Karma
is best understood by contrasting it with the other impulse in
man — that impulse which we describe with the word Freedom.
Let us first place the question of karma before us, quite
crudely, if I may say so. What does it signify? In human life we
have to record the fact of reincarnation, successive earthly
lives. Feeling ourselves within a given earthly life, we can look
back — in thought, at least, to begin with — and see
how this present life is a repetition of a number of former
earthly lives. It was preceded by another, and that in turn by
yet another life on earth, and so on until we get back into the
ages where it is impossible to speak of repeated earthly lives as
we do in the present epoch of the earth. For as we go farther
backward, there begins a time when the life between birth and
death and the life between death and a new birth become so
similar to one another that the immense difference which exists
today between them is no longer there at all. Today we live in
our earthly body between birth and death in such a way that in
everyday consciousness we feel ourselves quite cut off from the
spiritual world. Out of this everyday consciousness people speak
of the spiritual world as a “beyond.” They will even
speak of it as though they could doubt its existence or deny it
altogether.
This
is because man's life in earthly existence restricts him to the
outer world of the senses, and to the intellect; and intellect
does not look far enough to perceive what is, after all,
connected with this earthly existence. Hence there arise
countless disputations, all of which ultimately have their source
in the “unknown.” No doubt you will often have been
present when people were arguing about Monism, Dualism and the
rest ... It is, of course, absurd to argue around these
catch-words. When people wrangle in this way, it often seems as
though there were some primitive man who had never heard that
there is such substance as “air.” To one who knows
that air exists, and what its functions are, it will not occur to
speak of it as something that is “beyond.” Nor will
he think of declaiming: “I am a Monist; I declare that air,
water and earth are one. You are a Dualist, because you persist
in regarding air as something that goes beyond the earthly and
watery elements.”
These
things, in fact, are pure nonsense, as indeed all disputes about
concepts generally are. Therefore there can be no question of our
entering into these arguments. I only wish to point out the
significance. For a primitive man who does not yet know of its
existence, the air as such is simply absent; it is “beyond,”
beyond his ken. Likewise for those who do not yet know it, the
spiritual world is a “beyond,” in spite of the fact
that it is everywhere present just as the air is. For a person
who enters into these things, it is no longer “beyond”
or “on the other side,” but “here,” “on
this side.”
Thus
it is simply a question of our recognising the fact: In the
present earthly era, man between birth and death lives in his
physical body, in his whole organisation, so that this very
organisation gives him a consciousness through which he is cut
off from a certain world of causes. But the world of causes, none
the less, is working as such into this physical and earthly life.
Then, between death and a new birth he lives in another world,
which we may call a spiritual world by contrast with this
physical one. There he has not a physical body, such as could be
made visible to human senses; he lives in a spiritual form of
being. Moreover, in that life between death and a new birth the
world through which he lives between birth and death is in its
turn as remote as the spiritual world is remote and foreign for
everyday consciousness on earth.
The
dead look down on to the physical world just as the living (that
is, the physically living) look upward into the spiritual world.
But their feelings are reversed, so to speak. In the physical
world between birth and death, man has a way of gazing upward, as
to another world which grants him fulfillment for very many
things which are either deficient or altogether lacking in
contentment in this world. It is quite different between death
and a new birth. There is an untold abundance there, a fulness of
events. There is always far too much happening compared with what
man can bear; therefore he feels a constant longing to return
again into the earthly life, which is a “life in the
beyond” for him there. In the second half of the life
between death and a new birth, he awaits with great longing the
passage through birth into a new earth-existence. In earthly
existence man is afraid of death because he lives in uncertainty
about it, for in the life on earth a great uncertainty prevails
for the ordinary consciousness about the after-death. In the life
between death and a new birth, on the other hand, man is
excessively certain about the earthly life. It is a certainty
that stuns him, that makes him actually weak and faint — so
that he passes through conditions, like a fainting dream,
conditions which imbue him with the longing to come down again to
earth.
These
are but scant indications of the great difference now prevailing
between earthly life and life between death and a new birth.
Suppose, however, that we now go back, say, no farther back than
the Egyptian time — the third to the first millennium
before the founding of Christianity. (After all, the people to
whom we there go back are but ourselves, in former lives on
earth.) In yonder time, the consciousness of man during his
earthly life was quite different from ours today, which is so
brutally clear, if you will allow me to say so. Truly, the
consciousness of the people of today is brutally clear-cut, they
are all so clever — I am not speaking ironically —
the people of today are clever, all of them. Compared to
this terribly clear-cut consciousness, the consciousness of the
people of the ancient Egyptian time was far more dream-like. It
did not impinge, like ours does, upon outer objects. It rather
went its way through the world without “knocking up
against” objects. On the other hand, it was filled with
pictures which conveyed something of the Spiritual that is there
in our environment. The Spiritual, then, still penetrated into
man's physical life on earth.
Do
not object: “How someone with this more dream-like, and not
the clear-cut consciousness of today, have achieved the
tremendous tasks which were actually achieved, for
instance, in ancient Egypt?” You need not make this
objection. You may remember how mad people sometimes reveal, in
states of mania, an immense increase of physical strength; they
will begin to carry objects which they could never lift when in
their full, clear consciousness. Indeed, the physical strength of
the people of that time was correspondingly greater;
though outwardly they were perhaps slighter in build than the
people of today — for, as you know, it does not always
follow that a fat man is strong and a thin man physically weak.
But they did not spend their earthly life in observing every
detail of their physical actions; their physical deeds went
parallel with experiences in consciousness into which the
spiritual world still entered.
And
when the people of that time were in the life between death and a
new birth, far more of this earthly life reached upward into
yonder life — if I may use the term “upward.”
Nowadays it is exceedingly difficult to communicate with those
who are in the life between death and a new birth, for the
languages themselves have gradually assumed a form such as the
dead no longer understand. Our nouns, for instance, soon after
death, are absolute gaps in the dead person's perception of the
earthly world. He only understands the verbs, the “time-words”
as they are called in German — the acting, moving
principle. Whereas on earth, materialistically minded people are
constantly pulling us up, saying that everything should be
defined and every concept well outlined and fixed by clear-cut
definition, the dead no longer know of definitions; they only
know of what is in movement, they do not know that which has
contours and boundaries.
Here
again, it was different in ancient times. What lives on earth as
speech, and as custom and habit of thought, was of such a kind
that it reached up into the life between death and a new birth,
and the dead had it echoing in him still, long after his death.
Moreover, he also received an echo of what he had experienced on
earth and also of the things that were taking place on earth
after his death.
And
if we go still farther back, into the time following the
catastrophe of Atlantis — the 8th or 9th millennium B.C. —
the difference becomes even smaller between the life on earth and
life in the Beyond, if we may still describe it so. And thence,
as we go backward, we gradually reach the times when the two
lives were similar. Thereafter, we can no longer speak of
repeated earthly lives.
Thus,
our repeated lives on earth have their limit when we go backward,
just as they have their limit when we look into the future. What
we are beginning quite consciously with Anthroposophy today —
the penetration of the spiritual world into the normal
consciousness of man – will indeed entail this consequence.
Into the world which man lives through between death and a new
birth, the earthly world will also penetrate increasingly; and
yet man's consciousness will not grow dream-like, but clearer and
ever clearer. The difference will again diminish. Thus, in
effect, our life in repeated incarnations is contained between
two outermost limits, past and future. Across these limits we
come into quite another kind of human existence, where it is
meaningless to speak of repeated earthly lives, because there is
not the great difference between the earthly and the spiritual
life, which there is today. Now let us concentrate on present
earthly time — in the wide sense of the word. Behind our
present earthly life, we may assume that there are many others —
we must not say countless others, for they can even be counted by
exact spiritual scientific investigation. Behind our present
earthly life there are, therefore, many others. When we say this,
we shall recognise that in those earthly lives we had certain
experiences — relationships between person and person.
These relationships between person and person worked themselves
out in the experiences we then underwent; and their effects are
with us in our present earthly life, just as the effects of what
we do in this life will extend into our coming lives on earth. So
then we have to seek in former earthly lives the causes of many
things that enter into our life today.
At
this point, many people are prone to object: “If the things
I experience are caused, how can I be free?” It is a really
significant question when we consider it in this way. For
spiritual observation always shows that our succeeding earthly
life is
conditioned by our former lives. Yet, on the other hand, the
consciousness of freedom is absolutely there. Read my Philosophy
of Freedom
and you will see: the human being cannot be understood at all
unless we realise that his whole soul-life is oriented towards
freedom — filled with the tendency to freedom.
Only,
this freedom must be rightly understood. Precisely in my
Philosophy
of Freedom
you will find a concept of freedom which it is very important to
grasp in its true meaning. The point is that we have developed
freedom, to begin with, in thought.
The fountainhead of freedom is in thought. Man has an immediate
consciousness of the fact that he is a free being in his thought.
You may rejoin: “Surely there are many people nowadays who
doubt the fact of freedom?” Yes, but it only proves that
the theoretical fanaticism of people nowadays is often stronger
than their direct and real experience. Man is so crammed with
theoretical ideas, that he no longer believes in his own
experiences. Out of his observations of Nature, he arrives at the
idea that everything is conditioned by necessity, every effect
has a cause, all that exists has a cause. He does not think of
repeated earthly lives in this connection. He imagines that what
wells forth in human Thinking is causally determined in the same
way as that which proceeds from any machine.
He
blinds himself by this theory of universal causality, as it is
called. He blinds himself to the fact that he has very clearly
within him a consciousness of freedom. Freedom is simply a fact
which we experience, the moment we reflect upon ourselves at all.
There
are those who believe that it is simply the nervous system; the
nervous system is there, once and for all, with its property of
conjuring thoughts out of itself. According to this, the thoughts
would be like the flame whose burning is conditioned by the
materials of the fuel. Our thoughts would be necessary results,
and there could be no question of freedom.
These
people, however, contradict themselves. As I have often related,
I had a friend in my youth who at a certain period had quite a
fanatical tendency to think in a “sound,”
materialistic way. “When I walk,” he said, “it
is the nerves of' the brain; they contain certain causes
to which the effect of my walking is due.” Now and
then it led to quite a long debate between us, till at last I
said to him on one occasion: “Look now. You also say: ‘I
walk.’ Why do you not say, ‘My brain walks?’ If
you believe in your theory, you ought never to say: ‘I
walk; I take hold of things,’ and so on, but ‘My
brain walks; my brain takes hold of them,’ and so on. Why
do you go on lying?”
These
are the theorists, but there also those who put it into practice.
If they observe some failing in themselves which they are not
very anxious to throw off, they say, “I cannot throw it
off; it is my nature. It is there of its own accord, and I am
powerless against it.” There are many like that; they
appeal to the inevitable causality of their own nature. But as a
rule they do not remain consistent. If they happen to be showing
off something that they rather like about themselves, for which
they need no excuse, but on the contrary are glad to receive a
little flattery, then they depart from their theory.
The
free being of man is a fundamental fact — one of those
facts which can be directly experienced. In this respect,
however, even in ordinary earthly life it is so: there are many
things we do in complete freedom which are nevertheless of such a
kind that we cannot easily leave them undone. And yet we do not
feel our freedom in the least impaired.
Suppose,
for a moment, that you now resolve to build a house. It will take
a year to build, let us say. After a year you will begin to live
in it. Will you feel it as an encroachment on your freedom that
you then have to say to yourself: The house is ready now, and I
must move in ... I must live in it; it is a case of compulsion.
No. You will surely not feel your freedom impaired by the mere
fact that you have built yourself a house. You see, therefore,
even in ordinary life the two things stand side by side. You have
committed yourself to something. It has thereby become a fact in
life — a fact with which you have to reckon.
Now
think of all that has originated in former lives on earth, with
which you have to reckon because they are due to yourself —
just as the building of the house is due to you. Seen in this
light, you will not feel your freedom impaired because your
present life on earth is determined by former ones.
Perhaps
you will say: “Very well. I will build myself a house, but
I still wish to remain a free man. I shall not let myself be
compelled. If I do not choose to move into the new house after a
year, I shall sell it.” Certainly — though I must
say, one might also have one's views about such a way of
behaving. One might perhaps conclude that you are a person who
does not know his own mind. Undoubtedly, one might well take this
view of the matter; but let us leave it. Let us not suppose a man
is such a fanatical upholder of freedom that he constantly makes
up his mind to do things, and afterwards out of sheer “freedom”
leaves them undone. Then one might well say: “This person
has not even the freedom to carry out the things which he himself
decides. He constantly feels the sting of his would-be freedom;
he is positively harassed, thrown hither and thither by his
fanatical idea of freedom.”
Observe
how important it is not to take these questions in a rigid,
theoretic way, but livingly. Now let us pass to a rather more
intricate concept. If we ascribe freedom to man, surely we must
also ascribe it to the other Beings, whose freedom is unimpaired
by human limitations. For, as we rise to the Beings of the
Hierarchies, they certainly are not impaired by limitations of
human nature. For them indeed we must expect a higher degree of
freedom. Now someone might propound a rather strange theological
theory — to this effect: God must surely be free. He has
arranged the world in a certain way; yet he has thereby committed
Himself, He cannot change the World-Order every day. Thus, after
all, He is unfree.
You
see, you will never escape from a vicious circle if you thus
contrast the inner necessity of karma and the freedom which is
still an absolute fact of our consciousness, a simple outcome of
self-observation. Take once more the illustration of the building
of the house. I do not wish to run it to death, but at this point
it can still help us along the way. Suppose some person builds
himself a house. I will not say suppose I build myself a
house, for I shall probably never do so! — But, let us say,
some one builds himself a house. By this resolve, he does, in a
certain respect, determine his future. Now that the house is
finished, and if he takes his former resolve into account, no
freedom apparently remains to him as far as living in the house
is concerned. And though he himself has set this
limitation on his freedom, nevertheless, apparently, no freedom
is left to him ... But now, I beg you, think how many things
there are that you would still be free to do in the house that
you had built yourself. Why, you are even free to be stupid or
wise in the house, and to be disagreeable or nice to your
fellow-men. You are free to get up in the house early or late.
There may be other necessities in this respect; but as far as the
house is concerned, you are free to get up early or late. You are
free to be an anthroposophist or a materialist in the house. In
short, there are untold things still at your free disposal.
Likewise
in a single human life, in spite of karmic necessity, there are
countless things at your free disposal, far more than in a house
— countless things fully and really in the domain of your
freedom.
Even
here you may still feel able to rejoin: Well and good. We have a
certain domain of freedom in our life. Yes, there is a certain
enclosed domain of freedom, and all around it, karmic necessity.
Looking at this, you might argue: Well, I am free in a certain
domain, but I soon get to the limits of my freedom. I feel the
karmic necessity on every hand. I go round and round in the room
of my freedom, but at the boundaries on every hand I come up
against limitations.
Well,
my dear friends, if the fish thought likewise, it would be most
unhappy in the water, for as it swims it comes up against the
limits of the water. Outside the water, it can no longer live.
Hence it refrains from going outside the water. It does not go
outside; it stays in the water. It swims around in the water, and
whatever is outside the water it lets it alone; it just lets it
be what it is — air, or whatever else. And inasmuch as it
does so, I can assure you the fish is not at all unhappy to think
that it cannot breathe with lungs. It does not occur to it to be
unhappy. But if ever it did occur to the fish to be unhappy
because it only breathes with gills and not with lungs, then it
would have to have lungs in reserve, so as to compare what it is
like to live down in the water, or in the air. Then the whole way
the fish feels itself inside would be quite different. It would
all be different.
Let
us apply this comparison to human life with respect to freedom
and karmic necessity. To begin with, man in the present earthly
time has what we call ordinary consciousness. With this
consciousness he lives in the province of his freedom, just as
the fish lives in the water. He does not come into the realm of
karmic necessity at all, with everyday consciousness. Only when
he begins to see the spiritual world (which is as though the fish
were to have lungs in reserve) — only when he really lives
into the spiritual world — then he begins to perceive the
impulses living in him as karmic necessity. Then he looks back
into his former lives on earth, and, finding in them the causes
of his present experiences, he does not feel: “I am now
under compulsion of an iron necessity: my freedom is impaired,”
but he looks back and sees how he himself built up what now
confronts him. Just as a man who has built himself a house looks
back on the resolve which led him to build it. He generally finds
it wiser to ask, was it a sensible or a foolish resolve to build
this house? No doubt, in the event, you may arrive at many
different conclusions about this question; but if you conclude
that it was a dreadful mistake, you can say at most that you were
foolish.
In
earthly life this is not a pleasant experience, for when we stand
face to face with a thing we have inaugurated, we do not like
having to admit that it was foolish. We do not like to suffer
from our own foolish mistakes. We wish we had not made the
foolish decision. But this really only applies to the one earthly
life; because in effect, between the foolishness of the resolve
and the punishment we suffer in experiencing its consequences,
only the self-same earthly life is intervening. It all remains
continuous.
But
between one earthly life and another it is not so. For the lives
between death and a new birth are always intervening, and they
change many things which would not change if earthly life
continued uniformly. Suppose that you look back into a former
life on earth. You did something good or ill to another person.
Between that earthly life and this one, there was the life
between death and new birth. In that life, you cannot help
realising that you have become imperfect by doing wrong to
another human being. It takes away from your own human value. It
cripples you in soul. You must make good again this maiming of
your soul and you resolve to achieve in a new earthly life what
will make good the fault. Thus between death and new birth you
take up, by your own will, that which will balance and make good
the fault. Or if you did good to another person, you know now
that all of man's earthly life is there for mankind as a whole.
You see it clearly in the life between death and new birth. If
therefore you have helped another person, you realise that he has
thereby attained certain things which, without you, he could not
have attained in a former life on earth. And you then feel all
the more united with him in the life between death and new birth
— united with him, to live and develop further what you and
he together have attained in human perfection. You seek him or
her again in a new life on earth, to work on thus in a new life
precisely by virtue of the way you helped in his perfection.
When
therefore, with real spiritual insight, you begin to perceive
this encompassing domain, there is no question of your despising
or seeking to avoid its necessity. Quite the contrary; for as you
now look back on it, you see the nature of the things which you
yourself did in the past, so much so that you say to yourself:
That which takes place, must take place out of an inner
necessity; and out of the fullest freedom it would have to take
place just the same.
In
fact it will never happen, under any circumstances, that a real
insight into your karma will lead you to be dissatisfied with it.
When things arise in the karmic course which you do not like, you
need but consider them in relation to the laws and principles of
the universe; you will perceive increasingly that after all, what
is karmically conditioned is far better — better than if we
had to begin anew, like unwritten pages, with every new life on
earth. For, in the last resort, we ourselves are our karma. What
is it that comes over, karmically, from our former lives on
earth? It is actually we ourselves. And it is meaningless to
suggest that anything in our karma (adjoining which, remember,
the realm of freedom is always there), ought to be different from
what it is. In an organic totality you cannot criticise the
single details. A person may not like his nose, but it is
senseless to criticise the nose as such, for the nose a person
has must be as it is if the whole person is as he is. A person
who says: “I should like to have a different nose,”
implies that he would like to be an utterly different person; and
in so doing he really wipes himself out in thought — which
is surely impossible. Likewise we cannot wipe out our karma, for
we are ourselves what our karma is. Nor does it really embarrass
us, for it runs alongside the deeds of our freedom it nowhere
impairs the deeds of our freedom.
I
may here use another comparison to make the point clear. As human
beings, we walk. But the ground on which we walk is also there.
No man feels embarrassed in walking because the ground is there
beneath him. He must know that if the ground were not there, he
could not walk at all; he would fall through at every step. So it
is with our freedom; it needs the ground of necessity. It must
rise out of a given foundation. And this foundation — it is
really we ourselves!
Therefore,
if you grasp the true concept of freedom and the true concept of
karma, you will find them thoroughly compatible, and you need no
longer shrink from a detailed study of the karmic laws. In fact,
in some instances you will even come to the following conclusion:
Suppose
that some one is really able to look back with the insight of
Initiation into former lives on earth. He knows quite well, when
he looks back into his former lives, that this and that has
happened to him as a consequence. It has come with him into his
present life on earth. If he had not attained Initiation Science,
objective necessity would impel him to do certain things. He
would do them quite inevitably. He would not feel his freedom
impaired, for his freedom is in the ordinary consciousness, with
which he never penetrates into the realm where necessity is
working — just as the fish never penetrates into the outer
air. But when he has attained to Initiation Science, then he
looks back; he sees how things were in a former life on earth,
and he regards what now confronts him as a task quite consciously
allotted for his present life. And so indeed it is.
What
I shall now say may sound paradoxical to you, yet it is true. In
reality, a person who has no Initiation Science practically
always knows, by a kind of inner urge or impulse, what he is to
do. Yes, people always know what they must do; they are always
feeling impelled to this thing or that. For one who really begins
to tread the path of Initiation Science it becomes very
different. With regard to the various experiences of life as they
confront him, strange questions will arise in him. When he feels
impelled to do this or that, immediately again he feels impelled
not to do it. There is no more of that dim urge which drives most
human beings to this or that line of action. Indeed, at a certain
stage of Initiate-insight, if nothing else came instead, a person
might easily say to himself: Now that I have reached this insight
— being 40 years old, let us say, I had best spend the rest
of my life quite indifferently. What do I care? I'll sit down and
do nothing, for I have no definite impulses to do anything
particular.
You
must not suppose, my dear friends, that Initiation is not a
reality. It is remarkable how people sometimes think of these
things. Of a roast chicken, every one who eats it well believes
that it is a reality. Of Initiation Science, most people believe
that its effects are merely theoretical. No, its effects are
realities in life, and among them is the one I have just
indicated. Before a person has acquired Initiation Science, out
of a dark urge within him one thing is always important to him
and another unimportant. But now he would prefer to sit down in a
chair and let the world run its course, for it really does not
matter whether this is done or that is left undone ...
This
attitude might easily occur, and there is only one corrective.
(For it will not remain so; Initiation Science, needless to say,
brings about other effects as well.) The only corrective which
will prevent our Initiate from sitting down quiescently, letting
the world run its course, and saying: “It is all
indifferent to me,” is to look back into his former lives
on earth. For he then reads in his karma the tasks for his
present earthly life, and does what is consciously imposed upon
him by his former lives. He does not leave it undone, with the
idea that it encroaches on his freedom, but he does it. Quite on
the contrary, he would feel himself unfree if he could not
fulfill the task which is allotted to him by his former lives.
For in beholding what he experienced in former lives on earth, at
the same time he becomes aware of his life between death and a
new birth, where he perceived that it was right and reasonable to
do the corresponding, consequential actions. (At this point let
me say briefly, in parenthesis, that the word “Karma”
has come to Europe by way of the English language, and because of
its spelling people very often say “Karma” (with
broad “ah” sound.) This is incorrect. It should be
pronounced “Kärma” (with modified vowel sound.)
I have always pronounced the word in this way and I regret that
as a result many people have become accustomed to using the
dreadful word “Kirma”. For some time now you will
have heard even very sincere students saying “Kirma.”
It is dreadful).
Thus,
neither before nor after Initiation Science is there a
contradiction between karmic necessity and freedom.
Once
more, then: neither before nor after the entry of Initiation
Science is there a contradiction between necessity — karmic
necessity — and freedom. Before it there is none, because
with everyday consciousness man remains within the realm of
freedom, while karmic necessity goes on outside this realm, like
any process of Nature. There is nothing in him to feel
differently from what his own nature impels. Nor is there any
contradiction after the entry of Initiation Science, for he is
then quite in agreement with his karma, he thinks it only
sensible to act according to it. Just as when you have built
yourself a house and it is ready after a year, you do not say:
the fact that you must now move in is an encroachment on your
freedom. You will more probably say: Yes, on the whole it was
quite sensible to build yourself a house in this neighbourhood
and on this site. Now see to it that you are free in the house!
Likewise he who looks back with Initiate-knowledge into his
former lives on, earth: he knows that he will become free
precisely by the fulfilling of his karmic task--moving into the
house which he built for himself in former lives on earth.
Thus,
my dear friends, I wanted to explain to you the true
compatibility of freedom and karmic necessity in human life.
Tomorrow we shall continue, entering more into the details of
karma.
Continued
in the next issue of SCR.
Thanks to The Rudolf Steiner Archive.
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