The Rudolf Steiner Archive

15. The Dawn of Modern Occultism II

[ 1 ] Today we would like to build on the reflection from the day before yesterday, which can lead us to a deeply personal understanding of theosophical life. When we look back on our lives, when we try to make sense of their details, we can gain much from such a reflection on life. We will see, in some things that have befallen us or are befalling us as our fate, that we must acknowledge them as just, that we have deserved them. Let us say that a person has been somewhat reckless in this incarnation and is later struck by a stroke of fate; outwardly, one may no longer be able to connect the stroke of fate with the recklessness, but one still has the sense that this blow has come to us justly. Looking further ahead, we encounter other strokes of fate that seem like mere coincidence, for which we find no explanation. We find these two categories of experiences when we look back on our lives.

[ 2 ] The point is that we must make a clear distinction between what appears to us as chance and what seems to be a necessity. If a person views their life through these two categories of experience, they cannot achieve higher development without attempting to examine everything that appears to them as chance. We must especially try to look at the things we did not want, the things that run counter to what we like. There is a certain capacity of the soul to adopt a hypothetical perspective of possibility and say to oneself: What if I were to imagine that I had actually wanted precisely that which I did not want, that which is not at all pleasant to me, that which I do not like—that very thing I did not like at the time and did not want? One must imagine this intensely: that we ourselves would have wanted this very situation of ours with the greatest intensity.

[ 3 ] When it comes to what we perceive as chance, we must ask ourselves: What if we had applied our most determined will to bring all of this about? As if in meditation, we must place ourselves in this state of mind when faced with what appears to us in our lives as random events. And every person of the present can do this. If we proceed in this way, it gradually makes a very special impression on our soul; we feel as if something were trying to detach itself from us. I have imagined a second, a different person there, the soul tells itself; that person is now here. And one can no longer shake off this image; rather, such an imagined person gradually becomes our doppelgänger. “You actually have something to do with this imagined person,” the soul tells itself. One rises to the idea: “This person actually lives within you.” And if one immerses oneself quite deeply into this idea, then one becomes aware that this imagined person is not entirely without significance. The conviction awakens within us: This has happened before, and back then you possessed within yourself the willpower behind today’s apparent coincidences. — In this way, we acquire a deep conviction that we were here before, before we entered this physical body. And every person of the present can acquire this conviction.

[ 4 ] We must now consider what the successive incarnations of human beings are like. What is it, exactly, that reincarnates? How can we find out?

[ 5 ] In the life of the human soul, we must distinguish primarily between three types of soul experiences. First, our ideas, our thoughts. When we imagine something, this can happen in a completely neutral way. We do not need to love or hate what we imagine, nor do we need to feel sympathy or antipathy toward it. Following these ideas are the moods that arise from the fact that we like or love one thing, while detesting or hating another, and so on. A third type of psychological experience consists of volitional impulses. There are certainly transitions, but on the whole, these are the three categories of soul experiences. And it is a fundamental feature of a healthy soul life to be able to distinguish these three types of experience. Our life of imagination arises from our receiving external stimuli. Now everyone can easily see that this life of imagination is most closely connected with the present incarnation. This becomes clear when we consider that language serves as the means of expressing our ideas. And language, of course, can only be different in every incarnation. Just as we do not bring language with us when we begin a new incarnation, neither do we bring our ideas. We must acquire both—language and ideas—anew in every incarnation. Hebbel once made a curious entry in his diary. He mused on how drastically a play might have to be staged in which the reincarnated Plato is most severely scolded by his teacher for his poor understanding of Plato. — So the life of the imagination does not pass over from one incarnation to the next, and of all aspects of life, it is the life of the imagination that a person takes least with them into the afterlife. We do not form concepts after death, but perceive things directly, just as our physical eye perceives color. What we know as the world of concepts, we see after death as a net stretched across the world. But what remains with us once we have passed through the gate of death, and what we bring with us again as soul dispositions even in a new earthly birth, are our emotional stirrings, our moods. And we can observe, for example, in a child who is still very limited in terms of their imaginative life, how their emotional life, by contrast, already exhibits quite distinct patterns. And because our volitional impulses are linked to our emotional state, they too pass through the gate of death with us. For example, when a person succumbs to an error, it affects their mind differently than when they embrace a truth. We suffer the consequences of false ideas long after death. Therefore, we must say that we must look to what our moods and volitional impulses are when we ask ourselves what actually passes from one incarnation to the next.

[ 6 ] Let us suppose that a painful event befell us ten or twenty years ago. Today, we can still recall it quite clearly in our minds, even down to the smallest details. But how much has the pain we felt back then faded, and how little is a person capable of reliving the emotional turmoil and impulses of will from that time. Let us consider Bismarck, of whom it is well known under what extraordinarily difficult circumstances he went to war in 1866. What emotional turmoil, what immense abundance of impulses of will must have played out in Bismarck’s soul! But did Bismarck, even when writing his memoirs, relive these emotional stirrings and resolves with anything approaching the same intensity? Certainly not! Human memory is such between birth and death that it exists as a memory of imagination. Of course, it may be that even after ten or twenty years, pain still overtakes us at the memory of an event that took place back then and was painful for us, but in general the pain will have faded greatly over the years, while in our imagination the memory can extend down to the details. If we now imagine that we had wanted such painful events, that we would have found appealing what we as young people might have found quite unappealing, then the difficulty of this activity stirs the soul; it affects our mind. If, for example, a stone once fell on our head, we now try with all our might to imagine that we ourselves had wanted it that way. Through such imaginings—that we ourselves had willed the chance events that affected us—we develop a spiritual memory of our past incarnations. In this way, we gain an understanding of how we are situated within the spiritual world. We begin to comprehend our destiny. The will behind the chance events of this life we have brought with us from our previous incarnation.

[ 7 ] If we allow ourselves to indulge in such thoughts during meditation and develop them further, this can be of extraordinary importance. Something also happens between death and a new birth; indeed, this time is infinitely rich in experiences, though they are of a purely spiritual nature. Therefore, we also bring with us moods and impulses of will from the time between our last death and our last birth—that is, from the purely spiritual world. This is the basis for a fact of recent times that is extraordinarily important, yet generally receives little attention. A fact that is present in the lives of many people today, though most do not realize it. But our theosophical spiritual movement has the task of pointing out this fact and its significance. Let me illustrate what this is all about with an example.

[ 8 ] Let’s say a person has a reason to go somewhere, and this path involves following in the footsteps of another person—a child, perhaps. Suddenly, the person sees that a precipice yawns at the edge of the path the child is walking. The child will inevitably fall into it if they take just a few more steps. He runs after the child to save them, running and running, completely forgetting about the abyss. Suddenly, he hears a voice coming from somewhere, calling out to him: “Stop!”—He stands still, as if nailed to the spot. At that moment, the child grabs hold of a tree and also stops, so that nothing bad happens. Had the voice not come at that very moment, the man would undoubtedly have plunged into the abyss. The man now asks himself: Where did the voice come from? He finds no one who could have called out. But he is aware that he would undoubtedly have been lost had he not heard that voice. No matter how closely he searches, he cannot discover that any physical being called out to him.

[ 9 ] Many people today might have a similar experience in their lives if they engage in intimate self-reflection. People pay far too little attention to such things these days. Either such an experience will pass the person in question by without a trace—in which case the impression fades, and they do not consider the experience important— But let us suppose that the person becomes attentive; they do not consider this experience meaningless. Then they might come to the realization: You were actually standing there facing a crisis, a karmic crisis; your life was actually supposed to end at that very moment—you had forfeited your life. It is only through something akin to chance that you were saved, and since that hour, a second life has been grafted onto the first, as it were. You must regard this second life as a gift to you, and you must behave accordingly. — If such an experience triggers in a person this inner disposition that they regard their life from that hour onward as a gift, this makes that person today a follower of Christian Rosenkreutz. For this is his way of calling souls to himself. And the one who can recall such an experience—and all who sit here can find something of this kind in their lives upon sufficiently intimate reflection—such a person can say to themselves: Christian Rosenkreutz has given me a sign from the spiritual world that I belong to his current. Christian Rosenkreutz has added to my karma the possibility of such an experience. This is the way Christian Rosenkreutz chooses his disciples. Thus he chooses his community. Whoever consciously experiences this says to himself: A path has been shown to me; I must follow it and see to what extent I can place my powers in the service of Rosicrucianism. But those who have not understood the sign will come to it later, for once the sign has been given to someone, they will never be able to shake it off.

[ 10 ] The reason a person can have an experience of the kind described is that, in the time between their last death and their last birth, that person encountered Christian Rosenkreutz in the spiritual world. At that time, Christian Rosenkreutz chose us. He implanted a volitional impulse within us that now leads us to such experiences. This is the way in which spiritual connections are brought about. From a materialistic perspective, of course, all of this is regarded as a hallucination, just as Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus is viewed as a hallucination. The consequence of this would, of course, be that the whole of Christianity is based on a hallucination, that is, on an error. For theologians know full well that the event at Damascus actually forms the foundation for the entire later Christian tradition. And if this foundation is based on a delusion, then, if one were to think this through consistently, one would naturally have to regard everything built upon it as false.

[ 11 ] Today we have attempted to clarify how certain things that concern us in life, and certain experiences, can show us how we fit into the spiritual fabric of the world. If we cultivate our emotional memory, as described today, then we attune ourselves to what flows and pulses through the world as spiritual life. Therefore, the true theosophist is not yet the one who knows the teachings theoretically, but rather the one who knows how to interpret their own life and that of others in the sense indicated today. Then Theosophy becomes a fundamental force that transforms our inner life. And this must indeed be the goal of the work in our branches: that our inner spiritual experiences may be transformed, that we may learn to perceive the immortal through the gradual development of our spiritual memory. The theosophist must have faith: if you only will it, if you only apply your strong inner powers, then you can transform your character. One must learn to feel and sense that an immortal force reigns within ourselves and in everything else. The theosophist becomes a theosophist by remaining receptive throughout his entire life, even with gray hair. And this awareness that one can always and forever progress will transform our entire present spiritual life.

[ 12 ] Materialism is causing people to age prematurely. Thirty years ago, for example, children looked different than they do today. Today, you see ten- and twelve-year-olds who look like old people; there are children today who give the impression of being elderly. People have become so precocious, especially the adults. They say: We no longer want to lie to our children, for example, by telling them that the stork brings the babies. Children must be enlightened. But in truth, this is how they lie to the children. Our descendants will once again know that our children’s souls actually float down from the higher worlds as bird-like spiritual beings. It is extremely important to have an imaginative conception of certain things that are not yet comprehensible. It is, however, quite possible to find a better image for the reality in question than the stork story. What matters is that spiritual forces are at work between child and parent or educator; there must be something like a secret magnetism there. One must believe in the imagery one presents to the children. If one wants to explain death to children, one must point to another natural phenomenon. One can say: Look at the butterfly as it flies out of the chrysalis: so it is also with the human soul after death. — But first one must believe oneself that the world is arranged in such a way that the forces in the butterfly flying out of the chrysalis have drawn for us an image of the process of the soul emerging from the body. The World Spirit has sought to draw our attention to how this happens; that is why it has inscribed such an image in nature. It is immensely important that we may always learn, that we may always remain young, independent of our physical body. And that is the immensely important task of Theosophy: to bring the world the rejuvenation it needs. We must rise above the mundane and sensory. To recognize the soul and the spirit in practice—that must be the goal of our branch life. The realization must increasingly permeate us that we can become masters of the external world through the soul.