The Rudolf Steiner Archive

23. Insights and fruits of spiritual science: the law of karma as the effect of one's actions; the causes of illness and heredity

[ 1 ] Today we want to talk in detail about the law of karma in human beings. You know that it works through individual human lives. Any discussion of this law, however detailed, will of course always be incomplete, for the occultist should not speak of imaginary cases, but of experiences that have been made in this field and about which he has definite knowledge, for example through observation of a person who was such and such and whose various lives one has followed. We now ask: How does the fate of life come about, how does the position that a person occupies in life, how does his character, his inclinations, habits, and so on? One is born with a violent, angry character, the other as a mild, gentle person. One is granted a good fate, the other is in constant struggle. Misery and worry accompany him.

[ 2 ] Above all, we must consider the different bodies of human beings and ask how the karmic causes work in the three bodies, the physical, etheric, and astral bodies in human beings. We will first look again at the physical body and what happens through it. Above all, it is the factor through which our actions are carried out in the world, for what we do happens through movements made by our physical body. Our outer destiny in the next incarnation depends on our actions. Whether we are born poor or rich, in this place or that, in this environment or that, is the result of the actions of our physical body in previous lives. If we commit bad deeds, we are born into a bad environment; good deeds bring us a good environment. This is the first law.

[ 3 ] Now comes the second law. We can understand this most easily if we put ourselves in our own childhood. We will all find that since then we have absorbed many new concepts and ideas and that we have learned a great deal. We, for example, who have come to spiritual science, have absorbed many new concepts simply through this. For what do we not learn through it, and what new trains of thought does it give us! The content of what we learn and absorb into our thought life happens through the astral body. This causes changes to occur in the astral body, and since it is comparatively the thinnest and finest of the bodies that human beings have, it also reacts most quickly to any influence. But it is not only our concepts and ideas that have changed since childhood; our temperament, our inclinations, habits, and character have also changed. We remember that these latter qualities were formed in children through influences on the etheric body.

[ 4 ] Now, because the etheric body is a much denser body than the astral body, these habits are retained much more tenaciously and for much longer; indeed, if they are not consciously influenced, they remain throughout almost the entire life. The ideas and concepts we absorb, which cause changes in the astral body, transform it at a rapid pace, in comparison to the slowly changing character traits, which also gradually transform the etheric body. We can compare it to the two hands of a clock, the big one and the small one: the big one runs fast, the small one slower. So it is with the rapid changes in the astral body and the slower ones in the etheric body.

[ 5 ] In the physical body, which is the coarsest, the changes naturally take place even more slowly; it is the slowest to work. On subsequent evenings, we will hear that the initiate learns to work with increased speed on his astral and etheric bodies and finally even on his physical body. Yes, he will eventually reach the point where he can change his pulse rate. Of course, we are not there yet, but what we learn in this life will only bring about the corresponding changes in the next life. The change that the astral body undergoes in this life occurs in the etheric body in the next incarnation, in that it has a formative effect on it. Good deeds give rise to a tendency toward good deeds in the next life. We must prepare our habits now for the next life, so that we can have an effect there. If someone wants to be born with a good memory in the next life, they should try to remember everything as much as possible and recall everything they experience. For example, in the evening they should think about what they did today, and then what they did yesterday, a month ago, last year, and what they did and experienced in previous years. This is how you train your memory. People who rush carelessly through life will be born with tendencies that make it impossible for anything they encounter to stick in their minds. Of course, someone may be forced to rush through life; I meant what I said earlier only in relation to superficially overlooking everything they experience.

[ 6 ] We are all familiar with temperaments. The choleric person, with his strong will and urge to do a great deal, which is already apparent in childhood, wants to rule and set the tone among his peers. He is courageous, bold, and eager for action. Napoleon, Caesar, and Hannibal were choleric natures. The melancholic child, on the other hand, isolates itself, is distrustful, prefers to keep its belongings under lock and key, and watches its companions after they have left to see if they have taken anything. It is very preoccupied with itself. This is a person of contemplation rather than action. The phlegmatic child shows no particular interest. In a way, it seeks out everything, but nothing makes a big impression on its soul. It dreams a lot, is inactive, and seeks sensory pleasure. The sanguine temperament shows interest in everything, but this interest does not last and soon fades away. However, people cannot be categorized into different temperaments. In each person, only one temperament is usually present as a basic tone, but the others also play a role. These four temperaments express themselves in the etheric body as four different types and can be recognized in the astral body as four different basic colors. The melancholic temperament will emerge in the next incarnation if someone now has a tendency to live in the closest and quietest circle and to concern themselves only with themselves. The other, however, who has encountered many things, got to the bottom of them, and gone through many experiences, including difficult ones, will be born as a choleric. Those who have had a pleasant life without much struggle and hardship will become sanguine or phlegmatic. What happens to the astral body in this life is karmically transferred to the etheric body as a basic being in the next life.

[ 7 ] In the initiation schools, this knowledge is now consciously applied to the various bodies, and in the past even more so than today. This is related to cyclical development. Today, the secret teaching has a completely different way of teaching than it did five thousand years ago. At that time, it was necessary to work more with groups of people. Conscious effort was made to ensure that entire categories of people could harmoniously coexist in the next life. In India, the entire population was divided into four castes, and work was done on them so that people would fit into a certain caste in the next life. The education of human beings was systematically designed to provide for millennia, to shape the worldview for millennia to come. This is precisely what gave the occult leaders their great power. Now everything has changed completely. The progressive development of human beings is detaching them from these groups, these castes; they can no longer be educated en gros, so to speak. Human beings are becoming and should become increasingly individualized.

[ 8 ] How does the human being influence his etheric body with regard to the next life? All the inclinations and habits of the present etheric body determine the disposition to health or illness in the next life. From what is now slowly developing in the etheric body as certain habits, both good and bad, the good or bad character of a human being gradually crystallizes in the coming life. For example, one person seeks to cultivate diligence, while another works on overcoming anger. Yet another becomes accustomed to drinking, which weakens their will. Another becomes lazy, and so on. What is placed in the etheric body through one lifetime finds expression in the physical body in the next. A bad habit in the previous life is a cause of illness in the next; a good habit is, of course, a cause of health. A certain passion brings us a certain illness for the next life. One could see how a person's disposition to infectious diseases is acquired in this way. We know very well that someone can go to all people, to all places where epidemics or infectious diseases prevail, without endangering themselves and contracting these diseases. Another person picks them up, as it were, on the street and is immediately infected. Whether or not they become infected depends solely on their disposition. Now, the initiated know very well that the disposition that leads to infectious diseases is based on a pronounced selfish acquisitiveness in a previous life, which thinks in a self-centered way about accumulating riches for oneself. Those who want to become rich in one life harm themselves for their next incarnation. This selfish urge for gain and wealth is a characteristic of the etheric body, which emerges in the next life as a disposition for infectious diseases.

[ 9 ] If one wants to learn about health and illness, one must bear in mind that many factors interact. The causes of illness do not lie solely in individual karma. There is also a collective karma in relation to illness. An example that has been observed can illustrate this. This case concerns certain health conditions of races and entire peoples. We are all familiar with the migration of peoples and its history. We know that at that time various tribes, the Huns and Mongols, set out from the East and came to Europe. They poured out of Asia across the land and clashed with the Germanic peoples. These Huns, like the Mongolian race in general, were latecomers of the Atlanteans—as the name Attila or Atli suggests—remnants of this great race. While the Germanic peoples, Persians, and Indians represented the more advanced races, the Mongols, who had remained at a certain stage, were in decline. While the great stream of humanity develops forward, such individual lower races remain behind and separate themselves. The astral bodies of these backward races now carry astral decaying matter within them. Of course, large numbers of them came over to us. The Europeans were filled with fear and terror by these surging masses, and through this fear and terror they felt, the astral decaying substances thrived even better, for fear and terror are qualities of the astral body that have a favorable effect on the flourishing of these harmful influences. The European astral bodies were infected, and this infection manifested itself in later generations as leprosy, that terrible disease that wreaked such havoc in the Middle Ages. This was the physical consequence of the influence of the Mongolian astral bodies on the European ones, and the conduit, so to speak, through which this influence poured into the European bodies was the fear and terror that filled the Germanic peoples in the face of the devastating hordes that flooded their land. We can see how diseases arise in the karma of a people and how they are passed on from generation to generation. The ancestors experienced the disease spiritually, and it passed into the physical realm in later generations. This is exactly what is meant by the Bible verse: “I will punish the children for the sins of the fathers to the third and fourth generations.” We can take this quite literally. It refers to this kind of collective karma.

[ 10 ] In general, religious documents are taken far too literally. At first, people are naive, as is still often the case today in rural areas. There, people take Bible verses literally. Then people become clever and thus negative. They throw everything that has been handed down overboard; that is the second stage. The third stage is that of the modern free thinkers, who want to see everything only as a symbol. Bruno Wille can be taken as an example here. But now much depends on how clever such an interpreter is, for one finds an even better symbol than the other and now believes that he must proclaim his as the only correct one in the world. But then a lot is implied and not just interpreted. However, there is still a fourth stage: secret science. It teaches us to understand and interpret religious documents literally again. Finally, one becomes a secret student after first being a naive person and then a freethinker and symbolist.

[ 11 ] In our consideration of the karma of illness, both of individuals and of entire tribes, we have seen that what has been prepared spiritually beforehand asserts itself later in physical life. If we therefore ensure good education and good habits for humanity, we will also promote health! Not only is the moral element promoted by good inclinations, but also health, since a bad habit creates an illness for the next life. Nervousness, actually the most widespread form of illness today, is the result of a certain state of mind in an earlier time. It would never have occurred if the materialistic worldview with its habits of thinking had not become dominant. If this mindset were to continue, it would have a devastating effect on public health and bring humanity closer to insanity. Children would be born trembling with nervous weakness, and an epidemic of insanity would be feared as a result of increasing materialism, and people would experience agonizing pain from every sensation. This is the terrible influence of materialism, as it will manifest itself physically after it has infected the minds.

[ 12 ] This worldview of the future was the real reason why the occult leaders of humanity saw the need to bring something from the treasure trove of spiritual truths into the world. For only through a spiritual worldview, detached from the shackles of materialism, looking up to the highest currents of life in humanity and allowing them to flow into oneself, only through this can a good foundation for health be passed on to future generations. The reasons why our spiritual scientific worldview is being spread today go much deeper than some people think, and in it and through it, everyone can do their part in this healing of humanity. In the past, the word “nervous” had a completely different meaning than it does today. It meant: muscular, having nerves of steel. This change in the meaning of the word shows how something completely new has come into the world.

[ 13 ] Let us now turn to the question: What about individual heredity in children, both mentally and physically, and what about karma? We know that both characteristics and similarities are inherited from the father, mother, uncle, aunt, and grandparents. One child resembles its father, another its mother. Musical talent, for example, can be inherited through generations. In the Bach family, there were about twenty-eight musicians over the course of two hundred and fifty years, although only one of them was very famous, and in the Bernoulli family of mathematicians, there were eight important mathematicians. There are many examples where heredity plays a major role. However, one must understand the true meaning of karma and reincarnation in order to properly comprehend heredity, because the theory of heredity in materialistic science is only partially true and some aspects of it are distorted. For example, a great musician does not only have musical talent in their soul. This alone could not have any effect if this soul could not incarnate in a body equipped with a musically constructed ear. What is physical in such a family of musicians, these good and finely constructed hearing organs, is inherited from parents to children, and a human germ that comes from the Devachan and rushes towards a new embodiment will be attracted to such a family, in which its musical soul can live out its potential in well-formed musical organs. Just as the pole attracts the magnetic needle, such a child is born into a family where its personal aptitudes find the best physical preconditions. Everything fits together perfectly. An astral human germ is drawn to a family that suits it physically. The banal saying, “You have to be careful in choosing your parents,” is therefore not quite as nonsensical as it may sound. It is not that the child resembles its parents, but that it is born to the parents who are most similar to it, whom it already loves. The deepest sympathy already exists before birth; the child already feels drawn to the mother. Motherly love is secondary love; it is the response to the child's love that already existed before.

[ 14 ] These insights significantly broaden our understanding, and I hope that I will be able to clarify many things for you in the course of further lectures. The further we progress, the more we delve into all these questions. At first, much remains unclear, but then one veil after another is lifted, and as we progress, we will gain ever deeper insights after some time. And from this experience, we learn to tell ourselves that we want to wait calmly until the time comes when we can also understand what is still veiled from us. It is usually an advanced person who waits patiently until he can also absorb the higher within himself.