The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Eighth Lecture

[ 1 ] We continue our discussion of specific karmic issues relating to human life.

[ 2 ] Another question is: What is the secret doctrine's view of the origin of conscience? — To people of our cultural level, conscience manifests itself as a kind of inner voice that tells them what they should or should not do. How did such an inner voice come into being?

[ 3 ] It is interesting to investigate whether there has ever been anything in the historical development of humanity that corresponds to what we today call conscience. We find that in very early societies there was no word for this concept. In Greek literature it appears relatively late, so that the older Greeks did not yet have the word in their language. Similarly, other peoples did not have a word for it in the early stages of their culture. From this we can conclude that this conscience only gradually became known in a more or less conscious state. This is indeed the case. Conscience only came into being, developed, and even then quite late in the history of human development. We will see later what our ancestors had instead of conscience.

[ 4 ] How did conscience gradually develop? An example: Darwin once encountered a cannibal on his travels and tried, among other things, to make him understand that it was not good to eat another human being. But the savage said: In order to decide whether it is good or bad to eat a human being, one must first have eaten him! The savage had not yet judged good and evil according to moral concepts, but according to the pleasure he felt. He was a backward man from an ancient, ancient state of culture in which we all once existed. How did a human being come to distinguish between good and evil? For example, by practicing cannibalism until he himself was in a position to be eaten. At that moment, he experienced that the same thing could happen to him. Through this experience, he realized that something was not quite right, and the fruit of this experience remained with him in Kamaloka and Devachan. In the next incarnation, they brought with them a very dark feeling that their actions were wrong. After further incarnations, this feeling became more definite, they paid attention to the feelings of others, and gradually a certain restraint developed. After various further incarnations, this dark feeling had intensified and the thought had formed: One must not do that. — Similarly, at the beginning of civilization, a savage ate everything without distinction; this gave him stomach pains, and gradually he learned from experience that he could eat some things and not others. Thus, experience gradually intensified and became the voice of conscience.

[ 5 ] So what is conscience? It is the result of experiences through various incarnations. Basically, all knowledge, both the highest and the lowest, is the result of experience; it has arisen through trial and error, through experience.

[ 6 ] An interesting fact belongs here: it is only since Aristotle that there has been a science of logic, the study of thinking. From this we must conclude that correct thinking also only came into being later. And so it is. Thinking first had to develop, and correct thinking, logic, only arose over time based on the observation that wrong thinking leads to things that are evil. Knowledge is something that humans have acquired over many incarnations. After much trial and error, humanity arrived at a treasure trove of knowledge. Here we see the importance of the law of karma; we also have something here that forms as a lasting habit and inclination from experience. Such an inclination as conscience also adheres to the etheric body: as the astral body has convinced itself so often that this or that does not work, this inclination develops in the etheric body as a lasting characteristic.

[ 7 ] Another interesting karmic connection can be seen in habitual selfish behavior or in loving, sympathetic coexistence with others. There are hardened habitual egoists — not only in relation to the pursuit of profit — and there are altruistic, loving, compassionate people. Both are attached to the etheric body and are expressed in the physical body in the next life. People who habitually act selfishly in one life age early in the next life and shrink early; on the other hand, staying young and fresh for a long time stems from a loving, devoted previous life. Thus, one can also consciously prepare the physical body for the next life.

[ 8 ] Now, if you remember what I said yesterday, a question will be on your mind: What about the things that the physical body achieves for itself? Its deeds will determine its future fate, but what about the illnesses it has suffered in this life?

[ 9 ] The answer to this question, strange as it may sound, is not speculation, not theory; it is based on the experiences of secret science and teaches the mission of illness. Fabre d'Olivet, the explorer of the opening chapters of Genesis, once used a very beautiful image. He compares what emerges as fate to a natural process; he says: The precious pearl is created by a disease; it is an exudate of the pearl oyster, so that in this case life must become ill in order to produce something valuable. Just as the pearl is formed from the illness of the mussel, so the illnesses of the physical body reappear in the next life as aesthetic beauty. Either one's own body becomes beautiful in appearance in the next life as a result of the illness it has undergone, or an infectious disease that it has carried with its environment is rewarded by the beauty of its surroundings. Beauty thus develops karmically from suffering, pain, deprivation, and illness. This is a striking connection, but it does indeed exist. Even the sense of beauty is developed in this way. Nothing beautiful exists in the world without suffering, pain, and illness. We encounter something very similar in the history of human development in general. You will see from this how wonderful the karmic connections in life actually are and how the questions of evil, illness, and pain cannot be answered without knowing the great inner connections of human development.

[ 10 ] The line of evolution goes back to very ancient times. Conditions were very different then; the earth was completely different. Higher animals did not yet exist. There was a time when there were no fish, amphibians, birds, or mammals at all, only animals that were lower than fish. Humans existed, but in a completely different form. Their physical body was still very imperfect; their spiritual body was higher. They were still in a soft, ethereal body, and the soul itself worked on this physical body from outside. Humans still had all other beings within them. Later, humans developed further and left behind the fish form they had within them. These were powerful, fantastical-looking creatures, unlike our fish today. Humans developed further again and separated the birds from themselves. Then the reptiles and amphibians emerged from humans, grotesque beings such as dinosaurs and fish lizards, which were actually only stragglers of the earlier, even more human-like beings. Then, even later, humans separated the mammals. Finally, they rejected the apes and ascended even higher.

[ 11 ] So humans were humans from the beginning, not apes, and separated the entire animal kingdom from themselves in order to become more perfect; just as when one gradually separates the dyes from a liquid mixed with color and retains the clear water. Ancient naturalists such as Paracelsus and Oken expressed this beautifully: When humans look out at the animal world, they must say to themselves: I carried this within me and separated it from my being.

[ 12 ] Thus, man had within himself what he later had outside himself. And so, even today, man still has something within himself that he will later have outside himself, namely his karma, the two aspects of good and evil. Just as it is true that man has expelled the animal species from himself, it is equally true that he will expel evil and good into the world. Good will produce a race of people who are good by nature, evil will produce a separate race of evil people. This is also written in the Apocalypse; it must not be misunderstood. But now we must also distinguish between soul development and racial development. A soul may be incarnated in a race that is declining; but if this soul does not make itself evil, it does not need to incarnate again in a declining race; it incarnates again in a race that is ascending. Enough souls flow in from other sides for incarnation in the declining races.

[ 13 ] But what is inside must come out, and man will always ascend higher when his karma has worked itself out. Something extremely interesting is connected with this. With regard to this development of humanity, secret orders were founded centuries ago that set themselves the highest tasks imaginable. One such order is the Manichaean Order. Science knows nothing definite about it. It is believed that the Manichaeans taught that there is a good and an evil in nature that are in conflict with each other; that this was determined at the time of creation. This is a distorted glimpse of the real task of this order. The individual members of this order are educated in a very special way for their great task. This order knows that there will be people who will no longer have evil in their karma, and that there will also be a race that is inherently evil, in which all evil will be present to a greater degree than in the wildest animals, because they will do evil consciously, cunningly, with a highly trained mind. The Manichaean Order is already teaching its members in such a way that they not only fight evil, but become capable of transforming it into good in later incarnations. The enormous difficulty of this task lies in the fact that in those evil races of people, unlike in an evil child, there is no good alongside the evil that can be developed further through example and teaching. The members of the Manichaean order are already learning today how to radically transform those who are completely evil by nature. And this evil, once it has been remolded, will become something particularly good after the work has been successfully completed. A state of holiness will be the general moral condition on earth, and the power of transformation will bring about this state of holiness. But this cannot be achieved unless this evil first forms; and in the power that must now be applied to overcome this evil, the power to attain the highest holiness develops. The field must be fertilized with the disgusting manure; the manure must first grow into the field as a ferment, so to speak. Thus, humanity needs the fertilizer of evil in order to attain the state of highest holiness. That is the mission of evil. Man becomes strong when he has to strain his muscles; in the same way, if goodness is to rise to holiness, it must first overcome its opposite, evil. Evil has the task of raising humanity to a higher level.

[ 14 ] Such things allow us to glimpse the mystery of life. Later, when man has overcome evil, he can set about redeeming the creatures he has pushed down in order to develop himself. That is the meaning of development.

[ 15 ] The following is even more difficult. A snail shell, a mussel shell, are separated from the living substance of the animal itself. What surrounds the snail as a house was originally inside it; it is its own body in condensed form. Theosophy says: We are one with everything that surrounds us. This is to be understood in the sense that man once had everything within himself. In fact, the earth's crust was created when man once crystallized it; and just as the snail has its house, so man also had all other beings and kingdoms, mineral, plant, and animal, within himself and can say to all of them: The substances were within me, I crystallized the components. - So now he looks at something outside himself, and now it takes on a tangible meaning when he says, as he looks at it: All this is myself.

[ 16 ] A second idea is even more subtle. Imagine that ancient state of humanity in which nothing had yet been separated from man. Man was there and also had ideas; but he did not have them objectively through the impression made by external things, but purely subjectively. Everything came from within himself. Dreams are a remnant of that time when humans spun the whole world out of themselves, as it were. Then they set the world against themselves. We made things ourselves and see our own products, our own solidified essence, in other creatures.

[ 17 ] Kant speaks of something that humans cannot recognize, of a “thing in itself.” But there is no such thing. There are no limits to knowledge, because humans find traces of their own essence in everything they see around them.

[ 18 ] All this has been said to show you that if you only look at one side of things, you can never come to a real understanding. One must be clear that everything that appears to us in a certain state was completely different in earlier times, and only by comparing the present and the past can one come to an understanding. And so, too, if one considers only the sensory world: one will never understand why illness exists at all or what the mission of evil is if one limits oneself to sensory observation. All such connections have a deep meaning. This whole development through separation, which I have described to you, took place because human beings were to become inner beings; they had to put all this out of themselves in order to be able to see themselves. In this way we understand the mission of illness, the mission of evil, and the mission of the outer world. These are great connections, as revealed by consideration of the law of karma.

[ 19 ] We will now deal with a few specific karmic questions that are frequently asked. What is the karmic connection that causes many people to die so young, for example as children? Cases known to esoteric science teach the following. For example, a child who died early could be examined in relation to his previous life, and it turned out that he had been quite well endowed in his previous life and had also made good use of these gifts. He had become a quite capable member of human society, but he was somewhat weak-sighted. Because of these weak eyes and his less accurate vision, all his experiences took on a special character. As a result, there was always something small missing that could have been better; the person always lagged behind a little because of their weak eyes. They could have achieved something extraordinary if they had had good eyesight. They died and then reincarnated a short time later with healthy eyes, but only lived for a few weeks. However, this allowed the elements of his being to learn how to obtain healthy eyes, and the person was given a little bit of life to acquire what he had been lacking, a correction of his previous life, so to speak. The pain of the parents is, of course, karmically balanced, but they had to be the instrument for this correction.

[ 20 ] What is the karmic connection in the case of stillborn children? This is difficult to talk about. In individual cases that have been investigated occultly, the astral body had already connected with the physical body, but then withdrew again, so that the physical body was born dead. But why does the astral body withdraw? This is related to the following: certain members of higher human nature are connected to certain physical organs. For example, no being can have an etheric body without cells. A stone has no etheric body because it has no vessels or cells like a plant. Similarly, the astral body is bound to a nervous system. A plant has no astral body precisely because it has no nervous system. As soon as a plant were permeated by an astral body, it could no longer look physically like a plant; it would have to be equipped with a nervous system, just as a stone would be endowed with cells if it were permeated by an etheric body.

[ 21 ] If the ego body is to gradually take its place, then warm red blood must be present within the physical body. All animals that have red blood were separated from humans at a time when the ego state was being prepared for humans. From this we can see that the physical organs must be in order if the higher bodies are to take up residence in them. It is important to note that the physical body is shaped in its form by purely physical heredity. Now, the composition of the juices may be incorrect, while the parents are otherwise well suited to each other spiritually and emotionally. Then a proper physical body does not come into being; the human germ receives a physical body in which the higher bodies cannot establish their dwelling place. For example, the etheric body connects with the physical body, and now the astral body is supposed to take possession of the physical body. It finds no suitable instrument, no proper organism at its disposal, and the astral body must withdraw again. Thus the physical body remains behind and is born dead. A stillbirth is therefore caused by a physically poor mixture of fluids, which has not provided a suitable instrument for the spiritual-soul human germ. The physical body thrives only to the extent that higher elements of being can dwell in it. You see how necessary it is to go into detail when studying karmic relationships.

[ 22 ] How does karmic compensation come about? If someone has done something to another person, this must be karmically compensated between them. For this to happen, however, the persons concerned must be incarnated at the same time. How does this happen? What brings people together, what forces bring this about? The technique of karma is as follows: The evil I have done to a person has happened, and he has suffered as a result. Now I die and go to Kamaloka. Immediately after death, I must see it in the tableau of memory; this does not hurt. Then I relive my life. When I return to that point in Kamaloka, I must now suffer the pain that the other person endured. So the emotional content is added; it is imprinted like a stamp on the astral body. I take some of this pain with me as a reward into Devachan; a force remains in me as a result of what I experienced in the other person. I have to slip into the other person's pain or joy that they had to go through; this draws certain forces into the astral body, so that I take a large amount of forces with me into Devachan.

[ 23 ] When I return to a new incarnation, these forces draw me back to the person in question to balance the karma. In this way, all people who have once experienced something together are brought together; they have incorporated these forces during the Kamaloka period.

[ 24 ] Of course, a physically embodied person may also have Kamaloka experiences with several people in order to balance their karma. An example will clarify this for us. A case known in secret science tells the following story: A person was sentenced to death by five judges. What had happened? In a previous life, this person had killed these five, and karmic forces had brought these six people together for karmic balance. However, this does not result in a never-ending karmic chain, but rather other karmic relationships change the further course of events.

[ 25 ] You see, spiritual forces work in mysterious ways to bring about the complex structure of human beings. Some important, major aspects will become clear to us when we consider the entire development of the Earth and humankind over the next few days.