The Rudolf Steiner Archive

First Lecture

[ 1 ] The remarks we were able to make regarding the spiritual facts and beings of the higher worlds—which were interrupted by our General Assembly—can now be followed by a number of points that can shed light on certain matters related to the current development of humanity. While the reflections we engaged in last fall were intended to lead us, so to speak, into the processes within the higher hierarchies, today we wish to consider some matters that are close to our hearts as truly human concerns.

[ 2 ] Anyone who has studied anthroposophy for a while, and who has particularly taken to heart the fundamental concepts of reincarnation and karma, as well as the other truths concerning humanity and its evolution, will surely ask themselves: Why is it so difficult to arrive at a direct, real understanding of that essence within the human being that passes through repeated earthly lives—that is, the human essence which, if one were only to get to know it more and more precisely, would quite naturally lead to an insight into the mysteries of repeated earthly lives and, indeed, of karma?

[ 3 ] It must be said, however, that people usually approach everything related to this question in exactly the wrong way. To begin with, as is only too natural, people seek to understand these matters through their ordinary thinking and ordinary intellect, and they ask themselves: To what extent can one find evidence in the facts of life that the concept of repeated earthly lives and karma is correct?

[ 4 ] Now, a person may indeed be able to go so far with such an endeavor, which is essentially based on reflection; but they will still only be able to go so far. For our world of thought, as it is constituted, is actually entirely dependent on those structures within our overall human organization that are in fact limited to the single incarnation we receive by being assigned this particular organization precisely as we live as human beings between birth and death. And everything we can call our world of thought depends on this organization—indeed, on the specific configuration of the physical body and the etheric body, which extends only one step beyond the physical body. And the more acute these thoughts are, the more they can engage with abstract truths, the more these thoughts depend on the external human organization, which is limited to a single incarnation. We can already infer this from the fact that, as has often been said, in the life between death and a new birth—that is, in the spiritual life—of all that we experience in the soul, it is our thoughts that we are least able to take with us. Thus, what we conceive with the greatest acuity is precisely what we must leave behind the most. One could literally say: What does a human being lay aside when he passes through the gate of death? Well, first of all, their physical body. But of all that is now inner, a person sheds almost just as completely, without a trace, everything they have formed in their soul as abstract thoughts. These two things—the physical body and abstract thoughts, indeed, downright scientific thoughts—are what a person can take with them the least of all when they pass through the gate of death. To a certain extent, a person easily takes with them their inclinations, their drives, and their desires as they have developed, especially their habits; they also take with them the nature and character of their volitional impulses, but least of all their thoughts.

[ 5 ] Precisely because thoughts are so closely tied to external organization, it can be concluded that they are not a particularly suitable tool for penetrating the mysteries of reincarnation and karma, which are, after all, truths that transcend the individual incarnation. But one can still go so far, and to a certain extent one must even train one’s thinking if one wishes to understand reincarnation and karma theoretically. What can be said about this has, in essence, already been said either in the chapter on reincarnation and karma in *Theosophy* or in the short treatise *Reincarnation and Karma: Necessary Mental Images from the Standpoint of Modern Natural Science*. One can hardly add much to what is said in these two works.

[ 6 ] What the intellect can add to this is not the question that concerns us today; rather, the question is: How can a person arrive at a certain understanding of reincarnation and karma—that is, an understanding that is more than a mere theoretical conviction, one that can provide a kind of inner certainty that the actual spiritual-soul core within us comes from past lives and passes into future lives?

[ 7 ] One arrives at such a specific perspective by carrying out inner processes that are by no means easy—they are difficult—but which can nevertheless be carried out. The first step one can take is to practice a little of the ordinary kind of self-knowledge, the kind that may consist of a person looking back on their life, so to speak, in such a way that they ask themselves: What kind of person have I actually been? Have I been a person with a strong inclination toward reflection, an inwardly contemplative being, or have I been a person who has always loved the sensations of the external world more, who liked or disliked this or that in life? Was I a person who liked to read in school but didn’t like to do math, who liked to hit the other children but didn’t like to be hit? Or was I perhaps a child who was always destined to get hit, and who wasn’t clever enough to make the others get hit? — To look back on one’s life in this way, and in particular to ask oneself: What was I—intellectually or in terms of my emotional dispositions or volitional impulses—particularly predisposed to? What came easily to me, and what became difficult? What affected me so deeply that I wanted to escape it? What affected me so deeply that I said to myself: It is all right to me that it turned out this way, and so on—to look back on one’s life in this way, in a certain sense, is good for a more intimate understanding of the core of one’s spiritual and psychological being; above all, to clearly bring before the soul everything that belongs to what one actually did not want. For example, whether one was a son who perhaps would have liked to become a poet, but was destined by his father to be a craftsman and also had to become a craftsman, even though he never really wanted to be one; he became one, but would have preferred to become a poet. Thus, to clarify what one actually wanted to become, but what one became against one’s will; then to clarify what suited one in one’s youth and what one never received. Then to further clarify what one really wanted to emerge from, what one really wanted to escape. I note that what I am saying now is meant to refer to life in the past, not to the future; that would be a mental image.

[ 8 ] So, basically, you have to figure out what such a look back at the past tells you: what you didn’t want, what you wanted to escape from, and so on. Once you’ve figured that out, you actually have a picture of the things in your life that you like the very least. But that is precisely the point: to identify the things in your life that you liked the least in the past. And now you must try to fully immerse yourself in a highly peculiar mental image: to energetically want and desire everything that you actually did not want or wish for! So, stand before your soul with determination: What would you actually be like if you had vividly, intensely desired all that which you did not actually desire, all that which, deep down, went against the grain in your life? — In doing so, you must, in a certain way, set aside that which you have managed to overcome. For the most important thing is to desire those things—or to imagine them as if you were vividly desiring them—that you did not desire, or against which you were unable to assert your desires, so that you create in your feelings and thoughts a being of whom you can have a mental image that, fundamentally, you have not been at all until now. And now imagine that you have actually been precisely this being with all vehemence, with all intensity. If you create a mental image of this, if you succeed in identifying with this being that you have, so to speak, constructed for yourself in this way, then you have already gained something substantial on the path to getting to know the inner core of your soul. For it is precisely through the image one can now form of one’s own personality in the manner described that one will come to realize something that one is not in the present incarnation, but which one has brought into the present incarnation. One’s deeper being will become clear through the image one constructs in this way.

[ 9 ] So, in essence, what is required of someone who wishes to reach the core of their inner being is something that people in our time do the very least. Our present age is not at all inclined to even remotely yearn for anything resembling what has now been demanded; for in our present age, when people reflect on themselves, what they strive for most of all is to find themselves absolutely right just as they are. If we go back to earlier times of a more religious development, we find the feeling that a person should feel contrite, since they fall so short of what they can call their divine model. That was not, admittedly, the mental image discussed today, but it was the mental image that led away from what people are usually content with and toward something else—if not toward the conviction of another incarnation—namely, toward that being which survives beyond our physical constitution as it develops between birth and death. The following will become clear to you when you sketch the counter-image of what you are: this counter-image, however difficult it has become for you to grasp it as your image in this life, still has something to do with you; you cannot deny that. Once you have it, it will haunt you, it will hover before your soul and crystallize in such a way that you will say to yourself: This image has something to do with me, but certainly not with my present life. — Then the feeling arises that this image comes precisely from a previous life.

[ 10 ] If we keep this in mind, we will soon realize how mistaken most of the mental images are that people usually form about reincarnation and karma. You have probably heard it yourself: if you encounter someone in life who, for example, is good at math, and if you are also an anthroposophist, you will easily form a mental image of this person as being good at math in a previous incarnation. Unfortunately, many chains of reincarnation are constructed by untrained anthroposophists in such a way that one simply believes one can identify the previous incarnation by assuming that the abilities present in the current one must also be found in the previous one—or possibly in several previous incarnations. This is the worst way to speculate. One usually ends up with the wrong conclusion. For genuine observations using the methods of Spiritual Science usually show the exact opposite. People, for example, who were good at arithmetic or mathematics in their previous incarnation may appear in their present incarnation in such a way that they show no aptitude for mathematics at all, that they lack mathematical talent. And if one wants to know what talents one most likely had in the previous incarnation—I would point out that we are now speaking in terms of probability— if you want to know what abilities in this regard—in terms of intelligence, artistic matters, and so on—you possessed in your previous incarnation, you would do well to reflect on what you are least capable of in this incarnation, what you are least suited for in this incarnation. Once you have figured that out, you will discover in what you likely excelled in your previous incarnation, what you were particularly gifted at. I say “likely” because, on the one hand, these things are true, but on the other hand, they are often contradicted by other facts. For example, a situation may arise where someone had a special mathematical gift in a previous incarnation but died young, so that this mathematical gift did not fully manifest; then, in their next incarnation, they will be born again with a mathematical gift that will then appear as a continuation from the previous incarnation. The mathematician Abel, who died young, will most certainly be reborn in his next incarnation with a strong mathematical talent. Where, on the other hand, a mathematician has lived to a very old age, where this talent has run its course, the person in question will be downright dull-witted with regard to mathematics in his next incarnation. I know of one individual who had so little mathematical talent that, as a schoolboy, he downright hated numbers; and while he received good grades in other subjects, it was only because he was given particularly high marks in those other subjects that he was able to make it through school at all. This was due to the fact that in his previous incarnation he had been a particularly good mathematician. |

[ 11 ] If we examine this further, it becomes clear that what one does externally in one incarnation—that is, not merely what one does externally, but what one’s external or internal vocation is—becomes part of the formation of the internal organs in the next incarnation, for example, in such a way that if one was a particularly good mathematician in one incarnation, one takes what one acquired there in terms of mastery of numbers and figures and incorporates it into a special development of one’s sensory organs, for example, the eyes. And people who see very well owe this careful development of the forms of the eye to the fact that in their previous incarnation they thought in forms and carried this thinking in forms with them, and, as they passed through the time between death and new birth, they particularly refined their eyes. There the mathematical talent has flowed into the eye and no longer expresses itself as mathematical talent.

[ 12 ] Another case known to occultists is that of an individual who, in one incarnation, experienced architectural forms with particular intensity: what they felt there manifested as forces within their inner soul life and refined their sense of hearing with exceptional subtlety, so that this individual became a great musician in their next incarnation. It did not become a great architect because the forms of sensation derived from architecture became organ-building, leaving nothing but a profound capacity for musical perception.

[ 13 ] A superficial examination of the similarities usually obscures the unique characteristics of successive incarnations. And just as we must reflect on what we did not like and create a mental image of it as if we intensely desired it, so too should we reflect on the things we are least capable of, in which we are, so to speak, completely dull. And when we discover the most obtuse aspects of our being, they can most likely lead us to what we excelled at most in the previous incarnation. From this we see that it is natural to start with precisely these things in the wrong way. As, incidentally, a certain reflection on the fact that it is precisely the innermost core of the soul that survives from one incarnation to the next can teach us, this is shown, for example, by the consideration that a person never learns languages more easily simply because in a previous incarnation they lived in a linguistic region connected to the language they are now supposed to learn; for otherwise our college students would not have such a hard time learning Greek or Latin, even though many of them lived in an area in their earlier incarnations where these languages were spoken as the common vernaculars.

[ 14 ] Regarding what we bring to ourselves from the outside, we must say that it is so closely connected with what concludes in a person’s life between birth and death that there can be no question of these things reappearing in the same way in the next incarnation, but rather that they are transformed into forces and carried over into the next incarnation or incarnations. Those people who, for example, have a particular aptitude for learning languages in one incarnation will not have this aptitude in their next incarnation; instead, they will have the aptitude to make more unbiased judgments than other people. |

[ 15 ] These are matters connected with the mysteries of reincarnation. And it is precisely when one looks at these mysteries of reincarnation that one gains, in the most intense way, a mental image of what is actually truly within the human being, and what, in a certain sense, must nevertheless be counted among the external aspects. For example, for modern human beings, language is by no means an inner phenomenon anymore. One can love language for the sake of what it expresses, for the sake of the national spirit; but it is something that passes from one incarnation to the next in transformed forms of energy.

[ 16 ] When a person pursues such things that, on the one hand, he says: “I want to truly desire and will what I have become against my will and for which I have the least aptitude”—then he can know: The mental images I gain there will coalesce into the image of my previous incarnation. — This image of the previous incarnation will emerge with great clarity as soon as one gets serious about the things that have now been characterized in somewhat greater detail. One will indeed notice that, in the very way the mental images one has thus gained come together, one will feel: This image is actually quite close to me; it is not far from me at all. Or one will feel: It is an image far, far away from me. For if, through the elaboration of the mental images described today, one has painted such an image of one’s previous incarnation before one’s soul, then one will generally be able to gauge how much this image has faded. One will have the feeling, as if from a sense: You are standing here; your father, your grandfather, your great-grandfather cannot be the image standing there before you. — But if one allows the image to take effect on oneself, then one does indeed form the opinion through feeling and intuition: So and so many people stand between you and this image! — Let us suppose one gets this feeling—and such a feeling arises—that twelve people stand between oneself and this image, and another person gets the feeling that seven people stand between themselves and the image. But one does get such a feeling, and this feeling is extraordinarily important. For if, for example, twelve people stand between oneself and this image, one need only divide by three and would then get four. These are then, as a rule, the centuries that separate one from the previous incarnation. So a person who feels that they are twelve people removed from the image I have described in terms of its origin—that there are twelve people above them—would have to say to themselves: My previous incarnation occurred four centuries before the present one. —This is cited merely as an example; it will be the case in very few instances, but it allows one to arrive at an estimate. Most will find that they can correctly estimate in this way when they were here before. However, the prerequisites for this are, of course, somewhat difficult.

[ 17 ] We have thus touched upon matters that are as far removed from contemporary consciousness as possible. And there is absolutely no doubt that if anyone were to recount these things to people who are unprepared for them, they would find them to be nothing more than irresponsible fantasies. Now, it is the very fate of the anthroposophical worldview that, of all worldviews to date, it must, in a certain sense, oppose what is traditional more than any other. For what is traditional, in the broadest sense as it confronts us, is the crudest, the most barren materialism. And precisely where certain worldviews confront us as if they stood most firmly on the ground of a scientific worldview, they are in fact such that they grow out of a certain fundamental materialistic outlook in the most barren way. Since anthroposophy is now destined, in a certain sense, to be for the vast world of worldviews what has been required today of the human being who is to gain a mental image of his previous incarnation, it may seem understandable that it must be very foreign to the modern human being to take anthroposophical views seriously. For people will be just as averse to desiring and wanting what they have not desired or wanted throughout their lives as spiritual truths are foreign to their habits of thought.

[ 18 ] One might ask: Why is spiritual truth coming to people right now? Why doesn't it give people time to develop until they are more mature?

[ 19 ] This is because it is hard to imagine a greater difference between two successive epochs of humanity than there will be between the epoch in which present-day humanity lives and the one into which humanity will grow when those living today are reborn in their next incarnation. For it does not depend on human beings how certain spiritual abilities develop; this depends on the entire meaning, significance, and essence of Earth’s evolution. For people today are, in fact, the furthest removed from believing in reincarnation and karma. Not the anthroposophists—though there are, of course, only a few anthroposophists in the world—not those who still belong to the old religious forms, but those who are today the bearers of outer cultural life; they are the ones who are today the furthest removed from believing in reincarnation and karma. Now, curiously enough, it is precisely this fact—that people today are least inclined to believe in reincarnation and karma—combined with what people today do and learn—namely, do and learn insofar as this has significance in terms of intellectual abilities—that will cause the opposite to occur for these people of the present in their next incarnation. These people of the present will, in their next incarnation—regardless of whether they pursue spiritual or materialistic goals—have a strong predisposition to sense their previous incarnation. No matter what the people of the present are doing: by virtue of being people of the present time, they will be reborn with a strong predisposition and a strong longing to experience something of their previous incarnation, to know something of it. We are currently at such a turning point in history, which is leading people from an incarnation in which they want to know the very least about reincarnation and karma, to an incarnation in which the most vivid feeling within them will be: My entire life as I live it now hangs in the balance for me if I cannot know anything about my previous incarnation. — And the people who now rail the most against reincarnation and karma will writhe in agony over the next life, because they cannot explain how life could have turned out this way. Anthroposophy is not pursued by people today to cultivate a certain longing for the previous life, but to gain an understanding of what will one day occur for all of humanity when the people living today are here again. The people who are anthroposophists today will share with others the inclination to want to remember again; but they will have understanding and thereby inner harmony in relation to their soul life. Those who reject anthroposophy today will want to know about it, and they will feel something like an inner torment for what would have been their previous incarnation in the next life; but they will understand nothing of what weighs most heavily upon them and torments them; they will be at a loss, will be inwardly disharmonious. And it will have to be said to them in the next incarnation: You will only begin to recognize what causes you torment when you create a mental image of yourself seriously desiring this torment. — Of course, no one will want this torment. But the people who are materialists today will then, in their next incarnation, begin to comprehend their inner remorse, their inner anguish and torment, when they follow the demands, the advice of those who will then be able to know and tell them: Just imagine, this life, which you wish to flee, is what you might have wanted. — When they begin to follow this advice, to reflect on it: “How could I have wanted this life?” — then they will say to themselves: “Ah yes, perhaps I lived in an incarnation in which I said: ‘What, another, next life or incarnation is supposed to follow this life? Nonsense! Stupidity! How can one believe such a thing!’ This life fulfills itself within itself, is self-contained; it sends no forces over into a later one! Yes, because I had the feeling back then that a subsequent life is futile, is nonsense, that is why it has become futile and nonsense! I have just planted that very thought within me as a force that now makes life so dreary and empty for me!

[ 20 ] That is a valid point. In a sense, materialism will run its course karmically. The next incarnation will be meaningful for those people who have come to the conviction that their life, as it is now, is not only fulfilled in itself but also contains the causes for the next one. The lives of those who, through the thought that reincarnation is nonsense, have made their own lives dreary and meaningless will be senseless, empty, and dreary.

[ 21 ] Thus we see that the thoughts we harbor do not carry over into the next life in an intensified form, but rather appear in the next life as transformed forces. In the spiritual world, thoughts as they are now in the life between birth and death have no significance; rather, they have significance only in a transformed form. If, for example, someone has a great thought, no matter how great that thought may be: when the person passes through the gate of death, the thought is no longer a thought. But the enthusiasm and the sensation and the feeling that has come alive under the influence of the thought—that passes through the gate of death. From anthroposophy itself, a person does not take the thoughts with them, but rather what they have experienced in the thoughts—down to the details, not just the general underlying feeling. This is what we wish to emphasize in particular: that thoughts as such are what is truly significant for the physical plane, and that when we speak of the effect of thought on the higher worlds, we must at the same time speak of a transformation of these thoughts upward into the higher worlds. Thoughts that thus deny reincarnation transform themselves in the reincarnated life into inner nothingness, into the inner emptiness of life, and inner nothingness, the inner emptiness of life, is experienced as torment, as disharmony. — You can even get a mental image of how such inner nothingness and emptiness must feel by making a comparison: imagine that you are quite fond of something and always enjoy seeing it whenever you come to a certain place. For example, you have become accustomed to seeing a certain flower blooming in a garden at a specific spot. If that flower is then cut down by a wicked hand, you will feel pain. When you do not have something you love, when you lack it, then you feel pain. So it is with the entire human organism. Through what does a person feel pain? When the etheric body and the astral body of an organ are always connected to a specific part of the physical body, and when this organ is cut and injured, the etheric body and the astral body cannot intervene effectively. It is just as if, by the cut of a wicked hand, the rose in the garden were cut off at a specific spot. When an organ is injured, the etheric body and the astral body cannot find what they are seeking; this is then felt as physical pain. Thus, the thoughts that a person has formed as continuing into the future will confront him in the future. Conversely, they will be missing, and he will find nothing where he seeks them in a specific place if he sends nothing of his powers of faith and knowledge into the next incarnation; and then he will perceive this absence of something in a place as pain and torment.

[ 22 ] This information will shed light on the karmic course of certain events from a particular perspective. It had to be provided because we wish to gain an even deeper insight into the ways in which human beings can take further steps to recognize their true spiritual and soul-based core.