneity of causes in the physical and superphysical.

Now let us approach the animal kingdom. In the animal kingdom we shall investigate in vain within the animal itself the effects that occur during the creature's life. If it no more than crawls along in search of food — in the physical and chemical processes to be found within its body we shall seek in vain for the causes of these effects. We shall also seek in vain in the wide ether-spaces, where we find the causes for plant-nature. There too we shall look in vain for the causes of animal movement and animal sensation. For all that is plant-like in the animal and in its processes, we shall find the causes in the etheric spaces. And when it dies, the ether-body of the animal too goes outward into the wide universal ether. But for sensation we shall never find the causes within the realms of the earthly-physical, nor of the superphysical and etheric. We shall not find them there.

Here, even more, we come to a point where the modern idea is following up a blind alley. Indeed to some extent it has to admit it. For many a phenomenon that occurs in the animal — all the phenomena of sensation, movement, etc., — we must admit: If we investigate the physical and chemical forces within the animal, we cannot find the causes. And in the cosmic spaces — in the ether-spaces of the universe — there too we cannot find the causes. If I would explain a flower I must go out into the widths of the ether-cosmos. Out of the ether-universe I shall be able to explain the flower. Likewise I shall be able to explain many things that are plant-like in the animal. But I shall never be able to explain, even from the ether-universe, that which occurs in the animal as movement and sensation.

Suppose I observe an animal on the 20th June. For its sensation processes, I shall not find the causes on the 20th of June — not if I seek through all the realms of space within the earthly realm and beyond. And if I go farther back, there too I shall not find them — neither in May, nor in April ...

Modern science even feels that it is so. Hence it explains some at least of what is thus unexplainable, by referring it to “heredity,” that is, by a word. It is “inherited.” It comes down from the ancestors. Not of course everything (that would be too grotesque), but much of it-it is simply “inherited.”

What is the meaning of this phrase? In the last resort, the concept of heredity amounts to this: All that confronts us in the animal, with all its manifold configurations, was potentially contained in the germ-cell of the mother-animal. Such is the effort of modern science: to study the ox externally, in the untold variety of its forms, and then to say: The ox comes from the germ-cell. There were already the forces which in their full growth and development have given rise to the ox. Accordingly, the germ-cell is an extremely complex body ... It would indeed have to be appallingly complex, this germ-cell of the ox. For it would have to contain all that presses and moulds and twists and turns and works so that the tiny germ-cell may become the ox with its manifold forms.

However you may twist and turn it (and there are many theories — evolution, epigenesis, and so on ...) however you may twist it, it comes to this. In the last resort you must conceive the germ-cell, the minute ovum, as appallingly complicated. And where all things are referred to molecules, supposed to be built up in great complication from the atoms, some scientists are prone to represent the first rudiment of the germ-cell as a complex molecule. But this, my dear friends, does not even accord with physical observation.

Is the germ-cell really a molecule or an organism so complicated? Its peculiar quality lies not at all in complication, but on the contrary: it throws all the matter back into chaos. The germ-cell of all things, in the mother-body, is not a complicated structure, but a material utterly pulverised — chaoticised. It is not organised at all. It is something that falls back into an utterly unorganised, pulverised condition. Never could reproduction take place if it were not for this. Precisely in the egg, unorganised, lifeless matter — which tends to crystalline formation — falls back into complete chaos. Albumen is not the most complicated body, but the very simplest, entirely void of inherent determination. Out of this tiny chaos which the germ-cell is to begin with, no ox could ever arise — no, not in all eternity. For it is really chaos.

Why then does it become the ox? Because at this stage the whole universe proceeds to work upon the germ-cell in the mother organism. Precisely inasmuch as it has become chaos — void of determination in itself — the entire universe can work upon it. Fertilisation has no other object in the world than to reduce matter again to chaos, to the indeterminate void, so that no other entity is working but the pure universe.

But now if we look within the mother-body — there are not the causes. If we look outside into the universal ether — there too, in what takes place simultaneously, are not the causes. We must go back, before the animal came into being, if we would find the causes of what is germinating there as the beginning of a creature capable of sensation and movement. We must go back, before the creature's life began. For all that is capable of sensation and movement, the world of causes lies not in the simultaneous, but before the creature's origin.

If it is a plant which I observe, I must go out into the simultaneous, although in the far and wide universe. There I shall find the cause. But if I want to find the cause of all that works as sensation or capacity of movement in the animal, I can no longer go into the simultaneous universe. I must go into that which precedes the creature's life. In other words, the constellation of the stars must have become different. What influences the specifically animal nature is not the constellation in the universe simultaneous with the animal, but the constellation of the stars preceding the animal's life.

Here again, let us turn our thoughts to man after his passage through the gate of death. When he has passed the gate of death, when he has laid aside his ether-body which goes into the wide cosmic spaces — to every place whence come the ether-forces of plant-growth — man must go backward, as I have told you, until his birth. When he has done so, then he has undergone, in backward progress in his astral body, all that he underwent during his life. Thus, with his astral body after death, he has not to enter what is simultaneous, but he must wend his way back to the pre-natal. He must go thither, whence come the forces which provide the animal with faculties of movement and sensation. They do not come from the realm of space, but from the constellations which are simultaneous; they come from the antecedent constellations of the stars. If therefore we are speaking of the animal kingdom, we can no longer speak of simultaneity of causes in the physical and super-physical; we must refer the present effects of the physical to past superphysical causes. Thus, for the Animal kingdom: Past super-physical causes — present effects.

Once again, we enter the concept of time. To put it trivially, we must go for a walk in time. In the physical world, when we are looking for the causes of things that happen there, we move about in the physical. We do not need to leave the physical. And if we are seeking the causes of anything that is brought about in the living kingdom of plants, we must go very far away. We must sweep through the ether-world, and only where the ether-world is at an end — where, as in fairy-tale language, we come to the end of the world — there do we find the causes of plant-growth. But we can wander there as we will; we shall not find there the causes of the faculties of sensation or of movement. To do so, we must set out on a pilgrimage in time. We must go backward in time. We must go out of space, and into time.

As to causation, therefore, we can place the human physical body in its lifeless condition side by side with external lifeless Nature. And we can place-the human ether-body — both in its life and in its outward passage after death into the ether-spaces — side by side with the etheric life of the plants; for this too comes in from the ether-spaces, though from the simultaneous constellations, of that which is beyond the physical, above the earth. Moreover, we can relate the human astral body to the outer animal world.

Now, when in further progress from mineral nature to plant and animal, we come at length to the human kingdom proper, perhaps you will say, “We have already considered it.” Yes, but not altogether. We have considered it inasmuch as the human being has a physical body; then inasmuch as he has an ether-body; and thirdly, inasmuch as he has an astral body. But you will recognise: if man merely had his physical body, he would be a crystal — even it perhaps a very complicated one. And if in addition he only had his ether-body, he would be a mere plant — no matter, perhaps, how beautiful. And if he even had the astral body added, then he would go on all fours; he would have horns, or the like; in a word, he would be an animal. All this, he is not. He has the form and figure he possesses as an upright-walking being, because he also possesses the Ego-organisation, over and above the physical, etheric and astral. To this being alone, who also has the organisation of the Ego, we can apply the name: human kingdom.

Let us observe once more what we have already seen. If we are seeking the causes for the physical, we can remain within the physical. If we are seeking the causes for plant-nature, we must go out into the wide ether-realms. We can still remain within space — though, as I said, this “space” becomes a little hypothetical, so that we have recourse to fairy-like conceptions, as when we say “the end of the world — where the world is boarded up.” Yet it is so. Why, even they who only think along the lines of present-day research are now beginning to divine that in some sense there is such a thing as the end of the world — “where the world is boarded up.” It is of course a childlike and crude expression. But we need only remember the childlike way in which people are wont to think: There is the sun, it sends out its rays, on and ever on. The rays grow-weaker and weaker, it is true, yet the light goes on and on, ever away, into the infinite.

To those who have been at these lectures for years past, I have long ago explained what nonsense it is to imagine that the light goes on and on in this way, into the endless void. Often and often I have said, the expansion of light is subject to a kind of elasticity. If you have an india-rubber ball and you indent it here — you can continue pressing up to a certain point; then it springs back again. There is an end to the elastic pressure; then it recoils. It is the same for the light: it does not go on and out into the endless void. When it has reached a certain limit, it comes back again.

This very idea — that the light does not go on indefinitely, but to a certain limit, whence it returns — has recently been upheld, for example, in England, by the physicist Oliver Lodge. Thus, even outer science has come to the point of maintaining in this instance what is declared by spiritual science; as indeed, in time to come, it will arrive in every detail at the things which spiritual science expounds.

So likewise we may say: Out there, if we think our way far enough outward, sooner or later we must think back again. We must not assume a mere endless space which is a fantasy and moreover, one which we cannot grasp. Some of you may recall what I related in my autobiography of the deep impression it made on me, when I attended classes on modern Synthetic Geometry, and when for the first time it was shown me through Geometry itself that a straight line should not be conceived as though it went out into the endless void and never ceased. The line that goes outward in this direction, actually returns from the opposite side. Geometry expresses it by saying that the infinitely distant point to the right is identical with the infinitely distant point to the left. This can be found by exact calculation — not by the mere analogy of a circle, where, if you set out from here, you will eventually get back again to the same point, and if you then imagine the diameter infinitely long the circle will become a straight line. That would be a mere analogy, of little or no value to one who can think exactly. I was impressed, not by this trivial analogy, but by the possibility of real arithmetical proof, that the infinitely distant point on the one side — to the left — is the same as the infinitely distant point to the right. So that one who begins to run from here and runs on and on along the line will not run out into the endless void; if he only runs on for long enough, he will come back to meet us from the other side. To physical thinking it may seem grotesque. The moment we set aside physical thinking it is a reality. The world is not endless. As physical world, such as it lies before us here, it is limited.

Once more then, we may say: To deal with the plant-nature and with the etheric nature in man, we must go to the very limits of the ether. But if we wish to explain the animal nature, and the astral in man, we must go right outside all that there is in space. We must go for a walk, in time — beyond all that is contemporaneous; we must move forward in time. And now we come to the human kingdom.

When we thus come into time, you see, we are already transcending the physical in a twofold way. In order to describe the animal you must move on in time. But at this stage you must not abstractly pursue the line of thought; you must continue concretely. I beg you now observe, how we continue the line of thought concretely.

People think, when the sun sends out its light, that the light goes endlessly on and on. Oliver Lodge, however, shows that this kind of thought is already beginning to be left behind. They are beginning to realise that you get to a certain limit and thence come back again. The sun receives its light sent back to it again from all directions — though in another form, in a transmuted form, still it receives it back again.

Now let us apply the same kind of thought to the progression we have just followed. We stayed, to begin with, in space. Then, earthly space remained there within, while we must go out into the universe. But even that was not enough, for at the next stage we go out into time. Now, someone might say, we must go on still further — on and on. No, on the contrary; now we come back again. Just as it is when we go on and on into space: we get to a limit and thence return; so do we here come back again. Having looked in the distances of time for the past super-physical causes we must return again into the physical.

What does this mean in reality? It signifies that out of time we must come down again on to the earth. If we would seek the causes that apply to man as such, we must seek them once more on earth. Only we have gone backward in time, and I need hardly say: when, going backward in time, we come again on to the earth, we come into a former life of man. We come into a former life. For the animal we have to go on and on. It dissolves away in time, just as our ether-body dissolves away to the utmost limits ... Man, at this point does not dissolve away; we must come back again, even into his former life on earth. Therefore, in man's case, we can say: Past physical causes, for present effects within the physical.

Mineral kingdom: Simultaneity of causes, within the physical.

Plant kingdom: Simultaneity of causes, in the physical and super-physical.

Animal kingdom: Past super-physical causes, corresponding to present effects.

Human kingdom: Past physical causes, corresponding to present effects in the physical.

You see, it has cost us some pains today, by way of preparation, to enter into these abstractions. But that was necessary. I wanted to show you that there is also a logic for these realms — the really spiritual realms of life. This logic is only not coincident with the crude logic which is merely abstracted from physical phenomena, and in which alone people will commonly believe.

Proceeding purely logically, investigating all the series of causes, even in the pure course of thought we came to the repeated lives of man on earth. We need to be attentive to this fact: our thought itself must become different if we would apprehend the spiritual.

People imagine that one cannot understand what is revealed out of the spiritual world. One can indeed, but one must extend one's logic. After all, even to understand a piece of music or any other work of art, you must have in you the conditions to go out to meet it. If you have not the conditions, you will pass by it without appreciation — as a mere noise, if it is music; or if it is plastic art, you will “see nothing in it” but the crude obvious forms. And so for the communications from the spiritual world: you must meet them with a thinking adequate to the spiritual world. And this can already be found in pure logical thinking. Seek out the possible varieties of causes, and you can actually come to understand repeated earthly lives, even in logical consequence.

Now we remain with the great question which is opened up when we consider the corpse. The corpse has become lifeless. External lifeless Nature stands there before us in its crystals and manifold formations. Here the great question arises: How is lifeless Nature related to the corpse of Man?

Perhaps you will find that it will lead you on a little in a direction tending towards the answer, if you first seize the matter at the second stage. Say to yourselves: I look at the world of plants around me. Out of the wide spaces of the ether-universe, it bears within it the forces to which my own ether-body returns. Away up yonder in the ether-spaces, is the causative principle which gives the plants their origin. There is the realm to which my ether-body goes when it has served my life. Thither I go, whence — from the ether-spaces — all the life of plants wells forth. Thither I go: that is, I am akin to it. In fact, I can even say: something is there, up yonder. Thither my ether-body goes. Thence comes the greening, springing, sprouting world of plants. Yet there is a difference. I give up my ether-body; the plants on the other hand receive the ether for their life and growth. I, after my death, give my ether-body away; give it away as a thing that is left behind. They on the other hand — the plants-receive this ether-body, as that which gives them life. They have their beginning from yonder realm whither I go with my ending. The plants' beginning joins together with the human ether-body's ending.

This will bring near to you the question: Might it not also be so for the mineral, for all the manifold crystal formations? Might I not ask: perhaps this too is a beginning, in contrast to the ending which, of myself, I leave behind as the physical corpse? Perhaps here too, beginning and ending are joined together?

With this question we will close for today, my dear friends. Tomorrow we shall begin to enter quite thoroughly the question of human destiny-so-called karma. I shall continue about karma. You will no longer have to find your way through such a jungle of abstractions; but you will also perceive that for a certain unfolding of thought this was a necessary preparation.

posted January 21, 2011 06:32 PM            

II

We shall now go forward from the thoughts which were intended to prepare for the explanations of human destiny or karma. From the abstract element of thought we shall go forward to real life. Step by step, we shall bring before our souls the several domains of life into which man is placed, in order to derive from the constituents of life the foundations for a characterisation of karma, of human destiny.

Man, after all, belongs to the whole universe, and in a far wider sense than we are wont to think. He is a member of the universe, and without it he is really nothing. I have often used the comparison with a member of the human body, say a finger. It is a finger as long as it is on the human body; the moment it is cut off from the body, it is no longer a finger. Outwardly, physically, it is still the same; and yet, it is no longer a finger when it is cut off from the human body.

Likewise, man is no longer man if he is lifted out of the universal world-existence. For to this world-existence he belongs, and without it he can neither be looked upon nor understood as man at all.

Now as we saw again in yesterday's lecture, the world-environment of man is naturally divided into distinct regions. There to begin with, is the lifeless region of the world which in common parlance we call the mineral. We only become like this mineral or lifeless region of the world when we have laid aside our body; when-as regards this body-we have passed through the gate of death. With our true being, we never really become like this lifeless world. Only the bodily form which we have laid aside becomes like it.

Thus, on the one hand, we see that which man leaves behind him in the lifeless kingdom — the physical corpse. And on the other hand, we see the far-spread lifeless universe of Nature, crystalline and non-crystalline. We human beings, as long as we are living on the earth, are quite unlike this mineral world. This too, I have often pointed out. We in our human form are at once destroyed when we are relinquished as corpse to the mineral world. In the mineral world we are dissolved away, that is to say, what holds our form together has nothing in common with the mineral. Even from this fact it is evident that man, as he lives in the physical world, can receive practically no influences from the mineral as such.

By far the widest influences which he does actually receive from the mineral nature come to him via the senses. We see the mineral, we hear it, we perceive its warmth; in short, we perceive it through the senses. Our other relations to the mineral are very slight. You need but think how little of the actual mineral nature comes into relation to us in our earthly life. The salt with which we salt our food is mineral; so are a few other things which we take in with our food. But by far the greater part of the food the human being absorbs comes from the plant and the animal kingdoms. Moreover, what he absorbs from the mineral kingdom bears a remarkable relation to that which he receives of mineral nature through his senses, purely as psychological impressions, namely as sense-perception. In this connection you should again observe an important point which I have often mentioned here. The human brain weighs on the average 1,500 grammes. That is a pretty fair weight. If it pressed with its full weight on the vessels that are underneath it, they would be utterly crushed. It does not press so heavily, for it is subject to a certain law. I described it again a short while ago. When we put a body in a liquid, it loses some of its weight. You can investigate it, if you have a balance. Imagine this vessel of water removed, to begin with. You weigh the body which is suspended here; it has a certain weight. Then put the vessel of water beneath it, so that the body hanging from the beam is steeped in water. Immediately the equilibrium is upset. The beam of the balance goes down on the other side, for the body has become lighter. And if you now investigate how much, it will prove to have become as much lighter as is represented by the weight of the liquid it displaces. That is to say, if the liquid be water, the body — immersed in the water — will become lighter by the amount of weight of the body of water it displaces. It is the well-known principle of Archimedes, who, as I told you, found it when in his bath. He sat in his bath, and found his leg grow lighter or heavier, according as he laid it in the water or lifted it out. Then he exclaimed: “Eureka!” (I have found it).

It is a thing of great importance but important things, too, are sometimes forgotten. For if the art of engineering had not forgotten this principle of Archimedes, probably one of the worst elemental catastrophes of recent times would not have happened as it did, in Italy. Such things arise even in the outer life, owing to the lack of clarity and synthesis in the prevailing science.

Be that as it may, the body loses in weight by the weight of the liquid it displaces. Now the brain is immersed entirely in the cerebro-spinal fluid. It swims in the cerebral fluid. — Here and there, you can already find it recognised in science that man, inasmuch as he is solid, is like a kind of fish. Yes, he is really a fish; for he consists, as to 90 per cent, of a body of water, and in this the solid parts are swimming, like the fish in water. — So, too, the brain is swimming in the cerebro-spinal water; and it thereby becomes so much lighter that it only weighs 20 grammes. The brain only weighs 20 grammes — only with 20 grammes does it press on the surface beneath it. Think what this means; then you will realise how strongly, inasmuch as our brain is floating in the cerebro-spinal fluid, we human beings have the tendency to become free of the earth — and that in an organ of such importance. We think with an organ that is not subject to earthly gravity; we think in direct opposition to earthly gravity. The organ of our thought is first relieved of earthly weight.

Bear in mind the wide range and immense importance of the impressions you receive through your senses, which you confront with your own free will. Think, by comparison, of the minute influences you receive from salt, and other such substances taken as food or condiment. Then you will come to the conclusion that what comes from the mineral kingdom and has a direct influence on man is also as 20 to 1,500 grammes ... so great is the predominance of what we receive as mere sense-impressions, where we are independent of the stimuli — for our sense-impressions do not take hold of us and rend us. Moreover, those things in us which are still subject to earthly gravity like the mineral condiments or constituents of our food, are generally such as to preserve us inwardly. Salt has in itself a preserving, a sustaining, a refreshing power.

Man, therefore, is on a large scale independent of the surrounding mineral world. He takes into himself from the mineral world only that which has no immediate influence upon his being. He moves in the mineral world freely and independently.

Indeed, my dear friends, if it were not for this freedom and independence in the mineral world, what we call human freedom would not be there at all. The mineral world, we may truly say, exists as the necessary counterpart to human freedom. If there were no mineral world, neither should we be free beings. The moment we rise into the plant-world, we are no longer independent of it. It only seems to us as though we looked out over the world of plants just as we do over the crystals, over the far-spread mineral realm. In reality it is not so. There is the plant-world spread out before us. We human beings are born into the world as breathing, living beings, endowed with a specific metabolism. All this is far more dependent on our environment than the eyes and ears and other organs which convey our sense-impressions. The far and wide expanse of the plant-world lives by virtue of the ether, which pours in on to the earth from all sides. Man, too, is subject to this ether. When we are born and we begin to grow as little children, when forces of growth make themselves felt in us, these are etheric forces. The very forces which enable the plants to grow are living in us as etheric forces. We carry the ether-body within us. The physical body contains our eyes and our ears ... As I explained just now, this physical body has nothing in common with the remainder of the physical world. This is proved by the very fact that, as the corpse, it falls to pieces in the physical world. But it is quite different with our ether-body. By virtue of the ether-body we are very much related to the world of plants.

Now you must think of this. That which develops in us as we grow, is, after all, connected very deeply with our destiny. Only to choose grotesque and radical examples, we may have grown in such a way as to be short and thick-set, or tall and lanky, as the case may be; or so as to receive this or that shape of nose. In short, the way we grow is not without its influence on our external form. And this is certainly connected, in however loose a way, with our destiny. But our way of growth is expressed not only in these crude externals. If our instruments and methods of investigation were only delicate enough, we should discover that every man has a different composition of the liver, of the spleen, or of the brain. “Liver” is not simply “liver”; it differs — though in its finer aspects, needless to say — in every human being. And this is connected with the same forces which cause plants to grow. As we look out over the plant-bedecked earth, we should be conscious: That which pours in from the wide ether-spaces, causing the plants to grow, works in us human beings too, bringing about the original and native predisposition of each one of us, and this has very much indeed to do with our destiny. For it belongs very deeply to his fate, whether a man receives out of the ether-world this or that constitution of liver, lung or brain. Man sees, however, only the outer aspect of it all. When we look out over the mineral world we see, more or less, what is contained in it. That is why people are scientifically so fond of the mineral world (if, nowadays, one can speak of scientific fondness at all). They like it, because it contains in itself everything they want to find. For the sustaining forces of the plant-world, this is no longer so. You can perceive at once, as I have told you, the moment you rise to Imaginative Cognition, that the minerals are self-contained within the mineral kingdom; such is the nature of the mineral. That which sustains the plant-world does not appear externally at all to everyday consciousness. To find it we must penetrate into the universe more deeply.

What is it then that is working in the plant-kingdom? What is it that is working so that the forces pour in from the wide ether-spaces, causing the plants to spring and sprout from the earth, and in us too, bringing about our growth — the finer composition of our body? What is it that is working? Here, my dear friends, we come to the Beings of the Third Hierarchy, so-called — the Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai. They are invisible to us, but without them there would not be that ebb and flow of the etheric forces, causing the plants to grow, and working also in ourselves, inasmuch as we too carry in us the same forces which bring about plant-growth. Not to remain obtuse in knowledge, when we approach the plant-world and its forces we can no longer adhere to the merely outward and visible.

And we must also be aware that in the body-free condition between death and a new birth, we develop our relations to these Beings — Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai. And according to the kind of relations we develop, so does our internal karma take shape: what I might call our nature-karma, that of our karma which depends upon the way our ether-body compounds the living fluids in us, making us grow short or tall, and so forth ...

However, the Beings of the Third Hierarchy have only a certain degree of power. It is not owing to their power alone that plants can grow. In this respect, the Third Hierarchy — Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai — are in the service of higher Beings. Nevertheless, that which we live through before we come down from the spiritual world into our physical body — that which determines the finer constitution of our body — is brought about by our conscious meeting with these Beings of the Third Hierarchy, we having prepared ourselves for this during our former life on earth. With the direction, with the guidance we receive from them to form our ether-body from the wide ether-spaces, all this is achieved shortly before we descend from super-physical into physical existence.

Thus we must first observe that which enters into our destiny or karma out of our own internal constitution. Perhaps we may describe this portion of karma by the terms “well-being” or “comfort” and “discomfort, ” “content” and “discontent” in life. For our well-being or contentedness or our discontent in life are connected with this inner quality which is ours by virtue of our ether-body. Now there is a second element living in our karma. It depends upon the fact that not only the plant-kingdom but the animal kingdom also, peoples the earth. Think what different kinds of animals there are in the different regions of the earth. The animal atmosphere, so to speak, is different in the one region and the other.

But you will certainly admit that man also lives in this atmosphere in which the animals are living. It may seem grotesque nowadays, but that is only because the people of today are unaccustomed to observe such things. For instance, there are districts where the elephant is at home. These are simply the districts where the universe so works down on to the earth that elephant life can arise. Do you suppose, my dear friends — if this be a portion of the earth which the elephant inhabits, where the elephant-creating forces are working in from the cosmos — do you suppose that these forces are absent if a human being happens to be there? They are still there, needless to say, and so it is with all animal nature. Just as the plant-forming forces from the far ether-spaces are there, wherever we are living (for not wood walls, nor brick, nor even concrete will keep them from us; we here are living in the forces that form the plant-world of the Jura Alps) so, too, if he happens to be in a region where the earth-nature is such that the elephant can have its life, the human being also lives under the elephant-creating forces.

I can very well imagine many a quality of animals, both large and small, living in the souls of men! There are the animals inhabiting the earth, and as you have now learnt, man lives in the self-same atmosphere. And all this really works upon him. Of course, it affects him differently from how it affects the animals, for man has other qualities than they; man has additional members of his being. It affects him differently; if it did not, man in the elephantine sphere would also grow into an elephant, which he does not do. Moreover, man constantly raises himself out of these things that work upon him. Nevertheless, he lives in this atmosphere.

Diagram 2
Diagram 2
Click image for large view

All that exists in the human astral body is dependent upon the atmosphere in which he lives. And as we said just now that his well-being, his contentment or discontent, depends on the plant-nature of the earth, so may we say at this point: The sympathies and antipathies which we unfold as human beings in our earthly life, and bring with us from the pre-earthly, depend upon the forces constituting, so to speak, the animal atmosphere.

The elephant has a trunk, and thick, pillar-like legs; the stag has antlers and so forth. Here we behold the animal-creating, animal-forming forces. In man, these forces only show themselves in their effect upon his astral body, and it is in their effect upon the astral body that they beget the sympathies and antipathies which every human individual brings with him from the spiritual world.

Observe them, my dear friends, these sympathies and antipathies. Observe to what a large extent they guide us throughout life. Undoubtedly, and with good justification in a certain respect, we are brought up and trained so as to grow out of our strong sympathies and antipathies. Yet in the first place they are there. One man has sympathy for this, another man for that; one man for sculpture, another for in music: one prefers fair people, another has sympathy for dark people. These are the strong, radical sympathies; but our whole life is pervaded by sympathies and antipathies. In reality they depend for their existence on that which engenders all the variety of animal formations.

Thus you may ask, what do we human beings carry within us, in our own inner being, corresponding to the animal forms that are outside us? They are a hundred- and a thousand-fold — these forms. So are the forms of our sympathies and antipathies, only that the greater part remains in our unconscious — or sub-consciousness.

This is another world — a third world. First is the world where we feel no essential dependence — that is the mineral. Second is the world in which Angeloi, Archangeloi and Archai live. That is the world which brings forth the springing, sprouting world of plants, and which endows us with our inner quality whereby we bring well-being or discomfort with us into life, so that we feel, by virtue of our nature, happy or miserable, as the case may be.

Out of this world is taken that which determines our destiny by virtue of our inner constitution — our individual etheric humanity. Now we come to a third element deeply conditioning our destiny, namely our sympathies and antipathies. And, after all, it is through these sympathies and antipathies that many other things are brought into our life, belonging to our destiny in a far wider sense than the sympathies and antipathies themselves. One man is carried into far distances by his sympathies and antipathies. He lives in this or that part of the world because his sympathies have taken him there, and in that distant land, the detailed events of his destiny will now unfold.

Yes, these sympathies and antipathies are deeply involved in all our human destiny. They have their life in the world in which not now the Third but the Second Hierarchy are living: the Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes. In the animal kingdom lives the earthly image of the sublime, majestic formations of this Hierarchy. And what these Beings implant in us, when we commune with them between death and a new birth, lives in the innate sympathies and antipathies which we bring with us from the spiritual world into the physical.

When you see through these things, such ordinary concepts as that of “heredity” appear really very childish. Before I can carry in me any inherited characteristic of my father or mother, I must first have unfolded the sympathies or antipathies for this characteristic of father or mother. It does not depend on my having inherited the characteristic by a mere lifeless causality of Nature. It all depends whether I had sympathy for these characteristics.

As to why I had sympathy for them — that is a question we shall deal with in the coming lectures. But to speak of heredity in the way they generally do in modern science is childish, although science thinks itself so clever.

They even speak today of the inheritance of specifically spiritual and psychological characteristics. Genius is supposed to be inherited from ancestors, and when a man of genius appears in the world, they try to gather up among his forebears the several portions which, they suppose, should produce this genius as a resultant. Well, that is a strange method of proof. A sensible method would be to show that once a man of genius is there, his genius is then transmitted by inheritance. But if they looked for the proof of that, they would come upon very strange things ... Goethe, too, had a son; and so had other men of genius.

Nevertheless, as I said, that would be the way to prove it. But when a genius is there, to look for certain of his qualities among his forebears is just as though you were to prove that when I fall in the water and am pulled out again, then I am wet. It does not prove that I have much to do, in my essential nature, with the water that is dripping from me.

Naturally, having been born into this stream of inheritance through my sympathy for its characteristics, I have them about me, as “inherited characteristics.” Just as I have the water about me, when I fall in and am pulled out again. People's ideas in this respect are grotesquely childish. For the sympathies and antipathies already emerge in man's pre-earthly life. They give him his innermost stamp. With them he enters into his earthly life; with them he builds his destiny from the pre-earthly.

Now we can readily imagine: In a former life on earth we were with another human being. Manifold things resulted from our life together, and found their continuation in the life between death and a new birth ... There, under the influence of the forces of the Hierarchies, in the living Thoughts and cosmic Impulses, there is fashioned and created what shall pass over from the experiences of our former lives on earth into the next life, to be lived out further. We need the sympathies and antipathies so as to unfold the impulses through which we find one another in life. Formed in the life between death and a new birth, under the influence of Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes our sympathies and antipathies enable us to find in life the human beings with whom we must now continue living, according to our former lives on earth. All this takes shape out of the inner structure of our human being. Naturally, manifold errors occur in our acquiring these sympathies and antipathies. Such aberrations, however, are balanced out again in the course of destiny through many lives on earth.

Here, then, we have a second constituent of destiny or karma — the sympathies and antipathies. So we may say:

The first constituent of karma: well-being or inner comfort mid discomfort. The second: sympathies and antipathies. And, as we come to the sympathies and antipathies in human destiny, we have ascended into the sphere in which lie the forces for the forming of the animal kingdom.

Now, we rise into the human kingdom as such. For we live not only with the plant-world; we live not only with the animal; we live, above all, with other human beings in the world. This is the most important of all for our destiny. That is quite another “living together” than the common life with plants and animals. It is a living-together through which is fashioned what is of main importance in our destiny.

The impulses which bring about the peopling of the earth with human beings, work on humanity alone. So there arises the question, what impulses are these which work only upon humanity? Here we can let purely external observation tell its tale. It is a course which we have often followed.

Truly, our life is guided — from the other side of it, so to speak — with a far greater wisdom than is ours in guiding it from this side. Often in later life we meet a human being who becomes of extreme importance in our life. When we think back: How did we live until the moment when we met him? Then our entire life seems like the very pathway to the meeting. It is as though we had tended every step, that we might find him at the right moment — or that we might find him at all, at a certain moment.

We need only ponder the following: Think, my dear friends, what it signifies for fully conscious human reflection. Think what it means to find another human being in a given year of life, thenceforth to experience, work or achieve — whatever it may be — in common with him. Think what it means, think what emerges as the impulse that led up to it, when we reflect on this quite consciously. When we begin to think: How did it happen that we met him? It will probably occur to us that we first had to experience an event with which many other people were connected, for otherwise the opportunity would not have arisen for us to meet him in this life. And, that this event might happen, we had to undergo still another event ... and so on. We find ourselves in the midst of the most complex chain of circumstances, all of which had to occur, into all of which we had to enter, so as to reach this or that decisive experience. And now we may perhaps reflect: If the task had been set us — I will not say at the age of one, but let us say at the age of fourteen — to solve the riddle consciously: to bring about in our fiftieth year a decisive meeting with another human being; if we imagine that we had to solve it consciously, like a mathematical problem — think what it would involve!

Consciously, we human beings are so appallingly stupid, whereas what happens with us in the world is so infinitely wise, when we take into account such things as these. When we begin to think along these lines, we become aware of the immense intricacy and deep significance in the workings of our destiny or karma. And this all goes on in-the domain of the human kingdom. All that thus happens to us is deep in the unconscious life. Until the moment when a decisive event approaches us, it lies in the unconscious. All this takes place as though it were subject to Laws of Nature. Yet where are the Laws of Nature that have power to bring about such things? For the things that take place in this domain will often contradict all natural law — or all that we elaborate after the pattern of outer natural laws. This, too, I have often mentioned. The external features of human life may even be cast into the framework of mathematical laws.

Take, for example, the life-insurance system. Life-insurance can only prosper inasmuch as one can calculate the probable length of life of any human being, aged, let us say, 19 or 25. If you wish to insure your life, the policy will be made out according to the figure of your probable length of life. As a human being of 19, you will probably live so or so long; this figure can be determined. But now imagine that the allotted time has run its course. You will not feel obliged to die. At the end of their probable length of life, two people may long ago have died. But, on the other hand, they may be long “dead” — according to the insurance estimate — when they find one another in life in the decisive way I just described. These things transcend what one can calculate for human life from outer facts of Nature and yet they happen with inner necessity like natural facts. We cannot but admit: With the same necessity with which any event of Nature takes place — be it an earthquake, or eruption, or any natural event, whether great or small — with the same necessity two human beings meet in life according to the ways of life which they have taken.

Thus we here see established within the physical, another kingdom; and in this kingdom we are living. We live not only in comfort and discomfort, in sympathies and antipathies, but in this realm also — in our events and experiences. We are completely cast into this realm of the events and experiences which determine our life by destiny.

Archai, Archangeloi, Angeloi.

1. Well-being (comfort discomfort).

Kyriotetes, Dynamis, Exusiai.

2. Sympathies, Antipathies

Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones.

3. Events, Experiences.

In this realm the Beings of the First Hierarchy — Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones — are working. To direct all that is working here — every human step, every impulse of soul — to guide it all in the world so that the destinies of men grow out of it, a greater power is needed than works in the plant-kingdom, a greater power than belongs to the Hierarchy of Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai, or to the Hierarchy of Exusiai, Kyriotetes, Dynamis. It needs a power such as belongs to the First Hierarchy, to the most sublime of Beings: Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

What is lived out in this sphere lives in our true “I”, in our Ego-organisation, and it lives over from an earlier earth-life.

Now consider for a moment: you are living in an earth-life. In this earth-life you effect this or that; perhaps you do it out of instinct or passion or a strong impulse, or perhaps it is thought out — either stupidly or cleverly. In any case what you bring to pass is done in accordance with some impulse or other. But now all you do in this way in an earth-life leads to this or that result; it works for the happiness or the harm of some other human being. Then comes the life between death and a new birth. In this life between death and a new birth you have a strong consciousness of the fact: I have done harm to another man, and I am less perfect than I should be had I not done him harm. I must compensate for it. The impulse, the urge arises in you to compensate for the harm you have done. Or again, if you have done something to another that is for his good, that helps him on, then you look upon what you have done and you say to yourself: That must serve to build the foundation for the general good, it must lead to further consequences in the world. All this you can inwardly develop. And it can give you a sense of well-being or of discomfort according as you form the inner nature of your body in the life between death and a new birth. It can lead you to sympathies and antipathies, inasmuch as you build and shape your astral body correspondingly, with the aid of the Exusiai, the Dynamis and the Kyriotetes.

All this, however, will not yet give you the power to transmute what in a former life was merely a human fact, into a deed of the cosmos. You helped another human being or you harmed him. This must entail his meeting you in a next life on earth, and in the meeting with him you will have to find the impulse to balance-out the deed.

What, to begin with, has only moral significance, must be transformed into an outer fact — an outer event in the world. To do so, those Beings are needed who transmute or metamorphose moral deeds into world-deeds, cosmic deeds. They are the Beings of the First Hierarchy: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones. It is they who transmute what goes out from us in one earthly life into our experiences of the next lives on earth. They work in the “events and experiences” in human life.

Here then we have the three fundamental elements of our karma. Our inner constitution, our own internal human nature is subject to the Third Hierarchy. Our sympathies and antipathies (which, as we saw, already became in some sense our environment) are a concern of the Second Hierarchy. And that which we encounter as our actual external life is a concern of the First, the most sublime of the hierarchies above humanity.

Thus we perceive man's connection with the world and the whole way he stands in it. We come to the great question, how do the many detailed events of his destiny evolve out of these three?

He is born to such and such parents, in such and such a home, at a certain spot on the earth, into this or that nation, into a given nexus of facts. But all that takes place inasmuch as he is born of such parents, handed over to his educators, born into a certain nation and at a certain spot on earth — all this which enters so fatefully into his life, no matter what we say of human freedom — is in some way dependent on these three elements of which human destiny is composed.

All detailed questions will be revealed to us in their true answers, if we begin with the right foundations. Why does man get small-pox in his twenty-fifth year, passing through perhaps extreme danger of his life? How does some other illness or event strike down into his life? Or some essential help through this or that older person, through this or that nation, this or that series of outer events — how does it come into his life? In every case we must go back to these, the three constituents of human destiny, whereby he is placed into the totality of the cosmic Hierarchies. It is only in the realm of the mineral world that man moves freely. There is the realm of his freedom.

Only when he becomes aware of this, does he learn to put the question of freedom in the true way. Read my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity [In German: Philosophie der Freiheit (freedom)], and see how much importance I attach to the point that one should not ask about the freedom of the Will. The Will lies deep, deep down in the unconscious, and it is nonsense to ask about the freedom of the Will. It is only of the freedom of Thoughts that we can speak. I drew the line very clearly in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. Man must become free in his thoughts, and the free thoughts must give the impulse to the will — then he is free. Now with his thoughts he lives in the mineral world. In all the rest of his being, with which he lives in the plant, in the animal, and in the purely human kingdom, man is subject to destiny. Therefore, of freedom we may truly say: Out of the realms that are ruled by the Hierarchies, the human being comes into that realm which, in a sense, is free from them — into the mineral kingdom, there to become free in his turn. This mineral kingdom — it is precisely the kingdom to which man only becomes similar as to his corpse, when he has laid the corpse aside and passed through the gate of death. Man in his earthly life is independent of that kingdom which can only work to his destruction. No wonder he is free in it, since it has no other part nor lot in him than to destroy him the very moment it gets him. He simply does not belong to this kingdom. Man must first die; then only — as a corpse — can he be, even in outer phenomenal Nature, in the kingdom in which he is free.

Man becomes older and older, and if no accidents occur (these, too, we shall learn to know in their karmic aspects), if he dies as an old man, eventually as a corpse he becomes like the mineral kingdom. As he grows older, so does he gradually come into the sphere of the lifeless. At length he gives up his corpse — it is separated off from him. It is no longer man — needless to say, the corpse is no longer man. Let us look at the mineral kingdom: it is no longer God. Just as the corpse is no longer man, so is the mineral kingdom no longer God. What is it then? The Godhead is in the plant, in the animal, in the human kingdom; for we have found it there in the three Hierarchies. But in the mineral kingdom the Godhead is not, any more than the human corpse is man. The mineral kingdom is the corpse of the Divine. However, as we proceed we shall encounter the strange fact — which I shall only hint at now — that whereas man grows older to become a corpse, the Gods grow younger ... For they are on the other path, the path which we go through after our death. Therefore the mineral is the youngest of the kingdoms. Yet it is the one which is separated off by the Gods, and for this very reason, man can live in it as in the realm of his freedom.

Such are the real connections. Man learns to feel himself ever more at home in the world when he thus learns to place his sensations, his thoughts, his feelings and impulses of will into the right relation to the world. Moreover, only in this way can he perceive how he is placed by destiny in the world and in relation to other men.

posted January 21, 2011 06:33 PM            

III

Karma is best understood by contrasting it with the other impulse in man — that impulse which we describe with the word Freedom. Let us first place the question of karma before us, quite crudely, if I may say so. What does it signify? In human life we have to record the fact of reincarnation, successive earthly lives. Feeling ourselves within a given earthly life, we can look back — in thought, at least, to begin with — and see how this present life is a repetition of a number of former earthly lives. It was preceded by another, and that in turn by yet another life on earth, and so on until we get back into the ages where it is impossible to speak of repeated earthly lives as we do in the present epoch of the earth. For as we go farther backward, there begins a time when the life between birth and death and the life between death and a new birth become so similar to one another that the immense difference which exists today between them is no longer there at all. Today we live in our earthly body between birth and death in such a way that in everyday consciousness we feel ourselves quite cut off from the spiritual world. Out of this everyday consciousness men speak of the spiritual world as a “beyond.” They will even speak of it as though they could doubt its existence or deny it altogether.

This is because man's life in earthly existence restricts him to the outer world of the senses, and to the intellect; and intellect does not look far enough to perceive what is, after all, connected with this earthly existence. Hence there arise countless disputations, all of which ultimately have their source in the “unknown.” No doubt you will often have stood between, when people were arguing about Monism, Dualism and the rest ... It is, of course, absurd to argue around these catch-words. When people wrangle in this way, it often seems as though there were some primitive man who had never heard that there is such substance as “air.” To one who knows that air exists, and what its functions are, it will not occur to speak of it as something that is “beyond.” Nor will he think of declaiming: “I am a Monist; I declare that air, water and earth are one. You are a Dualist, because you persist in regarding air as something that goes beyond the earthly and watery elements.”

These things, in fact, are pure nonsense, as indeed all disputes about concepts generally are. Therefore there can be no question of our entering into these arguments. I only wish to point out the significance. For a primitive man who does not yet know of its existence, the air as such is simply absent; it is “beyond,” beyond his ken. Likewise for those who do not yet know it, the spiritual world is a “beyond,” in spite of the fact that it is everywhere present just as the air is. For a man who enters into these things, it is no longer “beyond” or “on the other side,” but “here,” “on this side.”

Thus it is simply a question of our recognising the fact: In the present earthly era, man between birth and death lives in his physical body, in his whole organisation, so that this very organisation gives him a consciousness through which he is cut off from a certain world of causes. But the world of causes, none the less, is working as such into this physical and earthly life. Then, between death and a new birth he lives in another world, which we may call a spiritual world by contrast with this physical. There he has not a physical body, such as could be made visible to human senses; he lives in a spiritual form of being. Moreover, in that life between death and a new birth the world through which he lives between birth and death is in its turn as remote as the spiritual world is remote and foreign for everyday consciousness on earth.

The dead look down on to the physical world just as the living (that is, the physically living) look upward into the spiritual world. But their feelings are reversed, so to speak. In the physical world between birth and death, man has a way of gazing upward, as to another world which grants him fulfilment for very many things which are either deficient or altogether lacking in contentment in this world. It is quite different between death and a new birth. There, there is an untold abundance, a fulness of events. There is always far too much happening compared with what man can bear; therefore he feels a constant longing to return again into the earthly life, which is a “life in the beyond” for him there. In the second half of the life between death and a new birth, he awaits with great longing the passage through birth into a new earth-existence. In earthly existence man is afraid of death because he lives in uncertainty about it, for in the life on earth a great uncertainty prevails for the ordinary consciousness about the after-death. In the life between death and a new birth, on the other hand, man is excessively certain about the earthly life. It is a certainty that stuns him, that makes him actually weak and faint — so that he passes through conditions, like a fainting dream, conditions which imbue him with the longing to come down again to earth.

These are but scant indications of the great difference now prevailing between the earthly life and the life between death and a new birth. Suppose, however, that we now go back, say, no farther back than the Egyptian time — the third to the first millennium before the founding of Christianity. (After all, the men to whom we there go back are but ourselves, in former lives on earth.) In yonder time, the consciousness of man during his earthly life was quite different from ours today, which is so brutally clear, if you will allow me to say so. Truly, the consciousness of the men of today is brutally clear-cut, they are all so clever — I am not speaking ironically — the people of today are clever, all of them. Compared to this terribly clear-cut consciousness, the consciousness of the men of the ancient Egyptian time was far more dream-like. It did not impinge, like ours does, upon outer objects. It rather went its way through the world without “knocking up against” objects. On the other hand, it was filled with pictures which conveyed something of the Spiritual that is there in our environment. The Spiritual, then, still penetrated into man's physical life on earth.

Do not object: “How could a man with this more dream like, and not the clear-cut consciousness of today, have achieved the tremendous tasks which were actually achieved, for instance, in ancient Egypt?” You need not make this objection. You may remember how mad people sometimes reveal, in states of mania, an immense increase of physical strength; they will begin to carry objects which they could never lift when in their full, clear consciousness. Indeed, the physical strength of the men of that time was correspondingly greater; though outwardly they were perhaps slighter in build than the people of today — for, as you know, it does not always follow that a fat man is strong and a thin man physically weak. But they did not spend their earthly life in observing every detail of their physical actions; their physical deeds went parallel with experiences in consciousness into which the spiritual world still entered.

And when the people of that time were in the life between death and a new birth, far more of this earthly life reached upward into yonder life — if I may use the term “upward.” Nowadays it is exceedingly difficult to communicate with those who are in the life between death and a new birth, for the languages themselves have gradually assumed a form such as the dead no longer understand. Our nouns, for instance, soon after death, are absolute gaps in the dead man's perception of the earthly world. He only understands the verbs, the “words of time” as they are called in German — the acting, moving principle. Whereas on earth, materialistically minded people are constantly pulling us up, saying that everything should be defined and every concept well outlined and fixed by clear-cut definition, the dead no longer know of definitions; they only know of what is in movement, they do not know that which has contours and boundaries.

Here again, it was different in ancient times. What lives on earth as speech, and as custom and habit of thought, was of such a kind that it reached up into the life between death and a new birth, and the dead had it echoing in him still, long after his death. Moreover, he also received an echo of what he had experienced on earth and also of the things that were taking place on earth after his death.

And if we go still farther back, into the time following the catastrophe of Atlantis — the 8th or 9th millennium B.C. — the difference becomes even smaller between the life on earth and life in the Beyond, if we may still describe it so. And thence, as we go backward, we gradually get into the times when the two lives were similar. Thereafter, we can no longer speak of repeated earthly lives.

Thus, our repeated lives on earth have their limit when we go backward, just as they have their limit when we look into the future. What we are beginning quite consciously with Anthroposophy today — the penetration of the spiritual world into the normal consciousness of man-will indeed entail this consequence. Into the world which man lives through between death and a new birth, the earthly world will also penetrate increasingly; and yet man's consciousness will not grow dream-like, but clearer and ever clearer. The difference will again grow less. Thus, in effect, our life in repeated incarnations is contained between two outermost limits, past and future. Across these limits we come into quite another kind of human existence, where it is meaningless to speak of repeated earthly lives, because there is not the great difference between the earthly and the spiritual life, which there is today. Now let us concentrate on present earthly time — in the wide sense of the word. Behind our present earthly life, we may assume that there are many others — we must not say countless others, for they can even be counted by exact spiritual scientific investigation. Behind our present earthly life there are, therefore, many others. When we say this, we shall recognise that in those earthly lives we had certain experiences — relationships as between man and man. These relationships as between man and man worked themselves out in the experiences we then underwent; and their effects are with us in our present earthly life, just as the effects of what we do in this life will extend into our coming lives on earth. So then we have to seek in former earthly lives the causes of many things that enter into our life today.

At this point, many people are prone to retort: “If then the things I experience are caused, how can I be free?” It is a really significant question when we consider it in this way. For spiritual observation always shows that our succeeding earthly life is thus conditioned by our former lives. Yet, on the other hand, the consciousness of freedom is absolutely there. Read my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity and you will see: the human being cannot be understood at all unless we realise that the whole life of his soul is oriented towards freedom — filled with the tendency to freedom.

Only, this freedom must be rightly understood. Precisely in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity you will find a concept of freedom which it is very important to grasp in its true meaning. The point is that we have freedom developed, to begin with, in thought. The fountain-head of freedom is in thought. Man has an immediate consciousness of the fact that he is a free being in his thought. You may rejoin: “Surely there are many people nowadays who doubt the fact of freedom?” Yes, but it only proves that the theoretical fanaticism of people nowadays is often stronger than their direct and real experience. Man is so crammed with theoretical ideas, that he no longer believes in his own experiences. Out of his observations of Nature, he arrives at the idea that everything is conditioned by necessity, every effect has a cause, all that exists has a cause. He does not think of repeated earthly lives in this connection. He imagines that what wells forth in human Thinking is causally determined in the same way as that which proceeds from any machine.

Man makes himself blind by this theory of universal causality, as it is called. He blinds himself to the fact that he has very clearly within him a consciousness of freedom. Freedom is simply a fact which we experience, the moment we reflect upon ourselves at all.

There are those who believe that it is simply the nervous system; the nervous system is there, once and for all, with its property of conjuring thoughts out of itself. According to this, the thoughts would be like the flame whose burning is conditioned by the materials of the fuel. Our thoughts would be necessary results, and there could be no question of freedom.

These people, however, contradict themselves. As I have often related, I had a friend in my youth, who, at a certain period had quite a fanatical tendency to think in a “sound,” materialistic way. “When I walk,” he said, “it is the nerves of' the brain; they contain certain causes to which the effect of my walking is due.” Now and then it led to quite a long debate between us, till at last I said to him on one occasion: “Look now. You also say: ‘I walk.’ Why do you not say, ‘My brain walks?’ If you believe in your theory, you ought never to say: ‘I walk; I take hold of things,’ and so on, but ‘My brain walks; my brain takes hold of them,’ and so on. Why do you go on lying?”

These are the theorists, but there also those who put it into practice. If they observe some failing in themselves which they are not very anxious to throw off, they say, “I cannot throw it off; it is my nature. It is there of its own accord, and I am powerless against it.” There are many like that; they appeal to the inevitable causality of their own nature. But its a rule, they do not remain consistent. If they happen to be showing off something that they rather like about themselves, for which they need no excuse, but on the contrary are glad to receive a little flattery, then they depart from their theory.

The free being of man is a fundamental fact — one of those facts which can be directly experienced. In this respect, however, even in ordinary earthly life it is so: there are many things we do in complete freedom which are nevertheless of such a kind that we cannot easily leave them undone. And yet we do not feel our freedom in the least impaired.

Suppose, for a moment, that you now resolve to build yourself a house. It will take a year to build, let us say. After a year you will begin to live in it. Will you feel it as an encroachment on your freedom that you then have to say to yourself: The house is ready now, and I must move in ... I must live in it; it is a case of compulsion. No. You will surely not feel your freedom impaired by the mere fact that you have built yourself a house. You see, therefore, even in ordinary life the two things stand side by side. You have committed yourself to something. It has thereby become a fact in life — a fact with which you have to reckon.

Now think of all that has originated in former lives on earth, with which you have to reckon because it is due to yourself — just as the building of the house is due to you. Seen in this light, you will not feel your freedom impaired because your present life on earth is determined by former ones.

Perhaps you will say: “Very well. I will build myself a house, but I still wish to remain a free man. I shall not let myself be compelled. If I do not choose to move into the new house after a year, I shall sell it.” Certainly — though I must say, one might also have one's views about such a way of behaving. One might perhaps conclude that you are a person who does not know his own mind. Undoubtedly, one might well take this view of the matter; but let us leave it. Let us not suppose a man is such a fanatical upholder of freedom that he constantly makes up his mind to do things, and afterwards out of sheer “freedom” leaves them undone. Then one might well say: “This man has not even the freedom to go in for the things which he himself resolves upon. He constantly feels the sting of his would-be freedom; he is positively harassed, thrown hither and thither by his fanatical idea of freedom.”

Observe how important it is, not to take these questions in a rigid, theoretic way, but livingly. Now let us pass to a rather more intricate concept. If we ascribe freedom to man, surely we must also ascribe it to the other Beings, whose freedom is unimpaired by human limitations. For, as we rise to the Beings of the Hierarchies, they certainly are not impaired by limitations of human nature. For them indeed we must expect a higher degree of freedom. Now someone might propound a rather strange theological theory — to this effect: God must surely be free. He has arranged the world in a certain way; yet he has thereby committed Himself, He cannot change the World-Order every day. Thus, after all, He is un-free.

You see, you will never escape from a vicious circle if you thus contrast the inner necessity of karma and the freedom which is still an absolute fact of our consciousness, a simple outcome of self-observation. Take once more the illustration of the building of the house. I do not wish to run it to death, but at this point it can still help us along the way. Suppose some person builds himself a house. I will not say suppose I build myself a house, for I shall probably never do so! — But, let us say, some one builds himself a house. By this resolve, he does, in a certain respect, determine his future. Now that the house is finished, and if he takes his former resolve into account, no freedom apparently remains to him, as far as the living in the house is concerned. And though he himself has set this limitation on his freedom, nevertheless, apparently, no freedom is left to him ... But now, I beg you, think how many things there are that you would still be free to do in the house that you had built yourself. Why, you are even free to be stupid or wise in the house, and to be disagreeable or nice to your fellow-men. You are free to get up in the house early or late. There may be other necessities in this respect; but as far as the house is concerned, you are free to get up early or late. You are free to be an anthroposophist or a materialist in the house. In short, there are untold things still at your free disposal.

Likewise in a single human life, in spite of karmic necessity, there are countless things at your free disposal, far more than in a house — countless things fully and really in the domain of your freedom.

Even here you may still feel able to rejoin: Well and good. We have a certain domain of freedom in our life. Yes, there is a certain enclosed domain of freedom, and all around it, karmic necessity. Looking at this, you might argue: Well, I am free in a certain domain, but I soon get to the limits of my freedom. I feel the karmic necessity on every hand. I go round and round in the room of my freedom, but at the boundaries on every hand I come up against limitations.

Well, my dear friends, if the fish thought likewise, it would be highly unhappy in the water, for as it swims it comes up against the limits of the water. Outside the water, it can no longer live. Hence it refrains from going outside the water. It does not go outside; it stays in the water. It swims around in the water, and whatever is outside the water, it lets it alone; it just lets it be what it is — air, or whatever else. And inasmuch as it does so, I can assure you the fish is not at all unhappy to think that it cannot breathe with lungs. It does not occur to it to be unhappy. But if ever it did occur to the fish to be unhappy because it only breathes with gills and not with lungs, then it would have to have lungs in reserve, so as to compare what it is like to live down in the water, or in the air. Then the whole way the fish feels itself inside, would be quite different. It would all be different.

Diagram 3
Diagram 3
Click image for large view

Let us apply this comparison to human life with respect to freedom and karmic necessity. To begin with, man in the present earthly time has what we call the ordinary consciousness. With this consciousness he lives in the province of his freedom, just as the fish lives in the water. He does not come into the realm of karmic necessity at all, with everyday consciousness. Only when he begins to see the spiritual world (which is as though the fish were to have lungs in reserve) — only when he really lives into the spiritual world — then he begins to perceive the impulses living in him as karmic necessity. Then he looks back into his former lives on earth, and, finding in them the causes of his present experiences, he does not feel: “I am now under compulsion of an iron necessity: my freedom is impaired,” but he looks back and sees how he himself built up what now confronts him. Just as a man who has built himself a house looks back on the resolve which led him to build it ... He generally finds it wiser to ask, was it a sensible or a foolish resolve, to build this house? No doubt, in the event, you may arrive at many different conclusions on this question; but if you conclude that it was a dreadful mistake, you can say at most that you were foolish.

In earthly life this is not a pleasant experience, for when we stand face to face with a thing we have inaugurated, we do not like having to admit that it was foolish. We do not like to suffer from our own foolish mistakes. We wish we had not made the foolish decision. But this really only applies to the one earthly life; because in effect, between the foolishness of the resolve and the punishment we suffer in experiencing its consequences, only the self-same earthly life is intervening. It all remains continuous.

But between one earthly life and another it is not so. For the lives between death and a new birth are always intervening, and they change many things which would not change if earthly life continued uniformly. Suppose that you look back into a former life on earth. You did something good or ill to another man. Between that earthly life and this one, there was the life between death and new birth. In that life, you cannot help realising that you have become imperfect by doing wrong to another human being. It takes away from your own human value. It cripples you in soul. You must make good again this maiming of your soul and you resolve to achieve in a new earthly life what will make good the fault. Thus between death and new birth you take up, by your own will, that which will balance and make good the fault. Or if you did good to another man, you know now that all of man's earthly life is there for mankind as a whole. You see it clearly in the life between death and new birth. If therefore you have helped another man, you realise that he has thereby attained certain things which, without you, he could not have attained in a former life on earth. And you then feel all the more united with him in the life between death and new birth — united with him, to live and develop further what you and he together have attained in human perfection. You seek him again in a new life on earth, to work on thus in a new life precisely by virtue of the way you helped in his perfection.

When therefore, with real spiritual insight, you begin to perceive this encompassing domain, there is no question of your despising or seeking to avoid its necessity. Quite the contrary; for as you now look back on it, you see the nature of the things which you yourself did in the past, so much so that you say to yourself: That which takes place, must take place, out of an inner necessity; and out of the fullest freedom it would have to take place just the same.

In fact it will never happen, under any circumstances, that a real insight into your karma will lead you to be dissatisfied with it. When things arise in the karmic course which you do not like, you need but consider them in relation to the laws and principles of the universe; you will perceive increasingly that after all, what is karmically conditioned is far better — better than if we had to begin anew, like unwritten pages, with every new life on earth. For, in the last resort, we ourselves are our karma. What is it that comes over, karmically, from our former lives on earth? It is actually we ourselves. And it is meaningless to suggest that anything in our karma (adjoining which, remember, the realm of freedom is always there), ought to be different from what it is. In an organic totality you cannot criticise the single details. A person may not like his nose, but it is senseless to criticise the nose as such, for the nose a man has, must be as it is, if the whole man is as he is. A man who says: “I should like to have a different nose,” implies that he would like to be an utterly different man; and in so doing he really wipes himself out in thought — which is surely impossible. Likewise we cannot wipe out our karma, for we are ourselves what our karma is. Nor does it really embarrass us, for it runs alongside the deeds of our freedom it nowhere impairs the deeds of our freedom.

I may here use another comparison to make the point clear. As human beings, we walk. But the ground on which we walk is also there. No man feels embarrassed in walking because the ground is there beneath him. He must know that if the ground were not there, he could not walk at all; he would fall through at every step. So it is with our freedom; it needs the ground of necessity. It must rise out of a given foundation. And this foundation — it is really we ourselves!

Therefore, if you grasp the true concept of freedom and the true concept of karma, you will find them thoroughly compatible, and you need no longer shrink from a detailed study of the karmic laws. In fact, in some instances you will even come to the following conclusion:

Suppose that some one is really able to look back with the insight of Initiation, into former lives on earth. He knows quite well, when he looks back into his former lives, that this and that has happened to him as a consequence. It has come with him into his present life on earth. If he had not attained Initiation Science, objective necessity would impel him to do certain things. He would do them quite inevitably. He would not feel his freedom impaired, for his freedom is in the ordinary consciousness, with which he never penetrates into the realm where the necessity is working — just as the fish never penetrates into the outer air. But when he has attained to Initiation Science, then he looks back; he sees how things were in a former life on earth, and he regards what now confronts him as a task quite consciously allotted for his present life. And so indeed it is,

What I shall now say may sound paradoxical to you, yet it is true. In reality, a man who has no Initiation Science practically always knows, by a kind of inner urge or impulse, what he is to do. Yes, people always know what they must do; they are always feeling impelled to this thing or that. For one who really begins to tread the path of Initiation Science it becomes very different. With regard to the various experiences of life as they confront him, strange questions will arise in him. When he feels impelled to do this or that, immediately again he feels impelled not to do it. There is no more of that dim urge which drives most human beings to this or that line of action. Indeed, at a certain stage of Initiate-insight, if nothing else came instead, a man might easily say to himself: Now that I have reached this insight — being 40 years old, let us say, I had best spend the rest of my life quite indifferently. What do I care? I'll sit down and do nothing, for I have no definite impulses to do anything particular.

You must not suppose, my dear friends, that Initiation is not a reality. It is remarkable how people sometimes think of these things. Of a roast chicken, every one who eats it, well believes that it is a reality. Of Initiation Science, most people believe that its effects are merely theoretical. No, its effects are realities in life, and among them is the one I have just indicated. Before a man has acquired Initiation Science, out of a dark urge within him one thing is always important to him and another unimportant. But now he would prefer to sit down in a chair and let the world run its course, for it really does not matter whether this is done or that is left undone ...

This attitude might easily occur, and there is only one corrective. (For it will not remain so; Initiation Science, needless to say, brings about other effects as well.) The only corrective which will prevent our Initiate from sitting down quiescently, letting the world run its course, and saying: “It is all indifferent to me,” is to look back into his former lives on earth. For he then reads in his karma the tasks for his present earthly life, and does what is consciously imposed upon him by his former lives. He does not leave it undone, with the idea that it encroaches on his freedom, but he does it. Quite on the contrary, he would feel himself unfree if he could not fulfil the task which is allotted to him by his former lives. For in beholding what he experienced in former lives on earth, at the same time he becomes aware of his life between death and a new birth, where he perceived that it was right and reasonable to do the corresponding, consequential actions. (At this point let me say briefly, in parenthesis, that the word “Karma” has come to Europe by way of the English language, and because of its spelling people very often say “Karma” (with broad “ah” sound.) This is incorrect. It should be pronounced “Kärma” (with modified vowel sound.) I have always pronounced the word in this way and I regret that as a result many people have become accustomed to using the dreadful word “Kirma”. For some time now you will have heard even very sincere students saying “Kirma.” It is dreadful).

Thus, neither before nor after Initiation Science is there a contradiction between karmic necessity and freedom.

Once more, then: neither before nor after the entry of Initiation Science is there a contradiction between necessity — karmic necessity — and freedom. Before it there is none, because with everyday consciousness man remains within the realm of freedom, while karmic necessity goes on outside this realm, like any process of Nature. There is nothing in him to feel differently from what his own nature impels. Nor is there any contradiction after the entry of Initiation Science, for he is then quite in agreement with his karma, he thinks it only sensible to act according to it. Just as when you have built yourself a house and it is ready after a year, you do not say: the fact that you must now move in is an encroachment on your freedom. You will more probably say: Yes, on the whole it was quite sensible to build yourself a house in this neighbourhood and on this site. Now see to it that you are free in the house! Likewise he who looks back with Initiate-knowledge into his former lives on, earth: he knows that he will become free precisely by the fulfilling of his karmic task-moving into the house which he built for himself in former lives on earth.

Thus, my dear friends, I wanted to explain to you the true compatibility of freedom and karmic necessity in human life. Tomorrow we shall continue, entering more into the details of karma.

posted January 21, 2011 06:34 PM            

IV

Today I wish to bring before you certain broader aspects concerning the development of karma, for we shall presently enter more and more into those matters which can only be illustrated — shall we say — by particular assumptions.

To gain a true insight into the progress of karma we must be able to imagine how man gathers his whole organisation together when he descends out of the spiritual world into the physical. You will understand that in the language of today there are no suitable forms of expression for these events which are practically unknown to our present civilisation. Therefore the terms we employ cannot but be inexact. When we descend out of the spiritual into the physical world, for a new life on earth, we have our physical body prepared for us, to begin with, by the stream of inheritance. This physical body is none the less connected in a certain sense, as we shall see, with the experiences we undergo between death and a new birth. Today, however, it will suffice us to bear in mind that the physical body is given to us from the earthly side, whereas those members which we may describe as the higher members of the human being — the ether-body, astral body and Ego — come down out of the spiritual world.

Take first the ether-body. Man draws it together from the whole universal ether, before he unites himself with the physical body which is given to him by heredity. The union of the soul-spiritual man as Ego, astral body, and ether-body, with the physical human embryo, can only take place inasmuch as the ether-body of the mother-organism gradually withdraws itself from the physical embryo.

Man therefore unites himself with the physical germ after having drawn together his ether-body from the universal ether. The more precise description of these events will occupy us at a later stage. For the moment we are mainly interested in the general question, whence come the several members which the human being has in earthly life between birth and death? The physical organism comes, as we have seen, from the stream of inheritance, and the ether-organism from the universal ether from which it is first drawn together. As to the astral organism, we may truly say that the human being remains in all respects unconscious of it, or only subconsciously aware of it, during his earthly life. This astral body contains all the results of his life between death and a new birth. For between death and a new birth — according to what he has become through his preceding lives on earth, man enters into manifold relations with other human souls who are in the life between death and a new birth, and also with the spiritual Beings of a higher cosmic order who do not descend to earth in a human body, but have their being in the spiritual world.

All that a man brings over from his former lives on earth — precisely according to how he was and what he did — meets with the sympathy or antipathy of the beings whom he learns to know during his passage through the world between death and a new birth.

Not only is it of great significance for karma, what sympathies and antipathies he meets among the higher Beings according to the things he did in his preceding earthly life. Not only so; it is also of deep significance that he now comes into relation to those human souls to whom he was related on the earth, and there takes place a wonderful “reflection” as between his being and the being of the souls to whom on earth he was related. Let us assume he had a good relation to a soul whom he now meets again between death and a new birth. All that the good relationship implies, was living in him during his former life, or lives on earth; and this good relationship will now be mirrored in the other soul when he encounters him between death and a new birth.

Yes, it is really so. As he goes through the life between death and a new birth, man sees himself reflected everywhere in the souls with whom he is now living, because in effect he was living with them on the earth. If he did good to another human being, something is mirrored to him from the other's soul. If he did evil, something is mirrored likewise ... And he now has the feeling — if I may use the word “feeling” with the reservations I made at the beginning — he has the feeling: “This human soul, you helped. All you experienced in helping him, all that you felt for this soul, the feelings that led you on to act thus helpfully towards him, your own inner experiences during the deed that helped him, are coming back to you now from his soul.” Yes, they are actually mirrored to you from the other's soul.

Or again, you did harm to a human soul. That which was living in you while you did him harm, is mirrored back. And so you have your former earthly lives (and notably your last life) before you as though in a far and wide-spread reflector, mirrored by the souls with whom you were together.

Especially with respect to your life of action, you have the impression that it is receding from you. Between death and a new birth you lose the Ego-feeling — the sense of “I” which was yours when in the body on earth. Indeed, you have lost it long ago. But you now get the feeling of “I” from this far-spread reflection. You come to life in the mirroring of your deeds, in the souls with whom you were during your earthly life.

On earth, your “I,” your Ego, was in the body — as it were, a point. Between death and a new birth, it is mirrored to you from the surrounding circumference. This life is an intimate being-together with the other human souls — according to the relations you have entered into with them.

And this is a reality in the spiritual world. When we go through a room hung with many mirrors, we see ourselves reflected in each one. But — in ordinary human parlance — we know that the reflections are “not there.” They do not remain when we go away; we are reflected no longer. But that which is reflected here in human souls remains; stays in existence. And there comes a time in the last third of the life between death and a new birth when we form our astral body out of these mirrored pictures. We draw all this into our astral body. In deed and truth, when we descend from the spiritual world into the physical, we carry in our astral body what we have re-absorbed into ourselves, according to the way our actions of the former life on earth were mirrored in other souls between death and a new birth. This gives us the impulses which impel us towards or away from the human souls with whom we are born again in the physical body.

In this way the impulse to karma in a new earthly life is formed between death and a new birth — though I shall have to describe it more in detail in the near future; for we must take the Ego also into account.

Now we can trace how an impulse from one life works on into other lives. Take, for example, the impulse of love. We can do our deeds, in relation to other men, out of the impulse which we call love. It makes a great difference whether we do them out of a mere sense of duty, convention, respectability and so on, or whether we do them out of a greater or lesser degree of love.

Assume that in one earthly life a man is able to perform actions sustained by love, warmed through and through by love. It remains as a real force in his soul. What he takes with him as an outcome of his deeds, what is now mirrored in the other souls, comes back to him as a reflected image. And as he forms from this his astral body, with which he descends on to the earth, the love of the former earthly life, the love which he poured out and which was now returned to him from other souls, is changed to joy and gladness.

Such is the metamorphosis — if so we may describe it. A man does something for his fellow-men, something sustained by love. Love pouring out from him accompanies the actions which help his fellow-men. In the passage through life between death and a new birth, this outpouring love of the one life on earth is transmuted, metamorphosed, into joy that streams in towards him.

If you experience joy through a human being in one earthly life, you may be sure it is the outcome of the love you unfolded towards him in a former life. This joy flows back again into your soul during your life on earth. You know the inner warmth which comes with joy, you know what joy can mean to one in life — especially that joy which comes from other human beings. It warms life and sustains it — as it were, gives it wings. It is the karmic result of love that has been expended.

But in our joy we again experience a relation to the human being who gives us joy. Thus, in our former life on earth, we had something within us that made the love flow out from us. In our succeeding life, already we have the outcome of it, the warmth of joy, which we experience inwardly once more. And this again flows out from us. A man who can experience joy in life, is again something for his fellow-men — something that warms them. He who has cause to go through life without joy is different to his fellow-men from one to whom it is granted to go through life with joyfulness.

Then, in the life between death and a new birth once more, what we thus experienced in joy between birth and death is reflected again in the many souls with whom we were on earth and with whom we are again in yonder life. And the manifold reflected image which thus comes back to us from the souls of those we knew on earth, works back again once more. We carry it into our astral body when we come down again into the next life on earth — that is the third in succession. Once more it is instilled, imprinted into our astral body. What is it in its outcome now? Now it becomes the underlying basis, the impulse for a quick and ready understanding of man and the world. It becomes the basis for that attunement of the soul which bears us along inasmuch as we have understanding of the world. If we find interest and take delight in the conduct of other men, if we understand their conduct and find it interesting in a given earthly life, it is a sure indication of the joy in our last incarnation and of the love in our incarnation before that. Men who go through the world with a free mind and an open sense, letting the world flow into them, so that they understand it well — they have attained through love and joy this relation to the world.

What we do in our deeds out of love is altogether different from what we do out of a dry and rigid sense of duty. You will remember that I have always emphasised in my books: it is the deeds that spring from love which we must recognise as truly ethical; they are the truly moral deeds. How often have I indicated the great contrast in this regard, as between Kant and Schiller. Kant, both in life and in knowledge, “kantified” everything (“Kante,” in German, means a hard edge or angle. — Note by translator.) In science, through Kant, all became hard and angular; and so it is in human action. “Duty, thou great and sublime name, thou who containest nothing of comfort or ease ... ” — this passage I quoted in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity to the pretended anger (not the sincere, but the pretended, hypocritical anger) of many opponents, while over against it I set what I must establish as my view: “Love, thou who speakest with warmth to the soul ...”

Over against the dry and rigid Kantian concept of duty Schiller himself found the words: “Gern dien' ich dem Freunde, doch tue ich es leider mit Neigung, drum wurmt es mich oft, dass ich nicht tugenhaft bin.” (Gladly I serve my friends, yet alas, I do it with pleasure, wherefore it oftentimes gnaws me, I am not virtuous.) For in the Kantian ethic, that is not virtuous which we do out of real inclination, but only that which we do out of the rigid concept of duty.

Well, there are human beings who, to begin with, do not attain to love. Because they cannot tell their fellow-man the truth out of love (for if you love a man, you will tell him the truth, and not lies), because they cannot love, they tell the truth out of a sense of duty. Because they cannot love, out of a sense of duty they refrain from thrashing their fellow-man or from boxing his ears or otherwise offending him, the moment he does a thing they do not like. There is indeed a difference between acting out of a rigid sense of duty — necessary as it is in social life, necessary for many things — there is all the difference between this and the deeds of love.

Now the deeds that are done out of a rigid concept of duty, or by convention or propriety, do not call forth joy in the next life on earth. They too undergo that mirroring in other souls of which I spoke before; and, having done so, in the next life on earth they call forth what we may thus describe: “You feel that people are more or less indifferent to you.” How many a person carries this through life. He is a matter of indifference to others, and he suffers from it. Rightly he suffers from it, for men are there for one another; man is dependent on not being a matter of indifference to his fellows. What he thus suffers is simply the outcome of a lack of love in a former life on earth, when he behaved as a decent man because of rigid duty hanging over him like a sword of Damocles. I will not say a sword of steel; that would be disquieting, no doubt, for most dutiful people; so let us say, a wooden sword of Damocles.

Now then, we are in the second earthly life.

That which proceeds as joy from love, in the third life becomes as we have seen, a free and open heart, bringing the world near to us, giving us open-minded insight into all things beautiful and good and true. While as to that which comes to us as the indifference of other men — what we experience in this way in one earthly life, will make us in the next life (that is, in the third) a person who does not know what to do with himself. Such a person, already in school, has no particular use for the things the teachers are doing with him. Then, when he grows a little older, he does not know what to become — mechanic or Privy Councilor, or whatever it may be. He does not know what to do with his life; he drifts through life without direction. In observation of the outer world, he is not exactly dull. Music, for instance — he understands it well enough, but it gives him no pleasure. After all, it is a matter of indifference whether the music is more or less good, or bad. He feels the beauty of a painting or other work of art; but there is always something in his soul that vexes: “What is the good of it anyhow? What's it all for?” Such are the things that emerge in the third earthly life in karmic sequence.

Now let us assume, on the other hand, that a man does positive harm to another, out of hatred or antipathy. We can imagine every conceivable degree. A man may harm his fellows out of a positively criminal sense of hatred. Or — to omit the intermediate stages — he may merely be a critic. To be a critic, you must always hate a little — unless you are one who praises; and such critics are few nowadays. It is uninteresting to show recognition of other people's work; it only becomes interesting when you can be witty at their expense.

Now there are all manner of intermediate stages. But it is a matter here of all those human deeds which proceed from a cold antipathy — antipathy of which people are often not at all clearly aware — or, at the other extreme, from positive hatred. All that is thus brought about by men against their fellows, or against sub-human creatures — all this finds vent in conditions of soul which in their turn are mirrored in the life between death and a new birth. Then, in the next earthly life, out of the hatred is born what comes to us from the outer world as pain, distress, unhappiness caused from outside — in a word, the opposite of joy.

You will reply: we experience so much of suffering and pain; is it all really due to hatred — greater or lesser hatred — in our preceding life? “I cannot possibly imagine,” man will be prone to say, “that I was such a bad lot, that I must experience so much sorrow because I hated so much.” Well, if you want to think open-mindedly of these things, you must be aware how great is the illusion which lulls you to sleep (and to which you therefore readily give yourself up) at this point. You suggest-away from your conscious mind the antipathies you are feeling against others. People go through the world with far more hatred than they think — far more antipathy, at least. It is a fact of life: hatred gives satisfaction to the soul, and for this reason, as a rule, it is not at first experienced in consciousness. It is eclipsed by the satisfaction it gives. But when it returns as pain and suffering that comes to us from outside, it is no longer so; we notice the suffering quickly enough.

Well, my dear friends, to picture, if I may, in homely and familiar fashion, the possibilities there are in this respect, think of an afternoon-tea, a real, genuine, gossiping party where half-a-dozen (half-a-dozen is quite enough) aunts or uncles — yes, uncles, too — are sitting together expatiating on their fellows. Think of it. How many antipathies are given vent to, what volumes of antipathy are poured out over other men and women, say in the course of an hour and a half — sometimes it lasts longer. In pouring out the antipathy they do not notice it; but when it comes back in the next earthly life, they notice it soon enough. And it does come back, inexorably.

Thus, in effect, a portion (not all, for we shall still learn to know other karmic connections) of what we experience as suffering that comes to us from outside in one earthly life, may very well be due to our own feelings of antipathy in former lives on earth.

But with all this, we must never forget that karma — whatsoever karmic stream it may be — must always begin somewhere. If these are a succession of earthly lives:

a b c (d) e f g h

and this one, (d), is the present life, it does not follow that all pain which comes to us from without, is due to our former life on earth. It may also be an original sorrow, the karma of which will work itself out only in the next life on earth. Therefore I say, a part — even a considerable part — of the suffering that comes to us from outside is a result of the hatred we conceived in former lives.

And now, as we go on again into the third life, the outcome of the suffering which came to us (though only of that suffering which came, as it were, out of our own stored-up hatred), the outcome of the pain which was thus spent in our soul is a kind of mental dullness — dullness as compared with quick, open-minded insight into the world.

There may be a man who meets the world with a phlegmatic indifference. He does not confront the things of the world, or other men with an open heart. The fact is, very often, that he acquired this obtuseness of spirit by his sufferings in a former life on earth, the cause of which lay in his own karma. For the suffering which subsequently finds expression in this way, in dullness of soul, is sure to have been the result of feelings of hatred, at least in the last earthly life but one. You can be absolutely sure of it: stupidity in any one life is always the outcome of hatred in this or that preceding life. Yet, my dear friends, the true concept of karma must not only be based on this; it is not only to enable us to understand life. No, we must also conceive it as an impulse in life. We must be conscious that there is not only an a b c d, but an e f g h. That is to say, there are the coming earthly lives and what we develop as the content of our soul in this life will have its outcome and effect in the next life. If anyone wants to be extra stupid in his next earthly life but one, he need only hate very much in this life. But the converse is also true: if he wants to have free and open insight in the next earthly life but one, he need only love extra much in this life.

The insight into and knowledge of karma only gains real value when it flows into our will for the future, plays its part in our will for the future. And the moment has now come in human evolution when the unconscious cannot go on working as it did when our souls were passing through their former lives on earth. Men are becoming increasingly free and conscious. Since the first third of the 15th century we are in the age when men are becoming ever more free and conscious. And so for those men who are men of the present time, a next earthly life will already contain a dim feeling of preceding lives on earth. A man of today, if it occurs to him that he is not very bright, does not ascribe it to himself, but to his native limitations; following the current theories of materialism, he will generally ascribe it to his physical nature. Not so the men who return as the reincarnation of those of today. They will already possess at least a dim, disquieting feeling: if they are not very bright, somewhere or other there must have been something connected with feelings of antipathy or hatred.

And, if we now speak of a Waldorf School educational method, naturally for the present we must take account of the prevailing earthly civilisation. We cannot yet educate frankly towards a consciousness of life in terms of reincarnation, so to speak. For the people of today have not yet a feeling — not even a dim feeling — of their repeated earthly lives. Nevertheless, the beginnings that have been made with the Waldorf School method will go on developing, if they are truly received. They will develop in the coming centuries, in this direction. This principle will be consciously applied in moral education. If a child has little talent, if a child is dull, It is somehow due to former lives in which he developed much hatred. With the help of spiritual science, you will try to find against whom the hatred may have been directed. For the men and women who were hated then, against whom the deeds inspired by hatred were done, must be there again somewhere or other in the child's environment. Education in coming centuries will have to be placed far more definitely into life. When you see what is coming to expression in such a child, in the metamorphosis of unintelligence in this life, you will then have to recognise from what quarters it is mirrored or rather was mirrored in the life between death and new birth. Then you will do something as educator so that this child will develop an especial love towards those for whom he felt specific hatred in former lives on earth. You will soon see the beneficial result of a love thus specifically roused and directed. The child's intelligence, nay, the whole life of his soul, will brighten.

It is not the general theories about karma which will help us in education, but this concrete way of looking into life, to see where the karmic connections lie. You will soon notice it; after all, the fact that destiny has brought these children together in one class is not a mere matter of indifference. People will get beyond the hideous carelessness that prevails in these things nowadays, when the “human material” — for so they often call it — which is thrown together in a class, is actually conceived as though it were bundled together by mere chance; not as though destiny had brought these human beings together. People will get beyond this appalling indifference. Then they will gain a new outlook as educators; they will be able to perceive the wonderful karmic threads that are woven between the one child and the other, as a result of their former lives.

Then they will bring consciously into the children's development that which can create a balance. For karma is, in a certain sense, inexorable. Out of an iron necessity we may write down the unquestioned sequence:

Love — Joy — an open heart.
Antipathy or Hatred — Suffering — Stupidity.

These are necessary connections. Nevertheless, we also stand face to face with a necessity when we see a river run its course; yet rivers have been regulated, their, course has been known to be altered.

So likewise it is possible, as it were, to regulate the karmic stream, to work into it, to affect its course. Yes, it is possible.

If therefore in childhood you notice there is a tendency to dullness and stupidity and you perceive the connections, if now you guide the child to develop love in its heart, if you discover (which would be possible already today for people with a delicate observation of life), if you discover which are the other children to whom the child is karmically related, and you now bring the child to love them especially, to do deeds of love towards these other children — then you will give, to the antipathy that was, a counter-weight in the love: and in a next earthly life the dullness will have been improved.

There are educators, trained, as it were, by their own instinct who often do these things instinctively. Instinctively they will bring dull-witted children to the point where they develop love, thus educating them by degrees into more intelligent and perceptive beings.

It is only when we come to these things that our insight into the karmic connections becomes of real service to life.

Before we go on to pursue the detailed questions of karma, one other general question will naturally come before our souls. What sort of person is it — generally speaking — whom you may confront so as to know that you are karmically related to one another? I must reply with a word which is sometimes used in a rather off-hand way nowadays: such a person is a “contemporary”; he is with us simultaneously on the earth.

Bearing this in mind, you will say to yourself: If you are with certain human beings in a life on earth, then you were with them in a former life (generally speaking, at least; there may of course, be displacements). And you were with them again in a life before it.

Now what of those who live fifty years later than you? They again were with other human beings in their former lives on earth. As a general rule, according to this line of thought, the human beings of the B series —shall I call it — will not come together with human beings of the A series.

Diagram 4
Diagram 4
Click image for large view

It is an oppressive thought, but it is true. I shall afterwards speak of other doubts and questions, such as arise, for instance, when people say — as they so often do — “Humanity goes on increasing and increasing on the earth,” and other things of that kind. Today, however, I want to put this thought before you; perhaps it is an oppressive thought, but it is none the less true. It is a fact that the continued life of mankind on earth takes place in rhythms. One shift of human beings — if I may put it so — goes on, as a general rule, from one life to the next; so does another shift, and they are in a certain sense separated from one another. They do not find their way together in the earthly life, but only in the long intervening life between death and a new birth. There, indeed, they find their way together, but not in the earthly life. We come down again and again with a limited circle of people. Precisely from the point of view of reincarnation, to be contemporaries is a thing of inner importance, inner significance.

Why is it so? I can assure you, on the basis of spiritual science, this question, which may well occupy one intellectually to begin with, has caused me the greatest imaginable pain. For it is necessary to bring out the truth, the inner nature of the fact. Thus you may ask: Why was I not a contemporary of Goethe's? Not having been a contemporary of Goethe's in this life, generally speaking — according to these truths — you can more or less conclude that you have never lived with him on earth. Goethe belongs to another shift.

What lies behind this? You must reverse the question; but to do so, you must have a real feeling, a perception of what the life of men together really is. You must be able to ask yourself a question on which I shall have very much to say in the near future: What is it really to be another man's contemporary? What is it, on the other hand, only to be able to know of him from history, as far as earthly life is concerned? What is it like?

We must indeed have a free mind, a sensitive heart, to answer these intimate questions: What is it like — with all the accompanying inner experiences of the soul — when a contemporary man is speaking to you, or doing any actions that come near you? What is it like? And having gained the necessary perception of this, you must then be able to compare it with what it would be like if you encountered a person who is not your contemporary, and probably has never been so in any life on earth, whom you may none the less revere — more, perhaps, than any of your contemporaries. What would it be like if you met him as a contemporary? In a word — forgive the personal note — what would it be like if I were a contemporary of Goethe? If you are not an insensitive, indifferent kind of person ... Needless to say, if you are insensitive and have no feeling for what a contemporary can be, you are scarcely in a position to answer such a question. What would it be like if I, walking down the Schillergasse, let us say, towards the Frauenplan in Weimar, had suddenly encountered “the fat Privy Councilor,” say in the year 1826 or 1827? One knows quite well, one could not have borne it. You can stand your contemporary; you cannot bear a man who, in the nature of the case, cannot be your contemporary. In a sense, he acts like a poison on your inner life. You can only bear him inasmuch as he is not your contemporary, but your predecessor or successor.

Of course, if you have no feeling for such things, they remain in the unconscious; but you can well imagine a man who has an intimate feeling for spiritual things ... if he knew that as he went down the Schillergasse towards the Frauenplan in Weimar, he would encounter the “fat Privy Councilor” — Goethe, with the double chin — he would feel himself inwardly impossible. A man who has no feeling for such things — he no doubt would just have taken off his hat!

These things are not to be explained out of the earthly life. The reasons why we cannot be contemporary with a man are in fact, not contained within the earthly life. To see them, we must penetrate into the spiritual facts. Therefore, for earthly life, such things appear paradoxical. Nevertheless, they are as I have said.

I can assure you, with genuine love I wrote the introduction to Jean Paul's works, published in the Cotta'sche Bibliothek der Weltliteratur. Yet, if I had ever had to sit side by side with Jean Paul at Bayreuth, it would have given me a stomach-ache, without doubt! That does not hinder one's having the highest reverence. And it is so for every human being — only with most people it remains in the sub-conscious, in the astral or in the ether-body; it does not affect the physical. The experience of the soul which affects the physical body must also become conscious.

You must be well aware of this, my dear friends. If you want to gain knowledge of the spiritual world, you cannot escape hearing of things which will seem grotesque and paradoxical. The spiritual world is different from the physical. Of course, it is easy enough for anyone to turn to ridicule the statement that if I had been a contemporary of Jean Paul's, it would have given me a stomach-ache to have to sit beside him. That is quite true — it goes without saying for the everyday, banal, Philistine world of earthly life. But the laws of the banal and Philistine world do not determine the spiritual facts. You must accustom yourselves to think in other forms of thought, if you wish to understand the spiritual world; you must be prepared to experience many surprising things. When the everyday consciousness reads about Goethe, it may naturally feel impelled to say: “How I should like to have known him personally, to have shaken him by the hand!” and so on. It is a piece of thoughtlessness; for there are laws according to which we are predestined for a given epoch of the earth. In this epoch we can live. It is just as in our physical body we are predestined for a certain pressure of air; we cannot rise above the earth to a height where the pressure no longer suits us. Nor can a man who is destined for the 20th century live in the time of Goethe.

These were the things I wanted to bring forward about karma, to begin with.

posted January 21, 2011 06:35 PM            

V

Speaking in detail about karma, we must of course distinguish between those karmic events of life which come to a man more from outside, and those which arise, as it were, from within. A human being's destiny is composed of many and diverse factors. To begin with, it depends on his physical and etheric constitution. Then it depends on the sympathies and antipathies with which he is able to meet the outer world, according to his astral and his Ego-constitution; and on the sympathies and antipathies with which others in their turn are able to encounter him according to his nature. Moreover, it depends on the myriad complications and entanglements in which he finds himself involved on the path of life. All these things work together to determine — for a given moment, or for his life as a whole — the human being's karmic situation.

I shall now try to show how the total destiny of man is put together from these several factors. Today we shall take our start from certain inner factors in his nature. Let us observe, for once, what is in many respects of cardinal importance. I mean, his predisposition to health and illness; and, with this underlying basis, all that comes to expression in his life, in the physical strength — and strength of soul — with which he is able to confront his tasks, and so on ...

To judge these factors rightly, we must however be able to see beyond many a prejudice that is contained in the civilisation of today. We must be able to enter more into the true original being of man; we must gain insight, what it really signifies to say that man, as to his deeper being, descends from spiritual worlds into this physical and earthly life.

All that people refer to nowadays as heredity, has even found its way, as you are well aware, into the realms of poetry and art. If any one appears in the world with such and such qualities, people will always begin by asking how he inherited them. If, for example, he appears with a predisposition to illness, they will at once ask, what of the hereditary circumstances?

To begin with, the question is quite justifiable; but in their whole attitude to these things nowadays, people look past the real human being; they completely miss him. They do not observe what his true being is, how his true being unfolds. In the first place, they say, he is the child of his parents and the descendant of his forebears. Already in his physiognomy, and even more perhaps in his gestures, they fondly recognise a likeness to his ancestors emerging. Not only so; they see his whole physical organism as a product of what is given to him by his forefathers. He carries this physical organism with him. They emphasise this very strongly, but they fail to observe the following:

When he is born, to begin with undoubtedly man has his physical organism from his parents. But what is the physical organism which he receives from his parents? The thoughts of the civilisation of today upon this question are fundamentally in error. For in effect, when he is at the change of teeth, man not only exchanges the teeth he first received, for others, but this is also the moment in life when the entire human being — as organisation — is for the first time renewed. There is a thorough-going difference as between what the human being becomes in his eighth or ninth year of life, and what he was in his third or fourth year. It is a thorough-going difference. That which he was — as organisation — in his third or fourth year, that he undoubtedly received by heredity. His parents gave it to him. That which emerges first in the eighth or ninth year of his life is in the highest degree a product of what he himself has brought down from spiritual worlds.

To picture the real underlying facts, we may put it as follows — though I am well aware it will shock the man of today. Man, we must say, when he is born, receives something like a model of his human form. He gets this model from his forefathers; they give him the model to take with him into life. Then, working on the model, he himself develops what he afterwards becomes. What he develops, however, is the outcome of what he himself brings with him from the spiritual world.

Fantastic as it may seem to the man of today — to those who are completely immersed in modern culture — yet it is so. The first teeth which the human being receives are undoubtedly inherited; they are the products of heredity. They only serve him as the model, after which he elaborates his second teeth, and this he does according to the forces he brings with him from the spiritual world. Thus he elaborates his second teeth. And as it is with the teeth, so with the body as a whole.

A question may here arise: Why do we human beings need a model at all? Why can we not do as indeed we did in earlier phases of earth-evolution? Just as we descend and gather in our ether-body (which, as you know, we do with our own forces, and bring it with us from the spiritual world), why can we not likewise gather to ourselves the physical materials and form our own physical body without the help of physical inheritance?

For the modern man's way of thinking, it is no doubt an grotesquely foolish question — mad, I need hardly say. But with respect to madness — let us admit it — the Theory of Relativity holds good. To begin with, people only apply the Theory to movements. They say you cannot tell, from observation, whether you yourself — with the body on which you are — are moving, or whether it is the neighbouring body that is moving. This fact emerged very clearly when the old cosmic theory was exchanged for the Copernican. Though, as I said, they apply the Theory of Relativity only to movements, yet we may also apply it (for it certainly has its sphere of validity) to the aforesaid ‘madness.’ Here are two people, standing side by side: each one is mad as compared to the other ... The question only remains, which of the two is absolutely mad?

In relation to the real facts of the spiritual world, this question must none the less be raised: Why does the human being need a model? Ancient world-conceptions answered it in their way. Only in modern time, when morality is no longer included in the cosmic order but only recognised as human convention, these questions therefore are no longer asked. Ancient world-conceptions not only asked the question; they also answered it. Originally, they said, man was pre-destined to come to the earth in such a way that he could form his own physical body from the substances of earth, just as he gathers to himself his ether-body from the cosmic ether-substance. But he then fell a prey to the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences, and he thereby lost the faculty, out of his own nature to build his physical body. Therefore he must take it from heredity. This way of obtaining the physical body is the result of inherited sin.

This is what ancient world-conceptions said — that this is the fundamental meaning of “inherited sin.” It signifies the having to enter into the laws and conditions of heredity.

We in our time must first discover and collect the necessary concepts so as to take these questions sincerely, in the first place; and in the second place, to find the answers. It is quite true: man in his earthly evolution has not remained as strong as he was pre-disposed to be before the onset of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influences. Therefore he cannot form his physical body of his own accord when he comes down into the earthly conditions. He is dependent on the model, he needs the model which we see growing in the first seven years of human life. And, as he takes his direction from the model, it is but natural if more or less of the model also remains about him in his later life. If, in his working on himself, he is altogether dependent on the model, then he forgets — if I may put it so — what he himself brought with him. He takes his cue entirely from the model. Another human being, having stronger inner forces as a result of former lives on earth, takes his direction less from the model; and you will see how greatly such a human being changes in the second phase of life, between the change of teeth and puberty.

This is precisely the task of school. If it is a true school, it should bring to unfoldment in the human being what he has brought with him from spiritual worlds into this physical life on earth.

Thus, what the human being afterwards takes with him into life will contain more or less of inherited characteristics, according to the extent to which he can or cannot overcome them.

Now all things have their spiritual aspect. The body man has in the first seven years of life is simply the model from which he takes his direction. Either his spiritual forces are to some extent submerged in what is pressed upon him by the model; then he remains quite dependent on the model. Or else, in the first seven years, that which is striving to change the model works its way through successfully.

This striving also finds expression outwardly. It is not merely a question of man's working on the model. While he is doing so, the original model gradually loosens itself, peels off, so to speak — falls away. It all falls away, just as the first teeth fall away. Throughout this process, the forms and forces of the model are pressing on the one hand, while on the other hand the human being is trying to impress what he himself has brought with him to the earth ... There is a real conflict in the first seven years of life. Seen from the spiritual standpoint, this conflict is signified by that which finds expression — outwardly, symptomatically — in the illnesses of childhood. The typical diseases of childhood are an expression of this inward struggle.

Needless to say, similar forms of illness often occur later in life. In such a case — to take only one example — it may be that the patient did not succeed very well in overcoming the model in the first seven years of life. And at a later age an inner impulse arises, after all to rid himself of what has thus karmically remained in him. Thus in the 28th or 29th year of life, a human being may suddenly feel inwardly roused, all the more vigorously to beat against the model, and as a result, he or she will get some illness of childhood.

If you have an eye for it, you will soon see how remarkable it is in some children — how greatly they change in physiognomy or gesture after the 7th or 8th year of their life. Nobody knows where the change comes from. The prevailing views of heredity are so strong nowadays that they have passed into the everyday forms of speech. When, in the 8th or 9th year, some feature suddenly emerges in the child (which, in real fact, is deeply, organically rooted) the father will often say: “Anyhow, he hasn't got it from me.” To which the mother will answer: “Well, certainly not from me.” All this is only due to the prevailing belief which has found its way into the parental consciousness — I mean of course, the belief that the children must have got everything from their parents.

On the other hand, you may often observe how children grow even more like their parents in this second phase of life than they were before. That is quite true. But we must take in earnest what we know of the way man descends into the physical world.

Among the many dreadful flowers of the swamp which psycho-analysis has produced, there is the theory of which you can read on all hands nowadays, namely that in the hidden sub-conscious mind every son is in love with his mother and every daughter with her father; and they tell of the many conflicts of life which are supposed to arise from this, in the sub-conscious regions of the soul. All these are of course amateurish interpretations of life. The truth however is, that the human being is in love with his parents already before he comes down into earthly life. He comes down just because he likes them.

Of course, the judgment of life which people have on earth must differ in this respect from the judgment they have outside the earthly life between death and a new birth. On one occasion, in the early stages of our anthroposophical work, a lady appeared among us who said: “No,” when she heard of reincarnation. She liked the rest of Anthroposophy very well, but with reincarnation she would have nothing to do; one earthly life, she said, was quite enough for her. Now we had very well-meaning followers in those days, and they tried in every imaginable way to convince the good lady that the idea was true after all, that every human being must undergo repeated lives on earth. She could not be moved. One friend belaboured her from the left, and another from the right. After a time, she left; but two days later, she wrote me a post-card to the effect that, after all, she was not going to be born again on earth!

To such a person, one who wishes simply to tell the truth from spiritual knowledge can only say: No doubt, while you are here on earth, it is not at all to your liking that you should come down again for a future life. But it does not depend on that. Here on earth, to begin with, you will go through the gate of death into the spiritual world. That you are quite willing to do. Whether or no you want to come down again will depend on the judgment which will be yours when you no longer have the body about you. For you will then form quite a different judgment.

The judgments man has in physical life on earth are, in fact, different from the judgments he has between death and a new birth. For there the point of view is changed. And so it is, if you say to a human being here on earth — a young human being, perhaps-that he has chosen his father, it is not out of the question that he might make objection: “Do you mean to say that I have chosen the father who has given me so many thrashings?” Yes, certainly he has chosen him; for he had quite another point of view before he came down to earth. He had the point of view that the thrashings would do him a lot of good ... Truly, it is no laughing matter; I mean it in deep earnestness.

In the same way, man also chooses his parents as to form and figure. He himself has a picture before him — the picture that he will become like them. He does not become like them by heredity, but by his own inner forces of soul-and-spirit — the forces he brings with him from the spiritual world. Therefore you need to judge in an all-round way out of both spiritual and physical science. If you do so, it will become utterly impossible to judge as people do when they say, with the air of making an objection: “I have seen children who became all the more like their parents in their second phase of life.” No doubt; but then the fact is, that these children themselves have set themselves the ideal of taking on the form of their parents.

Man really works, throughout the time between death and a new birth, in union with other departed souls, and with the beings of the Higher Worlds; he works upon what will then make it possible for him to build his body.

You see, we very much under-estimate the importance of what man has in his sub-consciousness. As earthly man, he is far wiser in the sub-conscious than in the surface-consciousness. It is indeed out of a far reaching, universal, cosmic wisdom that he elaborates within the model that afterwards emerges in the second phase of life — what he then bears as his own human being, the human form that properly belongs to him. In time to come, people will know how little they really receive — as far as the substance of the body is concerned — from the food they eat. Man receives far more from the air and the light, from all that he absorbs in a very finely-divided state from air and light, and so on. When this is realised, people will more readily believe that man builds up his second body quite independently of any inherited conditions. For he builds it entirely from his world-environment. The first body is actually only a model and that which comes from the parents — not only substantially, but as regards the outer bodily forces — is no longer there in the second period of life. The child's relation to his parents then becomes an ethical, a soul-relationship. Only in the first period of life — that is until the seventh year — is it a physical, hereditary relationship.

Now there are human beings who, in this earthly life, take a keen interest in all that surrounds them in the visible cosmos. They observe the world of plants, of animals; they take interest in this thing and that in the visible world around them. They take an interest in the majestic picture of the starlit sky. They are awake, so to speak, with their soul, in the entire physical cosmos. The inner life of a human being who has this warm interest in the cosmos differs from the inner life of one who goes past the world with a phlegmatic, indifferent soul.

In this respect, the whole scale of human characters is represented. There, for example, is a man who has been quite a short journey. When you afterwards talk to him, he will describe with infinite love the town where he has been, down to the tiniest detail. Through his keen interest, you yourself will get a complete picture of what it was like in the town he visited.

From this extreme we can pass to the opposite. On one occasion, for instance, I met two elderly ladies; they had just traveled from Vienna to Presburg, which is a beautiful city. I asked them what it was like in Presburg, what had pleased them there. They could tell me nothing except that they had seen two pretty little dachshunds down by the river-side! Well, they need not have gone to Presburg to see the dachshunds; they might just as well have seen them in Vienna. However, they had seen nothing else at all.

So do some people go through the world. And, as you know between these outermost ends of the scale, there are those who take every kind and degree of interest in the physical world around them.

Suppose a man has little interest in the physical world around him. Perhaps he just manages to interest himself in the things that immediately concern his bodily life — whether, for instance, one can eat more or less well in this or that district. Beyond that, his interests do not go; his soul remains poor. He does not imprint the world into himself. He carries very little in his inner life, very little of what has radiated into him from the phenomena of the world, through the gate of death into the spiritual realms. Thereby he finds the working with the spiritual beings, with whom he is then together, very difficult. And as a consequence, in the next life he does not bring with him, for the up-building of his physical body, strength and energy of soul, but weakness — a kind of faintness of soul. The model works into him strongly enough. The conflict with the model finds expression in manifold illnesses of childhood; but the weakness persists. He forms, so to speak, a frail or sickly body, prone to all manner of illnesses. Thus, karmically, our interest of soul-and-spirit in the one earthly life is transformed into our constitution as to health in the next life. Human beings who are “bursting with health” certainly had a keen interest in the visible world in a former incarnation. The detailed facts of life work very strongly in this respect.

No doubt it is more or less “risqué” nowadays to speak of these things, but you will only understand the inner connections of karma if you are ready to learn about the karmic details. Thus, for example, in the age when the human souls who are here today were living in a former life on earth, there was already an art of painting; and there were some human beings even then who had no interest in it at all. Even today, you will admit, there are people who do not care whether they have some atrocity hanging on the walls of their room or a picture beautifully painted. And there were also such people in the time when the souls who are here today were living in their former lives on earth. Now, I can assure you, I have never found a man or a woman with a pleasant face — a sympathetic expression — who did not take delight in beautiful paintings in a former life on earth. The people with an unsympathetic expression (which, after all, also plays its part in karma, and signifies something for destiny) were always the ones who passed by the works of art of painting with obtuse and phlegmatic indifference.

These things go even farther. There are human beings (and so there were in former epochs of the earth) who never look up to the stars their whole life long, who do not know where Leo is, or Aries or Taurus; they have no interest in anything in this connection. Such people are born, in a next life on earth, with a body that is somehow limp and flabby. Or if, by the vigour of their parents, they get a model that carries them over this, they become limp, lacking in energy and vigour, through the body which they then build for themselves.

And so it is with the entire constitution which a man bears with him in a given life on earth. In every detail we might refer it to the interests he had in the visible world — in an all-embracing sense — in his preceding life on earth.

People, for instance, who in our time take absolutely no interest in music — people to whom music is a matter of indifference — will certainly be born again in a next life on earth either with asthmatic trouble, or with some disease of the lung. At any rate, they will be born with a tendency to asthma or lung disease. And so it is in all respects; the quality of soul which develops in our earthly life through the interest we take in the visible world, comes to expression in our next life in the general tone of our bodily health or illness.

Here again, some one might say: To know of such things may well take away one's taste for a next life on earth. That again, is judged from the earthly standpoint, which is certainly not the only possible standpoint; for, after all, the life between death and a new birth lasts far longer than the earthly life. If a man is obtuse and indifferent with regard to anything in his visible environment, he takes with him an inability to work in certain realms between death and a new birth. He passes through the gate of death with the consequences of his lack of interest. After death he goes on his way. He cannot get near certain Beings; certain Beings hold themselves away from him; he cannot get near them. Other human souls with whom he was on earth, remain as strangers to him. This would go on for ever, like an eternal punishment of Hell, if it could not be modified. The only cure, the only compensation, lies in his resolving — between death and a new birth — to come down again into earthly life and experience in the sick body what his inability has signified in the spiritual world. Between death and a new birth he longs for this cure, for he is then filled with the consciousness that there is something he cannot do. Moreover, he feels it in such a way that in the further course, when he dies once again and passes through the time between death and new birth, that which was pain on earth becomes the impulse and power to enter into what he missed last time.

Thus we may truly say: in all essentials, man carries health and illness with him with his karma, from the spiritual world into the physical. Of course we must bear in mind that it is not always a fulfilment of karma, for there is also karma in process of becoming. Therefore we shall not relate to his former life on earth, everything the human being has to suffer in his physical life as regards health and illness. None the less we may know: in all essentials, that which emerges — notably from within outward — with respect to health and illness, is karmically determined as I have just described.

Here again, the world becomes intelligible only when we can look beyond this earthly life. In no other way can we explain it; the world cannot be explained out of the earthly life.

If we now pass from the inner conditions of karma which follow from a man's organisation, to the more outward aspect, here once again — only to strike the chords of karma, so to speak — we may take our start from a realm of facts which touches man very closely. Take, for example, our relation to other human beings, which is psychologically very much connected with the conditions of our health and illness, at any rate as regards the general mood and attunement of our soul.

Assume, for example, that someone finds a close friend in his youth. An intimate friendship arises between them; the two are devoted to one another. Afterwards life takes them apart — both of them, perhaps, or one especially — they look back with a certain sadness on their friendship in youth. But they cannot renew it. However often they meet in life, their friendship of youth does not arise again. How very much in destiny can sometimes depend on broken friendships of youth. You will admit, after all, a person's destiny can be profoundly influenced by a broken friendship of youth.

Now one investigates the matter ... I may add that one should speak as little as possible about these things out of mere theory. To speak out of theory is of very little value. In fact, you should only speak of such things either out of direct spiritual perception, or on the basis of what you have heard or read of the communications of those who are able to have direct spiritual vision, provided you yourselves find the communications convincing, and understand them well. There is no value in theorising about these things. Therefore I say, when you endeavour with spiritual vision to get behind such an event as a broken friendship of youth, as you go back into a former life on earth, this is what you generally find. The two people, who in a subsequent earthly life, had a friendship in their youth which was afterwards broken — in an earlier incarnation they were friends in later life.

Let us assume, for instance: two young people — boys or girls — are friends until their twentieth year. Then the friendship of their youth is broken. Go back with spiritual cognition into a former life on earth, and you will find that again they were friends. This time, however, it was a friendship that began about the twentieth year and continued into their later life. It is a very interesting case, and you will often find it so when you pursue things with spiritual science.

Examine such cases more closely and to begin with, this is what you find: If you enjoyed a friendship with a person in the later years of life, you have an inner impulse also to learn to know what he may be like in youth. The impulse leads you in a later life actually to learn to know him as a friend in youth. In a former incarnation you knew him in maturer years. This brought the impulse into your soul to learn to know him now also in youth. You could no longer do so in that life, therefore you do it in the next.

It has a great influence when this impulse arises — in one of the two or in both of them — and passes through death and lives itself out in the spiritual world between death and a new birth. For in the spiritual world, in such a case, there is something like a “staring fixedly” at the period of youth. You have an especial longing to fix your gaze on the time of youth, and you do not develop the impulse to learn to know your friend once more in maturer years. And so, in your next life on earth, the friendship of youth — pre-determined between you by the life you lived through before you came down to earth — is broken.

This is a case out of real life, for what I am now relating is absolutely real. One question, however, here arises: What was the older friendship like in the former life, what was it like, that rouses the impulse in you to have your friend with you only in youth in a new life on earth? The answer is this: for the desire to have the other being beside you in your youth and yet not to develop into a desire to keep him as your intimate friend in later life as well, something else must also have occurred. In all the instances of which I am aware, it has invariably been so: If the two human beings had remained united in their later life, if their friendship of youth had not been broken they would have grown tired and bored with one another: because, in effect, their friendship in maturer years in a former life took a too selfish direction. The selfishness of friendships in one earthly life avenges itself karmically in the loss of the same friendships in other lives.

Diagram 5
Diagram 5
Click image for large view

These things are complicated indeed; but you can always get a guiding line if you see this, for it is so in many cases: Two human beings go their way, each of them apart, say, till their twentieth year; thenceforward they go along in friendship (I). Then in the next earthly life, correspondingly, we generally get this second picture (II) — the picture of friendship in youth, after which their lives go apart.

This too you will find very often: If, in your middle period of life in one incarnation, you meet a human being who has a strong influence on your destiny (these things, of course, only hold good as a general rule — not in all cases), it is very likely that you had him beside you by forces of destiny at the beginning and at the end of your life in a previous incarnation. Then the picture is so: In the one incarnation you live through the beginning and ending of life together; in the other incarnation you are not with him at the beginning or at the end, but you encounter him in the middle period of life.

Diagram 6
Diagram 6
Click image for large view

Or again it may be that in your childhood you are united by destiny with another human being; in a former life you were united with him precisely in the time before you approached your death. Such inverse reflections often occur in the relationships of karma.

posted January 21, 2011 07:11 PM            

VI

If we now continue our studies of karma, it is necessary for us in the first place to perceive how karma enters into man's development. We must perceive, that is to say, how destiny, interwoven as it is with the free deeds of man, is really shaped and moulded in its physical reflection out of the spiritual world.

To begin with, I shall have to say a few things concerning the human being as he lives on earth. During these lectures we have been studying earthly man in relation to the various members of his being. We have distinguished in him the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the organisation of the Ego. But there is yet another way of perceiving his several members, namely when we direct our gaze upon him, simply as he stands before us in the physical world.

In today's lecture — independently of what we have already been discussing — we shall therefore approach a different distinction of the members of the human being. Then we shall try to build a bridge between what we discuss today and that which is already known to us.

Observing the human being as he stands before us on the earth — simply according to his physical form — we can recognise in this physical form and configuration three clearly distinct members. If they are not generally distinguished, it is only because that which counts as science nowadays looks at the facts in a merely superficial way. It has no feeling for what reveals itself when these things are observed with a perception that is illumined from within. There, to begin with, is the head of man. Even outwardly considered, we can perceive that this human head appears quite different from the remainder of the human form. We need but observe the origin of man out of the embryo. The first thing we can see developing as human embryo is the head organisation. That is practically all that we can see to begin with. The whole human organisation takes its start from the head. All that afterwards flows into man's form and figure and configuration, is, in the embryo, a mere system of appendages. As physical form, man to begin with is head, and head alone. The other organs are there as mere appendages. In the first period of embryo existence, the functions these organs assume in later life — as breathing, circulation, nutrition and so on — are not undertaken as such from within the embryo. The corresponding functions are supplied from without inward, so to speak: provided for by the mother-organism, through organs that afterwards fall away — organs that are no longer attached to the human being later on.

Man, to begin with, is simply a head. He is altogether “head,” and the remaining organs are only appendages. It is no exaggeration to say that man, to begin with, is a head. The remainder is merely an appendage. Then, at a later stage, the organs which to begin with were mere appendages, grow and gain in importance. Therefore, in later life, the head is not strictly distinguished from the rest of the body. But that is only a superficial characterisation of the human being. For in reality, even as physical form, he is a threefold being. All that constitutes his original form — namely the head-remains throughout his earthly life as a more or less individual member. People only fail to recognise the fact, — but it is so.

You will say: Surely one ought not to divide the human being in this way — beheading him, so to speak, chopping his head off from the rest of his body. That such is the anthroposophical practice was only the fond belief of the Professor, who reproached us for dividing man into head-, chest-organs and limb-organs. But it is not so at all. The fact is rather this: that which appears outwardly as the formation of the head is only the main expression of the human head-formation. Man remains “head” throughout his whole earthly life. The most important sense-organs, it is true — the eyes and ears, the organs of smell and organs of taste — are in the actual head. But the sense of warmth, for example, the sense of pressure, the sense of touch, are spread over the whole human being. That is precisely because the three members cannot in fact be separated spatially. They can at most be separated in the sense that the head-formative principle is mainly apparent in the outward form of the head, while in reality it permeates the whole human being. And so it is too, for the other members. The “head” is also there in the big toe throughout man's earthly life, inasmuch as the big toe possesses a sense of touch or a sense of warmth.

Thus we have characterised, to begin with, the one member of the human being as he stands before us in the sense-world. In my books I have also described this one organisation as the system of nerves and senses; for that is to characterise it more inwardly. This, then, is the one member of the human being, the organisation of nerves and senses. The second member is all that lives and finds expression in rhythmical activity. You cannot say of the nerves-and-senses system that it finds expression in rhythmic activity. For if it did, in the perception of the eye, for instance, you would have to perceive one thing at one moment and then another, and a third and a fourth; and then return again to the first, and so on. In other words, there would have to be a rhythm in your sense-perceptions; and it is not so. Observe on the other hand the main features of your chest-organisation. There you will find the rhythm of the breathing, the rhythm of circulation, the rhythm of digestion and so forth ... There, everything is rhythmical.

This rhythm, with the corresponding organs of rhythm, is the second thing to develop in the human being; and it extends once more over the whole human being, though its chief external manifestation is in the organs of the chest. The whole human being is heart, is lung; yet lung and heart are localised, so to speak, in the organs, so-called. It is well known that the whole human being breathes; you breathe at every place in your organism. People speak of a skin-breathing. Only here, once more, the breathing function is mainly concentrated in the activity of the lung.

The third thing in man is the limb-organism. The limbs come to an end in the trunk or chest-organism. In the embryo-stage of existence they appear as mere appendages. They are the latest to develop. They however are the organs mainly concerned in our metabolism. For by their movement — and inasmuch as they do most of the work in the human being — the metabolic process finds its chief stimulus.

Therewith we have characterised the three members that appear to us in the human form. But these three members are intimately connected with the soul-life of man. The life of the human soul falls into Thinking, Feeling and Willing. Thinking finds its corresponding physical organisation chiefly in the organisation of the head. It has its physical organisation, it is true, throughout the human being; but that is only because the head itself, as I said just now, is there throughout the human being.

Feeling is connected with the rhythmic organisation. It is a prejudice — even a superstition on the part of modern science to suppose that the nervous system has anything directly to do with feeling. The nervous system has nothing directly to do with feeling at all. The true organs of feeling are the rhythms of the breathing, of the circulation ... All that the nerves do is to enable us to form the concept that we have our feelings. Feelings, once more, have their own proper organisation in the rhythmic organism. But we should know nothing of our feelings if the nerves did not provide for our having ideas about them. Because the nerves provide us with all the ideas of our own feelings, modern intellectualism conceives the superstitious notion that the nerves themselves are the organs of our feeling. That is not the case.

But when we consciously observe our feelings — such as they arise out of our rhythmic organism — and compare them with the thoughts which are bound to our head, our nerves-and-senses organisation, then, if we have the faculty to observe such things at all, we perceive just the same difference between our thoughts and our feelings as between the thoughts which we have in our day-waking life, and our dreams. Our feelings have no greater intensity in consciousness than dreams. They only have a different form; they only make their appearance in a different way. When you dream, in pictures, your consciousness is living in the pictures of the dream. These pictures, however, in their picture-form, have the same significance as in another form our feelings have. Thus we may say: We have the clearest and most light-filled consciousness in our ideas and thoughts. We have a kind of dream-consciousness in our feelings. We only imagine that we have a clear consciousness of our feelings; in reality we have no clearer consciousness of our feelings than of our dreams. When, on awaking from sleep, we recollect ourselves and form wide-awake ideas about our dreams, we do not by any means catch at the actual dream. The dream is far richer in content than what we afterwards conceive of it. Likewise is the world of feeling infinitely richer than the ideas, the mental pictures of it, which we make present to our conscious mind.

And when we come to our willing — that is completely immersed in sleep. Willing is bound to the limbs — and metabolic and motor organism. All that we really know of our willing are the thoughts. I form the idea: I will pick up this watch.

Think of it quite sincerely, and you will have to admit: You form the idea: “I will take hold of the watch.” Then you take hold of it. As to what takes place, starting from the idea and going right down into the muscles, until at length you have an idea once more (namely, that you are actually taking hold of the watch) following on your original idea — all this that goes on in your bodily nature between the mental picture of the intention and the mental picture of its realisation, remains utterly unconscious. So much so that you can only compare it with the unconsciousness of deep, dreamless sleep.

We do at least dream of our feelings, but of our impulses of will we have no more than we have from our sleep.

You may say: I have nothing at all from sleep. Needless to say, we are not speaking from the physical standpoint; from a physical standpoint it would of course be absurd to say that you had nothing from sleep. But in your soul too, in reality, you have a great deal from your sleep. If you never slept, you would never rise to the Ego-consciousness.

Diagram 7
Diagram 7
Click image for large view

Here it is necessary to realise the following. When you remember the experiences you have had, you go backward — as along this line (see diagram). Beginning from now, you go backward. You generally imagine that it is so — that you go farther and farther backward along the line. But it is not so at all. In reality you only go back until the last time you awakened from sleep. Before that moment you were sleeping. All that lies in this intervening part of the line (see diagram) is blotted out; then from the last time you fell asleep until the last time but one when you awakened, memory follows once more. So it goes on. In reality, as you look back along the line, you must always interpose the periods of unconsciousness. For a whole third of our life, we must insert unconsciousness. We do not observe this fact. But it is just as though you had a white surface, with a black hole in the centre of it.

Diagram 8
Diagram 8
Click image for large view

You see the black hole, in spite of the fact that none of the forces are there. Likewise it is when you remember. Although no reminiscences of life are there (for the intervals of sleep), nevertheless you see the black nothingness — that is, the nights you have slept through. Your consciousness impinges on them every time, and that is what really makes you call yourself: “I.” If it went on and on, and nowhere impinged on anything, you would never rise to a consciousness of “I.”

Thus we can certainly say that we have something from sleep. And just as we have something from our sleep in the ordinary sense of earthly life, so do we have something from that sleep which always prevails in our willing. We pass asleep through that which is really going on in us in every act of will. And just as we get our Ego-consciousness from the black void in this case (referring to the diagram), so likewise our Ego is inherent in that which is sleeping in us during the act of will. It is, however, that Ego which goes throughout our former lives on earth.

That is where karma holds sway, my dear friends. Karma holds sway in our willing. Therein are working and wielding all the impulses from our preceding life on earth; only they too, even in waking life, are veiled in sleep.

Once more, therefore: when we conceive man as he stands before us in earthly life, he appears to us in a threefold form: the head-organisation, the rhythmic and the motor-organisation. The three are diagrammatically divided here, but we will always bear in mind that each of the members belongs in its turn to the whole man. Moreover, Thought is bound to the head-organisation, Feeling to the rhythmic organisation, Willing to the motor-organisation. Wide awake consciousness is the condition in which our ideas, our mental presentations, are. Dreaming is the condition in which cur feelings are. Deep sleep (even in waking life) is the condition in which our volition is. We are asleep in our impulses of will, even in waking life.

Now we must learn to distinguish two things about the head, that is, about our life of ideation. We must divide the head, so to speak, more intimately. We shall thus be led to distinguish between what we have as momentary ideas or mental pictures in our intercourse with the world and what we have as memory. As you go about in the world, you are constantly forming ideas according to the impressions you receive. But it also remains possible for you subsequently to draw the ideas forth again out of your memory. Moreover, the ideas you form in your intercourse with the world in the given moment are not inherently different from the ideas that are kindled in you when memory comes into play. The difference is that in the one case they come from outside, and in the other from within.

It is indeed a naïve conception to imagine that memory works in this way: that I now confront a thing or event, and form an idea or mental presentation of it; that the idea goes, down into me somewhere or other, as if into some cupboard or chest, and that when I afterwards remember it, I fetch it out again. Why, there are whole philosophies describing how the ideas go down beneath the threshold of consciousness, to be fished out again in the act of recollection. These theories are utterly naïve. There is of course no such chest where the ideas are lying in wait. Nor is there anywhere in us where they are moving about, or whence they might walk out again into our head, when we remember them. All these things are utterly non-existent, nor is there any explanation in their favour. The fact is rather as follows:

You need only think of this. When you want to memorise something, you generally work not merely with the activity of forming ideas. You help yourself by quite other means. I have sometimes seen people in the act of memorising; they formed ideas, they thought as little as possible. They performed outward movements of speech — pretty vehement movements, repeated again and again, like this (with the arms), “und es wallet und woget und brauset und zischt” (a line of Schiller's poem: The Diver). Many people memorise in this way, and in so doing, they think as little as possible. And to add a further stimulus, they sometimes hammer the forehead with their fist. That, too, is not unknown.

The fact is that the ideas we form as we go about the world are evanescent, like dreams. It is not the ideas which have gone down into us, but something quite different that emerges out of our memory. To give you an idea of it, I should have to draw it thus —

Diagram 9
Diagram 9
Click image for large view

Of course it is only a kind of symbolic diagram. Imagine the human being in the act of sight. He sees something. (I will not describe the process in any greater detail; we might do so, but for the moment we do not need it.) He sees something. It goes in through his eye, through the optic nerve into the organs into which the optic nerve then merges.

We have two clearly distinct members of our brain — the more outer peripheric brain, the grey matter; and beneath it, the white matter. Then the white matter merges into the sense-organs. Here is the grey matter (see the diagram); it is far less evolved than the white. The terms “grey” and “white” are, of course, only approximate. Thus, even crudely, anatomically considered it is so: The objects make an impression on us, passing through the eye and on into the processes that take place in the white matter of the brain. Our ideas or mental presentations, on the other hand, have their organ in the grey matter, which, incidentally, has quite a different cell-structure, and there the ideas are lighting up and vanishing like dreams. There the ideas are flickering up, because beneath this region (compare the diagram once more) the process of the impressions is taking place.

If it depended on the ideas going down into you somewhere, and you then had to fetch them out again in memory, you would remember nothing at all. You would have no memory. It is really like this: In the present moment, let us say, I see something. The impression of it (whatever it may be) goes into me, mediated by the white matter of the brain. The grey matter works in its turn, dreaming of the impressions, making pictures of them. The mental pictures come and go; they are quite evanescent. As to what really remains, we do not conceive it at all in this moment, but it goes down into our organisation, and when we remember, we look within; down there the impression remains permanent.

Thus when you see something blue, an impression goes into you from the blue (below, in the diagram), while here (above, in the diagram) you yourself form an idea, a mental presentation of the blue. The idea is transient. Then, after three days perhaps, you observe in your brain the impression that has remained. Once more you form the idea of blue. This time, however, you do so as you look inward. The first time, when you saw the blue from without, you were stimulated from outside by a blue object. The second time — namely now, when you remember it — you are stimulated from within, because in effect the blueness has reproduced itself within you. In both cases it is the same process, namely a process of perception. Memory too is perception. In effect, our day-waking consciousness consists in ideation, in the forming of ideas; but there — beneath the ideation — certain processes are going on. They too, rise into our consciousness by an act of ideation, namely by our forming of ideas in the act of memory. Underneath this activity of ideation is the perceiving, the pure process of perception. And, underneath this in turn, is Feeling.

Thus we can distinguish more intimately, in our head-organisation or thought-organisation — the perceiving and the activity of ideation. What we have perceived, we can then remember. But it actually remains very largely unconscious; it is only in memory that it rises into consciousness. What really takes place in man is no longer experienced in consciousness by man himself. When he perceives, he experiences in consciousness the idea, the mental presentation of it. The real effect of the perception goes into him. Out of this real effect, he is then able to awaken the memory. But at this place the unconscious already begins.

In reality it is only here, in this region (see the diagram) — where, in our waking-day consciousness we form ideas — it is only here that we ourselves are, as Man. Only here do we really have ourselves as Man. Where we do not reach down with our consciousness (for we do not even reach to the causes of our memories), where we do not reach down, there we do not have ourselves as Man, but are incorporated in the world.

It is just as it is in the physical life — you breathe in; the air you now have in yourself was outside you a short while ago, it was the-air-of-the-world; now it is your air. After a short time you give it back again to the world. You are one with the world. The air is now outside you, now within you. You would not be Man at all, if you were not so united with the world as to have not only that which is within your skin, but that with which you are connected in the whole surrounding atmosphere. And as you are thus connected on the physical side, so it is as to your spiritual part: the moment you get down into the next subconscious region — the region out of which memory arises — you are connected with that which we call the Third Hierarchy: Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai. Just as you are connected through your breathing with the air, so are you connected with the Third Hierarchy through your head-organisation, namely the lower head-organisation. This, which is only covered over by the outermost lobes of the brain, belongs solely to the earth. What is immediately beneath is connected with the Third Hierarchy: Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai.

Now let us go down into the region, psychologically speaking, of feeling: corporeally speaking, of the rhythmic organisation, out of which the dreams of our Feeling life arise. There, less than ever do we have ourselves as Man. There we are connected with what constitutes the Second Hierarchy — spiritual Beings who do not incarnate in any earthly body, for they remain in the spiritual world. But they are continually sending their currents, their impulses, the forces that go out from them., into the rhythmic organisation of man. Exusiai, Dynamis, Kyriotetes — they are the Beings whom we bear within our breast.

Just as we bear our own human Ego actually only in the outermost lobes of the brain, so do we bear the Angeloi, Archangeloi, etc. immediately beneath this region; yet still within the organisation of the head. There is the scene of their activities on earth; there are the starting-points of their activity. And in our breast we carry the Second Hierarchy — Exusiai and the rest. In our breast are the starting points of their activity.

And as we now go down into our motor-organism, the organism of movement, in this the Beings of the First Hierarchy are active: Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

The transmuted food-stuffs, the food-stuffs we have eaten, circulate in our limbs. There in our limbs, they undergo a process. It is really a living process of combustion. For if we take only a single step, there arises in us a living process of combustion, a burning-up of that which is, or was, outside us. We ourselves, as Man, are connected with this combustion process. As physical human beings with our limbs and metabolic-organism, we are connected with the lowest. And yet it is precisely through the limb-organisation that we are connected with the highest. With the First Hierarchy — Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones — we are connected by virtue of what imbues us there with spirit.

Now the great question arises (it may sound trivial when I clothe it in earthly words, but I can do no other), the question arises: What are they doing — these Beings of the three successive Hierarchies, who are in us — what are they doing?

The answer is: the Third Hierarchy, Angeloi, Archangeloi, etc. — concern themselves with that which has its physical organisation in the human head, i.e. with our thinking. If they were not concerning themselves with our thinking — with that which is going on in our head — we should have no memory in ordinary earthly life. For it is the Beings of this Hierarchy who preserve in us the impulses which we receive with our perceptions. They are underlying the activity which reveals itself in our memory; they lead us through our earthly life in this first sub-conscious, or unconscious, region.

Diagram 10
Diagram 10
Click image for large view

Now let us go on to the Beings of the Second Hierarchy — Exusiai, etc. They are the Beings we encounter when we have passed through the gate of death, that is, in the life between death and a new birth. There we encounter the souls of the departed, who lived with us on earth; but we encounter, above all, the spiritual Beings of this Second Hierarchy — the Third Hierarchy together with them, it is true, but the Second Hierarchy are the most important there. With them we work in our time between death and a new birth — we work upon all that we felt in our earthly life, all that we brought about in our organisation. Thus, in union with these Beings of the Second Hierarchy, we elaborate our coming earthly life.

When we stand here on the earth, we have the feeling that the spiritual Beings of the Divine World are above us. When we are in yonder sphere, between death and a new birth, we have the opposite idea — the Angeloi, Archangeloi, etc., who guide us through our earthly life, as above described, live, after our death, on the same level with us — so to speak. And immediately beneath us are the Beings of the Second Hierarchy. With them we work out the forming of our inner karma. All that I told you yesterday of the karma of health and illness — we work it out with these Beings, the Beings of the Second Hierarchy. And when, in that time between death and new birth, we look still further down — as it were, looking through the Beings of the Second Hierarchy — then we discover, far below, the Beings of the First Hierarchy, Cherubim, Seraphim, and Thrones.

As earthly man, we look for the highest Gods above us. As man between death and a new birth, we look for the highest Divinity (attainable for us human beings, to begin with) in the farthest depths beneath us. We, all the time, are working with the Beings of the Second Hierarchy, elaborating our inner karma between death and a new birth: that inner karma which afterwards comes forth, imaged in the health or illness of our next life on earth. While we ourselves are engaged in this work — working alone, and with other human beings, upon the bodies that will come forth in our next life on earth — the Beings of the First Hierarchy are active far below us, and in a strange way. That one beholds. For with respect to their activity — a portion, a small portion of their activity — they are actually involved in a Necessity. They, as the creators of the earthly realm, are obliged to follow and reproduce what the human being has fashioned and done during his life on earth. They are obliged to reproduce it — though in a peculiar way.

Think of a man in his earthly life: in his Willing (which belongs to the First Hierarchy), he accomplishes certain deeds. The deeds are good or evil, wise or foolish. The Beings of the First Hierarchy — Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones — are under necessity to form and mould the counter-images thereto in their own sphere.

You see, my dear friends, we live together. Whether the things we do with one another are good or evil; for all that is good, for all that is evil, the Beings of the First Hierarchy must shape the corresponding counterparts. Among the First Hierarchy, all things are judged; yet not only judged, but shaped and fashioned. Thus between death and a new birth, while we ourselves are working at our inner karma with the Second Hierarchy and with other departed souls, meanwhile we behold what Seraphim, and Cherubim and Thrones have experienced through our deeds on earth.

Yes, here upon earth the blue vault of the sky arches over us, with its cloud-forms and sunshine and so forth; and in the night, the star-lit sky. Between death and a new birth the living activity of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones extends like a vault beneath us. And we gaze down upon them — Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones — even as we here look up to the clouds, and the blue, and the star-strewn sky. Beneath us, there, we see the Heavens, formed of the activity of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. But what kind of activity? We behold among the Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, the activity which results as the just and compensating activity from our own deeds on earth — our own, and the deeds through which we lived with other men. The Gods themselves are obliged to carry out the compensating action, and we behold them as our Heavens, only the Heavens are there beneath us. In the deeds of the Gods we see and recognise the consequences of our earthly deeds — whether this deed or that be good or evil, wise or foolish. And, as we thus look downward, between death and a new birth, we relate ourselves to the mirrored image of our deeds, just as in earthly life we relate ourselves to the vault of heaven above us.

As to our own inner karma, we ourselves bring it into our inner organism. We bring it with us on to the earth as our faculties and talents, our genius and our stupidity. Not so what the Gods are fashioning there beneath us; what they have to experience in consequence of our earthly lives comes to us in our next life on earth as the facts of Destiny which meet us from without. We may truly say, the very thing we pass through asleep carries us in our earthly life into our Fate. But in this is living what the corresponding Gods, those of the First Hierarchy, had to experience in their domain as the consequences of our deeds during the time between our death and a new birth.

One always feels a need to express these things in pictures. Suppose we are standing somewhere or other in the physical world. The sky is overcast; we see the clouded sky. Soon afterwards, fine rain begins to trickle down; the rain is falling. What hitherto was hovering above us, we see it now in the wet fields and the trees, sprinkled with fine rain. So it is when we look back with the eye of the Initiate, from human life on earth into the time we underwent, before we came down to this earth, that is to say, the time we underwent between our last death and our last birth. For there we see the forming of the deeds of the Gods in consequence of our own deeds in our last life on earth. And then we see it, spiritually raining down, so to become our destiny.

Do I meet a human being whose significance for me in this life enters essentially into my destiny? That which takes place in our meeting was lived in advance by the Gods as a result of what he and I had in common in a former earthly life. Am I transplanted during my earthly life into a district — or a vocation — which is important for me? All that approaches me there as outer destiny is the image of what was experienced by Gods — Gods of the First Hierarchy — in consequence of my former life on earth, during the time when I was myself between death and a new birth.

One who thinks abstractly will think: “There are the former lives on earth; the deeds of the former lives work across into the present. Then they were the causes, now they are the effects.” But you cannot think far along these lines; you have little more than words when you enunciate this proposition. But behind what you thus describe as the Law of Karma, are deeds and experiences of the Gods; and only behind all that is the other ...

When we human beings confront our destiny only by way of feeling, then we look up, according to our faith, to the Divine Beings or to some Providence on which we feel the course of our earthly life depends. But the Gods — namely those Gods whom we know as belonging to the First Hierarchy, Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones — have, as it were, an inverse religious faith. They feel their Necessity among men on earth — men, whose creators they are. The aberrations human beings suffer, and the progressions they enjoy, must be balanced and compensated by the Gods. Whatever the Gods prepare for us as our destiny in a subsequent life, they have lived it before us.

These truths must be found again through Anthroposophy. Out of a consciousness not fully developed, they were perceived by mankind in a former, instinctive clairvoyance. The Ancient Wisdom did indeed contain such truths. Afterwards only a dim feeling remained of them. In many things that meet us in the spiritual history of mankind, the dim feeling of these things is still in evidence. You need but remember the verse by Angelus Silesius which you will also find quoted in my writings. To a narrow religious creed, it sounds impertinent:

I know that without me God can no moment live;
If I come to naught, He needs must give up the Ghost.
[From The Cherubinic Wanderer. Book I. 8.]

Angelus Silesius went over to Roman Catholicism; it was as a Catholic that he wrote such verses. He was still aware that the Gods are dependent on the world, even as the world is dependent on them. He knew that the dependence is mutual; and that the Gods must direct their life according to the life of men. But the Divine Life works creatively, and works itself out in turn in the destinies of men. Angelus Silesius, dimly feeling the truth, though he knew it not in its exactitude, exclaimed:

I know that without me God can no moment live;
If I come to naught, He needs must give up the Ghost.

The Universe and the Divine depend on one another, and work into one another. Today we have recognised this living interdependence in the example of human destiny or karma.

posted January 21, 2011 07:20 PM            

VII

In the last lecture I spoke of how the forces of karma take shape, and today I want to lay the foundations for acquiring an understanding of karma through studying examples of individual destinies. Such destinies can only be illustrations, but if we take our start from particular examples we shall begin to perceive how karma works in human life. It works, of course, in as many different ways as there are human beings on the earth, for the configuration of karma is entirely individual. And so whenever we turn our attention to a particular case, it must be regarded merely as an example.

Today I shall bring forward examples I have myself investigated and where the course of karma has become clear to me. It is of course a hazardous undertaking to speak of individual karmic connections, no matter how remote the examples may be, for in referring to karma it has become customary to use expressions of everyday language such as: “This is caused by so-and-so; this or that blow of destiny must be due to such and such a cause, how the man came to deserve it” ... and so forth. But karma is by no means as simple as that, and a great deal of utterly trivial talk goes on, particularly on this subject!

Today we will consider certain examples of the working of karma, remote though they may be from our immediate life. We will embark upon the hazardous undertaking of speaking about the karma of individuals — as far as my investigations make this possible. I am therefore giving you examples which are to be taken as such.

I want to speak, first, of a well-known aestheticist and philosopher, Friedrich Theodor Vischer. I have often alluded to him in lectures, but today I will bring into relief certain characteristic features of his life and personality which can provide the basis for a study of his karma.

Friedrich Theodor Vischer received his education at the time when German idealistic philosophy — particularly Hegelian thought — was in its heyday. Friedrich Theodor Vischer, a young man pursuing his studies among people whose minds were steeped in the Hegelian mode of thinking, adopted it himself. The absorption in transcendental thoughts that is characteristic of Hegel strongly appealed to Vischer. It was clear to him that, as Hegel asserts, thought is the Divine Essence of the universe, and that when we, as human beings, think, when we live in thoughts, we are living in the Divine Substance.

Friedrich Theodor Vischer was steeped in Hegelian philosophy. But he was a person who displayed in a very marked way the traits and characteristics of the folk from which he sprang. He had all the traits of a typical Swabian: he was obstinate, dogmatic, disputatious, exceedingly independent; his manner was abrupt, off-hand. He also had very striking personal peculiarities. To take his outward appearance first, he had beautiful blue eyes and a reddish-brown beard, which in spite of its scrubbiness he wore with a certain aesthetic enthusiasm! I say “aesthetic enthusiasm” because in his writings he minces no words about men who wear no beards, calling them “beardless monkey-faces”! As you see, his language is anything but restrained; all his remarks come out with the abrupt, off-handed assurance of a typical Swabian.

He was a man of medium height, not stout, in fact rather slight in build, but he walked the streets holding his arms as if he were forcing a way for himself with his elbows — which is an exact picture of what he did in a spiritual sense! So much for his outward appearance.

He had a passionately independent nature and would say just what he pleased, without any restraint whatever. It happened one day that he had been slandered by “friends” in the Stuttgart Council — such things are not unusual among friends! — and he was severely reprimanded by the Council. It chanced that on the very same day a little son was born to him — the Robert Vischer who also made a name for himself as an aestheticist — and the father announced the event in the lecture-hall with the words: “Gentlemen, today I have been given a big Wischer (wigging) and a little Vischer!”

It was characteristic of him to speak very radically about things as he found them. For example, he wrote an amusing article entitled: “On the Foot Pest in Trains.” It enraged him to see people sitting in a railway carriage with their feet up on the opposite seat. He simply could not endure it and his article on the subject is really enchanting.

What he wrote in his book on fashions, [Mode und Zynismus. Stuttgart, 1878.] about the ill-breeding and lack of adequate clothing at dances and other entertainments, had better not be mentioned here. To put it briefly, he was a very original and forceful personality!

A friend of mine once paid him a visit, knocking politely at the door. I do not know whether it is a custom in Swabia, but Vischer did not say “Come in,” or what is usually said on such occasions. He yelled out “Glei” — meaning that he would be ready immediately.

While still comparatively young, Vischer embarked on a weighty task, namely that of writing a work on aesthetics according to the principles of Hegelian philosophy. These five volumes are a truly remarkable achievement. You will find in them the strict division into paragraphs which was habitual with Hegel, and the characteristic definitions. If I were to read a passage to you, you would all yawn, for it is written in the anything but popular style of Hegel, all in abrupt definitions, such as: The Beautiful is the appearance of the Idea in material form. The Sublime is the appearance of the Idea in material form, but the Idea predominates over the material form. The Comic is the appearance of the Idea in material form, but the material form predominates over the Idea ... and so on and so forth. These statements are certainly not without interest, but the book goes a great deal further. As well as the abrupt definitions, you have what is called the “small print,” and most people when they are reading the book leave out the large print and read only the small — which as a matter of fact contains some of the very cleverest writing on aesthetics that is anywhere to be found.

There is no pedantry, no Hegelian dialectic here; it is Vischer, the true Swabian, with all his meticulousness and at the same time his fine and delicate feeling for the beautiful, the great and the sublime. Here, too, you find Nature and her processes described in a way that defies comparison, with an exemplary freedom of style. Vischer worked at the book for many years, bringing it to its end with unfaltering consistency.

At the time when this work appeared,. Hegelianism was still in vogue and appreciation was widespread. Needless to say, there were opponents, too, but on the whole the book was widely admired. In course of time, however, a vigorous opponent appeared on the scenes, a ruthless critic who pulled the book to pieces until not a shred of good was left; everything was criticised in a really masterly style. And this critic was none other than Friedrich Theodor Vischer himself in his later years! There is an extraordinary charm about this critique of himself in his Kritische Gangen (Paths of Criticism).

As aestheticist, philosopher and man of letters, Vischer published a wealth of material in Kritische Gangen, and subsequently in the fine collection of essays entitled Altes und Neues (Old and New). While still a student he wrote lyrics in, an ironic vein. In spite of the great admiration I have always had for Vischer, I could never help being of opinion that the productions of his student days were not even student-like, but sheer philistinism. And this trait came out in him again in his seventies, when he wrote a collection of poems under the pseudonym “Schartenmayer.” Here there is philistinism par excellence!

He was an out-and-out philistine in regard to Goethe's Faust. Part One ... well, he admitted there was something good in it, but as for Part Two — he considered it a product of senility, so many fragments patched together. He maintained that it ought to have been quite different, and not only did he write his Faust, der Tragodie dritter Ted, in which he satirises Goethe's Part Two, but he actually drew up a plan of just how Goethe ought to have written Faust. That is philistinism and no mistake! It is almost on a par with what du Bois-Reymond, the eminent scientist, said in his lecture “Goethe, nothing but Goethe.” He said: “Faust is a failure. It would have been all right if Faust had not engaged in such tomfoolery as the invocation of spirits or the calling up of the Earth-Spirit, but had simply and straightforwardly invented an electrical machine or an air pump and restored to Gretchen her good name ... ” And there is exactly the same kind of philistinism in what Vischer says about Faust.

Perhaps it would not be put like this in Wurttemburg, but in my homeland in Austria we should say that he gave Goethe's Faust a good “Swabian thrashing”! Such expressions differ slightly in meaning, of course, according to the districts where they are used.

It is these traits that are significant in Vischer. They really make up his personality. One might also, of course, give details of his life, but I do not propose to do that. My aim has been to give you a picture of his personality and with this as a foundation we can proceed to a study of his karma. Today I wanted simply to give you the material for this study.

A second personality of whose karma I want to speak, is Franz Schubert, the composer. As I said, it is a daring venture to give particular examples in this way, but it is right that they should be given and today I shall lay the foundations.

Here too, I shall select the features that will be needed when we come to speak of Schubert's karma. Practically all his life he was poor. Some time after his death, however, many persons claiming to have been not only his acquaintances but his “friends” were to be found in Vienna! A whole crowd of people, according to themselves, had wanted to lend him money, spoke of him affectionately as “little Franz” and the like. But during his lifetime it had been a very different story!

Schubert had, however, found one real friend. This friend, Baron von Spaun, was an extraordinarily nobleminded man. He had cared for Schubert with great tenderness from the latter's earliest youth, when they were schoolfellows, and he continued to do so in later years. In regard to karma it seems to me particularly significant — as we shall find when we come to consider the working of karma — that Spaun was in a profession quite alien to his character. He was a highly cultured man, a lover of art in every form, and a close friend not only of Schubert but also of Moritz von Schwind. He was deeply sensitive to everything in the way of art. Many strange things happen in Austria — as you know, Grillparzer was a clerk in the fiscal service — and Spaun too, who had not the slightest taste for it, spent his whole life in Treasury offices. He was an official engaged in administering finance, dealing with figures all the time. When he reached a certain age he was appointed Director of Lotteries! He had charge of lotteries in Austria — a task that was most distasteful to him. But now just think what it is that a Director of Lotteries has to control. He has, so to speak, to deal at a high level with the passions, the hopes, the blighted expectations, the disappointments, the dreams and superstitions of countless human beings. Just think of what has to be taken into account by a Director of Lotteries — a Chief Director at that. True, you may go into his office and come out again without noticing anything very striking. But the reality is there nevertheless, and those who take the world and its affairs in earnest must certainly reckon with such things.

This man, who had no part whatever in the superstitions, the disappointments, the longings, the hopes, with which he had to deal — this man was the intimate friend of Schubert, deeply and intensely concerned for his material as well as his spiritual well-being. One can often be astounded, outwardly speaking, at what is possible in the world! There is a biography of Schubert in which it is said that he looked rather like a negro. There is not a grain of truth in it. He actually had a pleasing, attractive face. What is true, however, is that he was poor. More often than not, even his supper, which he was in the habit of taking in Spaun's company, was paid for with infinite tact by the latter. Schubert had not enough money even to hire a piano for his own use. In outward demeanour — Spaun gives a very faithful picture here — Schubert was grave and reserved, almost phlegmatic. But an inner, volcanic fire could at times burst from him in a most surprising way.

A very interesting fact is that the most beautiful motifs in Schubert's music were generally written down in the early morning; as soon as he had wakened from sleep he would sit down and commit his most beautiful motifs to paper. At such times Spaun was often with him, for as is customary among the intellectuals of Vienna, both Schubert and Spaun liked a good drink of an evening, and the hour was apt to get so late that Schubert, who lived some distance away, could not be allowed to go home but would spend the night on some makeshift bed at his friend's house. On such occasions Spaun was often an actual witness of how Schubert, on rising in the morning, would write down his beautiful motifs, as though they came straight out of sleep.

The rather calm and peaceful exterior did not betray the presence of the volcanic fire lying hidden in the depths of the soul. But it was there, and it is precisely this aspect of Schubert's personality that I must describe to you as a basis for the study of his karma.

Let me tell you what happened on one occasion. Schubert had been to the Opera. He heard Gluck's Iphigenia and was enraptured by it. He expressed his enthusiasm to his friend Spaun during and after the performance in impassioned words, but at the same time with restraint. His emotions were delicate and tender, not violent. (I am selecting the particular traits we shall need for our study.) The moment Schubert heard Gluck's Iphigenia, he recognised it as a masterpiece of musical art. He was enchanted with the singer Milder; and Vogl's singing so enraptured him that he said his one wish was to be introduced to him in order that he might pay homage at his feet. When the performance was over, Schubert and Spaun went to the so-called Bargerstubi (Civic Club Room) in Vienna. I think they were accompanied by a third person whose name I have not in mind at the moment. They sat there quietly, although every now and again they spoke enthusiastically about their experience at the Opera. Sitting with others at a neighbouring table was a University professor well known in this circle. As he listened to the expressions of enthusiasm his face began to flush and became redder and redder. Then he began to mutter to himself, and when the muttering had gone on for a time without being commented on by the others, he fell into a rage and shouted across the table: “Iphigenia! — it isn't real music at all; it's trash. As for Milder, she hasn't an idea of how to sing, let alone bring off runs or trills! And Vogl — why he lumbers about the stage like an elephant!”

And now Schubert was simply not to be restrained! At any minute there was danger of a serious hand-to-hand scuffle. Schubert, who at other times was calm and composed, let loose his volcanic nature in full force and it was as much as the others could do to quiet him.

It is important for the life we are studying that here we have a man whose closest friend is a Treasury official, actually a Director of Lotteries, and that the two are led together by karma. Schubert's poverty is important in connection with his karma, because in these circumstances there was little opportunity for his anger to be roused in this way. Poverty restricted his social intercourse, and it was by no means often that he could have such a neighbour at table, or give vent to his volcanic nature.

If we can picture what was really happening on that occasion, and if we remember the characteristics of the people from whom Schubert sprang, we can ask ourselves the following question. (Negative supposition is of course meaningless in the long run, but it does sometimes help to make things clear.) We can ask ourselves: If the conditions had been different (of course they couldn't have been, only, as I say, the question can make for clarification) — if the conditions had been different, if Schubert had had no opportunity of giving expression to the musical talent within him, if he had not found a devoted friend in Spaun, might he not have become a mere brawler in some lower station in life? What expressed itself like a volcano that evening in the club room, was it not a fundamental trait in Schubert's character? Human life defies explanation until we can answer the question: How does the metamorphosis come about whereby in a certain life a man does not, so to say, live out his pugnacity but becomes an exquisite musician, the pugnacity being transformed into subtle and delicate musical phantasy?

It sounds paradoxical and grotesque, but for all that it is a question which, if we consider life in its wider range, must needs be asked, for it is only when we study such things that the deeper problems of karma really come into view.

The third personality of whom I want to speak is Eugen Dühring, a man much hated, but also — by a small circle — greatly loved. My investigations into karma have led me to occupy myself with this individual, too, and as before I will give you, first of all, the biographical material.

Eugen Dühring was a man of extraordinary gifts. In his youth he studied a whole number of subjects, particularly from the aspect of mathematics, including branches of knowledge such as political economy, philosophy, mechanics, physics and so on.

He gained his doctorate with an interesting treatise, and then in a book, long since out of print, followed up the same theme with great clarity and forcefulness. I will tell you a little about it. The subject is almost as difficult as the Theory of Relativity, but, after all, people have been talking about the Theory of Relativity for a long time now and, without understanding a single word, have considered, and still do consider it, quite wonderful. Difficult as the subject is, I want to tell you, in a way that will perhaps be comprehensible, something about the thoughts contained in this earliest work of Dühring.

The theme is as follows. — People generally picture to themselves: Out there is space, and it is infinite. Space is filled with matter. Matter is composed of minute particles, infinite in number. An infinite number of tiny particles have conglomerated into a ball in universal space, have in some way crystallised together, and the like. Then there is time, infinite time. The world has never had a beginning; neither can one say that it will have an end.

These vague, indefinite concepts of infinity were repellent to the young Dühring and he spoke with great perspicacity when he said that all this talk about infinity is devoid of real meaning, that even if one has to speak of myriads and myriads of world-atoms, or world-molecules, there must nevertheless be a definite, calculable number. However vast universal space is conceived to be, its magnitude must be capable of computation; so too, the stretch of universal time. Dühring expounded this theme with great clarity.

There is something psychological behind this. Dühring's one aim was clarity of thought, and there is no clear thinking at all in these notions of infinity. He went on to apply his argument in other domains, for example to the so-called “negative quantities.” Positive quantities (e.g. when something is possessed) are distinguished from negative quantities by writing a minus sign before the latter. Thus here you have 0 (zero), in one direction plus 1, and in the other direction minus 1, and so on.

Dühring maintains that all this talk about minus quantities is absolute nonsense. What does a “negative quantity,” a “minus number” mean? He says: If I have 5 and take away 1, then I have 4; if I have 5 and take away 2, then I have 3; if I have 5 and take away 4, then I have 1; and if I have 5 and take away 5, then I have 0. The advocates of negative quantities say: If I have 5 and take away 6, then I have minus 1; if I have 5 and take away 7, then I have minus 2.

Dühring maintains that there is no clarity of thinking here. What does “minus 1” mean? It means: I am supposed to take 6 from 5; but then I have I too little. What does “minus 2” mean? I am supposed to take 7 from 5; but then I have 2 too little. What does “minus 3” mean? I am supposed to take 8 from 5; but then I have 3 too little. There is no difference between the negative numbers, as numbers, and the positive numbers. The negative numbers mean only that when I have to subtract, I have too little by a particular amount. And Dühring went on to apply the same principle to mathematical concepts of many kinds.

I know how deeply I was impressed by this as a young man, for Dühring brought real clarity of thought to bear upon these things.

He displayed the same astute discernment in the fields of national economy and the history of philosophy, and became a lecturer at the University of Berlin. His audiences were very large and he lectured on a variety of subjects: national economy, philosophy, mathematics.

It so happened that a prize was offered by the Academy of Science at Göttingen for the best book on the history of mechanics. It is usual in such competitions for the essays to be sent in anonymously. The competitor chooses a motto, his name is contained inside a closed envelope with the motto written outside, so that the adjudicators are unaware of the author's identity.

The Göttingen Academy of Science awarded the prize to Eugen Dühring's History of Mechanics and wrote him a most appreciative letter. Therefore Dühring was not only recognised by his own circle of listeners as an excellent lecturer, but now gained the recognition of a most eminently learned body.

Along with all the talents which will be evident to you from what I have been saying, this same Dühring had a really malicious tongue — one cannot call it anything else. There was something of the malicious critic about him in regard to everything in the world. As time went on he exercised less and less restraint in this respect; and when such an eminently learned body as the Göttingen Academy of Science awarded him the prize, it acted like a sting upon him. It was quite in the natural course of things, but nevertheless it stung. And then we see two qualities beginning to be combined in him: an intensely strong sense of justice — which he undoubtedly possessed — and on the other hand an extraordinary propensity for abuse.

Just at the time when he was stung into abuse and sarcasm, Dühring had the misfortune to lose his sight. In spite of total blindness, however, he continued to lecture in Berlin. He went on with his work as an author, and was always able, up to a point, of course, to look after his affairs himself. About this time a truly tragic destiny in the academic world during the 19th century came to his knowledge — the destiny of Julius Robert Mayer, who was actually the discoverer of the heat-equivalent in mechanics and who, as can be stated with all certainty, had been shut up in an asylum through no fault of his own, put into a strait-jacket and treated shamefully by his family, his colleagues and his “friends.” It was at this time that Dühring wrote his book, Julius Robert Mayer, the Galileo of the 19th Century. And it was in truth a kind of Galileo-destiny that befell Julius Robert Mayer.

Dühring wrote with an extraordinarily good knowledge of the facts and with a really penetrating sense of justice, but he lashed out as with a rail in regard to the injuries that had been inflicted. His tongue simply ran away with him — as, for example, when he heard and, read about the erection of the well-known statue of Mayer at Heilbronn, and of the unveiling ceremony. “This puppet standing in the market square at Heilbronn is a final insult offered to the Galileo of the 19th century. The great man sits there with his legs crossed. But to portray him truly, in the frame of mind in which he would most probably be, he would have to be looking at the orator and at all the good friends below who erected this memorial, not sitting with his legs crossed but beating his breast in horror.”

Having suffered much at the hands of newspapers, Dühring also became a violent anti-Semite. Here too he was ruthlessly consistent. For example, he wrote the pamphlet entitled Die Ueberschätzung Lessings und dessen Anwaltschaft für die Juden, in which murderous abuse is hurled at Lessing. It is this trait in Dühring that is responsible for his particular way of expounding literature.

If you want one day to give yourselves the treat of reading something about German literature that you will find nowhere else, that is totally different from other treatises on the subject, then take Dühring's two volumes entitled Literaturgrössen (Great Men of Letters). There you will find his strictly mathematical way of thinking and his astute perspicacity, applied to literature. In order, presumably, to make it plain how his way of thinking differs from that of others, he sees fit to rechristen the great figures of the German spiritual life. He speaks, in one chapter, of “Kothe” and “Schillerer,” meaning Goethe and Schiller. Duhring writes “Kothe” and “Schillerer” and adheres to this throughout. The nomenclature he invents is often grotesque. “Intellectuaille” (connected with “canaille”) is how he always refers to people we call intellectualistic. The “Intellectuaille” — the Intellectuals. He uses similar expressions all the time. But let me assure you of this: a great deal in Dühring's writings is extraordinarily interesting.

I once had the following experience. When I was still on friendly terms with Frau Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche and was working on unpublished writings of Nietzsche, there came into my hands the material dealing with the “Eternal Recurrence”, now long since printed. [Thus Spake Zarathustra, Part III.] Nietzsche's manuscripts are not very easy reading, but I came across a passage where I said to myself: This “Eternal Recurrence” has some definite source. And so I went over from the Archives, where Nietzsche's note-books were kept, to the Library, and looked up Dühring's Wirklichkeitsphilosophie (Philosophy of Reality), where, as I thought, I was quickly able to find this idea of “Eternal Recurrence”. I took the book from the shelves of the Library and found the passage — I knew it and found it at once — where Dühring argues that it is impossible for anyone with genuine knowledge of the material facts of the world to speak of a return of things, a return of constellations which once were there.

Dühring tried to disprove any such possibility. At the side of the passage in question was a word frequently written by Nietzsche in the margin of a book when he was using it to formulate a counter-idea. It was the word: “Ass”!

The familiar epithet was written in the margin of this particular page. In point of fact we can find in Dühring's writings a great deal that passed over, ingeniously, into Nietzsche's ideas. In saying this I hold nothing against Nietzsche. I am simply stating the facts as they are.

In respect of karma, the most striking thing about Dühring is that he was really able to think only mathematically. In philosophy, in political economy, in mathematics itself, he thinks mathematically, with mathematical precision and clarity. In natural science, too, he thinks with clarity but, again, in terms of mathematics. He is not a materialist, he is a mechanistic thinker. He conceives the world as mechanism. And moreover he had the courage to carry sincere convictions to their ultimate conclusions. For truth to tell, anyone who thinks as he did cannot write about Goethe and Schiller in any other way — leaving aside the abuse and taking only the essential substance of what is said.

So much for the fundamental trend of Dühring's thought. Add to this the blindness while he was still young, and the fact that he suffered no little personal injustice. He lost his post as lecturer at the University of Berlin. Well ... there were reasons! For example, in the second edition of his History of Mechanics he cast all restraint aside. The first edition had been quite tame in its treatment of the great figures in the field of mechanics, so tame that someone said he had written in a way which he thought would make it possible for a learned body to award him a prize. But in the second edition he no longer held himself in check; he let himself go and fairly filled in the gaps! Someone remarked — and Dühring often repeated it — that the Göttingen Academy had awarded a prize to the claws without recognising the lion behind the claws! But when the second edition appeared the lion had certainly come into the open!

In this second edition there were in truth some astounding passages, for example in connection with Julius Robert Mayer and his Galileo-destiny in the 19th century. On one occasion when Dühring was in a towering rage about this, he called a man he considered to be a plagiarist of Mayer — namely Hermann Hehnholtz — so much “academic scaffolding,” “wooden scaffolding.” Later on he enlarged upon this theme. He edited a periodical Der Personalist, where everything had a strongly personal colouring. Here, for example, Dühring enlarges upon the reference to Helmholtz. He no longer speaks about wooden scaffolding, but when the postmortem examination had revealed the presence of water in Helmholtz's brain, Dühring said that the empty-headedness had been quite obvious while the man was still alive and that there was no need to wait for confirmation until after his death! Refinement was certainly not one of Dühring's qualities. One cannot exactly say that he raged like a washerwoman. His way of abusing was not commonplace; neither was there real genius in it. It was something quite unique.

And now take all these factors together: the blindness, the mechanistic bent of mind, the persecution he certainly suffered — for the dismissal from the University was not altogether free from injustice, and indeed countless injustices were done to him during his life ... All these things are connections of destiny which become really interesting only when we study them in the light of karma.

I have now given you a picture of these three personalities: Friedrich Theodor Vischer, the composer Schubert, and Eugen Dühring. Having outlined the biographical material today, I will speak tomorrow of the karmic connections.

posted January 21, 2011 07:21 PM            

VIII

I said yesterday that although it is a somewhat hazardous venture to speak of individual karmic connections, I intended to do so, and that I would take as examples the personalities of whom I gave you certain biographical details. Later on we shall also be able to study the karma of less representative personalities, but I have chosen, in the first place, examples which show clearly how in the karmic course of repeated phases of existence, the evolution of mankind as a whole goes forward. In modern civilisation we speak of history as if it were one continuous stream of happenings: events of the 20th century are related to events of the 19th century, these again to events of the 18th century, and so on. That it is men themselves who carry over things from one epoch of history to another, that the men now living have themselves carried over from earlier epochs what is to be found in the world and in life at the present time — this knowledge alone brings reality to light and reveals the true, inner connections in the historical life of mankind.

If we speak merely of “cause” and “effect,” no real connection comes to light. The connecting threads running through the evolution of humanity are woven as human souls pass over from epochs in the remote past to more recent times, entering again and again into new incarnations on the earth.

These connecting threads can be perceived in all their significance when we study really representative personalities.

In the lecture yesterday I spoke, firstly, of the aestheticist Friedrich Theodor Vischer, the “Swabian Vischer” as he is called, telling you something of his character. I said that I shall choose only examples that I have actually investigated. These investigations are a matter of vision, and are pursued by means of the spiritual faculties of which I have spoken so often and about which you can read in anthroposophical literature. Accordingly the only possible way of describing these things is that of narrative, for in this domain it is only what presents itself to direct vision that can be communicated. The moment we turn from one earthly life to an earlier life in the past, all intellectual reasoning comes to a standstill. Vision alone is the criterion here. A last vestige of intellectual understanding is possible when it is a matter of relating earthly life to the last phase of existence between death and rebirth from which it has directly proceeded — that is, to the life of soul-and-spirit just before the descent to earth. Here, up to a point, an intellectual approach is possible. When, however, it is a matter of showing the relation between one earthly life and a preceding incarnation, this can be done only in the form of narrative, for vision is the sole criterion. And if in contemplating a personality like Friedrich Theodor Vischer one is able to apprehend what is eternal in him — what passes over from one earthly life to another — then such a personality as he was in an earlier incarnation will emerge into one's field of vision, provided always that the right currents can be found in the whole series of earthly lives. Investigation leads back, first of all, of course, to the pre-earthly experiences. But in speaking now I shall give second place to these pre-earthly experiences and indicate how, behind the earthly lives of the three personalities in question, their previous incarnations can be perceived.

In undertaking such investigations it is absolutely essential to get rid of all preconceived notions. If, because of some opinion or view we may hold concerning the present or the last earthly life of a human being, we imagine that it is justifiable to argue intellectually that because of what he is now, he must have been this or that in an earlier incarnation — if we make judgments of this kind, we shall go astray, or at any rate it will be very easy to go astray. To base an intellectual judgment of one incarnation upon another in this way would be just as if we were to go into a house for the first time, look out of the windows facing north, and seeing trees outside were to conclude from these trees what the trees look like from the windows facing south. What must be done is to go to the south windows, see the trees there and look at them with entirely unbiased eyes.

In the same way, all intellectual reasoning must cease when it is a matter of apprehending the Imaginations which correspond to the earlier earthly lives of the personalities in question.

In the case of Friedrich Theodor Vischer, one is led back to the last incarnation of importance — in the intervening time there may have been one or another unimportant or possibly brief earthly life, but for the moment that is of no consequence — one is led back to the incarnation in which the karma of his present life was prepared — I mean “present” in the wider sense, for as you know, Vischer died at the end of the eighties of the 19th century. The incarnation in which the karma of his latest earthly life was prepared lies somewhere about the 8th century A.D. We see him among the Moorish-Arabian peoples who crossed over at this time from Africa to Sicily and there came into conflict with the peoples who were making their way down to Sicily from the north.

The essential point is that in this previous incarnation of importance, the individuality of whom I am speaking had received a thoroughly Arabian education, Arabian in every detail, containing all the artistic, perhaps also the inartistic elements in Arabism; it was characterised, too, by the vital energy with which in those days Arabism forced its way to Europe; and, above all, it brought this individuality into close human relationship with a large number of other men belonging to the same race.

This individuality, who afterwards lived in the 19th century as Friedrich Theodor Vischer, tried in the 8th century to establish close comradeship with many men belonging to the same Arabian stock and the same Arabian culture, who had already made strong contacts with Europe, were endeavouring to establish themselves in Sicily, and had to face heavy fighting; or rather it was really more the Europeans who had to face the fighting. The individuality we are considering took a full share in these conflicts. One may say that he was a person of genius — in the sense in which genius was conceived in those times. This individuality then, is to be found in the 8th century A.D.

Then he passes through the gate of death into the life between death and rebirth, during which there is naturally intimate fellowship with the souls with whom one has been together on earth. Here, in the spiritual world, were the souls with whom this individuality had tried, as I have just told you, to establish close relationship.

Now between these human beings — in language that has been coined for earthly relationships it is difficult to find expressions for describing supersensible conditions — between the human souls with whom this individuality was now together, after he and they had passed through the gate of death, there existed through all the following centuries, right into the 19th century, a spirit-bond, a spiritual tie.

You will have understood from the lecture I gave here a week ago that what takes place on earth is lived through in advance by the Beings of the highest Hierarchies, by the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, and that a human being who is passing through the life between death and a new birth looks down to a heaven of soul and spirit as we look up to the heavens. There, in that heaven of soul and spirit, the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones live through what subsequently becomes our destiny, what is brought to realisation as our destiny when we descend again to the earth.

Now, in the conditions obtaining in the spiritual world, it was foreseen by the souls belonging to the community into which the individuality we are studying had been drawn, that through the coming centuries it would be their destiny to preserve a line of progress that would be quite uninfluenced by Christianity. What I am now saying will seem very strange, for the idea often prevails that the ordering of the world is as simple as we humans like to have it in everything we arrange ourselves. But the ordering of the world is by no means so simple. While on the one hand the mightiest of all impulses poured from the Mystery of Golgotha into the whole of Earth evolution, on the other hand it was necessary that what had been contained in earthly evolution before the Mystery of Golgotha should not be allowed at once to perish; it was necessary that what was, I will not say “anti-Christian” but “non-Christian,” should be allowed to stream on through the centuries.

And the task of sustaining this stream of culture for Europe — as it were of enabling a phase of culture not yet Christian to continue on into the Christian centuries — fell to a number of individuals who were born into Arabism in the 7th and 8th centuries A.D. Arabism was not, of course, directly Christian, but neither had it remained as backward as the old heathen religions. In a certain direction it had made steady progress through the centuries. A number of souls born into this stream were to carry forward in the spiritual world, untouched by the conditions prevailing on earth, that which the spirit of man, separated from Christianity, can know, feel and experience. They were to encounter Christianity only later, in later epochs of earthly evolution. And it is in truth an experience of shattering grandeur, full of deep significance, to see how a large community lived on in the spiritual world removed from the development of Christianity, until in the 19th century the majority of these souls came down to incarnation on earth. As you may suppose, they were very different individualities, with every variety of talent and disposition.

Friedrich Theodor Vischer was one of the first souls from this community to descend in the 19th century. [Vischer was born in 1807 and died in 1887] And he was as remote as can be from any possibility of direct experience of Christianity.

On the other hand, while still in his pre-earthly existence, he was able to receive impulses from those leading spirits who had been more or less near to Christianity but whose views of the world and conceptual life had developed in a direction not primarily and intrinsically Christian.

For a soul such as the one we now have in mind, the incarnation in the 7th/8th century was an especially good preparation — (it is of course paradoxical to speak of these things as one speaks of earthly affairs, but as I said, I intend to make the venture) — for coming together in the spiritual world with souls like that of Spinoza and others of a similar type, and with a large number of bearers of non-Christian culture, particularly, too, of Cabbalistic culture, who died during those centuries and came up into the spiritual world.

Thus prepared, this particular soul came into earthly existence in the 19th century, rather earlier than the others. All the others, for the reason that they descended somewhat later, became bearers of the natural-scientific outlook prevailing in the second half of the 19th century. For in point of fact the secret of the peculiar evolution of natural-scientific thinking in the second half of the 19th century is that well-nigh all the bearers of this stream at that time had been Arabians in their previous incarnations of importance; they were companions of the individuality who then came down as Friedrich Theodor Vischer. But Vischer came down earlier than they — it was like a premature birth in the sense of soul-and-spirit.

This, moreover, was grounded deeply in his karma, owing to his association, before his descent to earthly life, with the souls with whom Hegel was connected. With these souls, too, Friedrich Theodor Vischer had been associated in the spiritual world. This expressed itself in a strong personal bent for what Hegelianism became on earth, and protected him from growing into a purely materialistic-mechanistic conception of the world. If he had been born somewhat later, as were his companions in the spiritual life, he too, as an aestheticist, would in the natural course of things have headed straight for materialism. He was protected from this by his experiences in pre-earthly life and by his earlier descent to earth. But he could not adhere permanently to this Hegelian influence. And that is why he came to write the destructive critique of his own aesthetics — because here was something that was not quite in the line of his karma but was the result of a deflection of his karma. It would have been entirely in line with his karma to have been born at the same time as men who were steeped in the natural-scientific thinking of the second half of the 19th century, men who had been his associates in the earlier incarnation, belonging, as he did, to Arabism. His karma would have led him naturally to the same orientation of thinking.

The strange fact is that through a deflection of karma — which will be adjusted in later earthly lives — Friedrich Theodor Vischer was torn away from the straightforward line of his karma. This deflection was determined by his pre-earthly existence, not by his earthly karma. But when he reached a certain age he could no longer sustain it; he was impelled to enter right into his karma. And so he rejects his five-volume work on aesthetics and succumbs to the temptation of approaching the subject in the way of which the natural scientists would approve. In his first work on aesthetics he looks down from above, starting from principles and then passing to sense-phenomena. This he now criticises root and branch. He wants now to build from below upwards, starting from material facts and gradually rising to principles. And we witness a tremendous struggle: Vischer working at the destruction of his own aesthetics! We see how karma had been deflected and how he is hurled back into it, led to those whose companion he had been in a previous earthly life.

It is shattering in its significance to see how Vischer never really makes progress with this second work on aesthetics, how a kind of chaos seems to creep into the whole of his spiritual life. I told you yesterday about his curiously philistine attitude even towards Goethe's Faust. It is all due to the fact that he feels unsure of himself and is striving to get back to his old companions. But we must remember how strongly the unconscious works in karma. At a higher stage, of course, it becomes conscious. We must also remember how deeply certain philistine scientists hated Goethe's Faust! I told you yesterday what du Bois-Reymond said on the subject: that it would have been much more sensible of Goethe to let Faust make some real discovery rather than call up spirits, evoke the Earth-Spirit, associate with Mephistopheles or seduce young girls and not marry them afterwards. du Bois-Reymond regards all this as tomfoolery. According to him, Goethe should have presented a hero who invents an electrical machine or an air pump! Then there would have been social propriety about it all and the hero would have become Mayor of Magdeburg. Above all, there ought to have been no Gretchen-tragedy, and instead of the Prison Scene a correct and proper civic wedding! Well ... it is a point of view that is not without justification; but it was certainly not what Goethe had in mind!

Friedrich Theodor Vischer, as I said, was not completely sure of himself after his karma had been deflected in this way. But something was always pulling him back, and unconsciously, although he was a really free spirit, he was always delighted when he heard the philistines running down Goethe's Faust. He was witty, of course, and clever, and it was like snowballing going on between them. It is precisely when one observes things about a human being that are more a matter of vision, that one lights upon the Imaginations which lead behind the scenes of material existence.

Truly it is a grand spectacle! There, on the one side, stand the philistines of the first order, like du Bois-Reymond and the others, saying that Goethe ought to have represented Faust as Mayor of Magdeburg, inventing the electrical machine and the air-pump, and marrying Gretchen — verily these are philistines of the first order! Something is at work in the subconscious, because a karmic connection is in operation here. All these men had been Moors, associated with Vischer in Arabism. He was attracted by it all, he felt related to it ... and yet in another respect he was not. In the intervening time he had come into contact with other streams which had brought about a deflection of his karma. And now when the philistines of the first order threw their snowballs, he threw back his, saying that someone ought to write a thesis on a subject like the relation of Frau Christine von Goethe's chilblains to the symbolic-allegorical figures in the second part of Faust! That, you will agree, is philistinism with a touch of real wit in it, it is philistinism of the second order!

To assess these things at their true value is a matter of vision, not of merely intellectual apprehension.

In what I have told you of Vischer, my aim, to begin with, was to give you some indication — I shall return to these things again — of how the one earthly life can be understood from foregoing earthly lives.

There was something extraordinarily significant about the figure of Vischer going about in Stuttgart. I mentioned to you yesterday the wonderful blue eyes, the reddish-brown beard, the arms held out in the way I described. The Imagination of him, however, did not tally with the physical stature of the Swabian Vischer as he went about Stuttgart, for even to occult sight he did not look like a reincarnated Arabian. Again and again I left the matter alone, because one becomes — I cannot say “sceptical” in regard to one's visions, but one does become distrustful, one wants to have definite confirmation. Again and again I let the matter drop, until the riddle was solved in the following way.

In the 7th/8th century — that was also a male incarnation — this individuality regarded the men from the North, especially those he encountered in Sicily, as his ideal. In those days, as you may imagine, it was very easy to be carried away by people one greatly admired. And so he “caught” as it were, his bodily characteristics in the later incarnation from those against whom he had once waged war. Here is the solution of the riddle in regard to his physical stature.

In the last lecture we considered a second personality, namely, Franz Schubert, in connection with his friend Spaun, and with his own volcanic nature which on rare occasions, such as the one I related to you, could flare up in rage, making him into a thorough brawler; on the other hand he was extraordinarily tender and sensitive; he was like a sleep-walker, writing down his lovely melodies directly after waking in the morning. It was extremely difficult to get a picture of this personality, but the connection with Spaun gave the clue. For in the case of Schubert himself, when one looks back in the occult field and tries to find something definite, one has the feeling that he gives one the slip — if I may use this colloquialism. It is not easy to go back to his former incarnation; he eludes one all the time.

There is in truth something of a contrast here with the destiny of Schubert's works after his death. At the time of Schubert's death his compositions were very little known; only a few people had heard of him. After the lapse of some years, however, he became more and more renowned, until in the seventies and eighties of last century, fresh works of his were published every year. It was very interesting: suddenly, long after his death, Schubert turned out to be a most prolific composer. New works of his were constantly appearing.

When, however, we look back spiritually from Schubert's life in the 19th century into his earlier earthly life, the tracks disappear; it is not easy to find him.

On the other hand it is comparatively easy to find the tracks in the case of Baron von Spaun. And this line also led back to the 8th or 9th century A.D., to Spain. He was a Prince of Castile who had a name for being extraordinarily wise. He busied himself with astrology and with astronomy in the form current in those days, amending and drawing up astronomical tables. At a certain time in his life this Prince was forced to flee from his home, and he found refuge among those who were actually the bitterest enemies of the Castilian population at that time, namely the Moors.

He was obliged to stay here for a considerable time, and he formed a relationship of great tenderness and intimacy with a Moorish personality in whom the individuality of the later Franz Schubert was then incarnated. And this Prince of Castile would certainly have met with his end had it not been for the tender-spirited personality among the Moors who cared for him with every kindness. His earthly life was thus safeguarded for many years, to the great joy of them both.

What I am now relating to you is utterly remote from intellectual deduction in any shape or form. I have indicated the roundabout way which the research had to take. But along this roundabout way one is led to the fact that in Franz Schubert we have a reincarnated Moorish personality, one who had little opportunity of cultivating musical talent in his life among the Moors, but who, on the other hand, steeped himself with impassioned longing in whatever was to be found in the way of art and, I will not say of subtle “thinking” but rather of subtle “reasoning,” which in the train of Arabic culture had come from Asia, passed across Africa and finally reached Spain.

During that incarnation this personality developed the gentle, unassuming and yet vital flexibility of soul which quickened to life the poetic, dreamlike phantasy in the later incarnation as Franz Schubert. On the other hand this personality was obliged to take part in the fierce conflicts now again taking place between the Moors and the non-Moorish inhabitants of Castile, Aragon, and so forth. And this accounted for the suppressed emotion which like a pent-up stream burst forth — but only in unusual circumstances — during the Schubert-existence.

It seems to me that just as the earlier life of Friedrich Theodor Vischer can be understood only when one can view it against the background of Arabism, so the essence of Schubert's music, especially the undertone of many of his songs, can be discerned only when one perceives (I have not constructed anything, it arises from the facts themselves) that there is something spiritual in this music, something Asiatic which was shone upon for a time by the desert sun, took on greater definition in Europe, was carried through the spiritual world between death and rebirth and as something essentially human, removed from all the artificialities of society, came to birth again in a penniless schoolteacher.

The third personality of whom I spoke yesterday was Eugen Dühring. [Born 1833, died 1901.] I shall give brief indications only, for we can always return to these subjects again. Eugen Dühring was of particular interest to me because as a young man I was deeply engrossed in the study of his writings. I was fascinated by his works on physics and mathematics, especially by the treatise Neue Grundmittel und Erfindungen Zur Analysis, Algebra, Funktionsrechnung, and by his treatment of the law of corresponding boiling points. I was irritated to distraction by a book such as Sache, Leben und Feinde which is a sort of autobiography. There is something terribly self-complacent about it, self-complacent to the point of genius; not to mention traits which came out in utterly malicious pamphlets such as Die Ueberschätzung Lessings und dessen Anwaltschaft für die Juden. On the other hand I could admire Dühring's History of Mechanics as long as the lion was not in evidence, but only the lion's claws. There was, however, one unpleasant impression: for a history of mechanics, too much is said about all the gossip associated with Frau Helmholtz; abuse is hurled at Hermann Helmholtz, but the emphasis is upon the gossip that went on in the circle around Frau Helmholtz. Well ... such things do happen; gossip goes on in all kinds of circles! ... As I have said, I experienced every shade of feeling in regard to Dühring and his writings: respect, deep appreciation, criticism, irritation. And you will understand the desire to see how these traits had developed against the background of at any rate the immediately preceding earthly life.

But here again it was not easy, and at first — I have no wish to keep back these things — at first, the pictures were deceptive. Deceptive pictures arise very easily, because everything often depends upon starting from what is actually the most significant feature in some particular life of a human being in order to be led back along the right path. And in the case of Dühring it was a long time before I succeeded in finding any really significant feature.

The procedure I adopted was as follows. — I pictured to myself everything about him that appealed to me most, namely his materialistic-mechanistic conception of the world — materialistic, but yet, in a certain respect, spiritual, intellectually spiritual. I turned over in my mind how it all has to do with a finite world of space, a finite world of time; I constructed Dühring's whole conception of the world again for myself. That is not difficult. But when one has done it and looks back to earlier incarnations, numbers and numbers come into view and again there is delusion. One finds nothing essential; countless incarnations appear, but there cannot, of course, possibly have been so many: they are nothing but reflections of the present incarnation. It is just as if you were to have mirrors in a room, one here and another there: you would see numberless reflections. Then I went on to ponder with all intensity: What is Dühring's world-conception in reality, expressed in terms of clear thought? For the time being I left aside all the spiteful criticism, the abuse and other such non-essentials. I left all that aside and concentrated upon what is really grand and impressive in a world-conception which, as such, has always been antipathetic to me, but which, on account of the way in which Dühring presented it, attracted me. I pictured all this vividly to myself and then tried to get a clear grasp of the reality. From a certain age onwards he was totally blind. A blind man does not see the world, and his mental image of it is quite different from that of a man with sight. In point of fact, ordinary materialists, ordinary mechanistic thinkers, are on a different level altogether from Dühring. In comparison with them, Dühring has genius. All these men who have evolved conceptions of the world, Vogt, Büchner, Moleschott, Spiller, Wiessner and the rest — “twelve to the dozen” as the saying goes — with them it is a very different matter. The way in which Dühring builds up his world-conception is utterly different. We can perceive, too, that the urge to give a certain shape to this view of the world was in him even before he became blind, and it really tallied with the fundamental trend of his mind only when he had lost his sight and space was dark around him. For the principles according to which Dühring builds up his world-conception belong essentially to dark space. It is a fallacy to imagine that this was the work of a man with sight.

But just think of it. In Dühring this is intrinsic truth. Other men — twelve dozen of them if you like — have evolved such conceptions of the world, but with Dühring there is a difference: with Dühring it is true. The others have sight and construct pictures of the world as if they were blind; Dühring is blind and evolves his world-conception as one who is blind. And that is an astonishing thing! If one realises what it means, if one observes this man and knows: here is someone who in his soul-evolution was like a blind man, whose outlook becomes mechanistic because of his blindness — then one finds him again. Two incarnations come into consideration here. We find him associated with the movement in the Eastern Church, about the 8th or 9th century A.D., which at one period was iconoclastic, bent upon the destruction of all images, and then, later on, reinstated them. In Constantinople, particularly, this conflict developed between religion employing pictures and images, and religion in which none were permitted. And there we find the individuality who was born in a later age as Eugen Dühring battling ardently, good fighter as he was, for a cultural life devoid of pictures and images. Here, manifesting in purely physical conflict, one can see all that later comes to expression in words.

One point was extraordinarily interesting to me. A strange word occurs in the second volume of the work on Julius Robert Mayer. One actually sees the whole thing! In the earlier incarnation, when Dühring was engaged in destroying images, he had a special way of brandishing his scimitar, the hooked scimitar which already then was being tried out and developed. In the book on Mayer — these things, you know, often turn on pictorial details — I found a word that seemed to ring in unison with the scimitar. There is a chapter in this book entitled Schlichologisches (“trick-ology”). “Trickology” in German University life and so forth — getting in from the side by a cunning manoeuvre.

Dühring coins the word “Schlichologisches,” as well as the amusing expression “Intellectuaille,” connected with canaille. He invents all kinds of words. As I said, details that seem quite unimportant may be very revealing. And paradoxical as it may appear, one does not really arrive at the connecting links between different earthly lives unless one has an eye and a feeling for symptoms of this kind. Anyone who cannot discern a man's character from the way he walks, how he steps on the soles of his feet, will not easily make progress in such matters as those dealt with in the present lectures. One must be able to see the very swing of the scimitar transferred into words that were coined by this individuality in his subsequent life.

Dühring was always heaping abuse on the savants — “men of unlearning,” as he calls them. He said he would be thankful if there were no more names to remind him of ancient erudition. He wants no logic, he wants anti-logic; no Sophia, but anti-Sophia; no science, but anti-science. He says explicitly that he would like best of all to make everything “anti.” Now in the incarnation before the one when he was a rabid iconoclast, this man who so fiercely abused everything in the way of erudition had belonged to the School of the Greek Stoics, was himself a Stoic philosopher. In days of antiquity Dühring was himself one of the kind of men he now abused so vehemently; in the third incarnation back he was a professed philosopher, a Stoic philosopher at that, therefore one who in a certain sense withdrew from earthly life.

What dawned upon me first of all was that very many of Dühring's thoughts, or rather the forms in which his thoughts are expressed, are to be found in the Stoics! The matter is not, of course, as simple as all that. Indeed a whole course of lectures might be given on the forms of thought in Dühring and in the Stoics.

Thus we are led back, first, to the age of iconoclasm in the east of Europe about the 9th century A.D., when Dühring was a rabid iconoclast; then to the 3rd century B.C., the period of Stoic philosophy in ancient Greece.

And now again it is astounding: this Stoic, who makes no demands upon life, who holds back from everything that is not absolutely essential to life, renounces earthly sight in the second of the subsequent incarnations. And in this he brings truth to expression, for he illustrates in a magnificent way the blindness of the modern conception of the world.

Whatever may be one's attitude to Dühring's conception of the world, the moving tragedy of it is that Dühring personifies what the world-conception prevailing in the 19th century truly is; he expresses it through his very make-up as a man. The Stoic, who would not face the world as it is, becomes blind; the iconoclast, the destroyer of images, who will not tolerate imagery, makes the history of literature and poetry into what it became in Dühring's two volumes on Great Men of Letters, where not only are Goethe and Schiller put aside but where at most a man like Bürger plays any definite rôle. Here we have the truth of what is presented elsewhere in a false light. For men assert that the mechanistic thought, the materialism of the second half of the 19th century, sees. There lies the untruth, for materialism does not see; materialism is blind. And Dühring presents it as it truly is.

And so a representative personality, viewed in the right light, is an illustration of world-historic karma, the karma of civilisation as represented by its conception of the world in the second half of the 19th century.

In the next lecture we will speak further of these matters.

posted January 21, 2011 07:27 PM            

IX

In these lectures we are speaking of karma, of the paths of human destiny, and in the last lecture we studied certain connections which can throw light on the way in which destiny works through the course of successive earthly lives. I have decided — although needless to say it was a decision fraught with risk — to speak in detail of such karmic connections, and today we will carry our studies a little further.

You will have seen that in describing karmic connections it is necessary to mention many details in the life and character of a human being which in the ordinary way might escape attention. In the case of Dühring, I pointed out how a bodily peculiarity of one incarnation became a particular trend and attitude of soul in the next. For it is a fact that when one presses through to the spiritual worlds in search of the true being of man, the spiritual loses its abstractness and becomes full of force; on the other hand, the corporeality, all that comes to expression in the bodily nature of man, loses, one may truthfully say, its materiality; it assumes a spiritual significance and acquires a definite place in the interconnections of human life.

How does destiny actually work? Destiny arises from the whole being of man. What a man seeks in life as the result of a karmic urge, and which then comes to him in the form of destiny, depends upon the fact that forces of destiny, as they pass from life to life, influence and condition the very composition of the blood in its more delicate qualities and regulate the activity of the nerves; to their working is due also the instinctive sensitiveness of the soul to this or that influence. We shall not easily find our way into the innermost nature of karmic connections if we do not pay attention — with the eye of the soul, of course — to the particular mannerisms of an individual. Believe me, for the study of karma it is just as important to be interested in a gesture of the hand as in some great spiritual talent. It is just as important to be able to observe — from the spiritual side (astral body and ego) — how a man sits down on a chair as to observe, let us say, how he discharges his moral obligations. If a man is given to frowning, to knitting his brow, this may be just as important as whether he is virtuous or the reverse.

Much that in ordinary life seems to be quite insignificant is of very great importance when we begin to consider destiny and observe how it weaves its web from life to life; while many a thing in this or the other human being that appears to us particularly important becomes of negligible significance,

Generally speaking, it is not, as you know, very easy to pay real attention to bodily peculiarities. They are there and we must learn to observe them naturally without wounding our fellow-men — as we certainly shall do if we observe merely for observation's sake. That must never be. Everything must arise entirely of itself. When, however, we have trained our powers of attention and perception, individual peculiarities do show themselves in every human being, peculiarities which may be accounted trifling but are of paramount importance in connection with the study of karma. A really penetrating observation of human beings in respect of their karmic connections is possible only when we can discern these significant peculiarities.

Some decades ago, a personality whose inner, spiritual life as well as his outer life were intensely interesting to me, was the philosopher Eduard von Hartmann.

When I try to study von Hartmann's life in such a way as to lead to a perception of his karma, I have to picture. to myself what was of value in his life somewhat in the following way. — Eduard von Hartmann, the philosopher of the Unconscious, was really an explosive influence in philosophy, but thinkers of the 19th century — pardon me if I sound critical, I mean it not unkindly — received the effects of this explosive effect in the realm of the spirit with extraordinary apathy. Indeed, the men of the 19th century simply cannot be wakened — and I include, of course, the 20th century that has now begun; it is impossible to shake them out of their phlegmatic attitude towards anything that really stirs the world inwardly. No enthusiasm of any depth is to be found in this phlegmatic age — phlegmatic, that is. to say, in respect of spiritual life.

In another recent series of lectures I gave a picture of the encounter between the Roman world and the world of the Northern Germanic peoples at the time of the migrations, at the time when Christianity was beginning to spread to the North from the southerly regions of Greece and Rome. You have only to picture these physical forefathers of Middle and Southern Europe truly, and you will get some impression of the inner, dynamic vigour which once spurred men to action in the world. The Germanic tribes whom the Romans encountered in the early Christian centuries knew what it was to live in union with the spiritual powers of nature. The attitude of these men to the Spiritual was quite different from ours; in most of them, of course, there was still an instinctive inclination towards the Spiritual. And whereas we today speak for the most part phlegmatically, so that one word simply follows another, as though speech contained nothing real, these people poured out what they actually experienced into words and speech. For them the surging roar of the wind was as much a physical gesture, a manifestation of soul-and-spirit, as when a man moves his arm. In the surge of the wind and in the flickering of the light in the wind, they saw an expression of Wodan. And when they carried these realities over into speech, when they clothed them in language, they imbued their words with the character of what they experienced. If we were to express it in modern words, saying “Wodan weht im Winde” (Wodan weaves in the wind) — and the words were almost similar in olden times — there the weaving activity pours into the language itself. Think of how this direct participation in the life and forces of nature vibrates and pulsates in the words, how it surges into them! When a man of those times looked up to the heavens and heard the thunder roaring and rumbling out of the clouds, and behind this nature-gesture of the thunder beheld the corresponding spiritual reality of being, he brought the whole experience to expression in the words ”Donner (or Donar) dröhnt im Donner” (Thor rumbles in the thunder) — for thus we may hear, transposed into modern language, words that still echo the sound of the ancient speech. And just as these men felt the Spiritual in the workings of nature and expressed it in their speech, so did they also express their experience of the God who aided them when they went forth to battle, who lived in their very limbs and in their whole bearing and action. They held their mighty shields before them, shouting the words like a war-cry. And the fact that spirits, whether good spirits or demons, stormed into the words which rose and fell with powerful resonance — all this they expressed as they rushed forward to attack, in the words: “Ziu Zwingt Zwist.” Spoken behind the shield, spoken with all the rage and lust of battle, that really was like the breaking of a storm! You must imagine it shouted as it were against the shields by thousands of voices at once. In those early centuries, when the peoples of the South came into conflict with those pouring down from Middle Europe, it was not the outer course of the battle that had the decisive effect. No — it was rather this mighty shout accompanying the attack against the Romans! For in those early times it was this shout that filled the people coming from the South with a terrible fear. Knees trembled before the “Ziu Zwingt Zwist,” bellowed forth by a thousand throats behind the shields.

And so we are bound to say: these same men are there again in the world today, but they have become phlegmatic! Many a man alive today bellowed and roared in those days of yore but has now become utterly phlegmatic, has adopted the attitude of soul typical of the 19th and 20th centuries. But if those men were to return in the mood of soul that inspired them in the days when they yelled their war-cry, they would feel like donning a nightcap in their present incarnation, for they would say: This phlegmatic apathy out of which people simply cannot be roused, belongs properly under a nightcap; bed is the place for it, not the arena of human action!

I say this only because I want to indicate how little inclination there was among the men of von Hartmann's time to let themselves be roused by an explosive force like that contained in his Philosophy of the Unconscious. He spoke, to begin with, of how all that is conscious in man, all his conscious thinking is of less significance than that which works and weaves unconsciously in him, as it does in nature, and can never be raised into consciousness. Of clairvoyant Imagination and Intuition, Eduard von Hartmann knew nothing; he did not know that the unconscious can penetrate into the sphere of human cognition. And so he asserts that what is really essential in the world and in life remains in the unconscious. This very reasoning, however, gives him the ground for his view that the world in which we live is the worst world imaginable. He carried his pessimism even further than Schopenhauer and reached the conclusion that the evolution of culture must culminate in the destruction of the whole of earth-evolution. He would not insist, he said, that this would happen in the immediate future, because that would not give time to apply all that will be necessary for carrying the destruction so far that no human civilisation — which in any case, according to his view, is worthless — will be left. And he dreamed — you will find it in his Philosophy of the Unconscious — he dreamed of how men will ultimately invent a huge machine which they will be able to lower deeply enough into the earth to produce a terrific explosion, scattering the whole earth in fragments through universal space.

It is true that many people have been enthusiastic about this Philosophy of the Unconscious. But when they come to talk about it, one does not feel that it has taken any real hold of them. A statement like Hartmann's can, of course, be made, and there is something powerful in the mere fact of its utterance — but people quote it as though they were making a casual remark, and that is the really terrible thing.

Yes, there was actually a philosopher who spoke in this way. And this same philosopher went on to expound the subject of human morality on earth. It was his work Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins (Phenomenology of the Moral Consciousness) that interested me most of all. He also wrote a book entitled Das religiöse Bewusstsein der Menschheit (The Religious Consciousness of Mankind), and another on Aesthetics — in fact he wrote a very great deal.[With the exception of the Philosophy of the Unconscious the works of Eduard von Hartmann mentioned in this lecture have not been translated into English.] And it was all extraordinarily interesting, particularly where one could not agree with him.

In the case of such a man one may very naturally desire to know the connections of his destiny. One may try, perhaps, to make a deep study of his philosophy, to glean from his philosophical thoughts some idea of his earlier earthly lives, but all such attempts will be fruitless. Nevertheless a personality like Eduard von Hartmann interested me in the highest degree.

When one has occultism in one's very bones — if I may put it so — the impulses for looking at things in the right way arise of themselves. And here one is confronted with the following circumstances. — Eduard von Hartmann was a soldier, an officer. The Kürschner Directory, besides recording his Doctorate of Philosophy and other academic degrees, put him down until the day of his death as “First Lieutenant.” Eduard von Hartmann was an officer in the Prussian Army and is said to have been a very good one.

From a certain day onwards this fact seemed to me more significant in connection with the threads of his destiny than all the details of his philosophy. As for his philosophy — well, one is inclined to accept certain things and reject others. But there is nothing much in that; everyone who knows a little philosophy can do the same and the result will not amount to anything very striking. But now let us ask ourselves: How comes it that a Prussian officer, who was a good officer, who took very little interest in philosophy while he was in the Army but was much more concerned with sword-exercises — how comes it that such a man turns into a representative philosopher of his age?

It was due to the fact that an illness left him with an affliction of the knee from which he suffered for the rest of his life, and he was invalided out of the Army on a pension. At times he was quite unable to walk and was obliged to recline with his legs stretched out on a sofa. And then, after having imbibed contemporary scholarship, he wrote one philosophical work after another. Eduard von Hartmann's philosophical writings are a whole library in themselves; his output was prodigious.

Now when I came to study this personality, it dawned upon me one day that there was very special importance in the onset of this knee affliction. The fact that at a certain age the man began to suffer from an affliction of the knee interested me much more than his transcendental realism, or even than his famous saying: “First there was the religion of the Father, then the religion of the Son, and in the future there will come the religion of the Spirit.” Such sayings show ability and astuteness of mind, but they were to be met with at every street comer, so to say, in the 19th century. But for a man to become a philosopher through contracting, while he was a Lieutenant, an infirmity of the knee — that is a most significant fact. Moreover until we can go back to such things and not allow ourselves to be dazzled by what appears to be the most striking feature in a man's life, we shall not be able to discover the karmic connections.

When I was able to bring the affliction of the knee into its right relation with the whole personality, I began to perceive how destiny manifested in the life of this man. And then I could go back. It was not by starting from the head of Eduard von Hartmann, but from the knee, that I found the way to his earlier incarnations. What seems to be of most importance in the life between birth and death does not, as a rule, afford the most reliable starting-point.

And now, what is the connection? Man as he stands before us as a physical being in earthly life, is a threefold being. He has his nerves-and-senses organism, which is concentrated mainly in the head but at the same time extends over the whole body. He has his rhythmic organisation, which manifests particularly clearly in the rhythm of the breath and of the circulation of the blood, but again extends over the whole human being and comes to expression every where within him. And thirdly, he has his motor organisation which is connected with the limbs, with the functioning of metabolism, with the reconstruction of the substances of the body and so forth. Man is a threefold being.

And then in regard to the whole constitution of life, we come to realise that on the journey through births and deaths, what we are accustomed to consider in earthly life as the most important part of man, namely the head, becomes of comparatively little importance shortly after death. The head that in the physical world is the most essentially human part of man, really expends itself in physical existence; whereas the rest of the organism — which, physically speaking, is subordinate — is of higher importance in the spiritual world. In his head, man is most of all physical and least of all spiritual. In the other members of his organism, in the rhythmic organisation and in the limbs-organisation, he is more spiritual. He is most spiritual of all in his motor organisation, in the activity of his limbs.

Now gifts and talents belonging to the head are lost comparatively soon after death. On the other hand, the soul-and-spirit which, in the realm of the unconscious, belongs to the lower part of the human organism, assumes great importance between death and a new birth. But whereas, speaking generally, the organism of man apart from the head becomes, in respect of its spiritual form, its spiritual content, the head of the next incarnation, it is also true that what is of the nature of will in the head, works especially into the limbs in the next incarnation. A man who is lazy in his thinking in one incarnation will most certainly be no fast runner in the next: the laziness of thinking becomes slowness of limb; and, vice versa, slowness of limb in the present incarnation comes to expression in sluggish, lazy thinking in the next.

Thus a metamorphosis, an interchange, takes place between the three members of the human being in passing over from one incarnation to another.

What I am telling you here is not put forward as a theory; it is based on the very facts of life. And in the case of Eduard von Hartmann, as soon as I turned my attention to the affliction of the knee, I was guided to his earlier incarnation, during which at a certain moment in his life he had a kind of sunstroke. In respect of destiny, this sunstroke was the cause that led in the next earthly life, through metamorphosis, to an infirmity of the knee — the sunstroke being, as you will realise, an affliction of the head. One day he was no longer able to think. He had a kind of paralysis of the brain, and this came to expression in the next incarnation as an affliction of one of the limbs. Now the destiny that led to paralysis of the brain was due to the following circumstances. — This individuality was one of those who went to the East with the Crusades and fought over in Asia against the Turks and Asiatic peoples, acquiring, however, a tremendous admiration for the latter. The Crusaders encountered very much that was great and sublime in the East, and the individuality of whom we are speaking absorbed it all with deep admiration. And now he came across a man concerning whom he felt instinctively that he had had something to do with him in a still earlier life. The account, so to speak, that had now to be settled between this and the still earlier incarnation, was a moral account. The metamorphosis of the sunstroke in one incarnation into the affliction of the knee in the next appears at first to be a purely physical matter, but when it is a question of destiny we are invariably led back to something that appertains to the moral life. This individuality bore with him from a still earlier incarnation the impulse to wage a fierce battle with the man whom he now encountered and in the heat of the blazing sun he set about persecuting his opponent. The persecution was unjust, and it recoiled upon the persecutor himself inasmuch as his brain was paralysed by the heat of the sun. What was to be brought to an issue in this fight originated in a still earlier incarnation when this individuality had been brilliantly, outstandingly clever. The opponent whom he encountered during the Crusades had suffered injury and embarrassment in an earlier incarnation at the hands of this brilliant individuality. As you see, it all leads back to the moral life, for the forces in play originated in the earlier incarnation.

Thus we have three consecutive incarnations of an individuality. A remarkably clever and able personality in very ancient times — that is one incarnation. Following that, a Crusader, who at a certain time in his life gets paralysis of the brain, brought about as the result of a wrong committed by his cleverness which had, however, in the next incarnation, caused him to acquire tremendous admiration for oriental civilisation. Third incarnation: a Prussian officer who is obliged to retire owing to an affliction of the knee, does not know what to do with his time, goes in for philosophy and writes a most impressive book, a perfect product of the civilisation of the second half of the 19th century: The Philosophy of the Unconscious.

Once this connection of lives is perceived, things that were previously obscure become quite clear. When I was reading Hartmann while I was still young, without knowing anything about these connections, I always had the feeling: Yes, this is extremely clever! But when I had read one page I used to think: There is something brilliantly clever here, but the cleverness is not on this particular page! I always felt I must turn the page and look at the previous one to see if the cleverness were there. In short, the cleverness in this writing was not of today, but of yesterday, or of the day before yesterday.

Light came to me for the first time when I perceived: the outstanding cleverness really lies two incarnations ago and is working on from there. Great illumination is shed upon the whole of this Hartmann literature — which, as I said, is a library in itself — as soon as one realises that the cleverness in it is working on from a much earlier incarnation.

And when one came to know Eduard von Hartmann personally and was talking with him, one also felt: another man is there behind him, but even he is not the one who is talking; behind him again is a third, and it is the third who is really the source of the inspirations. For listening to Hartmann was often enough to drive one to despair! There was an officer, talking philosophy without enthusiasm, apathetically, speaking with a certain crudity of the loftiest truths. One could see how things really were only when one knew: the cleverness behind what he says is that of two incarnations ago.

It may seem disrespectful to relate such things, but no disrespect whatever is intended. Moreover I am convinced that it can be of great value for any human being to know of such connections and apply them to his own life, even if it means that he has to say to himself: Three incarnations ago I was an out-and-out scoundrel! It can be of immense benefit to life when a man can say to himself: In one incarnation or another, perhaps not only in one, I was a thoroughly bad lot! In speaking of such things, just as in other circumstances present company is always excepted, so here present incarnations are excepted!

I was also intensely interested in the connections of destiny of a man with whom my own life brought me into contact, namely Friedrich Nietzsche. I have studied the problem of Nietzsche in all its aspects and, as you know, have written and spoken a great deal about him.

His was indeed a strange and remarkable destiny. I saw him only once during his life. It was in Naumburg, in the nineties of last century, when his mind was already seriously deranged. In the afternoon, about half-past-two, his sister took me into his room. He lay on the couch, listless and unresponsive, with eyes unable to see that someone was standing by him: He lay there with the remarkable, beautifully formed brow that made such a striking impression upon one. Although the eyes were expressionless, one nevertheless had the feeling: This is not a case of insanity, but rather of a man who has been working spiritually the whole morning with great intensity of soul, has had his mid-day meal and is now lying at rest, pondering, half dreamily pondering on what his soul worked out in the morning. Spiritually seen, there were present only a physical body and an etheric body, especially in respect of the upper parts of the organism, for the being of soul-and-spirit was already outside, attached to the body as it were by a stubborn thread only. In reality a kind of death had already set in, but a death that could not be complete because the physical organisation was so healthy. The astral body and the ego that would fain escape were still held by the extraordinarily healthy metabolic and rhythmic organisations, while a completely ruined nerves-and-senses system was no longer able to hold the astral body and the ego. So one had the wonderful impression that the true Nietzsche was hovering above the head. There he was. And down below was something that from the vantage-point of the soul might well have been a corpse, and was only not a corpse because it still held on with might and main to the soul — but only in respect of the lower parts of the organism — because of the extraordinarily healthy metabolic and rhythmic organisation.

Such a spectacle may well make one attentive to the connections of destiny. In this case, at any rate, quite a different light was thrown upon them. Here one could not start from a suffering limb or the like, but one was led to look at the spirituality of Friedrich Nietzsche in its totality.

There are three strongly marked and distinct periods in Nietzsche's life. The first period begins when he wrote The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music while he was still quite young, inspired by the thought of music springing from Greek tragedy which had itself been born from music. Then, in the same strain, he wrote the four following works: David Friedrich Strauss; Confessor and Author, Schopenhauer as Educator, Thoughts out of Season, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. This was in the year 1876. (The Birth of Tragedy was written in 1871). Richard Wagner in Bayreuth is a hymn of praise to Richard Wagner, actually perhaps the best thing that has been written by any admirer of Wagner.

Then a second period begins. Nietzsche writes his books, Human, All-too Human, in two volumes, the work entitled Dawn and thirdly, The Joyful Wisdom.

In the early writings, up to the year 1876, Nietzsche was in the highest sense of the word an idealist. In the second epoch of his life he bids farewell to idealism in every shape and form; he makes fun of ideals; he convinces himself that if men set themselves ideals, this is due to weakness. When a man can do nothing in life, he says: Life is not worth any thing, one must hunt for an ideal. — And so Nietzsche knocks down ideals one by one, puts them to the test, and conceives the manifestations of the Divine in nature as something “all-too-human,” something paltry and petty. Here we have Nietzsche the disciple of Voltaire, to whom he dedicates one of his writings. Nietzsche is here the rationalist, the intellectualist. And this phase lasts until about the year 1882 or 1883. Then begins the final epoch of his life, when he unfolds ideas like that of the Eternal Recurrence and presents the figure of Zarathustra as a human ideal. He writes Thus spake Zarathustra in the style of a hymn.

Then he takes out again the notes he had once made on Wagner, and here we find something very remarkable! If one follows Nietzsche's way of working, it does indeed seem strange. Read his work Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. — It is a grand, enraptured hymn of praise. And now, in the last epoch of his life, comes the book The Case of Wagner, in which everything that can possibly be said against Wagner is set down!

If one is content with trivialities, one will simply say: Nietzsche has changed sides, he has altered his views. But those who are really familiar with Nietzsche's manuscripts will not speak in this way. In point of fact, when Nietzsche had written a few pages in the form of a hymn of praise to Wagner, he then proceeded to write down as well everything he could against what he himself had said! Then he wrote another hymn of praise, and then again he wrote in the reverse sense! The whole of The Case of Wagner was actually written in 1876, only Nietzsche put it aside, discarded it, and printed only the hymn of praise. And all that he did later on was to take his old drafts and interpolate a few caustic passages.

In this last period of his life the urge came to him to carry through an attack which in the first epoch he had abandoned. In all probability, if the manuscript he put aside as being out of keeping with his Richard Wagner in Bayreuth had been destroyed by fire, we should never have had The Case of Wagner at all.

If you study these three periods in Nietzsche's life you will find that all show evidence of a uniform trend. Even the last book, the last published writing at any rate, The Twilight of Idols, which shows entirely his other side — even this last book bears something of the fundamental character of Nietzsche's spiritual life. In old age, however, when this work was composed, he becomes imaginative, writing in a graphic, vividly descriptive style. For example, he wants to characterise Michelet, the French writer. He lights on a very apt expression when he speaks of him as having the kind of enthusiasm that takes off its coat. This is a marvelously apt description of one aspect of Michelet. Other similar utterances — graphic and imaginative — are also to be found in The Twilight of Idols.

If you once have this tragic, deeply moving picture before you of the individuality hovering above the body of Nietzsche, you will be compelled to say of his writings that the impression they make is as though Nietzsche were never fully present in his body while he was writing down his sentences. He used to write, you know, sometimes sitting but more often while walking, especially while going for long tramps. It is as though he had always been a little outside his body. You will have this impression most strongly of all in the case of certain passages in the fourth part of Thus Spake Zarathustra, of which you will feel that they could have been written only when the body no longer had control, when the soul was outside the body.

One feels that when Nietzsche is being spiritually creative, he always leaves his body behind. And this same tendency can be perceived, too, in his habits. He was particularly fond of taking chloral in order to induce a mood that strives to get away from the body, a mood of aloofness from the body. This tendency was of course due to the fact that the body was in many respects ailing; for example, Nietzsche suffered from constant and always very prolonged headaches, and so on.

All these things give a uniform picture of Nietzsche in this incarnation at the end of the 19th century, an incarnation which finally culminated in insanity, so that he no longer knew who he was. There are letters addressed to George Brandes signed “The Crucified One” — indicating that Nietzsche regards himself as the Crucified One; and at another time he looks at himself as at a man who is actually present outside him, thinks that he is a God walking by the River Po, and signs himself “Dionysos.” This separation from the body while spiritual work is going on reveals itself as something that is peculiarly characteristic of this personality, characteristic, that is to say, of this particular incarnation.

If we ponder this inwardly, with Imagination, then we are led back to an incarnation lying not so very long ago. It is characteristic of many such representative personalities that their previous incarnations do not lie in the distant past but in the comparatively near past, even, maybe, in quite recent times.

We come to a life where this individuality was a Franciscan, a Franciscan ascetic who inflicted intense self-torture on his body. Now we have the key to the riddle. The gaze falls upon a man in the characteristic Franciscan habit, lying for hours at a time in front of the altar, praying until his knees are bruised and sore, beseeching grace, mortifying his flesh with severest penances — with the result that through the self-inflicted pain he knits himself very strongly with his physical body. Pain makes one intensely aware of the physical body because the astral body yearns after the body that is in pain, wants to penetrate it through and through. The effect of this concentration upon making the body fit for salvation in the one incarnation was that, in the next, the soul had no desire to be in the body at all.

Such are the connections of destiny in certain typical cases. It can certainly be said that they are not what one would have expected! In the matter of successive earthly lives, speculation is impermissible and generally leads to false conclusions. But when we do come upon the truth, marvellous enlightenment is shed upon life.

Because studies of this kind can help us to look at karma in the right way, I have not been afraid — although such a course has its dangers — to give you certain concrete examples of karmic connections which can, I think, throw a great deal of light upon the nature of human karma, of human destiny.

posted January 23, 2011 03:58 AM            

Glad you are enjoying it.