The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fourteenth Lecture

[ 1 ] Let us continue our reflections, which are intended to bring us ever closer to an understanding of the nature of the human being and his task in the world from a deeper perspective. You will remember that in one of the branch lectures given here this winter, we spoke of the fourfold nature in which illness is initially possible in human beings, and that we indicated at that time that we would come later to discuss what can be called the actual karmic cause of illness. Today we want to discuss at least some aspects of this karmic cause of illness.

[ 2 ] We explained then that the division of the human being into four members, the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body, and the I, also gave us the opportunity to gain a certain overview of the symptoms of disease, namely by pointing out that each of these members of the human being finds its expression in certain organs and organ complexes of the physical body itself. Thus, the ego finds its essential expression in the blood, the astral body in the nervous system, the etheric body in everything we call the glandular system and everything that belongs to it, and the physical body expresses itself as the physical body. We then described the diseases that originate in the ego as such and therefore manifest themselves externally in the physical form of irregularities in the blood functions. We have pointed out how that which has its cause in irregularities of the astral body finds expression through irregularities in the nervous system, and how, in turn, that which has its origin in the etheric body finds expression in the glandular system, and that we must then recognize in the physical body those diseases that have primarily external causes. However, we have thus only directed our gaze toward everything connected with the individual life of the human being between birth and death. Now, those who are able to view the course of the world from a spiritual scientific perspective sense that illness in human beings must also be connected in a certain way with their karma, that is, with the great law of causation that represents the spiritual connections between different incarnations. But the ways of karma are very intricate and manifold, and one must enter into the fine details of the karmic connections if one wants to understand anything at all about how these things are related.

[ 3 ] Today we want to discuss some of what is interesting for human beings to know in the first place, namely, how illnesses are related to causes that have been laid down by human beings themselves in previous lives. To do this, we must now return briefly to the workings of the law of karma in the human life course. We will mention some things that most of you already know from other lectures, but we must bring to mind very clearly how the karmic causes are carried over from one life to another in their effects. We must return briefly to what actually happens spiritually to the human being in the period following death.

[ 4 ] We know that when passing through the gate of death, the human being first has experiences that arise from the fact that, with death, he is for the first time in a situation in which he has not been throughout his entire life. He is connected with his ego and his astral body to the etheric body without the physical body. He has, so to speak, laid down his physical body. During life, this only happens in exceptional cases, as we have often mentioned. During life, when the human being is asleep and has laid down his physical body, the etheric body is also laid down, so that this connection between the ego, the astral body, and the etheric body only exists for a short time after death, which is counted in days. We have also mentioned the experiences that follow immediately after death. We have pointed out that the human being feels as if he is growing larger and larger, as if he is growing out of the space he occupied and encompassing all things. We have mentioned how the picture of the life just passed stands before him in a large tableau. Then, after a period of time that is measured in days and varies from person to person, the second corpse, the etheric body, is discarded and absorbed into the general world ether, with the exception of those cases we mentioned when discussing intimate questions of reincarnation, where the etheric body is preserved in a certain way for later use. But an essence of this etheric body remains behind as the fruit of what we have experienced and gone through in life. We now continue to live the life that is conditioned by this union of the I with the astral body, without the human being now being bound to the physical body. Now follows the period which we have become accustomed to calling the Kamaloka period in spiritual scientific literature, which we have also often referred to as the period of growing out of, of weaning oneself from the connection with the physical body or with physical existence in general.

[ 5 ] We know that when a person has passed through the gate of death, they initially still have in their astral body all the forces they had in their astral body at the moment of death. For they have only laid aside the physical body, the instrument of enjoyment and action. He no longer has this, but he still has his astral body. He still has the carrier of his passions, drives, desires, and instincts. After death, he desires exactly the same things — out of habit, one might say — that he desired in life. Now, in life, human beings satisfy their desires and cravings through the instrument of the physical body. After death, they no longer have this instrument and therefore lack the means to satisfy all these desires. This then manifests itself as a kind of thirst for physical life until the human being has become accustomed to living only in the spiritual world as such, to having what can be had from the spiritual world. Until the human being has learned this, he lives in what is called the time of weaning, the time of Kamaloka.

[ 6 ] We have already described the very peculiar course of this period of life. We have seen that during this time, human life runs backwards. This is something that is difficult for beginners in spiritual science to understand at first. Human beings go through the Kamaloka period—which takes up about one third of ordinary life—in reverse. Let us assume that a person dies at the age of forty. He then goes through all the events he experienced during his life in reverse order. So first he experiences the time of his thirty-ninth year, then comes his thirty-eighth, thirty-seventh, thirty-sixth, and so on. So it is really true that they go through life in reverse until the moment of birth. This is the basis of the beautiful statement in the Christian message that tells us when human beings actually enter the spiritual world or the realms of heaven: “Unless you become like children, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven!” This means that man lives back to the time when he experienced his childhood moments, and then, having completed everything backwards, he can enter Devachan or the kingdom of heaven and spend his further time in the spiritual world. This is difficult to imagine because we are so accustomed to thinking of time as something absolute, as it is on the physical plane, that it takes some effort to become accustomed to these ideas. But this will happen.

[ 7 ] Now we must bring before our minds what human beings actually do in Kamaloka. We could, of course, describe many and varied things here. Today, however, we are only interested in what is relevant to our question about the karmic causes of illness. What is now being said should therefore not be regarded as the only kind of experience in Kamaloka, but as one among many.

[ 8 ] First, we can illustrate how this Kamaloka period is used by humans in terms of the future if we imagine that a person who died at the age of forty had done something at the age of twenty that harmed another person. If someone accomplishes something in the course of their life that harms another person, this has a certain significance for the entire human life cycle. Such an act, which a person commits to the detriment of their fellow human beings or other beings, or even to the detriment of the world in general, represents an obstacle to human development, an obstacle to progress in development. This is the whole meaning of the human pilgrimage on earth, that at all times the fundamental force of the human soul, which passes from reincarnation to reincarnation, is directed toward progress, striving for upward development. And development proceeds in such a way that human beings repeatedly place obstacles in their own path, so to speak. If the fundamental force—which is, after all, the fundamental force in the soul that is supposed to bring this soul to re-spiritualization—were to act entirely on its own, then only a very short time on earth would be necessary for human beings. But then the whole development of the earth would have been completely different; and the purpose of earthly development would not have been achieved. One must not think that it would be better for human beings if they did not place obstacles in their own way. It is precisely by placing obstacles and hindrances in their way that they become strong and gain experience. It is only by removing and overcoming the obstacles they have placed in their own way that they become the strong beings they must become at the end of earthly development. It is entirely in the interest of earthly development that he places obstacles in his own path. And if he did not have to gain the strength to remove these obstacles, he would not have the strength he needs to do so. This means that the world would lose the strength he develops in this way. We must completely disregard what is good or evil in such obstacles and hindrances. We must look only to the fact that, from the beginning of human development on earth, the wisdom of the world has intended to offer human beings the opportunity to place obstacles in their path so that they can remove them and then have the great strength for later in the world. One might even say that the wisdom of the world's guidance has allowed humans to become evil, has given them the possibility of evil and harm, so that in making amends for the harm they have done, in overcoming evil, in the course of their karmic development, they become stronger beings than they would otherwise have become if they had reached their goal by themselves. This is how we must understand the meaning and justification of obstacles and impediments.

[ 9 ] So when a person relives his life in Kamaloka after death and comes to some harm he inflicted on a fellow human being in his twentieth year, he experiences this harm just as he relives the joy and good he did to his fellow beings. Only then does he experience the pain he inflicted on another in his own astral body. So let us assume that he hit someone in his twentieth year, that he hurt someone, then the other person felt it. When reliving this, the person who caused the pain feels it in their astral body in exactly the same way as the other person felt it when they received it. So, in the spiritual world, you objectively experience everything that you yourself have caused in the outer world. In this way, one takes on the power, the tendency, to compensate for this pain in one of the following incarnations. It is so that when one relives it, one notices it in one's own astral body: What one did there hurts! And one realizes that one has placed a stone in the way of one's further development. The stone must be removed! Otherwise, one cannot get past it. At that moment, you take on the intention, the tendency, to remove this stone so that when you have lived through the Kamaloka period, you actually arrive in childhood with nothing but good intentions, namely, the intention to remove all the obstacles you have created in your life. You are completely filled with good intentions. The fact that one has these intentions as a force within oneself brings about the very peculiar shaping of future life courses.

[ 10 ] Let us assume that B caused harm to A in his twentieth year. Now he himself must experience the pain, and he takes with him the intention to make amends to A in a future life, and indeed in the physical world, because that is where the harm was done. The fact that he has this power, that is, the will to make amends, forms a bond of attraction between B and A, who suffered the harm, and this bond of attraction brings them together again in their next life. That mysterious force of attraction that draws people together in life comes from what has been absorbed in Kamaloka and formed into forces. We are led in life to people with whom we have something to make up for or with whom we have something to do, precisely because of what we have gone through in Kamaloka. Now you can imagine that what we have absorbed in Kamaloka as compensation for a life cannot always be made up for in a single life. It may be that we have established relationships with a large number of people in one life and that the next Kamaloka period has given us the opportunity to meet these people again. Now, it depends on the other people whether we meet them again in the next life. This is then spread over many lives. In one life we have to make amends for this, in another life for something else, and so on. It should not be imagined that we can make up for everything in the next life. It also depends on whether the other person develops the corresponding bond of attraction in their soul.

[ 11 ] Now let us take a closer look at the workings of karma and examine it in a specific case. In Kamaloka, we form the intention to do this or that in the next life or in one of the next lives. What is implanted in our soul as a force remains in the soul; it does not leave the soul again. We are reborn with all the forces we have absorbed. This is completely inevitable. Now, there are not only things to do in life in a karmic context that relate to making amends to someone else, although what is to be said can also relate to this. We have placed many obstacles in our path, we have lived one-sidedly, we have not used our lives properly, we have lived only for this or that pleasure, this or that work, and we have let other opportunities that presented themselves in life pass us by, thereby failing to develop other abilities. This is also something that awakens karmic causes in us in the Kamaloka life. This is how we live our way into the next life. Now we are reborn, with zero years. Let us assume that we live to the age of ten or twenty. Everything we have absorbed in our soul in terms of Kamaloka forces lies there, and when it is ripe for life, it comes out. For a certain period of our life, an inner compulsion undoubtedly arises in some form or another to carry this out. So let us assume that in our twentieth year, an inner urge, an inner drive arises in us to carry out some action because we have absorbed this force in Kamaloka. So we stick with it because it is the simplest case: the inner urge arises to make amends to someone. The person is there, the bond of attraction has brought us together. We could do it quite well for external reasons. But there may still be an obstacle: the compensation could require an action on our part that we are not capable of through our organization. In our organization, we are also dependent on hereditary forces. This always creates disharmony in every life. When a person is born, they are on the one hand within the hereditary forces. They inherit the characteristics that they can inherit from their ancestors for their physical body and for their etheric body. This inheritance is, of course, not entirely without external connection to what our soul has prescribed for itself karmically. For our soul, which descends from the spiritual world, is drawn to the parents, to the family, where characteristics can be inherited that are most closely related to the needs of the soul. But they are never entirely identical with the needs of this soul. That cannot be in our body. There is always a certain discrepancy between the hereditary forces that are present and what the soul has within itself on the basis of its past lives. And it is simply a matter of the soul being strong enough to overcome all the resistance present in the hereditary line, so that it is able to shape its organization throughout its entire life in such a way that it overcomes what is not suitable for it. In this respect, people are very different. There are souls that have become very strong through their previous lives. Such a soul must be born into the most suitable body, not the absolutely perfect body. It may be strong enough to overcome almost everything that is not suitable for it, but this is not always the case. Let us examine this in detail and consider our brain.

[ 12 ] When we consider this instrument of our imagination and thought life, we inherit it as an external instrument from our ancestral line. It is shaped in its finer curves and convolutions from the ancestral line. To a certain extent, the soul will always be able to overcome what does not suit it through an inner force, and its tools will be able to adapt to its powers; but only to a certain extent. The stronger soul can do this more, the weaker soul less. And if circumstances arise that make it impossible for us to overcome the conflicting dispositions and organizations of the brain through our soul forces, then we cannot handle the instrument properly. Then what we might call the impossibility of handling this instrument occurs, in a certain sense a mental defect, a mental illness, as it is called. What is called a melancholic temperament also occurs, because certain organizations within us cannot be overcome by the forces of the soul, which are not strong enough for this. So now, in the middle of incarnation—at the beginning and end of incarnation it is different—we always have within us a certain inadequacy of the instrument in relation to the forces of the soul. This is always the mysterious reason for the inner conflict and disharmony of human nature. Everything that people often think about the reason for their dissatisfaction is usually only a mask. In truth, the reasons lie where we have just pointed out. So we see how the soul, which lives from incarnation to incarnation, relates to what we receive in the line of heredity.

[ 13 ] Now let us imagine that we are reborn, and in our twentieth year our soul urges us to make amends for this or that deed. The person in question is also there, but our soul is unable to overcome the inner resistance that could allow the deed to be carried out. We must always set our powers in motion if we are to carry out any deed. Most people do not notice that something is going on in their being; they do not need to notice it at first. The following may well happen. A person lives in the world. Twenty years after his birth, the urge and desire to compensate for something lives in his soul. The possibility of compensation would also be there, the external circumstances would be there. But he is not inwardly capable of using his organs in such a way that he could carry out what he should carry out.

[ 14 ] The person does not need to know anything of what has now been said, but he will become aware of the effect. The effect now appears as this or that illness, and here lies the karmic connection between what happened in a previous life and the illness. The entire disease process will now proceed with this spiritual cause in such a way that it will lead to this person becoming capable of balancing things out the next time the circumstances arise. So, in our twenties, we are incapable of doing this or that. But the urge, the impulse is there; the soul wants to do it. What does the soul do instead? It fights, so to speak, against its useless organ; it storms against its useless organ, and the result is that it smashes it, so to speak, that it destroys it. The organ that should actually be used to carry out the act externally is destroyed under the influence of these forces, and the result is that the reaction process must occur, which we now call the healing process, in which the forces of the organism must be called upon to rebuild the organ. This organ, which has been destroyed because it was not as it should have been in order for the human being to do his or her work, is now being built by the illness in exactly the way the soul needs it to carry out this act, for which it may now, after the illness, already be too late. But now the soul has taken on a completely different power, namely, during the corresponding reincarnation, to shape this organ during growth and throughout its entire development in such a way that this task can be carried out during the next reincarnation. Thus, illness can be what makes us capable in one life of carrying out what is our karmic duty in another life.

[ 15 ] Here we have a mysterious connection between illness, which is basically a process of upward development, and a karmic connection between illness and this upward development. In order for the soul to develop the power to shape an organ as it is needed, this organ, which is unsuitable, must be broken down and rebuilt by the soul forces. This brings us to a law that already exists in the human life cycle and must be described as follows: Human beings must acquire their power by overcoming obstacles in the physical world piece by piece. This is basically how we have acquired all our powers, by overcoming this or that resistance in previous lives. Our present abilities are the result of our illnesses in previous lives. To be particularly clear, let us assume that a soul is not yet capable of using the middle brain. How can it acquire the ability to use the middle brain properly? It can only do so by first realizing its inability to use the middle brain, then destroying it and rebuilding it; and in rebuilding it, it learns to acquire the strength it needs in this direction. Everything that we ourselves have once accomplished through destruction and reconstruction, we can do. This has been felt by all those who, in this or that religious creed on earth, have attributed a very significant essence to destruction and restoration. In the Indian creed, “Shiva” are the ruling powers that destroy and restore. Here we already have one of the ways in which karmic processes bring about illness, so to speak. For those processes in which it is not so much the individuality of the human being that is taken into account as the nature of human beings in general, there is already something that causes illnesses to occur more generally. For example, we see childhood illnesses occur quite typically at certain times. They are nothing more than an expression of the fact that, while going through its childhood illnesses, the child learns to control a certain part of its organs from within and can then control them in all subsequent incarnations. We should regard illnesses as a process that makes human beings capable. This brings us to a completely different way of thinking about illnesses. Of course, one cannot conclude from this that if someone is run over by a train, this must be explained in the same way. All of this must always be sought outside of illness, outside of what has just been characterized. But there is another case of karmic causation of illness that is no less interesting and that we can only understand if we characterize the circumstances in life a little more precisely.

[ 16 ] Suppose you learn this or that in life, what one learns in life. You have to learn it first, because the most important acquisitions in life are definitely learned first. The process of learning is absolutely necessary. But that is not the end of it, because learning is also the most external process. When we have absorbed something, it does not mean that, even if we have learned what is involved, we have already experienced everything that what we have learned is supposed to do for us. We are born into life with very specific abilities, some of which we have acquired through heredity, some through our previous lives. The scope of our abilities is limited. In every life, we increase our experiences and adventures. What we experience is not as closely connected to us as what we bring into life with us in the form of temperament, natural disposition, and so on. What we have learned during our life, initially as memory and habit, is more loosely connected to us. It therefore emerges in isolated parts during our life. Only after life does it emerge in the etheric body, in the great tableau of memory. We must now incorporate this into ourselves; it must become part of us.

[ 17 ] So let us assume that we have learned something in our life and are reborn. When we are reborn, it may well be that, due to heredity or other circumstances, or perhaps because our learning did not proceed harmoniously and we learned one thing but not what we needed to reach the level of what we learned, we develop what we learned in one direction after rebirth, but not in another. Let us assume that we have learned something in life that made it necessary for a certain part of our brain to be organized in a certain way in a subsequent life, or for this or that to function in a certain way in the blood circulation, and let us now assume that we did not learn the other things that are also necessary. However, this is by no means a deficiency. Human beings must proceed in leaps and bounds in their lives and must experience and recognize that they have pursued something in a one-sided manner. Now they are reborn with the fruits of what they have learned, but they lack the opportunity to shape everything in such a way that everything can be lived out, so that they can also carry out what they have learned in life. It may be, for example, that a person was even initiated to a certain degree into the great mysteries of existence during one incarnation. Now he is reborn in such a way that these forces, which have been implanted in him, want to come out. But let us assume that he has been unable to develop certain forces that can bring about the corresponding harmony of the organs. At a certain point in life, what he learned earlier wants to come out. But he lacks an organ that is necessary to carry this out. What is the consequence of this? An illness must occur, an illness whose karmic cause may lie very, very deep. And, so to speak, a part of the organism must be destroyed and rebuilt. Then, during this rebuilding process, the soul senses which forces are the right ones to move in a different direction, and takes this feeling of which forces are the right ones with it. If this stems from such learning or even from an initiation, it is usually the case that the fruits are then evident in the life in question. An illness arises, so that the soul senses that it is lacking this or that. And then, for example, immediately after the illness, something may occur that would not otherwise have been possible. It may be that in a previous life one could have risen to a certain level of enlightenment, but now a button in the brain has not been pressed, and one has not developed the power that could have pressed it. Now it is inevitable that this button must be broken. This can then cause a serious illness. Then the affected limb is rebuilt and the soul feels the forces necessary to flip the switch, and afterwards one has the enlightenment that one is supposed to have. Illness processes can certainly be seen as very meaningful precursors.

[ 18 ] However, this brings us to things that our profane world today will turn its nose up at. But many people have experienced something like a constant dissatisfaction, as if there were something in their soul that cannot come out, something that makes life virtually impossible. Then a serious illness comes, and overcoming this serious illness means that something completely new enters life, something that feels like redemption, that the knot has actually been untied and the organ can be used. This was only because the organ was not usable. However, in today's life cycle, people still have many such buttons, and they cannot all be released at once. We do not always have to think of enlightenment; it also occurs in many subordinate life processes.

[ 19 ] So we see that we are faced with the necessity of developing this or that, and that here too, in the karmic line of causation, lies the cause of illness. Therefore, we should never be completely satisfied when we say in a purely trivial sense: If I am struck by an illness, I have brought it upon myself through my karma. For in this case we should not think only of karma in the past, that the illness is therefore a conclusion, but we should even remember that the illness is only the second link — that in the illness we have the cause for the creative power and efficiency for the future. We completely misunderstand illness and karma if we always look only to the past; this makes karma something that, one might say, is merely a completely random law of fate. But karma becomes a law of action, of the fruitfulness of life, when we are able to look from the present into the future through karma.

[ 20 ] All this points us to a great law that governs our human existence. And in order to gain at least a little insight into this great law today—we will return to it later and characterize it more precisely—let us take a look back at the time when human beings in their present form came into being, the Lemurian epoch. There, they lived their way down from divine-spiritual existence into their present outer existence, surrounding themselves first with shells, thus embarking on the path of outer incarnations and progressing from incarnation to incarnation until today. Before human beings entered into incarnations, it was not possible in the same sense as today to transplant diseases into themselves. Only when man acquired the ability within himself to regulate his relationship with his environment could he err, thereby causing false inner organ formations and implanting the possibility of illness within himself. Before that, it was impossible for man to cause disease processes within himself. When everything was still under the influence of divine powers and forces, when it was not yet up to him to lead his life, the possibility of illness did not yet exist. Then this possibility of illness arose. Where, then, can we best learn what the paths to healing are? This can best be learned by looking back to those times when divine spiritual forces worked within human beings and endowed them with absolute health, without the possibility of illness, that is, to the time before the first incarnation of human beings. This is how people always felt when they knew something about these things. And now try to take a deep look at such things as they are presented in mythology from this starting point. I do not even want to point you to the source of actual medicine in the Egyptian Hermetic tradition; I only want to point you to the Greek and Roman Asclepiad tradition.

[ 21 ] Asclepius, the son of Apollo, is, so to speak, the father of Greek physicians. And what does Greek mythology tell us about him? His father brings him to that mountain in his youth, where he can become the pupil of the centaur Chiron. And it is the centaur Chiron who teaches Asclepius, the father of medicine, about the healing powers of plants and other healing powers to be found on earth. Chiron, the centaur, what kind of being is he? He is a being who is characterized as one of those who existed before the descent of human beings before the Lemurian epoch: a being half human, half animal. Hidden in this myth is the fact that Aesculapius was shown in the corresponding mystery those powers which were the great powers of health that could bring about health before human beings entered into their first incarnation.

[ 22 ] And so we see how this great law, this great spiritual fact that must interest us so much at the end of humanity's pilgrimage on earth, is also expressed in Greek mythology. It is precisely the myths that will reveal themselves for what they are: images of the deepest connections in life, once human beings have mastered the ABCs of spiritual science. Myths are images of the deepest mysteries of human existence.

[ 23 ] When the whole of life is viewed from this perspective, then the whole of life will also be placed under this perspective, and spiritual science will increasingly become something — this must be emphasized more and more — that will become part of everyday life. People will live spiritual science, and only then will what spiritual science has strived for from the beginning be realized. Spiritual science will become the great impulse for the upward ascent of humanity, for true salvation and true human progress.